I find this to be more and more important the more experienced I get. At some point, I had a poignant realization. I work to earn money. I then use the money to provide for myself & my family, to buy things and experiences, and to build a safety net. I do these things to have a relatively stressless, happy, and fulfilling life.
If I just maximize for cash earned, I need to compensate for other things. I want to maximize free time and minimize commute. I have errands to run and things to do. Having flexible work, with a work from home option is worth more to me than making more money. Otherwise, I need to spend more on an apartment close to the office. A more expensive car can make a commute more bearable. I value peace and quiet, and city living is at odds with this. Reconciling all this while working a 9-5 at a central office in the city costs a lot of money.
I currently work at 15Five, where "Embrace Freedom & Flexibility" is one of our core values. We actually are active in living this and our other core values. You can feel the effect directly. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and arrived at the same conclusion as this article.
Completely agree. I'll trade some salary for flexibility and control. I hate doing pointless work (hence control), and I like working remote and work very well at home. The odd thing is, I go to the office regularly, and it's enjoyable because it's my choice to go.
At my current company we state it as "you're all adults, and that's how we treat you." We have hired some people who needed more structure and they had to move on. There is no judgement on people who left, not every position is right for every person.
I agree. The only rational explanation I personally see for maximizing earnings at the expense of current life flexibility is to save/invest enough to retire earlier. But even then there are certain aspects of life that you can't catch up on later; being a part of your children growing up, establishing a strong bond with your spouse, remaining healthy by minimizing stress, etc
This makes sense if you're going to try to get a big payday early in your career - trying to build a unicorn startup in SV and cash out by 30. That sort of makes sense to me. But maximizing earnings by working 60+ hour weeks so you can retire at 55 instead of 65? That's a pretty high cost for not a lot of reward, as far as I can see.
There is no single right answer to that question so you need to figure it out for yourself.
Some of the answers require you to work 80+ hours a week (at a good job) while living in a tent so you can save every penny - when you finally retire at 68 you will just barely have enough money to enjoy the last 5 years of your life spending all the money you saved over the years.
Some answers you save 50% of your income until you retire at 40 to live the life you choose.
Some answers you save 10% until 65 working a 40 hour a week job.
The first allows you have an expensive hobby (sail the world in a very nice yacht). The second means you have to enjoy not buying anything. The last is a reasonable compromise for most of us.
I agree with you. The question then becomes: if you achieved this level of performance, isn't it better to work for yourself rather than work for somebody who all the time undervalues your performance? Isn't it better in the long run to build a product that might need minimum level of attention once it's done?
I'd say it's not just about risk tolerance but also deciding what pieces to "outsource" in your daily job.
When you're running your own firm (even one person), you are in charge of catching billable work, doing the billable work, billing the work, filing the taxes, etc, etc. If you add anyone else, the non-billable efforts get even bigger. I ran my own firm for ~7 years and had a team of 8 at one point. Hunting the next project just got exhausting and I never got to build things.
If you work for another firm - consultancy or product - the vast majority is handed off to other people who are probably better at (or at least focused on) many of those things. Yes, you make less money but you're "paying" to have all those things done for you.
That depends on your risk tolerance, though. Self-employment, especially the entrepreneurial kind, inherently has a higher risk of failure. Sure, you might win big and build a self-sustaining business that earns you a tidy living, but then again you might also go bankrupt and lose everything because you can't pay your bills.
Is self-employment really so much riskier than sequential employment? With the latter if you're laid off you instantly lose all your income. As a self-employed consultant / freelancer if you lose a customer who quite likely still have other customers, which mitigates the overall risk.
I wouldn't say riskier, just more churn. Higher highs and lower lows but you can probably extract more value because there is no middle man (i.e. an employer).
However, one significant risk is losing out on promotions and status if you ever want to return to the corporate world. Seniority is often measured in "time in seat" and taking 10 years off to build your own business can make it harder to jump right back in at a level you'd expect.
The other risk is the stress of uncertainty. At a corporate gig you get a paycheck every two weeks like clockwork. The moment that pattern ends, panic ensues and the company is gone. When you work for yourself you have to be responsible for ensuring the paycheck is there. Quite often freelance work can be feast or famine. You may get a bigger payday than you ever expected one month but prepare because the next month might not bring in a dime.
> However, one significant risk is losing out on promotions and status if you ever want to return to the corporate world. Seniority is often measured in "time in seat" and taking 10 years off to build your own business can make it harder to jump right back in at a level you'd expect.
That's provided you'd actually ever want to return to the corporate world. Measures like "time in seat" make me wonder why given other options anyone would ever want to work in such an environment in the first place.
> Quite often freelance work can be feast or famine.
That certainly can be a challenge but there are approaches to alleviate that problem. It's mostly a matter of getting (and staying) organised and regularly keeping in touch with both existing clients and potential new ones.
United States. I've had every payment system from once a month (while working at a Unviersity), to the 1st and 15th of every month (small company in Austin), to every 2 weeks (Much bigger company in Wisconsin).
If you get laid off in most western countries you get ~10k over 6 months in unemployment benefits from the government + accrued vacation time and possibly more. Assuming you where ok financially before you started that's a long time to look for the next job especially if your cut down your lifestyle.
