Ask HN: How Would You or Did Convince Your Boss That You Can Work Remote? - <AUTHOR> .. and be as productive as if you are in the office or even more productive. <comment><USER3> As someone who has been the manager in those discussions I see four things to help your manager be supportive:

1\. The company policy: of the company has a no-remote policy this will be very difficult. If the company has a limited-remote policy, it's already much easier, it means asking for additional remote days on top of existing policy and provides you an opportunity to show that you are productive working remote

2\. Your productivity and mutual trust: on the individual level I like to believe everybody can be productive remote. On the aggregate it didn't work that way though. Some people would use the remote time for personal matters and chalk up a day with limited output to 'I was doing research', others would have twice the output they had at the office. It's difficult to know up front where someone will fall on that scale. If you can show with 1-2 days remote that you can be productive, it's a huge help in this decision

3\. Spill-over effects. If others in your team are (possibly) not productive remote it might be difficult to give you a full remote opportunity. Others will expect the same privileges and it might be easier to limit it for everybody rather than explaining individuals that I dont trust them remote yet.

4\. Interactions: if the office has a weekly townhall, or if we have a quarterly long-term planning session, can you join these, or do we need to setup video and mics for that? It helps if you can be in person on these moments (even if you're not convinced they're always useful)

<comment><USER4> > Some people would use the remote time for personal matters and chalk up a > day with limited output to 'I was doing research'

Be careful with this, because it can be a form of selection bias. I've run plenty of errands and had plenty of non-productive days from the office too. This stuff is unavoidable. If you're going to put WFH under intense scrutiny, make sure to put office work under the same level of scrutiny otherwise it might just be that you notice unproductive days more because you're looking harder.

At a previous company, the WFH policy included a question "How will your performance be measured when working from home?" to which I answered "The same as when at the office", but the question implies a level of suspicion that sets the tone for the whole thing. If you want to allow WFH but are concerned about productivity, do it in good faith and allow enough time to get a statistically significant sample size, and actually compare it with office work rather than just looking at the raw numbers in isolation.

Edit to add: You might also find that people will choose to WFH on days they were planning to run errands, but they likely would have anyway had they worked from the office, so you need to account for this too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remote has to be baked into the company culture, otherwise you'll forever be the outsider, and be the first to be let go when the company hits tough times.

Find a job that already offers remote.

<comment><USER6> This has been my experience thus far as well. It hasn't really mattered how well I could frame productivity or measurable improvements in my quality of life to an immediate manager or team - ultimately if the senior leadership dislikes the idea of remote work, each level beneath them will hesitate to fully embrace it.

I've found that companies that promote work-life balance as one of their strengths are the best places to ask or test the waters.

<comment><USER7> Remote work goes against having the best work-life balance.

When you walk out the door of the office, work should be over and done with until you return. Taking work home should be impossible.

Paid overtime helps greatly. It discourages the employer from trying to get free work out of you.

Having a non-zero commute doesn't have to mean commuting for 2 hours in urban traffic. You can pick a location where a tiny commute is possible.

<comment><USER8> Huh? I work 40 hours a week remote in my office. After 5pm I close my office door and I'm done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was the tactic I used successfully...

Firstly, ensure that you are always seen to be productive and delivering even when you're not being watched. The most important thing to build trust is for people to see that you can be trusted to do your work to a high standard without supervision.

Once this has been achieved, move to the next stage of your plan:

"I'm not coming in on Wednesday, I have an appointment I need to attend to a 11:45am and 4 hours of commute is unproductive so I'm going to get my work done from home."

Ensure that your deliverables are visible when you work from home - go the extra mile to ensure that your efforts are seen. Visibility is highly important here.

Do this periodically for a few months and eventually tell them that you will be working from home on Wednesdays from this point forward. This is much easier to do when you've got a reputation for delivering the goods. Continue to ensure that the work you deliver from home is visible.

After a little while of this, up it to two days a week and perhaps this will be okay. I find that 2-3 days a week from home is plenty for my sanity. I need to be in the office for the social aspect and to feel like I'm part of the team.

Completely cutting myself off from the camaraderie of the office doesn't do anything for my sense of wellbeing. So I usually try to be in the office a couple of days a week, just for my own sanity.

I worked over the summer for a company based out of Vancouver and never got to meet the team because it was work from home for 5 days a week. This was hard. I actually went so far as to get farm hands for my farm, as much so that I didn't feel alone as for farm labour. At the end of the summer, I negotiated a part time contract with them for another 6 months so I could take on a local client so I'd have a social outlet.

<comment><USER10> As an introvert, visibility has always been an issue for me. Last week I had a big task for which I put in well over 10 hours a day. When people see it's done sooner than expected they just assume that is was easier. Meanwhile, other people get a lot of credits for some things because they are apt at subtly (or not so subtly) mentioning it. Maybe it's something I still have to learn.

<comment><USER11> I'm going to probably be unwisely candid in this answer.

It's a game, and a game that often in large corps involves deception, but I don't think has to. (Or perhaps I'm just making myself feel better by calling it "Crafting perceptions.")

There was a post a while back about a topic, "status fungibility." In a perfect world, you'd be in a team where everyone knows how hard that task is and you wouldn't have to say a thing. I've been on teams like that. They're fantastic. But in most worlds, you have a team where, if you're lucky, a handful of the people know _deeply_ what you're doing and the rest have a general idea. They probably aren't _trying_ too look down on you for being silent, but next to the guy who gives status updates translating what might be a simple task into something they perceive as a journey and time consuming, the human mind tends to use flawed heuristics that benefit certain types of overcommunication.

I've wrapped this in a lot of flowery and clinical language to try and not get incendiary about of it, but the crux is that you sometimes have to help your team see the value you bring, (The positive side) while recognizing (the negative side) that this enables an ecosystem where this opaqueness can allow others to use this intangibility to try and boost their standing vs. yours, so there's a degree of "protect yourself."

Sorry if this is a ramble. It's a topic I took a while to build mental models for (similarly introverted) and something that I've had frustrations with which is why I now try to look at it very impassively. I hope these thoughts offer at least a useful point of view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just told my boss I was moving, and let them offer.

Working for HP in Atlanta, I'd already proved myself during the '96 Olympics, when even the 12 miles to work was impossible. In 2000, our rent went out of sight; we owned 7 rural acres -- about 800 miles away -- so we just decided to move. I figured my boss would let me telecommute, but I didn't ask for it: I just told him, very honestly, that I was moving, and why. He said, "That's fair. I support you in this move, if you understand that you won't have the same advancement opportunities as someone who's in the office." I agreed, and that was that. I worked another 15 years that way, until HP fell apart and I wanted to change jobs.

<comment><USER13> Same. I came back from a long work trip (3 mo in a foreign country) and said "I'm moving. I'm either moving and I'm going to keep working with you it I'm moving and I'm not. I'd like to keep working eih you." The reply was something like "Let us know when you get there." We a had no remote culture for a while but eventually started a couple small (3 people) remote offices. That opened the door and I've been working remote ever since.

I'm with a different company now. The original company didn't actually handle full remote well. Poor communication made everything difficult. The new job has a pretty strong remote culture. MKe sure you out in the effort of no one else does or you'll be unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Start my own company and become the boss. ;-)

(29 years ago. I guess Em Software is a "lifestyle" company (just 4 of us working out of our homes, so you can discount the anecdata...).)

<comment><USER15> Everyone pay attention to this comment. All of us here have this option.

<comment><USER16> Not if you have pre-existing medical conditions that marketplace medical insurance won't cover, like dwarfism or albinism - there are others but those are the ones I know of. You need big-company insurance benefits for these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been remote for 4 years and it all started at a company who didn't have a remote culture, but my boss wasn't too worried about me going remote.

I was on a software team for 2 months before finding out I needed to move. I told my boss I had to move in 4 months, but I really wanted to keep my position and wanted to switch to working remotely. More than half of the engineering team at the time was offshore; however, they were all in an office with close communication with the higher-ups there. My boss basically said to me that he'd been working with remote folks for his entire career and if the other engineers had no problem with it, he didn't see an issue either.

4 years later I'm still remote and I couldn't be happier. Not at that same company, but at a new remote position.

The offshore team, previous bias to remote employees, and potentially the need to keep me onboard to get shit done for cheap helped me here. There were other employees who inquired about going remote, but they were turned down - <USER2> even needed to move for their SO (same as my case), so they ended up leaving the company when they moved.

