I always thought I enjoyed remote work as an engineer/architect, I did it for 6 months by my own volition before coming back. I am extremely unhappy. I really miss being in the office with my coworkers and friends. I've struggled deeply with overwhelming sadness at the idea of not going back anytime soon. My work has suffered from a lack of dynamic interactions. I get lots of focus time, just like I did at the office, but working in the same building I live in has been brutal. Maybe I'm different than the average HN reader, but I'm a social butterfly and not going in to the office has been devastating to my mental health, my appetite, my motivation, and my overall interest in work. I exercise the same amount, I eat just as healthy (just less), but something is missing. If this field goes primarily remote, I will leave.
I have worked from home for the last couple of years. Prior to the Covid shutdown, I had generally enjoyed it. Once my children's school closed and my wife's work switched to work from home, my productivity has plummeted. I find it impossible to focus as every 10 minutes I have a young child running into my office, or have to listen to them yelling at each other (as all kids do). My wife has had a hard time adjusting and she is equally distracted by the kids and her frustration feeds mine. She is forced to be on conference calls for most of the day (I am actually surprised at how many there are, they are all calls with executive level people so she cant opt out. Almost all income producing departments have to pass through her team and they laid off her support staff) but is still expected to complete real work as well which she cant do now until the calls stop after 5. I have been able to get very little deep work done and find myself working until 2 / 3 am to accomplish the same work I used to do in a normal shift.
I feel very bad for my kids as all they want is to be able to play with their friends and do all the things they could before so I do my very best to not show them my frustration. Its a depressing situation all around but I am very grateful to actually still have a job while so many others have lost theirs. My kids ask me why I have to work so much all the time, as all they want to do is spend time with me.
I guess what I am trying to say is the current situation is not optimal.
My company (large-ish un-sexy software company you've never heard of) gave the software managers clear direction on this: "It's not realistic for people with school-aged children to be fully productive right now. Do not demand they take PTO or ask them to work at night. If they can only work five hours a day, that's what they can do."
I suspect it's unusual that my boss actually said that out loud, but I hope everyone is thinking it. This is a temporary situation none of us planned for, and it ought to be reasonable and expected to lower your standards until schools and childcare are around again.
I lead one of our teams and that's pretty much the explicit directions my VP gave us. Actually, the entire leadership team gave those directions. It's made me glad I switched jobs 18 months ago.
Somehow I'm the only one on our team with kids but some of my team has had a difficult time managing the change from an emotional standpoint and I just treat it the same way. I don't expect them to somehow magically "power through it". They're normally very productive and I know this will pass.
My company (large consulting firm you have probably heard of) gave us essentially the same guidance from the top. The culture was already one that discouraged micromanaging, but they flat out said they don't expect us to be as productive. Most of my team is realistically working 15-20 hours a week, and that's ok because our clients are doing the same and understand when we miss milestones.
I've actually been impressed at the amount of empathy that's been going around, at least when it comes to adjusting expectations. Hopefully it sticks around.
I appreciate the sentiment, but five hours?! That's your example of an acceptable low level of performance for someone working from home with a child with no possibility of childcare?
I'm splitting card of my toddler with my spouse, and on my BEST days, I get 3 hours of actual work done. 1.5 is more typical, and that's only because the toddler takes 2 hour naps.
One of the reasons we built Squawk, a push-to-talk group chat platform, was for this very reason. Many of our team have young kids at home, and current chat tools require too much work to ensure you're muted and not spamming your background noise all over the place. Might be worth a click - https://www.squawk.to
Thanks for sharing. Three kids spanning elementary and middle; one is neurotypical, other two have different strengths and needs. My work space is a single car unconditioned garage, atop a stack of boxes. Yesterday I was inside between meetings for a total of 4 minutes between meetings and had reduced two of them to tears. Today I had to cut off my 1st grader, who was in middle of excitedly presenting me a LEGO she completed, because it was :59 after and I needed to get on a call. Granted, most days are a little more even, but it's hard to not feel like there's a choice between damaging relationships/reputation at work or damaging relationship with kids. They're of course not mutually exclusive, and kids are clear priority if it were.
Having work and home contexts now collapsed into single environment has had the surprising effect where each interaction with the family during my work day triggers the subconscious thought of whether I just made a tradeoff between work and home -- and if so, was it the right one. In isolation the amount of energy each thought takes is negligible, but add up each interaction throughout the day, and day after day, it's been incredibly draining.
I dunno, my thoughts change daily on this topic. But this is my venting of for whatever day it is. usually I type these replies and never submit, but cathartic, if nothing else, to vent and post this one today.
p.s. agree, while not optional, still incredibly grateful to still have a job.
Yeah, not a day goes by during this compression of work and home life that I don't wonder at least a couple of times if I am a bad parent. Kind of (I hesitate to use the word) good to hear others going through the exact same thing. Kids just want to spend time with me but after the 4th time of them just coming to say hi in 10 minutes and the cursor still just blinking on an empty line on the screen I sometimes, regretfully snap and feel bad about it. My productivity is 25% of what it was and now I'm not worried about being laid off but rather fired for lack of production.
Note: I thought I had it bad with my office, that has no door, but you have me beat pretty handily.
I work from home and since about February my productivity nose-dived. It suffered before they closed the schools because of worry and constant news checking, etc. Then when the schools closed here in March I have been near useless. I have started to claw back some routines and some short spells of focused work lately but as the main carer for the kids, I have constant homeschooling, cooking, peace-making, MacGuyvering, Wikipediaing, Joe Wicksing to do for them. Closing my home office door last about on average 3 minutes, probably.
The other problem is the confusion of what day it is and that since I got not much work done during the weekdays I also work at the weekend, which before was a complete no-no. Over the long term, this lack of time off for them and me probably is not good.
Cut and paste. I have three kids and they span a broad range of ages. I feel lucky to have a dedicated home office with a door that closes, but that doesn’t stop the constant interruptions from my kids. I can only imagine the global destruction of productivity that is happening right under our noses.