PS: It's often the case where people get a little warning and end up finding a job before they get laid off. From the companies perspective the trade off is a little more chaos up front for significant savings on unemployment insurance.
It's true about the US, and if you go on unemployment the company that let you go can be on the hook to pay for about half of it. So you definitely want your ex employees to get another job fast.
Every time I've went on unemployment, it was waaaay less than 10k - if I managed to get 1000 bucks a month it was a miracle. Last time I did it (years ago) I let the money sit in the bank at Chase because I had lost track of the debit card they (unemployment) sent me. Until at a certain point they had to close out the account. This was years later, and I had (mostly) forgotten all about it. I had to go down to the bank and prove who I was to withdraw it.
So - why did I let it sit? Didn't I need it? Well - no, not really. I applied because I could; I was laid off my previous job, so I thought "hey, why not, I earned it, right?". So I applied. Kept my notes and log and such. But before I got the confirmation and debit card, I had a new job. Before that, I just used my savings (actually, I don't even think I had to dip into that - I had more than enough to cover things in my checking, after the severance pay).
When I finally did withdraw the money, it was something like $400 or so for a couple of weeks.
You do need to pay taxes on the income, and I assume dev's are at the high end of the scale. "The current weekly benefit amount provided by the Maryland Unemployment Insurance Law ranges from a minimum of $50.00 to a maximum of $430.00." https://www.dllr.state.md.us/employment/claimfaq.shtml
The high is 430 * 52 / 2 = 11,180 and the low is 430 * 52 / 2 = 1,300. But, again before taxes.
Yes it's riskier. If I'm laid off it only takes weeks to find a new position. If my business goes under, I'm likeley burnt out and have just lost not only my income but my life savings as well.
I don't think it is, at least once you are established. I've been working for myself for nearly twenty years, I'd say I'm fairly conservative in my approach to business and money as are most of the people I know in the same situation.
When I look back at my earlier career it was quite volatile compared to doing my own thing.
If I do X for someone I get paid Y. If I do X for myself, I get paid X*Z. However, I also have to do marketing, sales, and everything else a particular X requires to be a business. These are things that I prefer not doing. I'm on the fence if the Z multiplier is enough. Been there, done that. I don't knock it, but for the time being, I enjoy the stability of a long-term contract and not doing the peripheral work.
But after preaching it for a decade, I realized that working for yourself implies to develop a certain skill set and embrace another set of constraints many people don't wish for them-self. There is a lot of comfort in being an employee.
This is true, you replace one set of problems with some completely different ones. However, it does give you the ability to set your own priorities rather than them being handed down from management.
That would depend on whether the work you find happy, low stress and fulfilling overlaps much with the work you'd need to be doing to work for yourself. Personally I enjoy the software engineering part of my job, and have no desire to take on the business, sales and marketing work that I think would form a large part of working for myself.
What this mindset and view doesn't take into account is the direct financial impact of these measures, and taxes are a lot more involved that people think.
Take google catering your lunch every day and night. It might be costing google 25 U$S per meal to provide that to the employees. Would the employee, not having that option, spend 25 U$S a meal? No way. But do employees choose or prefer companies that cater lunch?
Lets say google can offer an employee a double offer: either full benefits and salary of X, or NO benefits and salary of Y. What is your Y?
In general I would always think that most people will take Y, precisely because most of the benefits are very costly. Y could be 30%.
Now, there is a difference in taxes: that extra Y will get taxed at 30%, while googles benefit cost might even have tax deductions. So the gap between X and Y is blurred by rules that applied differently.
If company benefits were not only deductible, but expenditure there were considered part of wages and taxed at that rate, they would quickly diminsh if not dissapear.
This is very topical for me as I'm considering offers at a couple of companies this week and was trying to estimate Y for each, since they have pretty different benefits. One of them has catered breakfast and lunch.
It sounds like a great perk but in Canada* in-kind benefits, including meals, are considered part of your salary, and are subject to income tax.
I'm not sure how that plays out with daily catered meals; am I deemed to have received the benefit even if I eat out or bring leftovers? I could be paying taxes on food I haven't eaten. Probably not cheap food either.
I'd prefer being paid in cash, and having the option to buy meal vouchers. That's true of most benefits - cash is always more flexible.
There's also what it says about the culture: we offer free breakfast because we expect you to be at the office before your usual breakfast time. We offer free lunch because we don't expect you to have enough time to go out for lunch, or to pack a lunch the night before.
There's also something to be said about attention and creativity in most coding/tech jobs. I could sit at my desk all day writing marginally efficient code, or I could take a 1-hour break to do something else, come back and write really exceptional code, but most work cultures frown on doing this regularly.
If you're full (or mostly) remote, you can regulate this yourself
I think the problem is, the money is one of the only things written down. There's no, gee we're really sorry but things got rough this month so we're only going to pay you 70%. (Of course you leave if that does happen.)
But there's no guarantee on any of the intangibles. And whenever they need to save a buck, or even in ways that aren't fully appreciated, the good-workplace stuff can erode. After spending a while in this industry, I'd say places are more alike than different, and total compensation is a reasonable thing to maximize for.
Give me clear goals which are measurable, and I will get things done either remotely or on-site. It doesn't matter which one. This is a win-win situation because my manager can track my progress based on the previously setup measurements. And to achieve this, location is irrelevant.