It's really hit or miss unless you find a remote position where the company expects you to be remote right off the bat or you just get lucky and your boss trusts you to switch. Just remember that trust goes both ways - if your company doesn't trust you, maybe don't trust that you'll retire there. Going remote is a great way to test both sides of trust.

<comment><USER18> We've been transitioning to be more supportive of remote work. We're a small company (~30), and have never had much an official policy. Generally, it's - you're adults, get your work done. But the culture was such that it was basically expected you'd be in the office most of the time, and whenever someone worked remotely they seemed to feel a need to explain why.

There were even times in the past where my boss talked to me about wanting me to be physically in the office more. These days I often only go in twice a week for less than half a day for meetings. Recently our boss worked remotely for a month from the other side of the globe. Our head of sales is considering moving 1000 miles away while staying on remotely.

We're tight knit and small enough that it hasn't been difficult to accommodate more remote work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Short answer: A week or two after I started working remote, my boss realized that I could do it very effectively.

Long answer: I married a medical student, and due the matching process, had very little control over where I would end up moving to. I told my boss, boss's boss, head of the company, ect, that there was a chance that I'd have to move in about a year. Throughout the year, I periodically reminded everyone that I might move.

Once matching happened, I declared where I was moving. Our parent company happened to be local, and we worked closely with a team that was a 60 minute commute to where I was going. We arranged for me to have an office with the team that we worked with; but we all knew that I would primarily telecommute.

Except for a 1-month period of very bad weather, I commuted to my new office 1-2 times a week. It worked very well until our parent company announced they were closing my new office and moving everyone to what would be a 90 minute commute, in rush hour, for me.

I then asked to be a full-time telecommuter, and the answer was, "you work very well remote." A day or two after I packed my office up, our parent company sold us. I never went to the new office, although I honestly thought I was going to go there 1-2 times a month. It was a very nice location, and I was really looking forward to spending the day there when I needed to interact with our team there.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a manager of software engineering teams I can tell you that: there are two options to be as productive remotely as within office hours.

1) Either the whole team communicates in a remote manner, e.g. holding meetings via videoconferencing only and writing down follow-ups, meticulously logging progress via special tools, putting a lot of effort into documenting everything, so any member of the team can quickly find literally any piece of information and manage most of the tasks without asking peers for help.

2) Or you should ask for a position as mechanical and routine and async and redundant as possible, like I don't know, fully scripted first line of customer support, or data markup, or monkey testing, or something like that.

This is because most of the teamwork is actually about information flow, and the bigger the team - the larger the stream. In case of partial remote working, when some team members are indulged with home office days or even full remote, other members, and especially leads and managers, are just paying these outstanding info bills, just to keep remoters in the loop with the team and company as a whole.

So in my opinion the only way to work remote in a close-quarters team is to either be extremely special and indispensable just to strong-arm your privilege, or be largerly underpaid to justify communication tax you will lay on your teammates and direct supervisor.

<comment><USER20> Now you should consider those effects.

1) most mechanical and routine jobs will be automated first. So in XXI it is not a wise choice.

2) Any team manager's duty is to reduce bus factor [1], so strong-arming remote job from competent supervisor should entail dissolving or breaking apart a unique employee's position.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I did it by violating company rules, proving that I was more effective at home, and then forcing them to either fire me or let me work remote. I had worked there for several years, and the rules were really stupid (nobody leaves until everyone is done with their work, and I had been there for 10 hours or so and had family obligations), so I wasn't really worried about explaining that to a future employer.

I don't recommend going that route, but I _really_ wanted to work from home and was ready to quit if I didn't get it. I had requested a trial period of working from home two days a week and didn't even get one day. I brought it up every few months, but no progress was made, so I stopped caring about their stupid rules and did what I had to in order to focus on my work (I even moved my computer to an abandoned room at the opposite side of the room to prove I was more productive away from distractions).

My boss has a weird phobia of people working remote _despite_ everyone who _does_ work remote getting more done than those who work in the office. It's weird, and your boss is probably not as bad as mine in this regard.

Honestly, I recommend asking your boss to give you a trial of working from home for 2 days/week and prove that you're able to get more done. Once that's done, push for more days until you're only coming in for meetings, and then start pushing for whatever other pieces you'll need to go fully remote (virtual meetings, move conversations to a digital format, etc). Even if they say no, they'll recognize your initiative if you keep the dialogue about you giving more value to the company.

<comment><USER18> I'm a bit (maybe more than a bit..) of a limit pusher too, and over the course of a half dozen years or so I've helped push our small company from saying they're ok with remote work - but yet I'd occasionally get talked to by the boss about coming into the office more - to personally coming in often less than half a day in a week (I work remote the most by a good margin), our sales lead considering moving across the country with full leadership support, and our boss recently working remotely for a month from across the globe.

Our boss is great, and does support remote work, it just seemed like there was this mental hurdle - inertia from social norms - that took a while to get past. He said he was ok with working remotely, but would still be bothered by simply not seeing a person for days at a time. There wasn't an issue staying in communication, and no issue with work getting done, so eventually he had to reconcile his position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Should you expect a pay cut if you transition from on-site to remote?

Someone proposed something like that to me recently, arguing that if the cost of living in my home city is less than in the office city then I shouldn't be paid as much. I'm thinking pay should be based on productivity and value to the company instead of value to me.

<comment><USER23> Cost of living adjusted pay is a fact of life and you will struggle to find a firm that does not do it. GitLab the company has a cool salary calculator so you can at least see exactly how they do it. No one wants to be paid less for the same work, but if you take a small pay cut and are putting more money in the bank every month, is it a pay cut? :)

<comment><USER24> I've been on the receiving end of Gitlab's calculator. The pay cut isn't small at all; I was offered less than half the equivalent SF salary. And I live in North America, just not in SF.

<comment><USER23> Their calculator can be a little harsh for sure, I just appreciate how up front it is. Still, rent in SF is crazy if you compare it to anywhere that isn't near a coast. I wonder do you think the pay cut was unfair based on other offers? I am biased because we only do genuinely minor comp adjustments for location.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I appreciated the transparency of it too. The offer I got was okay compared to market rates here, so I do think it's pretty fair.

I guess I just find it a bit weird that your value to the company is so dependent on location that it can vary from 100% down to ~20% of the base SF salary. People living in SF _chose_ to live there despite the absurd rents, and it's not like that changes anything for a remote company.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but if they don't pay enough, they won't be able to hire those people to start with. On the flip side, considering if they starting hiring people from other countries and reducing your salary because you choose to live in a high cost country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been remote for 7 years. A lot of people seem to reference company culture as the seed for wether or not being remote will be successful. I disagree.

The company doesn't care about you. And the company culture certainly doesn't care about where you are. Success in being remote depends solely on your managers preference for keeping watch – and wether or not the majority of your teams talents and productivity takes place remote as well.

If your manager doesn't like work happening outside of arms reach, you won't be successful. If 60-70% of progress happens within reach of your managers arms, you won't be successful.

The only other major impediment is top level company policy. Read: Yahoo and IBM.

</comment><comment><USER27> While it's a gamble, one way that worked for me 2 years ago: Work extremely hard and dazzle them for 6 months. Make sure that you are extremely critical to the project you are on. Give notice and let them offer. I didn't plan it out when I joined but I needed to move out of the area because of elder care issues. I was hoping they would offer but wasn't counting on it. It worked out well for me and the company.

</comment><comment><USER28> Our family was moving in two months due to my wife's job. I told my boss we were moving out of state and asked if I could work remote. Since I'm a developer, he said yes, even though we are a no remote worker company. I had been working at the company for about 2 years and I believe he said yes due to my punctuality, work ethic, and projects I was already lead on.

There were/are so drawbacks that I should mention.

-I didn't get a raise that year because he wanted to make sure this remote thing was going to work.

-Everyone in the office gets free lunch every Friday but me since I am remote.

-I miss out on every company team building event

-I miss out on the company big Christmas party

I could go to the company events, but I would have to pay for my own flight and hotel. So I don't see myself going.

-I often feel disconnected with the company and only know a handful of remaining employees that still work there when I was in the office

So there are downsides to bring the only remote employee. But I have an amazing schedule and don't have to travel. This works out perfectly with dealing with 2 kids and daycare.

Btw, the raises come almost every year now and are decent. I am very content in my current situation.

So my advice is to keep your head down, come to work early, stay late and get some good experience at your current job. My boss is a big time micro manager that said yes.

</comment><comment><USER29> I worked at a small startup as the only senior back end engineer.

I bought my plane tickets to Asia for a 6 week trip and I told my boss 2 weeks before my trip that I wasn't happy living in the bay area. I loved my job, but I wanted to live anywhere else.