Exact same boat here, we can't complain because we still have our jobs, we feel terrible because our kids are getting bored out of their minds and all they want is our attention, i don't know how long we can go on like this.
I haven't figured out how to be as productive as night as I would be in the morning, which used to be my best hours.
You simply can't WFH with young children at home and no full-time caretaker. My wife and I tried alternating 6-hour shifts of work and childcare, 6 days/week, and finally gave up and hired a nanny.
Your comment has converted me from a lurker to a first time poster. I'm in the exact same boat as you and just wanted to tell you to keep on plugging away and doing the best you can. Its all we can really do.
This is really interesting, and rings a lot of bells for myself as well. Are you in the US?
I think it is time for a lot of people for a relocation to somewhere with better-larger living arrangements, and better access to childcare (private or public).
And it also should give rise to gig economy around private tutors/babysitters/nannys - which is very useful, and actually could be fun for a lot of people.
Thanks for this comment, I'm empathetic and am in a similar boat. I'm curious if there are managers/companies out there that are expecting the same level of productivity from their staff during these times?
I for one expect lower productivity from my staff whether or not they have kids, and am adjusting delivery dates to account for this.
Other than having not worked from home for many years now (which I am very happy to do when it works out), your experience is highly relatable. For the kids, I'm sad and wish I could do something more for them. But work abounds.
> I really miss being in the office with my coworkers and friends.
Are you young, single, and live in an apartment? I have noticed a divide along those lines with WFH. As an older, married person, living in a house with a yard, I haven't worked in an office for any length of time for last 10 years.
None of my close friends are related to work. I like having lunch with my wife and going out back with the dogs when I need a break. I also have an actual office with a door in my house. The time I save commuting means there is more time to workout and cook healthy meals every day. And, if I really want to 'get out' the local coffee shop is 5 minutes away. The owner and her 2 employees are awesome along with great coffee and great internet.
Of course I may think differently if I was back in my 600 sqft apartment and single with few friends.
I think it is expected that we will see the full spectrum of reactions to this new work environment. Everything from :
- whether you are living single or with a significant other
- happily married or have your relationship just scraping by (As an aside, I read that China has seen a spike in divorces after their lockdown)
- have kids or no kids, have teenagers or toddlers
- have a comfortable home office or are working from your kitchen table and sitting on a dining chair
- are introverted or extroverted
- have great co-workers in a great workplace environment or if you dislike your office and/or co-workers
- if you have a long commute or live a relaxing 10 minute walk from the office
... the list goes on and on.
It is not surprising that you will have every variation of the above. But my guess is that for the majority of the people, once they setup a proper home office, the would likely find working from home to be somewhere in the "mildly positive" to "really positive" side of things. Even if some disagree with that, at the very least, I imagine that most would agree that they would like to have the _option_ to work from home whenever they choose.
Speaking as a young, single and lives in an apartment person. As an introvert I've often relied on being present among people to kind of substitute for my social life. With that not being present, it really puts focus on the presence or lack of social network. I'm actually grateful in a way that it has forced me to reach out to people in my network, that I otherwise wouldn't have..
I might be some kind of extreme introvert, because I don't miss people in my office at all. In fact it feels like a relief, for professional reasons I've had to be more outgoing that I'd like to and that feels extremely tiring after a while.
As much as your boss might want it, your coworkers don't have to be your friends if you don't want to. The greatest advantage of working remotely is that you can choose who you want to spend your working time, lunches, etc, with. Maybe it's just yourself.
Age of children is also factor. I suspect people enjoy the escape an office provides when they have toddlers. I really enjoy having lunch with my teenage kids everyday thanks to Covid. Working from home has been a blessing.
As someone with an infant and a toddler, working from home, this hits the nail on the head. I have been working remotely my whole career, and I love it, but working at home _with_ children there is about 5x harder.
More or less. Young kids want your attention and don't have the capacity to understand why you can't give it and have to focus on something else for 8 hours, so they'll just keep interrupting you. Babies require your attention periodically for basic-life needs or general fussiness but nothing beyond that (which is stressful, but not intellectually taxing). Teenagers are likely a bag of contradictions, but at least they understand the concept of working all day and needing space to concentrate. You can reason with a 15 year old, but not a 5 year old.
I'm mostly solving this issue with my 3-year old by playing with her all day (save for an hour or two of meetings) and then catching up on work at night, at the expense of a bunch of sleep.
I'm lucky that my software job is mostly conducive to this...
My and my spouses co-workers seem to be split on whether or not they have young kids at home that they're supposed to be watching while they work. My spouse and I are lucky enough to have help watching our kids and seeing them more as well as getting those prep and commute hours back is such a blessing.
My kids are 1 and 3, going to work at the office was definitely the easier part of my day before WFH started! I consider it a good week now if I'm mostly attentive in all the meetings I have and get a modicum of actual work done.
> I like having lunch with my wife and going out back with the dogs when I need a break. I also have an actual office with a door in my house. The time I save commuting means there is more time to workout and cook healthy meals every day.
My 200 sq ft. microstudio has been absolute torture these last few weeks. I thought I was being smart and saving money - I'd pay much more now to be sheltered anywhere else. A house with a yard would be amazing.
However, I do have friends outside of work. Obviously right now I'm rarely if ever seeing them, and certainly not all. Very occasionally we decide on a small coffee shop to go support at the same time and talk from a couple car spaces away for a few minutes just to engage in some kind of social behavior. It helps momentarily, but not consistently.
Going to work and making friends there, while not "IRL" friends, really helps work become a more fluid environment where you don't need to stress out all the time on structure. It gives breathing room. Some jokes lighten the mood. I personally feel like it's easier to discuss important topics when I have "friends" on my team or other teams who have a respect for my train of thought.
Also, while I do have a desk and monitor now, I work in the same room as my entertainment space (living room). So I'm literally in the same room all day. And no, I don't want to setup a workspace in my bedroom, that'd be even worse.