Things usually start turning south when managers just simply demand speed. Or eagerness. Or dedication. Or other bullshit which has no relevance regarding any specific task.
These are the cases which brilliantly show the lack of management skills. These are the kind of little men who demand you to be at the office all time. You can call them control freaks, or micro-management fetishists. It doesn't matter. These people just show one thing with their behaviour: that they don't trust their subordinates.
That is technically true, but you do NOT want clear goals though. Clear goals are for junior "code monkeys" who just do what they are told without any concern for if they are going the right thing.
If you want input into your work and the feeling that you are actually doing the right thing you need to have the context around your goals. Your physical presence in the offices lets you take part in "water cooler" and "hallway" conversations with various people.
Yes you can do some of that via email, forums, and the like. However the human factor of your presence changes the tone of the conversation. It isn't just you either, the other person(s) involved.
When you have a short, critical, task that needs to be done fast, then staying home without a phone or email is the best way to get it done fast. However for anything else communication is an important part of your job and physical presence aids that.
That isn't to say remote work cannot - it does. However there are real disadvantages to it that need to be considered.
> Clear goals are for junior "code monkeys" who just do what they are told without any concern for if they are going the right thing.
Agree 100%, the less you act like a cog in a machine the less people will treat you like one. Lots of developers seem to want to log in to a system every day and just have a list of tasks they have to complete without any real collaboration or divergent thought and have their salary calculated by % of task completion.
In my experience the people who collaborate in the office and try to push things further are the ones easily granted autonomy and no longer have to answer to micromanagement. Managers can see the difference between a box ticker and the breakouts that are actually making a difference at the company, once you achieve that then you'll notice people stop questioning what time you turn up to the office if at all.
You can act like you're not a cog, but there's only so much autonomy you get working under someone else.
If you're an employee you are a "code monkey" to one degree or another. If you do not need clear goals, Work for yourself.
You don't need dozens of people above you telling you what to do and extracting part of your paycheck if you can figure it out and execute it on your own.
The CEO of my company doesn't tell me what to do. He tells a vice president who tells [skip a dozen or so layers of management] who tells my boss who tells me. Part of my job is to go on down the line - I'm expected to feed work to a half a dozen junior engineers (there are other senior engineers on my team who also are expected to find work to feed on down the chain).
Each level of the chain requires understanding of what the business needs. I need to make autonomous decisions every day that ultimately the CEO stands behind. The composite of all the good decisions (enough better be good) results in the success of my company and the CEO will take credit for it. However all the CEO says to me is "we will be the global leader in [the generic area my project is in]" in an all company meeting. Every step down the chain has just been filling in details.
I get what you're saying (and agree) but you're using my metaphor on how to extract a better work life in a team environment to make a completely different different point on a completely different topic.
And what would be those disadvantages? You listed things which you think are supporting the arguments to be present in the office. But one argument which is supporting on-site presence, doesn't make it automatically an argument against working remotely.
And you are basically trying to put words in my mouth. I didn't say a word that I will do what I am told without concern. That's only your implication.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you imply that because requirements are usually unclear: that means that clear goals are undesirable. Does that sound logical to you? Because to me that's a big no-no. I only saw people pushing this kind of mentality who like to fish in troubled waters and enjoy the mess to take advantage of it for their own sake (i.e. climbing corporate ladders).
And let me highlight one thing: if I am supposed to clear things up and organize my work, than what is my manager supposed to do? In this world that you imagined there is no role for a manager IMO. And that would be pretty much fine with me. It's just far from reality.
I won't subscribe to the idea that the office is a rainbow colored fairytale. I am coming from the exact opposite direction of thinking.
"Clear goals" can have different levels of abstraction. Junior code monkeys may need finely grained detailed steps while climbing the technical, architectural or management ladder will make your goals more abstract as they encompass greater breadth and depth, yet them not being any less clear. "Steer team to deliver product A in 3 months with top quality" or "provide analysis of strange crash events P, Q, R that appear to be vaguely related and originate in lib K, and propose possible short-term mitigation tactics as well as systemwide refactoring strategies to reduce or remove dependency on regularly problematic but heavily used lib K within a mid-term timeframe, and we'll talk about your conclusions in two weeks" can be just as clear to some people as "implement method foo doing X according to spec point Y.Z by the end of the day" is to others.
This is true. However, I think at the highest levels of autonomy is when people actually get to define what their goals are[0].
That is not to say that it cannot be done remotely. In fact, in most large tech organizations, the highest autonomy positions will almost certainly entail a lot of remote collaboration (with customers, sales, suppliers, support, remote engineering teams, etc.). However, the more autonomy one is granted, the more context one needs to make the correct decisions. Context requires access to high-signal information sources (i.e. relationships with the right people). Being in the office is a good way to discover those information sources.
You also have to make yourself highly visible. You can certainly do that while being remote, but there is more conscious effort involved.
On site vs remote is a very complex topic that I just scratched the surface of. I agree that my arguments are NOT the only ones. They are not the only ones for working onsite (but they are major ones programmers like to ignore), and your arguments for remote work are not the only ones for working remote. We can spend years debating this and not come to a clear answer: a clear one size fits all does not exist.