Rather than fire me / have me quit, he let me start working remotely keeping California time.

<comment><USER30> Similar story for me, only my wife accepted a new job outside California back in 2008.

I was in a small place, we both liked each other, and I simply explained my situation. Been remote every since

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I accomplished it by showing first, although that's probably not very helpful for your particular situation. But for anyone else:

I started as an employee of a contracting firm whose offices are all in different parts of the country from my now-employer. As a contractor, companies can be much more willing to not have you on site, especially if you aren't independent. Demonstrate enough value, and you may get a full-time offer, in which case it's a lot easier to leverage the fact that you've already proved your ability to work remote effectively.

The biggest benefit in this case was that I was able to negotiate salary as if I lived where the company is headquartered, resulting in an almost 2x increase over what I could negotiate where I am physically located.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm the only remote engineer at my company, which has over 100 engineers. I'm also one of the more senior engineers. I told the company that I was moving closer to family (for medical reasons) and asked if I could continue working remotely. So far its been great. I've been more productive then ever. I did go back to individual contributor from team lead for a few months but now I'm back to leading a very small team.

So the steps for me were. 1) Establish myself as a valuable asset over several years at the company 2) Move closer to family and ask if I could work remotely 3) Work really hard to establish communication lines and insert myself into the same conversations that I would have been included in at the office.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why convince your boss? Ask if it would be alright to work remotely sometimes. If they say no, you look for a new job that does allow it.

No convincing needed.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've pretty much gotten remote from my last two jobs. I was a full time employee for at least one year before i negotiated remote. I worked my ass off for the first year and proved that i was a valuable employee, negotiating for remote was made easy by that. I just asked my manager both times during our one on one meeting. No company likes letting valuable employees go, if you can prove that you can be just as productive as a remote worker, maybe by having a "trial" period, then i think your manager will be ok with it.

<comment><USER35> Also I think it gos quite case by case. Some employees can be seen as more trustworthy than others, and with others remote work can work better than with others for other reasons.

<comment><USER34> i agree but the competition for true remote only jobs is really crazy. I've had much better luck getting an onsite job and transitioning into remote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Finally a topic I can contribute to!

I am moving to Spain in April and will be working remotely for the company I started contracting with back in August 2018. I did a ton of research and prepared a pitch deck and presented to my manager, who then advocated for me and moved it up the line to get approval from the department.

Some key points:

1\. The company already allows a very flexible work from home schedule.

2\. Although primarily focused around my region, there are a couple team members spread across the world. So it's not unprecedented.

3\. The person whose role I took over (contract as well) moved to another country but then quit when they had trouble adapting to the culture (there was an eight hour time difference). So I had some possible baggage to work around.

4\. I tested my ability to work off-hours and remotely with a two-week long trip to another city living with a friend and performed swimmingly.

5\. You must convince them that, other than your physical presence, they will not notice any difference in quality of work, availability, or communication. Being that Spain has long working days anyway, the transition from my time (-7 GMT) to Spain (+1 GMT) will actually work out quite well from a working hours perspective.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER37> If the company has multiple offices.. Work for a while from the second one and then rotate between them. Schedule meetings at each of the offices so you can justify this.

Also I find partial days remote works if your commute isn't so large. Work mornings from home and then afternoons in the office. Justify the work at home by early morning calls/meetings.

Have clear project plans with deliverables. Provide a weekly written update to your boss and other stake holders with the weekly progress.

</comment><comment><USER38> As the manager of a half remote team at a company that supports it, but isn't 100% remote...

To me, it comes down to a couple of things.

\- Have you proven you are a good remote communicator (eg: if you're always doing private messages in Slack or don't communicate much at all, so everything that you do is only in your head, you might not be a good fit)

\- Do you have plans to have a proper work area once you're remote. If you're going to be working from the middle of the living room with your significant other interrupting you to do the dishes or the kids screaming during video conference....NOPE. You need a plan.

\- Your reasons for going remote won't interfere with productivity. It's totally ok if you're doing it for work life balance and take better care of your family. However if you're going to do strictly 9-5 (which is ok!) and be out half of the day on top of it (no longer ok) to take care of the kids and be constantly cancelling meetings and other obligation, then you just won't be meeting expectations anymore.

If you meet those criterias, it's a no brainer for me. I personally much prefer face to face interaction, but Ill fully support anyone who's serious about working remotely in my team. But they have to be serious about it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I lucked out to be employed at a company with a culture permitting remote work. I don't have the 'answer', but I can describe some factors which make it a no-brainer.

Our company is located in NYC a few blocks away from PENN Station, where Long Island commuters arrive in Manhattan. Several top peeps in the company live on LI, and commute to work. Sometimes the commute is terrible, and they work remotely. And, there are peeps in the company who have family obligations which necessitate a flexible schedule. The schedule gaps in their office attendance is filled by remote work.

It all just works. I believe my colleagues recognize this situation is not common, and therefore the flexibility engenders loyalty to the company.

Also, senior colleagues are not micro-managers, and my fellow colleagues don't need constant supervision and instruction.

Finally, there's one argument which comes up in this cultue that might be helpful. Some senior colleagues say they can't get a lot done at work with interruptions from junior colleagues and phone calls. If you're in this position, then remote work could increase your productivity and help you meet deadlines.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER40> I was fairly senior when I made the transition (~10 exp) and I knew my bosses very well by that point. I decided to roll the dice when another employee moved to work remotely and that seemed to be going well. I didn't ask my bosses, I told them I was moving for family reasons but I would still love to work with them.

Having a remote job when moving to a new town is ideal as it allows you to quickly secure housing with your latest paycheck. In my experience neither landlords nor mortgage companies care that your office/employer is out of state.

I would advise against this approach if you are more on the junior side as you might not learn as much as you would in the office (of course you might not learn anything from coworkers regardless in some cases). I would also advise against trying to work remote from the same city as your employer without a really good reason. This usually just makes you look like a jerk.

As for productivity, this can be a major challenge. When I first moved I lived in a very small apartment and was distracted by a good many things. I usually felt like I had to work into the night to make up for distracted time during the day.

Going to libraries and coworking spaces a couple days a week helps me. It helps with the cabin fever and it helps staying on task. Communication with your team and manager will likely also be a huge challenge and all I can say is be nice to everyone, be willing to help out in anyway you can, and initiate conversation with your manager often. I check in with my manager several times a week outside of standup to make sure critical items aren't getting missed. Our team will also screen share with each other often which can be uncomfortable at first but is vital. Our team is a mix of remote and in- office, but as more people became remote things improved. Reminding your manager and team dispassionately about any remote work challenges your are facing can help.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER41> By showing them an offer to go work remotely somewhere else. But it backfired because being the only remote engineer while the rest of the team is collaborating in person is hard. The company needs to support remotees. So I again found a new job with a boss who was remote friendly, and a company with remote-first culture.

</comment><comment><USER35> The easiest way I think is to quit and work as a contractor/freelancer. You can offer your services to your ex-employer and if you actually deliver value there shouldn't be problems to have remote work as a term in the contract. Otherwise you can look out for other customers who accept remote work.

<comment><USER42> This is what I did. Next employer was a freelance client first. They make me a pretty good offer to become an employee that included continuing to work remotely.

Since then, I've done more freelance and employed work, but I've only accepted remote roles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've been working there for over a year and the company was already distributed - this was critical.

I've used [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote- job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job) to find a new job

</comment><comment><USER44> About one and a half years ago, I decided to move to another city, but very much wanted to continue working for my company, so I proposed to my boss that I would go remote at that point. Our company had two other engineers working remotely before me, so that definitely helped. As far as I was considered, it was mostly about making sure that my boss viewed me as someone who knows how to help myself or proactively seek help when I get stuck and make sure I am able to find new tasks to work on on my own. There was also a need for more proactive communication and more status updates. While it is pretty easy to know or find out what a coworkers status is in an office situation, it is far less obvious in a remote situation.

</comment><comment> bb-85 I interviewed for a position that supported/requested relocation but had other remote team members and an HQ that wasn't in the same office in which I interviewed. We agreed in the interview/negotiation process that I could work from home since the travel would be to the HQ anyway (meaning even if I moved to work in their office, I'd still be mainly working with people in the HQ anyway). I go once a month on average to get in some face time meetings but otherwise get to stay home. It's great!

</comment><comment><USER45> I realized I was indispensable and just went home, never looked back. Not a single complaint was heard and this is a work place that does not officially condone remote work.

But I'm not alone in doing this, I might be relatively unique in doing it every single day though.