If I had a dedicated office room that'd be nice. If I had a more normal house where I had space to walk between areas like the kitchen, dining room/area, living room that would help.
This is a very American way of looking at things. In many countries singles live with their parents and families live in apartments and the country is not so vast and big so your social circle can go with you all the way from school just because they still live around. So the level of isolation and space can vary and not necessary depends on the parameters you have mentioned, however in the individual level it is pretty correct, the level of isolation and convenience will dictate how happy a remote worker is. Personally I have found that a mix of 2 days at the office and 3 at home works the best for me.
The current situation has unfortunately eliminated some options like co-working spaces that might otherwise alleviate this issue for you.
I'm optimistic about a "work wherever works for you" future. That might mean the company's office, or your home office, or your living room couch, or a coworking space, or a beach, or your parents' house, or a friend's place. It might mean all of those at different times. The current situation has made it clear that remote work is pretty viable, but it's destroyed the element of choice that is so important to mental health for many people.
I think it's good for you to realize this is how you feel.
I, on the other hand, get a lot more focus time here, at home, than in the office. Every little 'ding' sound, every little 'hey, when did you get home last night' conversation, every time someone turns on or off the lights, all of that and much more just rips me out of my concentration.
I've been able to focus _a lot_ more from home. It's good for me to realize this as well.
Feel free to stay in the office when you're finally able to, and I'll work towards staying at home, if I'm able to. That way, we're both happy.
Nothing wrong with a friendly face, its more that it can throw you out of your flow, especially when trying to debug some code. This describes it best:
Nice comic! I think I face this trouble less because I document everything extensively. It costs a bit of time, but every bug I investigate will have notes on my notepad/a google doc to go along with.
Some of us are more likely to worry about work not getting done than others. When those same people also have less general need for social interaction, that 'friendly interruption' feels like a selfish demand to meet your greater need for social interaction at the cost of my own need for lack of worry about the thing I get paid to do.
EDIT: I didn't really drive my point home. It's not the friendly face that bothers me, in fact if it was a friendly face then it would hurt me less. But it still hurts regardless.
When using async communication the person can wait until they’re out of the flow and respond. This is one of the great things about email, and the worst thing about Slack.
I was using Slack a few years ago and I didn't have this issue. Everyone who chose to use it had IRC experience, and so immediately treated it as a fancier IRC. That includes a lack of expecting an immediate response.
But I can definitely see how people who didn't grow up on freenode et al might come in with different expectations around Slack responsiveness.
There's an option in the Preferences to "Show a badge on Slack's icon to indicate new activity" which, when unchecked, may stop the behaviour you're describing.
Well, how about doing just the work and working less hours a day, because of fewer distractions and see your friends after or before work?
Sounds more sane that forcing an office environment, where I understand that everyone wants to socialise, but why spent more hours for work than necessary?
My social life does not intersect much with my work life.
Do you perhaps live alone in a small apartment? I can see how working from home could be tough on a situation like that.
I live with my family, in a house, with a garden, and I absolute abhor the idea of resuming a daily commute. I hate our office, and I love my home.
I live in a small apartment with my dog. I don't get out enough, it does make you depressed after a while. Luckily I have a some friends that work from home in the area. We take turns going to each other's house for the work day. Gives you a change of scenery while you work, and someone to interact with while working. Although a lot of it is sitting in silence in the same room, just having another human around can boost your mood. At least for me this does wonders.
I think I overall enjoy WFH, that said, my quality of life would be greatly improved if I lived in a larger home rather than my one bedroom apartment.
I've seen some people predict that a surge in home buying may follow the pandemic because people will realize how much better off they would have been in a larger space.
I will go ahead and move into a 2 bedroom in the next few months to allow me to have a more private office space.
My office is a wework so it's literally like 1000 times better than my shitty apartment. I just have to worry about so much less at the office. Free barista coffee, washing up and cleaning done for you so you're not messing up your workspace. I miss it a lot.
> Money in/out this month was about 80%/target, so they may pull a rabbit out of a hat.
During the middle of a worldwide lockdown? The only explanation I can imagine is a substantial decrease in operating costs due to disuse, but that doesn't strike me as enough to offset the cost of rent.
I have the same feelings and I think a part of it comes from the fact that it's not exactly possible to meet with people after work (not counting Zoom/Skype/Whatsapp with friends). It's not the remote working that is depriving us of our joy of socializing - it's having to stay home after.
Absolutely. My work has been better than ever due to not being in the office and not having to do a horrible commute (min. 45 mins each way, usually more).
The evenings are pretty dull, though - no jam sessions or martial arts classes can run, so my hobbies are on hold.
I fully agree with you. Although office interactions play a big part in socialization, I think most of the uneasiness I feel right now is due to the fact that I can't even socialize outside of work, or with non-coworkers. Not caused by remote work per se.
You are not alone. We often under estimate the value of workplace bonding. Planning a dinner for the team when we have been through a tough development cycle for a couple months for instance is incredibly rewarding. It vastly improves the quality of collaboration and the way people engage with each other. Helping them communicate in an informal settings and find better ways to connect with each other even on an emotional level.
Remote work takes all of it away and adds this invisible burden to navigate through your teams thought process. That alone is a huge factor for me to make sure there is a balance between remote work and office visits.
Like you, I don't think it can be done away with entirely. But, seemingly, I don't see this quite as binary as many here do. This doesn't have to be an all remote or no remote proposition. This could easily be a three or four day a week, remote position, with one day set aside to come in and have meetings/Agile development, what have you, team spirit a awards, maybe lunch. The days could be scheduled out so the real estate needs would be smaller than the company is, as a whole, making it beneficial for the company on a cost level and it helps with traffic congestion levels (assuming there were mass adoption).
Because that still means you have to live near where you work and that gives you a small home (at least if you live in a large metro area) due to the real estate being scarce and expensive.