My implication is not that you do what you are told without concern. My implication is that remote workers in general lack critical knowledge of that should shape what their concerns are. Knowledge that you only can get by keeping in touch with lots of different people. (example, last week I was talking to an engineer who had to stay late because a bunch of others subtly broke the build system - In 10 minutes I had a solution so nobody would have to touch that part again. As the build system maintainer I have the knowledge to do that, while most people don't really understand the big picture. If I was remote I never would have learned of this issue)
Yes clear goals are undesirable because requirements are unclear. As others have pointed out, your value has a human is ability to make sense of unclear requirements. Once you make sense of the requirements you automate them. You are not a factory worker doing the same thing over an over again on an assembly line.
The office is not all rainbows - far from it. However there are real advantages to them that cannot be ignored.
First of all, the guy doing the manual process didn't even realize that it was easy to automate. So he never would have invoke the processes.
Even ignoring the above, the official process is by nature too heavy. It would cost over hundred man-hours by the time the proposal is written, put before a committee, acted on, the proper story wrote, and someone assigned to the write the code. In the mean time 6 months have passed and the first guy thus spent another 2 hours doing it manually. That is 100 hours on a manual process that ultimately costs the company 4 hours a year over the expected 15 year life of this project - the math does not work out. Oh, and the committee includes marketing who don't really care about engineering tools (they should not!), so the end result would be the process remains manual because the final decision is this isn't worth doing - and it isn't worth the time it would take to make them understand why they should do it.
There is a reason for official processes. There is a reason companies give trusted people authority to ignore them for trivial things.
Not that it is undesireable, just that it doesn't exist.
The mess you are talking about is fact. Maybe this is because managment sucks, but it's still a fact. Goals & requirements are unclear. This is a fact almost everywhere. Very few people (definitely programmers) have very clear requirements and goals to work against.
So, I agree with you that having clear goals and requirements is a path to virtual workplaces. But, I think this is a troublesome route. Clarity is elusive. If it wasn't elusive, all the outsourcing efforts of 10 years ago would have been more successful.
Computers are against us on this. If something is very clearly defined, it is a candidate for automation, outsourcing and such. The stuff we're left with is the poorly defined mess. That's why we have so much of it.
Just about anyone writing code in this industry can learn to implement, given a blueprint. Not everyone can learn to generate the blueprint. The former takes some marginal ability to memorize facts and to recognize patterns. The latter takes the ability to truly understand a problem and orchestrate the pieces of a solution together, some of which will be tasks ("clear goals") for a coder to implement. It's the (or at least one) difference between perpetually solving homework from CS and being an engineer.
Can't speak for GP, but my view is the latter can't be accomplished without some direct, in person interaction today. The future, with more robust collaboration tools, may be different.
> Clear goals are for junior "code monkeys" who just do what they are told without any concern for if they are going the right thing.
Most of the interview processes in tech are geared towards hiring for this exact role. There's some ego stroking involved, but for the most part the sorts of "code trivia" questions candidates jump through are basically "can you implement this algorithm or data structure" correctly. They don't actually test problem solving ability.
So it seems to me for he kinds of trivial work most of us in the industry are doing your objection is a bit immaterial.
Some of us are engaged in more complex work, and I agree 100% with you about that. Remote doesn't quite cut it most of the time for that sort of thing.
I think this is confusing goals with tasks. And even then, sometimes you still want a mix of both.
A nice backlog of tasks that need done along with high level goals we'd like to achieve (but no solid tasking to make happen) is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, it isn't free and takes effort. Which is a large part of what a manager should help with.
I would say there are trade-offs with remote based communications with distinct advantages you don't mention that help make up for the lack of the human factor. The most obvious is that it eliminates the human factor, which can make it a lot easier to work with people who have unpleasant personalities. It also makes all communications more asynchronous, which means you can discuss things at the pace needed instead of the forced sync of a person staring at you. Then there are all the technical benefits, like cut-n-paste, live URLs, screen sharing, logs of conversations, etc.
It also sounds like you haven't experienced a fully remote team working. You don't miss out on the physical presence because it is not there to miss and people make up for that absence in other ways. All the water-cooler/hallway conversations are then there, online, in the chat rooms or what not.
I find that even when given "goals" in a broad sense, when you break down the problem into its constituent parts there generally is very little to debate. And when there is something to debate, those conversations take time to accumulate information and research, and for people to "digest" them completely.
I find that in-person discussions about said topics is more counter-productive than productive since in-person meetings sometimes inadvertently suggests you have a fixed time-frame within which to come to a conclusion. And the "debatable" topics generally aren't going to be acted on immediately. There needs to be coordination and planning when you all come to a conclusion that a particular strategy is going to be the way forward, and a lot of times assumes you're probably going to break backward compatibility so it won't be released until a major version bump.
> Clear goals are for junior "code monkeys" who just do what they are told without any concern for if they are going the right thing.
Yeah, this is so true.
I think the task with an clear process to do it have an clear goal. But other than that, tasks that's very vague such as design an API, design schema to efficient some kind of certain query usually requires a bit of art, and we learn from the mistake/success of last similar project to improve this one.
Arguably, I need talented individuals forming good teams to clarify the goals and to have direct input to the roadmap. Reducing people to implementors may not be great for morale, motivation and engagement. Some people want their input to be more than their code, and rightly so.
I'm currently working remote and took the job over an on-premises gig in the big smoke.