</comment><comment><USER46> I needed to go to the other side of the world for three events spaced over a couple of months. My company wasn't a remote working company though. I suggested my three options were:

* travel to each event separately (my least preferred)

* have a couple of months off without pay

* work remotely for the couple of months while I was away

I'd earned a good rep at my company by smashing out the previous project on time/budget, so the working remotely was approved and all went well.

I liked it so much (escaping the northern hemisphere Winter), that I started my own consultancy and did the annual migration for the next 8 years. Most of that work was remote, so as long as I managed timezones, all was good.

</comment><comment><USER47> I worked for my company for 1.5 years and then said I was moving in 6 months. So, with plenty of warning, my boss said he wanted to keep me... so here I am wor king remote.

I did have several things going for me:

1) We had a wfh day once a week

2) We had a few other employees (but not other devs) already working remotely

3) I already had a lot of freedom that came from tackling not fun (to some) issues, like build tolling, infrastructure interactions, etc. So I was already trusted to be proactive in what I was doing

4) I'd say perhaps the biggest thing that lead to it was having split management - a people top level manager over development and a tech top level manager of development. Both are great and work well together.

</comment><comment><USER48> My boss is in a different office in a different city anyway, so it doesn't matter much to him whether I'm in the local office or at home or wherever, as long as work gets done.

It helps that my company, SAP, has a strong home-office culture: A lot of employees are consultants, who spend most of Friday doing time-recording and other administrative activities, so Friday is traditionally home-office day (for those who want it). Last year, a new company policy was adopted that requires managers to provide an objective reason for why mobile work (such as home office) should not be allowed for their team members.

<comment><USER49> I spent 3 months in Germany regularly interacting with SAP.

I was impressed at just how well they treat their employees. Kinda reminded me of the Simpson's episode where the Germans take over the power plant.

<comment><USER48> It's not just an SAP thing, it's got to do with German culture and German law. For example, the US concept of "sick days" looks really bizarre to Germans. When someone is sick, they get a doctor's note and stay at home until fully recovered. When someone goes into work sick, their colleagues and managers tell them to go see a doctor. There is a shared understanding that sick employees working regardless are a liability to everyone involved.

That said, it helps that IT is a white-collar industry. I have a few friends in blue-collar jobs, and working conditions sound worse over there, esp. for temp jobs where workers are considered fungible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I sometimes work remotely, but most days I wasn't very productive. This is partially my own fault for not having a dedicated room to work in (so I sit in the living room, which is full of distractions). But it's also an infrastructure problem (my remote connection has stopped for multiple times, which means that I can't reach infrasupport anymore), and a culture problem (there is literally no documentation for the project I work on, the best strategy so far is to ask around if something isn't clear to you).

</comment><comment><USER50> I had been with the company for 5 years and was the most senior employee. I simply said "I'm moving but would like to continue working with you remotely." They didn't like it but weren't willing to lose me either.

I worked remotely for them for two years before they laid off the entire engineering team, me included. My next and current job was remote from the beginning. It was easy to get because by then I had proven that I could be effective remotely.

</comment><comment><USER51> In my experience if you need to convince them its not a good fit. An employer needs to embrace remote work as part of the culture for it to work well...in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER52> Does someone have best practices for remote work from the workers perspective? Example end of day email for work complete. Weekly check in for priority projects.

<comment><USER42> Communicating is probably the most important thing. I talk to my team on slack daily and on video chat about every other day.

A private office with a door you can shut is also up there. I actually lease a small office about 1.5 miles from my home. Normally a spare bedroom is sufficient, but we ran out of those in my home.

Keep a normal schedule. It doesn't have to be 9-5, but it needs to have a good amount of overlap with your team.

Have a backup computer and internet connection. (Cellphone tethering qualifies here.)

All that said, there's really no substitute for occasional face time. My company has a lot of remote staff, so we do quarterly gatherings where everyone comes to the same city to work together for a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For me, I've simply started freelancing. I love working remote so much that it became non-negotiable for me. I've then worked at one startup, where my hiring basically pushed the whole team to become remote (they were kind of on the fence before I joined, and the boss realized that not having an office was much cheaper).

I believe that the key to make it work is to have a remote-first culture, at least in the team you're on.

</comment><comment><USER53> You should first ask yourself if it's really true.

Being one of a company's only remote workers can be a terrible experience. What you gain in focus may easily be lost in terms of missed communications, being left out of spontaneous meetings, etc.

Also, depending on how far you live, missing out on company events. That can negatively impact your level of engagement with the company, which could also hurt your productivity.

</comment><comment><USER54> My wife got a job a couple states away and while I loved my job, I was moving with her. My responsibilities had been moving into more server-admin stuff for a while, so my boss was able to get approval to let me work remotely. It's been 3 and a half years now and still working well. I miss the ability to drop in on people and bounce ideas off them, but we talk a lot through IMs and calls.

</comment><comment><USER55> If you can show evidence that you are at least as effective remotely than in the office, that will go a long way towards convincing a manger. Start working from home on off hours. Come in late. Show them timestamps from all of your commits, that you're most effective during non-work hours. Give them hard evidence, and most reasonable people will do the reasonable thing.

</comment><comment><USER56> I used to manage a team with employees over 120 miles away. My VP was against remote employees, but I convinced him to allow my distant employees to work remote 4 days out of the week, and come to the office just on Thursday. The team remained productive and we slowly got approval to avoid even that one day in the office. It was a matter of trust, which was built over time.

</comment><comment><USER57> 3 years of remote work experience here:

1) Report frequently

2) Ask for paring if boss likes or whenever you need non-trivial discussion (it's better than chat obviously)

3) Tell boss what you will do today, your expectation on results

4) When problems occurs, let him know immediately or within 4 hours

I did all of these just for less than a year. After that he doesn't give a shit what I do anymore. It's kind of lonely now lol

</comment><comment><USER58> "I really want to work with you, but I need to put myself first so I will be leaving that country. If you want we can find a way to make it work, otherwise I have already written up the resignation letter." That, with being a good employee granted me 2 years of amazing remote work.

</comment><comment><USER59> Whenever I was asked to do something hard, I answered that I needed to work from home in order to avoid distractions and focus on the problem.

For I couple of years I did all the actual coding from home, and then I spent a few weeks in the office, relaxing, being social and drinking free coffee :)

</comment><comment><USER60> If your company doesn't have a remote culture I have seen people go remote mainly by moving away for family reasons or similar. Then the company has to make a choice.

I don't think you will have much of a chance of convincing them with arguments about productivity. Otherwise we wouldn't have loud open offices everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER61> There is an extended discussion about this in Cal Newport's excellent book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

In short, build up "career capital" by making yourself valuable to the company, which you can later use as leverage. Or as others have said, just get a different job that's already remote.

</comment><comment> piotr-yuxuan Less context switching, less disruption, home as a quieter environment. When remote I feel I have to prove I've worked and tend to work more because of that. I've personally experienced a x2 gap in remote, compared to a noisy office. It's a bit like a code retreat.

</comment><comment><USER62> \- Hey $BOSS, I need tomorrow afternoon off as I need to go to the airport

\+ Sure, picking up someone?

\- No, flying.

\+ Ah! Where are you going?

\- Home.

\+ Home? Where are you?

\- I've been in $REMOTE_COUNTRY for the last 3 months, I told you...

\+ Right, I thought you stayed for a week or two only

(laughs on both sides of the call)

It helps when your boss is 10000KM from you :)

</comment><comment><USER63> I said "We're out of office space. If you want to keep hiring, we have to let people work from home." He accepted that immediately, and we moved on to logistics.

</comment><comment><USER64> For me, the number one indicator is what did you do on the last snow day. If you put in an incredibly productive day and wrapped up a bunch of bugs and stories, let's talk.

<comment><USER65> Not very useful metric for people living in, say, the Mediterranean.

<comment><USER64> Substitute last time you "worked from home"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Don't try to change the company. Leave and find a company that already offers what you want. That way is way easier IMO.

</comment><comment><USER67> [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

</comment><comment><USER68> I never really talked about it with my boss...I just stopped going in one day but kept hitting my deadlines and attending video meetings. We had a few offices in other timezones. Nobody said shit.

Finally, like a year later, my boss asked about it (in our first 1:1 meeting ever lol)... Apparently, a bunch of other devs did the same thing after me and now the office was becoming a ghost town. Leadership was super confused about it and tried forcing people back into the office.

Eventually, a re-org had the office "flourishing" again, with a new exciting "bro" culture and lots of mandatory after-work events (in the office...) \- I left soon after and have been fully remote ever since.