But having 2 people work from home increases your required footprint and yet you live in the same area as before. If i need an additional 20sqm in or near London, that is going to be expensive.
True, but if you're only travelling one day a week you could probably stomach a longer commute on that one day than if you were doing it 5 days a week. I guess ideally there would be some variety in the way jobs offer home working, then people could choose for themselves and hopefully that would take some pressure off housing markets in metro areas as well as giving a sense of connection to employees/employers who particularly desire that.
My official office (which I rarely go into) is about a 30 minute drive away. But to your point, we have another office in the city. It's not really that big a deal for me to take commuter rail in now and then (or drive in early). But it's still about 90 minutes each way.
OK for a day or so a week. But that's a huge chunk out of your day if it's a daily thing.
True, but this also prevents the problem of (or worry of) excessive outsourcing. The company I work for has been actively trying to outsource my department's jobs for coming on two years now, with quite a few vendors, moving about 20 percent of us to managerial positions but the work quality is not of a high enough standard. So with that and the time difference, I'm not overly concerned, but this would at least put away such concerns. Plus, as noted above, there is something to be said from some face to face interaction.
I worked freelance for a number of years and I found that I am the same as you; I miss the social interactions.
Since I had no options to work in an office - I didn't have one - I decided to start working in a co-working space.
The co-working space cost me money I would otherwise not have spent but the impact on my mental health was great. I got a regular group of "colleagues" and it clearly divided my home life and work life.
I would definitely recommend it once we're all out of lockdown.
I'm surprised nobody has really pointed out - living through a lockdown and global pandemic is a hugely stressful, scary, and isolating experience. Especially if you're living alone, or with roommates that you're not very close with. I'm pretty introverted and I still feel that way, don't be too hard on yourself for having those feelings.
I would be cautious about overfitting too much to this exact scenario though. Normally even if you were working from home, you could still have a very active social life, get lunch with nearby friends who also work from home, do activities after work, go out on the weekends, etc. I know people that are extroverted and have really enjoyed working from home.
And even if it's really not for you, as other comments have pointed out, there will still certainly be co-located workplaces in the future. Even if almost every company were to go remote, you're definitely not the only one that likes being around other people and I'm sure companies will accomodate this (whether it's a small optional company office, or paying for employees to use a co-working space like a We Work, etc.)
I don't mean anything against you personally but I am strongly disapprove of people who socialize excessively at work. It is distracting, annoying, and worst of all passive-aggressive because you can't stop someone from socializing with you without making yourself seem unchill, throwing your career in the trash. You also can't take a break from socialization or else you make yourself a target.
In sum, the social aspect really is the worst part of engineering in Silicon Valley, and I have half a mind to do something on my own so I no longer have to entertain mediocre engineers with terrible interests.
So, I would love to work for a place that was fully remote. It would be paradise to me.
I work at an agency where this is understood. It's headphones on all day. Socialising happens at lunch and if you don't want to join in you can have your lunch early or late. Socialising also happens after work and you can go home if you don't want to join in.
Part of the reason this happens is because every task is estimated and timed. Over time the estimates have become fairly accurate so you can't get away with dossing the whole day.
I'm no social butterfly but I feel the same way. Working in an office gives me regular light social contact that would be very tiring to get otherwise.
I never liked working from home before this whole covid situation when the office had a lot of interactions.
But with the whole office working remotely, virtual hang out sessions, asynchronous communications, everyone joining remotely for office updates etc etc. I hate to admit it but I quite enjoy it now. I feel more productive. If a company sets up the right culture for remote work, it's not that bad.
Working from home is a challenge, there’s no doubt about that, but assuming some return to normalcy, you don’t have to work from your house or apartment.
Remote work means you can work wherever you want, you can go to a coffee shop for a few hours, you can head to your town’s local library, a coworking space. You can take an extended trip and live out of a van.
Once starlink is up, if you can get away with high latency, you can work from the middle of Greenland if you wanted to.
Working from home, which is really working from wherever you want, is about the flexibility and control to work how, when and where you want.
I do hope that large tech companies like twitter leave their offices open, because that’s also a piece of the remote work puzzle. Just like when we switched from cubicles to open offices, it would be nice to be more thoughtful about remote work AND an in office hybrid situation.
> Once starlink is up, if you can get away with high latency
Off topic but, the latency will be better than cable. They're low altitude satellites. There was even talk of using Starlink for New York / London HFT, because signals travel faster in space than they do in fiber optic (some fraction of the speed of light).
I miss the "buzz" of human interaction that TV in the background never gives, but I can usually get that from Starbucks.
I'm an introvert, and I've been doing independent consulting over the phone for clients for, gosh, 7-or-so years now, and I love talking to my clients, but I don't want to be in the office with them.
One of my sons is about to go bat-shit crazy. The other loves his ability to get tasks in the morning and focus.
I guess we are all wired different.
I was in the process of putting together a "Remote First" business plan, for my next venture, where -- there simply was no home office.
But reading comments like yours really brings home how bad an idea that might be, because I'd be losing out on incredible talent by doing so.
BTW: My current main client has an office (mostly shut down), but I've made it a point to take out a different engineer for lunch (of something similar, depending on the lockdown harshness), 3 times a week (we're small, so I tend to take out everybody for lunch, including my boss) about every six weeks. That's not enough ... but it's the little things that make you feel connected, right? We had a young (28 y.o.?) superstar that was about to lose his shorts release week about two weeks ago and simply bringing to my place with pizze and Netflix and Nintendo (we got shitfaced and he beat my ass at Super Mario Cart), it was good. He felt better, I felt better, nobody got laid, and we both woke up refreshed...
I think you have a solid point that people need people. But, my question is: Can this be done virtually?
I'm a USian, but I lived in Japan for over 10 years, and my mother always wanted to see me, but I never understood why, when I could read her voice better over the phone than in person. She wanted to see me because she could read my body language better in person than over the phone (which I did not like, actually), but is there a way via which you can feel connected without being in the same room? My girlfriend (I live in Texas) is in Taiwan and we have pretty engaging conversations every day and she comes to see me (or vice versa) about 10 times/year. Would that kind of work satisfy you, or do you literally need to see people every day? (As an introvert, I guess I don't know how extraverts work).