It's a 200 pay cut per day.
However factoring in expenses in fuel and parking and car wear, and the 10 hours of time lost commuting per week. I'm counter-intuitively better off by the equivalent 200 per day.
Reason being my time spent NOT commuting is invested in my bootstrapped startup. If I had to commute, I was essentially earning money by sitting in traffic rather than coding, which had to be spent to an offshore developer while I'm in a car instead of at my machine. So that including expenses in commuting will erode my net income. Not to mention the stress and health and mental performance impact commuting does to you. Sitting in traffic, cognitively processing the driving, finding a car park, walking ten minutes from a car park to premises.
My motivation and energy is sapped by the time I'm in the office. And more so by the time I get home.
Prior to this I was doing the commute to make sure the boss sees me gig for a year and compared to now, the difference in performance I notice is remarkable.
I can't remember the exact details, but I remember there being a British study that found that cutting an hour a day off your commute increases your happiness more than a ~30% payrise (figures misremembered).
If you've gotten back two hours a day, that's a massive quality of life improvement!
If you're going to be talking about "HR issues" out in the open, you can only say certain things. Things people like. The "skeptics of completely virtual organizations" or opponents of flextime, increased holidays, work-life balance, on-site childcare, employee empowerment, higher pay.... they can't exactly blog about it and get an applause. But clearly, they still set the agenda.
I want those things like everyone else does. I'm also pretty sympathetic to a lot of the arguments that they are good for business. But, we can't have a discussion when only one side speaks. I am somewhat skeptical about an existing large company virtualizing itself without major teething issues. I know very little about these thing, so who cares..
Anyway, where's the CEO blog on "why I make everyone work 9-5." or "never allow anyone to work from home." I know you're out there. Speak your piece!
Anyway, where's the CEO blog on "why I make everyone work 9-5." or "never allow anyone to work from home." I know you're out there. Speak your piece!
Here's Marissa Meyer doing exactly that [1]:
To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
The reason why there's no one publicly taking that position is that an honest argument perhaps wouldn't exactly be favourable to the person making that argument.
"I'm a petty control freak who needs to constantly supervise his subordinates in order to feel valuable."
Well, good for you sir!
The only arguments against remote work I keep hearing are the quite hazy "Face time is better." and "Water cooler talk is valuable." ones. Nobody making those arguments seems to be willing to substantiate them, though:
Why exactly is face time better? If it is certainly it should be sufficient to just occasionally have people talk face to face, shouldn't it? Then why have everyone in the same office every time, all the time?
If creative, serendipitous talk only happens around the proverbial water cooler you might have a deeper problem with the communication flows in your organisation. Perhaps information silos are your real problem in that case.
I think that reluctance towards remote work often points to more fundamental issues within an organisation.
I would also say in some cases, it's because their arguments are based on things people don't like to acknowledge.
"I require my workers to be in the office because if I don't constantly ride them, they will be on Facebook/Reddit/etc. all the time instead of working.
This is due to hiring second-string developers that I can pay less than self-motivated superstars.
I have consciously made this decision because I can extract more useful work for less money out of a larger team of underpaid developers than I can from a happy, higher-paid, but much smaller team."
Obviously this business model depends on the market, product, etc. but regardless of all of that, NO one in this scenario consciously wants to confront this, because it just makes everyone feel depressed.
They might not be able to hire that team of self-motivated superstars. Let's face it, some 95% of software development is likely boring, run of the mill CRUD stuff or similar. Those self-motivated superstars are going to gravitate toward companies where they can do interesting and novel things, regardless of the pay (those places do generally pay well, usually).
I have heard Eric Schmidt say that he discusses Google's preference for on-site employees in _How Google Works_. I cannot comment on what or how much he discusses.
That said, my personal experience at Google has been flexible. Most people I interact with work from their home office most of the time with large schedule overlap with their colleagues. But people do shift their schedules as life needs and occasionally work from other offices for up to a couple weeks a year.
While there are no blog posts, companies clearly speak with their policies.
For example, Google's project continuous consolidation efforts lead to decreased viability of remote work (even from the different office), and to increased on-site monoculture and luck of project options. This, of course, is fighting the tide since the talent is increasingly less open to changing physical locations and, given current market, can opt out to work elsewhere.
"If conversely you capped the salary of computer programmers, we would expect a flood of companies competing with every possible other amenity they were allowed to offer and managers being very very polite to computer programmers. (In fact this does happen with relatively better computer programmers, which tells us that something is bounding the salaries of top programmers underneath their purely financial equilibrium.)"
It's only their preferences that are bounding their salaries in those cases. At some point, a polite manager is worth more than X more in compensation. The type of person who becomes a top programmer tends to value being in an environment conducive to being a better programmer, because that's how you get to be among the best. So many naturally tend to value productivity enhancing perks more than comp at the upper end.
>It's only their preferences that are bounding their salaries in those cases. At some point, a polite manager is worth more than X more in compensation.
A good boss isn't a benefit that can be awarded or revoked by the company. Sometimes money isn't enough to induce employees to remain in a bad environment or leave a good environment for a bad one, but normally a decent manager is expected and taken for granted, and if salaries are "bounded" below market that employer is dead meat.
Part of the cap is business models that weren't designed with higher developer salaries in mind (if there were even fully developed in the first place).