Remote work isn't for everyone, and it becomes apparent pretty quickly if you aren't cut out for it... we're all professionals here and should be allowed to choose our optimal environment for getting things done.

TLDR; Be ready to walk, there are a ton of remote companies out there. Employment is a 2-way street, make it work for you!

</comment><comment><USER69> I quit.

</comment><comment> 70122-_6 reason with him about income-protection (about 75 USD a month)?

</comment><comment> bra-ket i just stopped coming to work one day</comment>


The Moral Hazard of Dealing with China - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/01/stephen-schwarzman-china-surveillance-scholars-colleges/604675/ <comment><USER2> In case you were wondering, it's a "moral hazard" as in the author saw those two words together once and figured they just mean a moral bad-thing. It's not a moral hazard in the sense of economics.

<comment><USER3> Normally it is a specific agency problem and apparently the author does not refer to economics. This is kind of journalism signals bad practice more than forgetting to run an article through a spell checker. Or is this the new clickbait i.e. create controversy at every costs as in Game of thrones way?

Either way applying such a "smart" clicktrick a second time and the outlet is duly noted on my blacklist.

Would be awesome if hn would give the option to also apply my own blacklist.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are blood test results of people who died with COVID19 available? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Dynamodb emulator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ananthakumaran/fake_dynamo

<comment><USER2> Thanks!, that looks useful. I am trying it right now.

<comment><USER2> Works fine when I tested with some Ruby code and the Ruby aws-sdk gem. Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your startup ideas that you aren't pursuing? - <AUTHOR> (I'm going to keep posting this topic on HN - partially because I think the answers will be interesting, but also partially as an experiment to see how much randomness goes into a HN post becoming successful). <comment><USER2> It turns out that councils (i.e. a city council) don't actually know where their pipes run and in particular don't know where their storm water drains are. This makes flood planning very difficult. So there's money in driving around a la streetview and finding where the drains are. One could possibly license the actual streetview images and mine them, too.

<comment><USER3> [http://cityscan.com/](http://cityscan.com/)

<comment><USER4> FYI - most links the menus lead to 404

<comment><USER3> Oops, looks like they went out of business. They had some pretty interesting LIDAR technology for mapping cities. Not sure what happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever moved a couch into an apartment with a small and/or winding staircase? It's a huge pain in the ass, and a couple years ago when I moved 3 times in a short period I really wanted to find a better way.

My idea is to use 3d scanning to help you move, using something like Google's project Tango. You scan your couch, bed, or table and the area you want need to move it through. Then it could algorithmically find the easiest path to move it and it shows you directions, so you and your moving partner know exactly how/when to rotate, turn, etc.

I'm sure it's possible because my mechanical engineering friends have software to do something similar for their robotic arms on the assembly line. I think this idea is really cool and hard to make profitable :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I have one of the largest database of camping sites and hostels globally at [http://www.wikibackpacker.com/](http://www.wikibackpacker.com/) I get pretty decent organic footfalls and it's stressing out my hosting bills.

I tried to get some media coverage & some funding for it but it's getting impossible from Australia.

It's stuck in a limbo for now until I decide what to do with it.

<comment><USER4> Describe someone who is using this service, and how they use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Subscription boxes for very specific fetishes. The market is there, and willing to pay. Problems are: a) Margins don't justify time required for a worthwhile product b) The state of payment processing for anything "adult" is offensive

</comment><comment><USER8> ..like improving education, democracy, gun violence!

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes. Share your secrets with me!

</comment><comment><USER10> I want to build drone startup.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice try! :)</comment>


Tesla's Repair Spend per Vehicle Comparison to Other Industry Players - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-warranty-idUSKCN0XO1M3 <comment><USER2> Kind of misleading report. They try to explain a bit in the article why it's not an apples to apples comparison, but the damage is done by the article overall, as well as the title.

GM has a much lower repair value "per vehicle" because on average its vehicle price is also much lower than Tesla's. So of course Tesla would pay "more per vehicle".

That's not to say Tesla's cars don't have issues. They're still an early adopter of a new car technology that's still in the process of maturing, and the other car makers are still quite far from catching up as well, but this is not the only reason there's a gap in "repair price per vehicle" compared to other car makers.</comment>


Internet Simulator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nsec/the-internet <comment><USER2> It seems like a really good idea to write a network simulator (multiple simultaneous things going on) in Go...

(Note to self: On a side note, I wonder if Go would be the best language to choose for a digital logic (CPU) simulator (again, multiple simultaneous things going on)... this would seem to be a good logical conclusion...)</comment>


A Look at the Ugly Side of Getting Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-19/a-look-at-the-ugly-side-of-getting-rich <comment><USER2> > In another, Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines accused > of stealing billions from state coffers, sits in her Manila apartment > beneath a gold-framed Picasso

Everytime I read something like this, I feel ill.

What drives human beings to this level of greed and excess? Is there some primitive or primate instinct in all of us? Meanwhile, the beggar children in India don't even have a shirt on their back. True story: When I went back to India for the very 1st time after coming to America, I saw a shirtless kid on a train station begging for food. I opened my suitcase and gave him 1 of my oversized (for him) shirt. The look on his face was priceless.

What drives so many people throughout history over 100s of years to hoard stuff and waste (mostly) ill-acquired wealth?? Is there something in-grained in us, that we can't resist it??

Still searching for an explanation.

<comment> self-diversity What in particular makes you feel ill about this? What is the strong emotion that affects you so upon reading of the wealth of a person you will never meet?

Normally when people say this, their tone makes it evident they are envious, but that's missing here and I'm curious.

<comment><USER2> I'm not envious. I want to understand why such wealthy people wouldn't spend the money improving the lives of other human beings, and instead waste it on overprices sh*t like a $12,000 Hermes bag.

I grew up in India and the wealth disparity couldn't be any starker. I feel that if I was ever that wealthy, I would spend a lot of it trying to improve the lives of poor people and homeless people, instead of buying 4000 shoes or a 100 Hermes bags.

I know from close contact with Filipino Boxers, how broke and poor a large population of their country is. Meanwhile their President is stealing from her people and hoarding 4000+ shoes, when she can only wear 1 pair at a time :)

So I really want to know, is there some very primate (and hence hard to control) instinct in all human beings, which causes them to hoard useless stuff instead of using their wealth for 'greater causes'?

<comment><USER3> One way to answer that might be to look inside ourselves.

Take me for example. I indulge myself with books, songs, apps, etc. Granted, it's on a completely different financial scale than Hermes bags, but I own more things than I can realistically consume. So let's call whatever I buy but can't consume "excess".

Whatever instinct causes me to buy stuff in excess instead of using that excess to help the poor more than I currently do is likely the same instinct that causes the rich to buy 4000 shoes and 100 Hermes bags instead of helping the poor more.

I don't introspect enough to know what that instinct is, but most of us here probably have similar very minor excesses in our lives and can get some clues by thinking about those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish people would stop using the term "1%" to refer to the super- rich. They're actually talking about the 0.01%, or an even smaller group.

Heck, anyone making $30k/year is in the 1% globally. Even in the West, a good (not superstar) doctor or lawyer can expect to be in the 1%. If you're buying $300k handbags, you're way, way, way beyond the 1%.

II

Documentary works like this, mixing avaricious fascination with super-wealth as well as the morally-delicious feeling of superiority, always put me off a bit. It's sort of like the inverse of watching Hoarders - you get to be horrified and fascinated and feel superior at the same time.

"How could someone live like this?" you get to say. "I would never..." you get to say.

(Not saying that this photographer had that intention, specifically - I'm more commenting on the audience than the photog).

People are people; wealth is wealth; most people would act in these ways if they could.

And from the point of view of a kid starving in Delhi slums, your Prius looks a lot like Imelda Marcos' gold-framed Picasso.

That said... I'm looking at these photos with interest :)

<comment><USER5> I wish people would stop using the "1%" as a global entity. When people refer to the "1%" it is understood implicitly that they are referring to the 1% of the wealthiest individuals in the western world. By referring to the "1%" in the way you do, you demean people who struggle daily making 8 bucks an hour because "chin up, you're in the 1% hehe".

You think you're doing some good by making this argument, but really you're hurting more people than you understand.

<comment><USER6> > When people refer to the "1%" it is understood implicitly that they are > referring to the 1% of the wealthiest individuals in the western world.

The people making minimum wage in the western world are, by your own definition, NOT in the 1%. They are very much NOT among the wealthiest individuals in the western world. It's not demeaning at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think part of the problem is how often people idolize the rich just for being rich and not for what sort of person they are, it enables them.