Anyway - A bit more disclosure than I usually do - but I am sincerely interested in your perspective.
Many comments that I have read here take one side or the other. Maybe we need to realize that it is just the right thing for some and doesn't work for others. Realities in life are often complex.
WFH without a choice to come to office is pure suffering. I really miss the interactions with my coworkers before COVID. I also miss time I can grab a book from the shared book-self and find an empty office and just do reading for one hour.
If I have a choice to go back to office, I will take it anytime.
This time is not a great example of Remote working, it would be as sad and stressful (maybe more) if you were forced to live in the actual office and share the same space with all your coworkers every day without being able to leave.
on top of the actual stress given by just looking at the current state of the world.
I keep reading your comment because it seems intense and sincere, and ... I don't know what you mean. What's the difference?
I mean, like being under rubble in Battery Park after 9-11, waiting 3 days for the people to dig you out as your batteries die is stressful, but that's not really the same as hiding from a virus that won't kill you, is it?
EDIT: Re-reading my comment, that 2nd paragraph sounds snarky. It wasn't intended to be. I guess I just don't understand your comment. Would you be kind enough to clarify my mind? :-)
But now, she works from home and then can't socialize after hours, except virtually. She can't go anywhere or do anything. Shopping is the only time she gets out, but she didn't like it before and now it's even more stressful.
The difference (unless you have kids or a noisy house) isn't the home bit, it's the not-home bit. For people who aren't introverts, this is a very, very tough time. Their basic needs aren't being met.
I'm lucky that I'm an introvert. This has been a pretty good experience for me. I have no commute, I get more done in the same 8 hours, and all my socializing can be done in my own home. I miss going places a tiny bit, but only the places that have things I can't do at home. (I'm talking Disney World here.)
The difference, at least for me, it's that I'm more worried for several other things than work and I cannot be as productive as I was before.
Also some people have kids at home because schools are closed; my SO for instance is also at home, while usually she's not, and the apartment is not bigger now that we're two; sometimes I need to go to the grocery at specific time because otherwise is crowded...
And even worse, as other comment mentioned, some people would have sick family and / or friends.
There are many things that make this situation different than a "regular day working from home".
You said: "I'm more worried for several other things than work and I cannot be as productive as I was before."
This makes sense - I have some acquaintances who have parents locked up in long-term care facilities that they haven't seen since February - and this is taxing both the parents and the kids/grandkids that can't see them.
You (also)said: "There are many things that make this situation different than a "regular day working from home"."
You bring up several good points. I was focused on the "working from home" part, I've actually been more concerned about the funemployment people, for which I do food-bank work (Whole Foods, HEB (it's a grocery store in Texas) and Bank of America (who would have thunk?) have all been very very generous), but there are other "factions" of people with other concerns that my brain was kind of glossing over somehow.
I already said "Thank You", but I really do appreciate your clarification. It broke open some blocked thinking pathways for me.
it might very well kill the person you were responding to, or their loved one were they to bring it home.
supposing that's not a concern, and you're not emotionally impacted by the possibility of hundreds of thousands of additional deaths from this, most folks will be stressed out by having their routines disrupted.
so now multiply that stuff happening to you, by a factor of it happening to your boss and all of your coworkers, and now everything else is just a bit tougher.
Of course, I am. I have parents and children and neighbors and grandparents and the like. It's not that I don't care - it's that I simply didn't understand the upstream comment. I was asking for clarification on the intended meaning.
Please, if you need help, there is the PTSD hotline for people who are having problems dealing with this new-new situation we are going through: 1-800-985-5990
Just commenting to say that I feel similarly to you, and I seem to be the only one among my coworkers that feels it to this extent. Good to know that there are others out there.
It might be due to your home sitation as well. I have my wife and kids, so I have the opportunity to go and chat with them or grab some lunch. I remember when I WFH'ed on my own as a singleton and I did not like it as much, as I was on my own for a good 8 hours a day. We are very social creatures. You only have to look a prisons. You're surrounded by criminals, quite a few who are manipulative / hostile or just hard work from untreated mental conditions, yet the form of punishment is to place you on your own into Solitary confinement.
If you were working from home under normal circumstances you could still be a "social butterfly" after work. But anyway, you have the right attitude when you say you'll leave if it goes remote and you don't like that. That's exactly what people should do. Fixing your problems usually starts with yourself.
As someone on the more extroverted side, I see office work as an easy source of meaningful social stimulation / bonding (well, assuming I like my coworkers) with little personal setup required on my end. Although the in-person component can be a distraction, I mostly saw it as a source of energy and creativity. I met some of my best friends at work.
I've been working from home for about 2 years, a legacy consequence of a few acquisitions. Despite its perks, I don't think that I would've stayed with it past the first year if not for 1) a local set of friends that I could still take breaks / lunches with 2) going to the corporate office once a month for about a week which allowed me to form a nice social network in the mothership city.
But covid-19 stopped both, and I'm stuck with this ennui that's been hard to shake.
I've been very interested in remote work, like you said you were, and I'm worried about the same issues you discuss here. However, one of the things I've seen that I hope will mitigate these issues is the idea of not working at home, but still working remote. For example, getting work done at a coffee shop or public library, instead of home.
I'm worried that mixing my work and personal life too much will be a big strain on my mental health, but I plan to work at home as little as possible in the future, while still trying to work remote to avoid having to commute and enjoy a more flexible schedule. I hope this idea will help you!
I love the flexibility of WFH but worry about people's mental health in the long term if too many did it too much for too long. (Once the pandemic is over)
I ranted about this today [1]. For many the separation of home and office is healthy. Different people, different social interactions, etc.
And for many, an office is where they make new friends, meet their partner etc.