I personally don't get the love for working at home/remote. I HATE working at home. To me, home is home and work is work. I don't want to mix them, and I feel awful when I have to stay home all day, or don't get to interact casually with my coworkers. Its just so depressing to be alone all the time.
That being said, a bad office environment is definitely a turn off, and at this point in my career free lunch and the ilk isn't that much of a perk anymore. I want reasonable hours, decent vacation and health-insurance, and a big income.
I work with a guy just like you, and I think that's great. Some people are natural extroverts, and love the interactions and water cooler conversations that come with that personality type.
Just don't drag me into the office just because that's your personal preference. I will be miserable and looking for a new job.
It's not necessarily about introversion and extroversion. I'm a natural introvert, and I also have working at home. I want a strong, clear boundary between work and personal activities. It's not so much about being in an office; it's about being a place that isn't home.
You need a home office for your own sanity, this much is true. I found this out the first year when the kids were out of school. Many others I've talked to also found satisfaction in co-working centers.
I'm exactly like you. Home is strictly for non-work stuff: no work, no reading emails (not that I carry my work phone anyway), no nothing and I despise working from home.
Yet I work remotely. I work remotely because I felt like moving to a sunny, cheap place where I get to live like a king and I just rent a desk at a co-working office where a couple of my friends work too. It's lovely, all the nice things about being in an office and all the nice things about working remotely.
There is another alternative which is the moneyball approach [1]. Identify those people overlooked because they don’t meet the current fashionable ideal and hire on the basis of what they can actually produce.
True, but it's fairly easy to identify people who aren't the "fashionable ideal".
There is a chain shoe repair company in the UK that hires ex-prisoners, they give the impression it is altruistic but it seems to make good business sense to me.
Measuring performance is not hard. What is hard is estimating future performance at the hiring stage.
One area that could be worked on is dealing with “difficult” people. At the moment most managers are not really incentivised to hire for performance, but they are certainly incentivised at a personal level to hire people who do as they are told and don’t make waves. Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.
Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems.
You could blame the 10X dev. But it's fair to say that there isn't much talk about how to quantify those kinds of concerns.
> Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems.
It's not that hard to see that your codebase is a mess.
Even if you have no ability to judge the codebase and systems yourself, extreme case, spin that super-productive person up on an independent side project for a few weeks or months and see how the rest of the team grapples with things.
There are a lot of parts of management that aren't hard, but are annoying and potentially unpleasant - if you realize this dev is much less valuable to the long term health of your systems than you thought, that could lead to difficult decisions and a tricky mentoring situation - so they get ignored because managers are either too lazy, "too nice," or just too oblivious.
It really depends on how you define "measuring performance". Any high-level manager can pick a set of garbage KPI's and pretend that they're measuring what really counts. And and many get away with that especially in large organizations. This is why performance review time is universally despised and viewed as a bullshit politics-laden activity.
Measuring performance of humans is an intrinsically subjective process when you're dealing with knowledge work or anything more sophisticated than a brutal piece-work assembly line.
I completely agree. Also there is an obvious discrepancy between the knowledge of the manager and the knowledge of the team member. How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place?
It's a misguided preconception that managers are more skilled than their subordinates. I am still have to see happening this in real life.
OTOH what I usually see happening is that managers assign more challenging tasks to specific people based on their prejudice and assumptions then they evaluate those very same people as top performers, while other team members don't even have the chance to perform well (because of the lack of tasks). :D
> How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place?
As a Manager, I am not measuring your performance based on your skill, but on the tangible output of solutions that provide value to the business that you produce.
Your skills and knowledge are your own tools that you can use to produce such output in less time or with better quality.
As an IC, managers exist to set me in a direction and then free me from the political wrangling necessary to deliver (recognized) business value: stakeholder management, scoping, sufficient resourcing, realistic timelines, cooperation and prioritization from teams we depend on, air cover while I deal with unexpected setbacks, upward/outward/inbound communication about the project, etc. We're a team on this, but I have my area of responsibility and you have yours. It's on you to replace me if I'm not doing my part; I have no such option.
If I'm accountable to (recognized) business value, something is deeply wrong. The whole reason we have you is to shoulder that responsibility, and to insulate developers so that we're only accountable for/thinking about architecture and implementation. If I have to do the job of both engineering manager and engineer, I'll find somewhere to pay me both compensation packages (i.e. consulting), or (more likely) somewhere I can do just one.
As an aside, even if all your projects are successful, comparing ICs on business value created only tells you who you gave the most impactful projects to. Sometimes your best engineers are stuck doing unsexy, low-impact but necessary maintenance. They create no business value, but prevent existing business value from being destroyed by bit-rot. Sometimes your weakest engineers get a low-hanging-fruit project that's impossible to screw up and immensely valuable to the business. That does not make them ready to take a larger role in more difficult problems, which is typically what a high performance rating entails.
> How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place?
Are you wanting to only ever work for people who have a superset of your knowledge? Who know everything you do (for evaluation purposes) but probably also even more? That sounds miserable.
I consider it part of my job to produce results that demonstrate my skill to my manager. I don't want to be micromanaged, and the most effective way I've found to get independence of method is by demonstrating quality of results.
It depends if the manager is actually interested in measuring performance or if the whole exercise is just box ticking.