Money doesnt impress me, good people impress me.

<comment><USER8> And there are plenty of good people with money, and without.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Money doesn't make you happy. It makes you unhappy in a better part of town.

Great quote!

<comment><USER10> It's something only the fabulously wealthy can say. For almost everyone else, even if money doesn't directly make you happier, it removes the vast majority of barriers to attaining happiness (though clearly not all of them). I know I'm much happier now that I make six figures and don't have to worry as much about medical bills, rent, food and so on and have disposable income to direct into new hobbies I couldn't have afforded before (fishkeeping and hydroponics in my case).

<comment><USER11> Most places in western countries provide citizens medical and food/shelter security without being wealthy.

<comment><USER12> Except the largest Western nation in the world...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bloomberg should retitle this article "The Ugly Side of Greed". But then we never would have read it. ;)

The people portrayed here are on the extreme end of greed & materialism.

I once worked with an almost-billionaire family. If you ran into them in a restaurant, you would never know. They were out of the mold of Sam Walton. Ok, they drove Cadillacs, but Cadillacs with well over 100,000 miles on them. The rest of their vehicles were Chevy Tahoes or Ford pickups.

Further, there are tons of millionaires who saved their money over their life. They don't act like this, and they probably live right near you, but you wouldn't notice because they don't go overboard on their materialism.

On the poorer end of the spectrum, there are tons of "credit-card millionaires" \- as I call people who make $100-300,000 per year but have no real savings and spend all their money on "glamorous" crap that fills up their homes. To me, the article is about people just like this, but who have secured more money - their behavior is identical.

<comment><USER14> > _I once worked with an almost-billionaire family. If you ran into them in a > restaurant, you would never know._

One of my favorite books is The Billionaire Who Wasn't, about Chuck Feeney of DFS (Duty-Free Shoppers), and it keeps referencing his cheap Casio watch:

 _"Since my earliest days I have been frugal, but I am a frugal person in that I hate waste, at any level," says Feeney, who always wears off-the-peg clothes, a cheap plastic watch, and reading glasses of the type sold in book- stores. "If I can get a watch for $15 that keeps perfect time, what am I doing messing around with a Rolex?"_

[https://www.amazon.com/Billionaire-Who-Wasnt-Secretly- Fortun...](https://www.amazon.com/Billionaire-Who-Wasnt-Secretly- Fortune/dp/1610393341/)

[Incidentally, it means the $200 Pebble watch I wear & love is 13x more expensive/extravagant than that of a billionaire. Gives an interesting perspective.]

<comment><USER15> It actually makes more sense for the already successful and wealthy to not be interested in outward appearance. They have no one to impress and nothing to gain by showing off.

Your up and coming business man, however, may have some logical reasons to signal wealth. Either for networking purposes or convincing potential customers or partners that you are the type of successful person they might want to work with, conspicuous consumption can have its merits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So what do you do when you have a ton of money? You can of course spend it on charity or investing in companies, but that requires work, and is not in everyone's interests. There are also only so many expensive things that they can buy in this world, so they buy all of them, and some more, and there is still a lot of money left to spend. Even if they do all of the above, there will be more money left, and the search for purpose and meaning will become more and more intense. Also, due to the nature of capitalism, the rich can't stop making more wealth than the rest.

</comment><comment><USER17> When Fortune (or was it Forbes) introduced the list of 500 richest Americans (early 1970s?) many people on the list were angry and threatened to sue.

Now it's honor, a form a celebrity

<comment><USER18> people are still sueing Forbes

      http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-saudi-billionaire-idUSBRE9560Q020130607

<comment><USER17> Ha!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those of you in LA, this work is being exhibited at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that "In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are "low income""

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194803)

...was posted 3 hours before this one.</comment>


The End of HDD? Samsung Debuts a 3.2TB PCIe SSD Card - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2694877/storage/the-end-of-hdd--samsung-debuts-a-3-2tb-pcie-ssd-card.html

<comment><USER2> Technology revolutions, and the fates of companies involved in them are very much how Ernest Hemingway described how he went bankrupt "two ways -- first gradually, then suddenly." I am reminded of that reading this article.

<comment><USER3> It's like how digital cameras took over and killed off film. It took a while, at first there was no comparison, but eventually it became almost impossible to source film at all.</comment></comment>


Argentina's government is wooing entrepreneurs with a new law - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/argentinas-government-is-wooing-entrepreneurs-with-a-new-law <comment><USER3> This sounds great. I think, however, that the big challenge for Argentina is convincing investors that this has any chance of being stable for many years to come. In a country where every new government promises and attempts a radical re-foundation of the State, with no long-term policies and goals agreed to and respected by the whole political spectrum, this may be hard to do.

<comment><USER4> I've been in Buenos Aires for 3 months in the beginning of the year and I can assure you that if this government stays all startups will shutdown due to impossibility to pay electric and other bills.

<comment><USER5> I'm from Buenos Aires and I can assure you that this is outright false. Buenos Aires is the largest population center of Argentina and has had heavily subsidized (e.g. electricity bills of 2 USD are not uncommon) utilities for almost a decade . In the rest of the country these subsidies rarely exist, so everyone else pays a realistic price.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, bills went from 2 USD to 30 USD. And the dollar from 8 pesos to 16. If cheap electricity doesn't help technology companies, I don't know what helps. Sure isn't "entrepreneur's laws", because most of projects fail way before really need it, like when the founders (or wannabe) can't pay their bills (and quit their jobs, if they are lucky to have one).

<comment><USER6> It was only 8 pesos for very small amounts authorized by the government, the street price was already 14/15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How come no-one is talking about safety w.r.t. moving to and living in Argentina?

> In the first three months of 2017, there were 77 kidnappings for ransom.

Source: [May 2017] - The Numbers And Locations Of Kidnappings For Ransom In Argentina => [http://www.thebubble.com/the-numbers-and-locations-of- kidnap...](http://www.thebubble.com/the-numbers-and-locations-of-kidnappings- for-ransom-in-argentina/)

> From March 20 to March 31, authorities registered at least 16 express > kidnappings in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. According to Clarin, the > victims of these kidnappings are of all ages and social classes.

Source: [Apr 2017] - Express Kidnappings on the Rise Again in Buenos Aires => [http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/express- kidnappings-...](http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/express-kidnappings- on-the-rise-again-in-buenos-aires)

Can someone who lives there throw some light on the prevalence of ransom kidnappings? I read about this a while back, and want to know if it's really a cause for concern for Americans and other foreigners moving to Argentina for work, or is it mostly localized (i.e. political kidnappings / gang related kidnappings) in which case you can be somewhat "reassured" that it may not happen to you.

<comment><USER8> As a European I lived in Argentina for a year. At one point I took an official looking city cab at the airport and quickly realised that the driver had other intentions than getting me to my apartment. He dropped me off in another part of town after emptying all my pockets, keeping my luggage as ransom. It does not need to be a complex kidnapping for you to feel unsafe.

<comment><USER9> I'm really surprised by this, there is an official cab office right outside ezeiza, which gives it some legitimacy. How did you pick a cab? (i want to know which ones are actually unsafe)

<comment><USER10> Use Uber, call a radio taxi, use an app that is used by a local radio taxi or when you are actually at Ezeiza just go to one of the many stands that are right after the scanners before you go out into the main hall.

I am really careful at the points where you will find a lot of tourists like Ezeiza and the central bus station. We've got screwed by a "tapper" once, paid much more for the ride than was actually supposed because he rigged the meter. This happened just outside the bus station where they're waiting for victims from out of town that don't know the tariffs, distances etcetera.

Hailing on the street never went wrong.

<comment><USER9> I'm argentinian, I've never had issues coming from the airport, thats why i'm asking. Uber works from the airport? thats pretty sweet..

<comment><USER10> I actually never used Uber! I assumed they were working in the greater Buenos Aires area not just the center. I'd personally take a remise over Uber any day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd be skeptical. Hopefully the new government will make things different, but with precedents such as [1] and [2], I'd give them a good couple of decades to prove they're going to remain stable.

If you're looking for stability + healthy startup environment + South America, look into Chile.

Source: Am from Uruguay

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-13/now- argen...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-13/now-argentina- can-t-even-pay-bonds-in-argentina)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito)

<comment><USER12> On Monday they issued 100-year bonds that yield nearly 8% of interest. Huge public debt, desindustrialization of the economy and capitals flowing out of the country are some of the causes that led to the Corralito. This is history repeating itself.

Bus this new law is certainly good news.