Long ago, I thought remote working was awesome. Then I learned to appreciate working in a team, and I thought remote working was overrated. When the COVID crisis hit and we were forced to work from home, I was surprised how much more productive I became. But that was the first couple of weeks. The focus is wearing off, and I miss my team and the office environment. It helps that I've got a really cool team.
I think the best case (for me personally) is both... 2-3 days per week from the office, and 3-2 days from home. You talk with people, socialize, hear all the gossip (from non-work related, to work related - eg. aout someone who's working on some interesting new project, etc.), but still don't have to drive to work 3 times a week, and can work in your underwear.
What I do is to treat work as work only, while cultivating a rich social life outside of it.
I still have some friends at work, but to be honest: I never really did well with random people, usually those that I consider friends I chose since we have similar interests/vibe/philosophy.
As counterpoint, I love working from home. Pre-COVID I'd usually work from home 4-5 days a week. My focus at home is always way better than in the office (though a noisy open-plan office and a culture of interruptions is a factor as well). One nice benefit around focus is that when I'm having trouble focusing at home, I don't feel as guilty (or try to cover it with make-work) as I do when I'm at the office in the same situation.
I'm also a very social person, but my non-work time is my social outlet (though I still get some "lower-quality" social time over Slack and Zoom during work hours). When the company was smaller (a couple hundred people, now we're over 3k), I certainly spent more social time at the office. But these days I prefer to just work hard during work hours, and meet up with friends (who are often also co-workers) after work.
But at the same time, I love that working at home gives me the flexibility to cook lunch with my girlfriend or take a break for a walk or even just stare out the window in the middle of the afternoon. While my commute isn't bad (25 min transit ride or 45 min walk), I don't mind getting that time back, either. Instead I can get up and go for a 30 minute run, and start work at the same time.
So the COVID rules have left me in roughly the same situation as I was before, at least work-wise (I miss seeing my friends like crazy). Fortunately I don't have kids; nearly everyone I know with kids is finding it impossible to juggle them being home all the time with getting their work done.
It's really interesting though to see how this sort of thing affects people differently (and I'm genuinely sorry you're having such a bad time!). I expect the incidence of work-from-home will increase a lot even after we've stopped social distancing, but there will still be a strong (but newly-flexible) office culture.
The original discussion is about whether or not remote work is enjoyable. I too find it enjoyable and have done it, generally, for about 4-5 days a week for years now.
I'd like to say that I'm enjoying it too. If my coworking space was open I'd feel compelling to go because otherwise I'd miss out on interesting conversations and connections.
But with FOMA out of the way - I'm happy as larry staying in and having those same conversations selectively and remotely.
Have you tried a co-working space, even if just part-time? You get the social interactions but can work at the "office" or home as you wish. And if conversing with a co-tenant, you have no concern that you're dragging down your own business by distracting a colleague!
I'm the opposite. I think it's just a personality trait. I'm more introverted and socially anxious so I feel much more comfortable at home by myself. I've been remote for 8 years now and I hope I never have to go back to an office.
I'm an extreme introvert and I've found WFH to be very challenging. Part of the problem is that the engineering team at my startup is still figuring out what to build and design sessions over Zoom feel incredibly frustrating and unproductive compared to a shared office with a whiteboard.
I can't imagine forced remote for all employees would ever become the norm. It feels like likely that companies would move from dedicated offices to leasing co-working spaces for those that want it.
Most social butterflies aren’t going to experience the extreme symptoms you describe, but it sucks and I’m sorry.
I invite you now to consider that a much milder version of these is what introverts deal with almost all the time due to the norms of society (which are biased toward social butterflies). We have to learn to overcome and adapt to these difficulties early in life, and for some of us that struggle is real (and life-long).
My counterpoint: From day #1 I always hated office jobs. I hated that management cared so much what time we showed up at the office (they'd all pretend to not care, but then use it against you). I hated being locked there until 5:30pm or whatever was the "appropriate" time to leave even if I'd finished my work by 3pm and no longer had the mental energy to be productive (I remember one time during my first job getting a lot of work done all morning/afternoon, and leaving at 3pm. A couple hours later I get a text asking where I was, and I said I left, and they're like "you just left? lol you're not supposed to do that". I'm think wtf? So I can sit there for 2 hours with some code on my screen doing nothing and that's fine, but I'm not allowed to leave after a 4-5 hour focused coding session? Nobody's really productive after ~4 hours of deep focus anyways).
I hated daily standups, where every morning we have to justify our existence and repeat what's already on the Jira board to some product manager who for whatever reason isn't obliged to give us their status update. I hated all the other numerous pointless agile meetings - backlog refinement, backlog grooming (once got accused of not appearing attentive enough in meetings). I hate open offices, where you have no privacy, have to listen to other peoples' conversations, and constantly feel like you're being watched and paranoid that somebody might catch a glance at your monitor the second you took a 5 minute break from work. I hate having to be surrounded by boring co-workers with no personality all day, in offices where most people eat alone at their desks in front of their computer screens (I never understood this, are people actually working when they eat in front of their computer monitors? You're sitting there for 8 hours and you're so busy you can't take 30 minutes to eat your lunch without being glued to the screen?)
I've been working remotely since last year and I am significantly happier. 98% of that "office bullsh!t" vanished overnight. No commuting. No daily standups. Less pointless meetings (it's like remote workers don't need meetings to bullsh!t meetings to rationalize being stuck in an office for 8 hours). I've traveled the world. At ~$200k/yr I make less than I would in SF, but it's a very comfortable living practically anywhere else in the world since my expenses are a fraction what they were before, and I don't need to be locked in to a lease. When it's 2pm and I'm not feeling productive, I just close my laptop and do something else (instead of trying to figure out how to blow the next 3 hours at the office). When I need to go to the grocery store or gym, I go. If I want to spend a month in Hawaii, I do it.