There is nothing wrong with subjective measures provided what is being measured is performance and not something else. Assuming a manager is not totally clueless they are able to subjectively measure performance just as well as the rest of the team. Everyone on a team knows who is pulling their weight and who is being being pulled along.
There are course edge cases where some people go unrecognised or other get the credit, but in the main most people know who is contributing and who is not. The real problem is that actual performance is rarely even subjectively measured.
Measuring performance is incredibly hard in a team environment. People are not machines or cogs, and many skills that make a great functioning team are soft in nature.
> Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.
If the 10x person can't get along with their team or manager, then they are probably not a 10x person. Every day I'm surprised that people still thinking writing code is the hard part of software development. For most software development, writing code is the easy part.
In my opinion, it's not really possible for dissimilar jobs. You can measure performance moneyball-style in baseball because everyone is playing the same game. For jobs, that'd only work if everyone did the same job, and if the companies at which these people worked agreed to share data.
More important would be to find a good way to get rid of toxic workplace politics and middle management. Scrum was good as idea but backfired into even more micro management. Just look at the recent Google executives leaks. Most workplaces might be even worse.
And please stop with all this "war" talk. We know that the US is at war with everyone. You cannot even go to a basketball or football game to be reminded of the constant war. But stop it.
(Just to be clear, I don't think it's right to pay women less for the same work. I'm just pointing out an example of an employer using the moneyball approach.)
Dang, this guy really put his money where his mouth is. This was a classic application of what Friedman used to say would eventually happen on the Pay Gap.
Once you cross into the 6 digit salary territory, free lunches and similar gimmicks are not going to cut it anymore... the only thing that keeps me in my current company is the working from home factor and all the perks it entitles like no traffic, home gym, after lunch naps, swimming at 17:00, etc
Just treat adults as adults, show a little bit of trust.
I don't like strict schedules, where you have to just sit through the required number of hours, or show up at some specific time for no reason (i.e. it does not affect other people). Don't force people to sit in a crammed open space office, all day every day, no matter the weather and other factors, because 'collaboration' or whatever. Commuting to the office when it is -20C definitely sucks. If someone wants to setup their ideal working environment at home - perfect, win win. Most of the time it doesn't even cost much.
Sure, making it work requires some effort from both parties. But it's too often ruled out for no reason (or some BS reason).
I made this switch and that's one of the best things that happened to my quality of life.
Flexibility was always our "secret" but even if we have people working remotely we prefer people who work at our offices. Few cabdidates are ready and responsible to work remotely. This is our experience.
So our other flexibility method is time. Most developers work 6 hours per day and that works.
Given someone who is ready and responsible to work remotely, which would you prefer, office based or remote based? I feel as though writing off remote work due to the performance of someone not able to work remotely is a bit unfair.
I am full time remote, and the hours per day I can work range between a couple of hours and a dozen. So long as the work is done and the clients are happy, that's what matters. The main thing is self-discipline, having the self-discipline to get the work done and to provide top quality work. You have the flexibility to choose your best working space, working hours, and working style, so go and produce your best work.
I prefer to work and interact with people face to face than work remotely. It is great that technology enabled us to work everywhere and have the flexibility to continue working outside the office but I feel alienated when I don't interact with people in a more human compatible way.
A big part of my interest in working remotely is how likely I am to find a replacement job. At this time, it is much easier to find a job if I am in person.
When they won't let me adjust my subs pay, this is about the only thing I can give them. I don't care what hours they work or where they work as long as they get their work done. They need to attend meetings but video conferencing is always used.
This is important but so difficult. I'm one of the co-founders at Turtle(dot)ai. We have no problem attracting amazing developers who want total remote flex and to work 10-30 hours per week across different projects.
We absolutely have a hurdle with convincing most companies that output = output and that remote work is ok. Companies still put an unreasonable amount of value on butt-in-seat, 9-5 work.
Why? How can we get hiring managers and companies past this?
We try to convince with logic. We show what companies spend on hiring their own devs (20K+ hiring cost, 10-20K/mo salary). Startups tend to go hire-crazy after raising, but it's rare that they need to go 0 to 1 with full-time, local hiring. Going remote can save them a ton (on hourly and on not paying a salary for someone to twiddle their thumbs or show up before a boss does).
Our "easy way out" is to find companies who are already remote friendly. I remain convinced that this is a cultural hurdle we'll get over, but I'd be a liar if I told you I had timing perfectly predicted.
If there's such a huge war for talent, then why don't those employees have more bargaining power? Last I checked on glassdoor, salaries for SE are way below living costs in the bay area. And the vast majority of SE don't even have enough bargaining power to leave the bay area and work remotely. I strongly suspect, the "war for talent" is a huge myth, or perhaps, isolated to small specialties. I've worked for a company in the bay area that had huge growth and taken part in much of the hiring. We seemed to have more than enough talent available - so much so, we were actually turning some of it away. If anything, the problem was more - being able to recognize talent and hire it, rather than lack of supply.
This is why I never understood the obsession with working for the big prestigious corporations like Google and the unicorns. As far as I'm aware, they don't allow remote work and working from home without an excuse correct?