<comment><USER13> They sold a bound at 0.05% of face value? That's an incredibly new kind of low. Why would they ever push for that long term?

<comment><USER14> It's a rock and a hard place. They have a deficit, they cannot wring out any more money via taxes, and cutting social spending would likely result in both outrage from the electorate and economic pains due to the policies of the previous administration. So to keep the machine running they're borrowing money, with the hope that pro-business policies will attract the investment needed to be able to make everything ultimately sustainable.

At least, this is how it was explained to me.

<comment><USER13> It's funny that here at Brazil, every time the government uses this policy we get 1.5-2 years of intense growth, and then a big recession.

The recession always lasts until ~1 year after the government start cutting social spending and stop the pro-growth policies. Then we get moderate growth again, as long as the non-pro-growth is maintained.

Besides, business don't tend to like most policies called "pro-business".

Still what I don't get is why they are selling 100 years bounds at all. The interest rate is quite understandable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On another node, Larry Summers told an interesting anecdote regarding Argentina recently:

> In 1900, Argentina was closer to the United States economically than most of > Europe is today. Today, we think of Argentina as a poor developing country. > Argentine growth only has lagged American growth by 7/10 of a 1 percent over > all of that period. So when you get things wrong, when you have > dysfunctional governance, it doesn't undo you in a year or five years or > even a decade. It does over time.

Argentina's "deal-based" system where initiative comes from the charismatic leader have been outperformed by the ruled-based system prominent in US or Germany.

<comment><USER9> Argentina's economic history is ridden with political catastrophes.

Even the period of liberalism in the 1880-1920's had plenty of issues: indentured servants, borderline slavery. Workers protests were met with violence and murder by officials.

Argentina has had a military coup every couple of decades in the previous century, which included entire presidencies with unelected officials, culminating in a coup that killed between 9000 and 30000 thousand people.

The lack of political stability can explain the problems in all other areas, like ineffective justice or economic stability.

Not to mention that using a 100 year span, and including germany as an example to follow..

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with doing business in Argentina is you could have written the title "Argentina's government is wooing entrepreneurs with a new law... this week". Next week? Who knows.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of the reasons tech is doing really well here in the last ten years despite the governments is that you don't need a lot of imports to work on IT except for the computers, the customers abroad are easily reached through internet and also you don't pay export taxes like you would if you would export meat or soy. People are really well educated as education up to a bachelor's degree is completely free.

What used to be difficult is getting money into the country, something that sounds as crazy as it really is and all of the different white grey and black exchange rates. I had to send money to a US account owned by somebody that would promise to pay me in pesos here because there just was no other way to do it. That really made me nervous.

Also I couldn't pay my bills abroad because I couldn't send any money if nothing was left on my foreign accounts.

<comment><USER17> You say "used to be". How long ago was that?

<comment><USER9> Less than two years ago. There were currency controls that pushed most operations outside the country or through the illegal ring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone here lived/worked in Buenos Aires? I've been considering it as a place to check out for an extended period of time in 2018.

<comment><USER19> I've lived in Buenos Aires all my life. This is my biased pros/cons list: \- It's a beautiful city with a lot of art and beautiful places. \- Food is great \- Most of the people is nice and open minded (same sex marriage is accepted here) \- We have a lot of good IT professionals and great entrepreneurial ecosystem (including cryptocurrencies) \- Argentina is a beautiful country to do some tourism \- Our timezone is great, we are close to NYC time for example

Cons: \- Prices. I've been travelling a lot this past years and I found Buenos Aires might be as expensive as other big cities. \- Inflation, it's really hard to deal everyday with it. I've lost sense of prices to be honest \- Some places are _really_ insecure. Also, you might have problems on safe areas too. I live in a good neighborhood and someone broke into my apartment when I was out.

<comment><USER20> I looked into moving to Argentina recently but found some complaints on forums about the speed and reliability of the Internet. What are your experiences with the Internet in Argentina?

<comment><USER19> Well. Sadly I don't have any benchmark (or some serious analysis) to share with you but I can tell you this:

\- I pay about 40usd for a non symmetric 12Mbps connection. It works ok - <USER2> least for me - I can stream music or watch something on Netflix without any problems.

\- My ISP has a max of 50Mbps (non symmetric)

\- You can find some corporate symmetric connections (I'm not aware if you can have those at home) but I suspect they are like a regular connection in some other more advanced countries

<comment><USER10> In some zones you have symmetric fiberoptic lines. To your house too if you want to pay that premium (I do).

<comment><USER19> Besides Iplan, is there another alternative? Can you share how much does it cost to you?

<comment><USER10> iPlan perhaps doesn't even use it's own fiber, apparently there are more companies offering it. But it's legal to call your company FiberTel in Argentina and then sell cable not fiber, so the situation is pretty opaque to me.

The full price is 1200 pesos, around 75 bucks. So not cheap. But to have something that works reliably up and down it's peanuts, the cheaper options are not as reliable and have asymmetric speeds. Stable videoconferencing is a must.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Latin America needs more integration. None of its markets is very big (except Brazil or Mexico), but together they are huge. It needs to be easier for small businesses to interact and swap money and goods. There are some sectors (automotive comes to mind) where governments set up deals, but for most businesses it's really hard. Not even the mail works well enough.</comment>


A Patent Case That Affects Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-21/a-patent-case-that-affects-everyone <comment><USER2> Looks like the story was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13929992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13929992).

</comment><comment><USER3> That is crazy. I thought that rooting your Android is totally legal. How can that be legal, but refilling ink cartridges isn't?</comment>


Most software architecture diagrams are useless - <AUTHOR> https://www.ben-morris.com/most-architecture-diagrams-are-useless/ <comment><USER2> Its true. But i still do them anyway since it makes me look busy when im not.</comment>


Show HN: A library of GTFS Realtime translators (for transit data) - <AUTHOR> https://ixn.intersection.com/found-in-translation-announcing-a-library-of-gtfs-realtime-translators-1d196857dded <comment><USER2> Already a great help, and looking forward to the future support of the Alert object

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome for the community!</comment>


Can anyone explain why Tuesday C19 deaths have been 2x Sunday's? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/1264333616974139392 <comment><USER2> Most likely administrators, who don't work weekends, demand signoff on publication of clinical data.

</comment><comment><USER3> People don't work on the weekend.</comment>


America's Top States for Business (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/11/americas-top-states-for-business-2017-overall-ranking.html <comment><USER2> Nevada at 39, Delaware at 40, and Wyoming at 27 feels curious.</comment>


The Grand Illusion: Does time have a future? - <AUTHOR> http://laphamsquarterly.org/time/grand-illusion

<comment><USER2> The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from our bodies: if you view us as being big ropes of particle-worldlines in a 4-dimensional fixed universe, you are basically stuck with describing us as "souls" who have latched onto this rope and are traveling along it, living the experience even though the future is as set in stone as the past. It makes relativity really easy to understand, but it makes entropy comparably harder (since the premise of entropy is that our uncertainties multiply due to particle collisions until things end up in more and more uncertain states). It _almost_ sounds like there's no free will in this perspective, but that's not quite true. Instead you get a model of free will which is a lot like you see in the movie The Matrix: "Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand _why_ you made it."

Relativity does not necessarily _compel_ this. It is true, the relativistic "present" is a space between two light cones, and not just one plane. But that's not necessarily a huge obstacle: we can just pretend that there is one plane which is the "true present" and accept that the laws of physics make it impossible to know if we're truly right about which it is. As long as _one_ of the planes is the true present you can lift up the Newtonian way of looking at time to the special-relativistic whole.

It turns out that black holes aren't really so interesting as this article claims, because there is a 'co-moving' metric which falls into the black hole's event horizon in a finite time. What happens with a black hole is, you see someone slow down more and more to a standstill as they approach the event horizon, appearing to "merge in" with that surface, redshifting into the quantum noise of the Hawking radiation there. But from their perspective, you're just seeing their "last moment in this universe"; they'll keep going on past that horizon.

But general relativity _is_ still a problem. It describes the causal fabric of the universe as warped by the energies that inhabit each part of that fabric, and that makes it really hard to deal with time. Some of the interesting stuff here comes either from (a) alternative descriptions of relativity (like spinors/twistors, where you describe the entire world-line of a particle as a point), or (b) quantum mechanics (where you can do multiple-universe- splitting). The combination of relativity and quantum mechanics, for example, seems to give us the Wheeler-de Witt equation, which time famously "falls out" of (it plays no final role in the equation). Some physicists, notably Julian Barbour, think that this means we've got to fixate on a static universe. I'm totally undecided on this but I find it fascinating.