Remote work certainly has its challenges - you need to be disciplined, have a comfortable workspace ideally separate from your home so you're not stuck in the same place all day (I like coffee shops), do other activities that get you outside the harm (a little more difficult now with COVID), you can't just walk over to someone's desk so people need to be available (not necessarily on a second's notice, but within some acceptable range such that time isn't wasted being blocked), and you have to know when to turn off and go offline. You can't rely on co-workers for your social life anymore, though I don't think I ever had more than 2-3 real friends at any office job in terms of anyone I still keep in contact with.
So it's funny to me seeing occasional comments on remote work posts talking about how much they like working in an office. Personally offices have always been the bane of my existence, and there are few thoughts more repulsing then being trapped in some office for 8 hours/day. To be fair I once worked out of the office of a company I was working remotely for and really enjoyed it because it was a tiny startup with cool people who didn't care when or what time I showed up since I had been hired on purely remote terms and was only at the office voluntarily. So the problem is not the office itself, but the idea of being locked inside for designated hours, and the other bullsh!t management practices generally prevalent in office jobs especially at bigger companies.
I'm not entirely sure, but I at least have observed that meetings are a lot less "charged" and backdoor rumors aren't as "present" in a remote situation.
When people are physically in a room, you can focus on body language, you can focus on emotions. On a voice call or email, its a little bit easier to focus on data and not who has the fancy watch on.
I think this is the hugest news yet. It suddenly opens the pool of candidates to all across the country.
I expect other tech giants will follow suit.
Those who previously can't afford or don't want to live in big cities like NYC/Seattle/SF because they are older, have families, or various other reasons now are included in the candidate pool.
This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction.
Whatever the case is, suddenly fresh graduates, mid level developers, senior developers, are now competing on the same pool. It is getting even more real to compete in the high FAANG salary job openings now.
This serves as a reminder for us, whether fresh graduates, mid level, or even seniors, to always to keep your edge. DS&A grinding, system design, etc, do whatever you can to not lose your edge.
As a matter of fact, I think almost all knowledge workers will find themselves in this situation. If you are a knowledge/office worker, huge competition looms over the horizon. Never lose your edge.
I think you are overestimating the size of the eligible labor supply increase. Just for Google, for 2017-2019 the number of H1B workers sponsored was 22k. For the same period the increase in number of full time employees was 40k (couldn’t find the figure for US only but fair to assume majority is US-based). So more than half of the new employers are supplied internationally. Does the geo-unlocked US supply pose a substantial competition to that? I don’t see how. FAANG salary is a pretty damn strong incentive to overcome that geo-friction to begin with.
If anything, if the twitter trend follows, FAANG salaries will lose heat. For the majority of the employees, a good chunk of the paycheck goes to housing costs. Wider WFH adoption will ease the overly localized housing demand, even with several days of WFO, longer commutes will be much more tolerable and the housing spread will increase. That would mean acceptance of lower salaries and lowering of housing costs over time.
One competing factor; as the seniority increases, the say on WFH policies increases, also the possibility of housing ownership increases (whether as primary residence or also with rental properties). That creates a perverse incentive to not let people go away in aggregate. Not saying individual managers will think this way explicitly, but might have an indirect influence.
I'm curious - you seem to be saying that FAANG companies can't find enough employees, but your support for the point is that Google hired a significant amount of H1B workers. However, I've read/seen that many H1B workers work for significantly less, and under more pressure, because they are trying to become citizens in the US. Is it possible that the reason for FAANG companies hiring so many H1B workers isn't due to shortage of qualified new employees, but instead because they are more efficient workers, due to the pressures and lower salary?
I went studied CS in Idaho and know many of my peers took significantly lower paying jobs than they are qualified for so they could remain in the area. I'm certain at least some of them would rather work for larger companies with higher salaries and better benefits (and more prestige), if it didn't mean moving into the BIG CITY and leaving their friends/family behind.
My main point was, a globally distributed labor pool is already accessible to FAANG and is being utilized despite higher transition costs both for the employer and the employee. The H1B hires for FAANG is the global top talent for which companies compete for, hence an upward pressure for compensation, not downward. In fact you can check the H1B salary information yourself from the website I linked, to see that salaries are at par with US levels. I admit there might be some difference is non-salary compensation such as signing bonuses and inital stock grants, but I would attribute that to lack/difficulty of deploying local negotiation tactics (e.g get several offers and pit them to each other). In general price of the labor is not a driving factor at all. Besides, most of these companies will happily pay for a law firm to help with the green card application process of their employees, and H1B is transferable to a new employer, possibly to another FAANG company. Yes, all of these pose transition costs, but it is far from the desparate overworked underpaid foreign worker image painted.
For your second point, the delta of the “higher salary” is important. US ranks the highest in sofware engineer salaries globally, which means for most countries coming to US as a software engineer will mean a much higher increase in salary than within US. If that delta offsets the perceived cost of leaving friends and family behind, they it is rational to take the offer. In other words, non-US candidates need to be hurting much more than US candidates to lose access to friends and family to not take the offer. In fact they already do, they lose access to their culture and their language unless they are from anglosphere. They still take the offers, so the income differential must be more than adequate to make the transition. Additionally, individual cost function of losing access to these things will differ. Many people will actively seek a challenge away from their friends and families to take up new opportunities and experiences. Your friends seems to have not.
Actually, I think is misrepresented what I was trying to ask by including salary. I don't think or have any evidence to suggest H1B salaries are lower, only that pressure on H1B employees is higher to perform, as they are working for more than just the salary, but also the visa.
Thanks for your detailed response, though. I understand what you're saying more clearly.
It is actually very difficult to get an initial H-1B worker, since the worker has to get selected in a lottery, and the company has to wait 7 months.[1] The odds of getting picked in the H1B lottery is around 32% as of 2020. The 7-month wait time itself massively disincentivizes employers from hiring non-US workers. The end result is that most of H1B sponsorships go to people already in the US on a student visa who are working for the company using a status called "F-1 OPT". It's quite difficult to get hired from abroad. Many larger companies still do it, and are willing to wait 7 months, but the wait 7-month time and uncertain nature of the lottery are significant factors that discourage companies from hiring non-US workers.