Oh come on. Sure, as I live in Middle East my rent might be 450$/month but after you consider that I'm paid 5$/hr, I'd gladly take 60k/yr (which is very low end) even if my rent and other expenses quintupled
It's all relative. I'm just saying that someone who's talented enough to get a job at Google could probably land a cushy remote gig and live somewhere dirt cheap, saving more money and enjoying a higher quality of life.
At Google, it is completely not out of the ordinary to make 300k a year as a senior, or 200k after 2-3 years with the company. To get a remote job making that is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Also, nobody wants to hire junior remote people, so if you go to MIT it's either 160k at Google or 40k remote. Maybe after 4 years at Google someone'll be willing to pay you 50% of what you make there, but you don't really want to move away after being in a place for 4 years to get a remote job and be completely depended on your employer.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I tried to get a remote job before emigrating. I applied to dozens of places and could only get an interview at one company that was paying about 25k because Eastern Europe is cheap anyway. Was rejected for lack of experience. Got a job in Western Europe for 4x more.
In addition, the are many many interesting things to work on at Google and smart people to learn from, whereas the few remote jobs that exist are mostly making CRUD is the web framework du jour.
Places that are dirt cheap usually are so for a reason: Hardly anyone wants to live there. If you're that talented, most likely you're going to want to congregate with others who are also quite talented. There's only a few places you can do that. Add in the other benefits of living in an urban area (variety of foods, cultural things going on, just more stuff to do), and there's a reason why they don't choose to do that.
Not saying that's everyone; there probably are some who are doing what you suggest. They're just not the majority.
Hopefully, more employers are waking up to this reality. I'd bet there are thousands of devs out there willing to take a pay cut for the opportunity to work at home full time, some who have confided this to me personally. It actually makes financial sense too.
While workplace flexibility is a good idea in general, this article is based on a false premise. Business isn't war, and there is little evidence that "talent" even exists as a specific quality.
In workplaces where facetime is valued, they are maximizing availability.
Sometimes this can be legitimate, since you do have to collaborate with others and be available to answer questions etc.
However in my experience those workplaces which are obsessed with availability tend to be disorganized firefighting organizations that operate in an in 'all hands on deck' style.
I think rather than choosing one over the other a company has to find a balance. While working remotely offers employees flexibility whether it's the ability to manage different branches in different locations or as the article suggests a "reward," there's still value in human to human interaction. Digital means of communication offers instant service, it's mostly transparent, and there's limited chance of miscommunication or forgetting directives as the log of messages provides users with a written history of the conversation. At the same time, working collaboratively in an office of fellow employees yields to an established vernacular. Workers are acquainted with other workers styles, methods and tricks for business. There's more learning opportunities, I believe available for same place working, because a team of people are experiencing the same challenges in real time.
Thinking about it more carefully, I value working at different times or not even a contiguous time range. Sometimes I get up at 4AM and have all kinds of good ideas and am ready to go. In fact, I would probably get more done in 24 hours if I could break it up into 3-4 parts. This type of schedule is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve by going into the office.
I really like being around (most of) my coworkers and would probably feel left out if I worked from home all the time. That's why I really like the flexibility to work from any location at any time. If only I could convince the bosses that me not being in my desk, or answering chat/email questions right away, was the best way for me to work I would be happy. Hmmm... now I know what to ask in my next job interview. :)
It's not remote vs on-site for best performance from engineers, it's nice and quiet vs distracting. An open office jam-packed with noise makes remote work look way more attractive.
We're a 100% remote company, and you would probably not be surprised at the extreme level of push back we've gotten from VC's about that, to the point where it's the reason they won't invest.
Now, that might be a BS excuse on their part, but in many cases I know it's not.
There are many many benefits to being a remote company, but it does take a particular kind of person to make it work. The best people for remote tend to be older and more highly skilled in my experience.
This article seems loosely based on ideas from the Dropbox blogpost on open offices [0]. The connection being the mention of employers offering all kinds of perks and more office space or private space never is one of them, that it could be a useful perk to attract talent.
DHH from 37signals / basecamp agrees with that.
I just wonder what happens when there is enough flexible companies offering similar terms. I guess it's back to square one then?
Sure. Then the next level will start and we will have achieved a great milestone. The way I see it though is that we are quite some time away from that point. (Unfortunately)
If you can't find people of talent then you're not paying enough.
I quit working because I couldn't get paid more than $300K working for someone else despite the fact that I make my employers way way more than that. I quit to do my own startup and made a ton of money. I'm now retired way too young. I'd love to go back to work because I like having a big impact on people's lives but now I'd need at least $500K to break even on taxes if I moved back to the US and no one is paying that for me.
Can you explain what is involved in "Having to make $500k, just to break even on taxes"? I can't wrap my head around it. Are you currently living somewhere that does not tax investment income?
If I just maximize for cash earned, I need to compensate for other things. I want to maximize free time and minimize commute. I have errands to run and things to do. Having flexible work, with a work from home option is worth more to me than making more money. Otherwise, I need to spend more on an apartment close to the office. A more expensive car can make a commute more bearable. I value peace and quiet, and city living is at odds with this. Reconciling all this while working a 9-5 at a central office in the city costs a lot of money.
I currently work at 15Five, where "Embrace Freedom & Flexibility" is one of our core values. We actually are active in living this and our other core values. You can feel the effect directly. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and arrived at the same conclusion as this article.