<comment><USER3> >The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from our bodies

Whose mind? Would you say that the mind of a worm is separate from its body? Suppose - no. Then where does mind gets separates from the body - at ant level? at fish level? at lizard? at mammal? at ape? at Neanderthal? at Cro- Magnon 20K years ago?

Mind is just an emergent behavior of a pretty complex organized matter. The more complex the matter the more its ability to increase entropy beyond simple local gradient and that ability is what we call mind.

"Free will" is just a part of that "mind". The obvious question here again - does a worm has free will?

In general these notions of separate mind or especially soul are misconceptions coming from religion where world was created 6 thousands years ago with God giving soul to humans only and with no continuous biological connection between first living cells couple billion years ago and humans today.

<comment><USER4> At the full blown materialist end there's another big problem though: Are you just a cloud of ever changing atoms mistaken for a person? Since almost none of the atoms from your childhood remain in you now, are you actually the same individual? If yes, by what measure and means? If no, then how can a cloud of atoms have things like "rights", personhood, etc?

In addition to both dualism and materialism there is a third way called Hylomorphism: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism)

<comment><USER3> >Since almost none of the atoms from your childhood remain in you now, are you actually the same individual?

i hoped that not, i hope that i did mature at least a bit :)

But you question i suppose was about a little bit different aspect of "the same" and to that aspect i'll ask you - this river, the set of ever changing atoms of water, is it the same river that it was a second ago, an hour, an year...?

>If no, then how can a cloud of atoms have things like "rights", personhood, etc?

In physics where is no "rights". The "rights" is just a "mind" construct reflecting current balance of violent interactions between different "clouds of ever changing atoms".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I take umbrage with this part: "A past that can be revisited has not really passed. So, Gödel concluded, time does not exist." This is a very silly conclusion. My assumption is that the silliness is attributed more to the author of this article than to Gödel himself.

Our intuitive concept of time from our existence at speeds very slow compared with the speed of light and at masses which are very small when compared to those necessary to bend space-time is not necessarily applicable to time in all regions of this speed-mass phase space. Particularly the regions where the speed is close to the speed of light and the mass is very large. There's just no logical path from the initial observation to the conclusion that time doesn't exist.

<comment><USER6> I admit I'm well below the mental capacity to confidently state something as bold as "time does not exist", but I'd like to offer my thoughts. When thinking about Schrödinger's cat, [1] I imagined that the cat remained dead (and in every other possible state) even after the observer had confirmed the cat was alive. Every unobserved state did not collapse, but became inaccessible by means currently understood. Those states could still be observed by the same or another observer from a different perspective (i.e. revisiting the event). We just have to figure out how.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just came up with this stupid theory for the fun of it.

Say time is self contained in the universe, just like all frames in a DVD. The process of going back and forth thru frames is what we call time, you need an observer capable of processing frames as input to produce information from them. Without the information processor, you still could see the universe as a whole (like the DVD) but not be able to see the frames stored in it in a sequencial manner.

The only big difference between a DVD and the universe is that the latter is infinite.

Well forget about it. If everything is self-contained then it gives determinism an upper hand against free will, and I hate determinism.

Perhaps the universe is like a DVD being burned as we speak and free will still reigns?

I said it was all for fun, don't be too hard on me. I always thought time was absolute, and perception was relative. Well, tell that to a god's particle before being created. There is no time in the void.

<comment><USER8> I kind of enjoy to intellectually "know" (or think I know) that there is no free will -- certainly not to the degree our consciousness often thinks there is -- and still to appreciate and say yes to the illusion. I don't know why, but I still do :) Such is the power of the mind. You can know there is no free will and still believe there is, and you can know that belief to be false and still allow it in, like a dirty old dog you let sleep on the couch because its your favourite dog and you love it deeply. We can do that, and I find that beautiful.

Also, from [http://www.einstein- website.de/z_biography/credo.html](http://www.einstein- website.de/z_biography/credo.html) :

> I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he > wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations > throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they > are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me > from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding > individuals, and from losing my temper.

But I don't like that translation too much, so here is my own very slight variation on it:

> I do not believe in the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's word: "Man may > be able to do, what he wants, but he can't will, what he wants", accompanies > me in all situations of life and reconciles me with the deeds of mankind, > even though they are quite painful to me. This realization of the unfreedom > of the will protects me from taking myself and my fellow human beings all > too seriously as acting and judging individuals, and from loosing my good > humour.

<comment><USER9> I feel like the idea that free will is an "illusion" kind of misses the more fundamental realisation of Compatiblism: Will doesn't need to exist as something external to the rules of the universe for it to have meaning.

We might not have "free will" (whatever that means), but we definitely have "will", and that's all that ever mattered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a pretty fascinating Google Talk on this subject by Sean Carroll: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE)

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's my layman hypothesis:

Time has a wave-like nature, not the particles. Since space and time are related through the Lorentz transformations, you could substitute a wave-like property of time and make the time dependent wave equation into a space dependent equation. The results would be the same, but it's a different interpretation. This is why you cannot measure a particles momentum and position at the same moment - they do not both exist at the same moment and depend on the current phase of the wave.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and- ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of- time.html)</comment>


Gooey – Turn (almost) any Python CLI into a full GUI with one line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey#what-is-it <comment><USER2> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218785)</comment>


Ballmer: Android Isn't Free - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2010/05/21/tm_microsoft_mobile.fortune/

<comment><AUTHOR> Poor job by the reporter for not pressing Ballmer on what he means about Android not being free.</comment>


Hell Yes, You Should Raise VC Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.npost.com/2009/08/18/hell-yes-you-should-raise-vc-funding/

<comment><USER3> The benefits of VC funding do you little good if you get clipped in the process, which is precisely what is likely to happen to you in today's lousy funding environment unless your company is truly exceptional - <USER2> valuations, oppressive terms and conditions, lopsided liquidation preferences, etc. are unattractive by any measure.

The author pitches the VCs' expertise, and this is a valid point. If you are going to be potentially acquired, it helps immeasurably to have a talented team at your side (as well as sufficient financial backing) to enable you to negotiate for the best price.

But that doesn't mean you take your bootstrap startup and run to the VCs when you are at your earliest stages and hence at your weakest. They may fund you but that is when you get the worst terms.

The best path I have seen after many years of working with bootstrap startups is one where the startup _defers_ VC funding until it builds sufficient value in the company to warrant a solid valuation. At that stage, the startup can approach the VCs from a position of strength, get a good valuation, and get good terms. That brings the needed VC expertise into the company but only when it most benefits the founders and other early-stage participants.

Some startups, of course, have capital-intensive needs right up front but these are not bootstrap startups and they will live or die by VC funding in the early stages.

For the bootstrap, bide your time, plan wisely, limit your expenses, stay lean, and build value. Then _you_ will have the choice whether you do or don't want to bring in the VC cash and expertise, depending on how it fits into your strategic plans.

VCs can and do add tremendous value to the right situations but don't go chasing after an ill-timed funding just to get VCs into your company.

</comment><comment><USER4> You don't have to bowdlerize your headlines.

<comment><USER5> "Bowdlerize" is more specific than "censor". I don't think it applies here.

<comment><USER6> Bowdlerize means change out the swear words. i.e., expurgate them. [ex = out of , purg = cleanse, ate = verb]

Thomas Bowdler was a guy who published a women-and-children friendly translation of Shakespeare.

I regret posting this, because I strongly suspect the more time-consuming process of actually looking up a word would improve retention. This is because declarative memory is actually condensed episodic memory.

Even better, look it up yourself after reading this post! At a different time and a different location!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most important thing about taking VC funding is the money. Its real money that you can spend now. We raised $3MM and this allows us to iterate on the product and the pitch and to get it right. Without funding, there would be no way that I could have done this business, with a wife and two kids, ramen is not feasible for dinner (more than twice a week anyway).

</comment><comment><USER8> You can accomplish alot of these things by finding a good set of advisers and giving them a much smaller percentage of your company.

</comment><comment><USER9> author: randall lucas, senior associate, voyager capital

[http://www.voyagercapital.com/team/index.php?category=Invest...](http://www.voyagercapital.com/team/index.php?category=Investment+Team&team- member=Randall+Lucas)

</comment><comment><USER6> My favorite quote from the article:

"instead, we have an institutionalized way to recycle capital from its gargantuan silos, a means for taking the risk that could be ruinous to an individual and divvying it up among the pools of concentrated capital. We call that institution VC"

This is great. It helps explain the equation I learned in econ class, savings = investment.</comment>