For out-of-US hires, Facebook will actually get you a Canadian work visa, and have you work in Canada for the 7 month wait, and potentially for year if you don't get picked in the lottery. The strategy for multiple large firms is to bring non-US workers to Canada first, and then try to move them over to the US, since US immigration law is extraordinarily restrictive compared to most countries.
[1] The company applies for the worker in March of the year, and if the individual is picked in the lottery, they get to start working for them in October.
H1B in tech companies are not paid significantly less, and they can easily find alternative employers willing to help with the transfer in Silicon Valley. It's H1B in non-tech companies that manipulate job postings to massively underpay their workers, and whose geographically-limited set of alternative employers are already small and also generally less willing to offer legal support dealing with the H1B transfer issues.
What's stopping someone from moving to SF for higher comp on hiring, then getting a P.O. box or friend's mailing address in SF and moving back to work from lower cost area after some time?
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
If your employer thinks you're in California, they'll tell the California tax authorities that you are. CA will use that as evidence that you owe them a big chunk of your income. If you don't pay, you'll have to fight. To win, you'll probably have to prove that you misled your employer, which will probably result in your getting fired for it. If you lose, CA can force your employer to take the tax out of your salary, so you'll pay California anyway plus you'll probably have to pay the place you actually live if you've done anything to establish residence. Along the way, any number of other unpredictable problems can arise (bad credit rating, legal threats, ongoing disputes with entities that don't understand or care that you've surrendered, etc.)
I think it’s gonna get really weird. If a company pays the same in seattle as SF (or near), and A person lives in SF, I’d rather pay a friend in WA state a few hundred a month to “rent a room” than 10% of my income to California.
That said there’s probably a bunch of laws around faking residency for tax purposes which id imagine has some hefty consequences.
Many faang companies pay the same 'higher' salaries at the same rates across seattle, sf, and nyc. The fangs used to do that when i worked there, but i wonder if they pay more in sf now? I'm sure some companies will want to pay you less if they can get away with it. But twitter will probably have to pay almost as much to keep their devs if they move. that's the key, keeping your workforce.
It used to be that way 3 years ago when I worked at Google. I don't have a link, it was personal knowledge. I'm 100% sure of it. They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.
> They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.
Google pays for cost of labor, not cost of living. While related, it isn't the same: for example, Google London pays much less than NYC, and Tokyo even less than that; yet Pittsburgh pays only slightly less than NYC despite being far and away the cheapest of the 4.
I believe Google's competitors tend to follow this model more than cost of living, especially internationally.
I’m guessing you’re being downvoted by those who think your comment is encouraging unethical behavior.
While I certainly don’t think it’s ethical to do so, I did wonder the same thing - would companies start putting measures in place to verify you’re working from the same general area as your initially provided address? Eg, sifting through VPN log files to geo locate IP addresses etc.
They don't care as long as you show up to critical work meetings and are available when you need them for high-profile projects. I had a coworker (while at Google) who moved to Uganda without telling his manager, because he felt like it. His manager called a meeting for the next day, he hopped on a plane that night, showed up for the meeting, flew back to Uganda afterwards until he got bored there, and his manager was never the wiser, except for it being a great story for friends to tell.
What's stopping people is largely that
a.) if you aren't in the office, you miss out on critical opportunities, and if you aren't in the office too much, your boss may decide you're not worth keeping. (Officially, Google has a "if you don't show up for 3 days in a row without telling anyone you're considered to have voluntarily resigned". Unofficially this gets bent by high-performers all the time, but legally they can do it.) This is also why ambitious people at the satellite offices - NYC, Pittsburg, Seattle - move to Mountain View, because the high-priority projects require facetime and rarely go to remote employees.
b.) Hopping on a plane to make a meeting gets old really quickly, and also pretty expensive if you aren't pre-IPO. I know people who would commute from LA -> MTV, Uganda -> MTV, Seattle -> MTV, or do frequent business trips from Zurich or Sydney -> MTV. They hated it. You think the commute on 101 sucks, try adding the TSA to it.
Should it be a race to the bottom? Also, I think it's pretty rare in tech to have multiple qualified candidates to choose from. Typically the candidates have multiple offers, not the other way around.
Compensation is not based on the value provided to the company. Compensation is based on "market rate" as in, the lowest amount of money a candidate is willing to accept to do the job. The information asymmetry is such that candidates accept offers for far less than the company is willing to pay.
Good for the Idaho candidate, living in SF shouldn't warrant some kind of salary privilege (much of which just gets funneled to landlords and increasing housing prices).
Is it good for the Idaho candidate to get paid less for the same work? If a company is willing to pay $x for a role because it will give them $y benefit where $y > $x why should any candidate accept less than $x? How much of a delta between $y and $x is even acceptable? Why should we celebrate companies playing candidates against each other for the benefit of the few?
This realistically isn't a major concern because the pool of qualified software engineers in a state like Idaho is far too small to make a noticeable dent in market salary levels.
You're assuming the availability of mobile tech work will not enable more people to move to places with low cost of living, such as Idaho. I believe that it will.
A few people will do that, yes, but there are a couple million software developers in the US, and most of them are not going to suddenly move to sparsely populated interior states. They'll spread out from the SF bay area a bit.
Actually, there is good reason to be within 30ms ping (99th percentile). Half that, plus the 5ms algorithmic delay from Opus (in CELT-only-restricted-low-latency mode) gives 20ms, which is the lower end of uncanny valley for real-time interactive audio (certainly for musicians in a band, but I'll presume relevance for verbal communication to set in at the same psychoacoustic threshold).
If you introduce any amount of latency by executing the encoder/decoder pair, you'll have to subtract double the latency from your ping-allowance.
If you try to have correctly-lipsynced audio in a video call, I only know of one setup to offer similarly-low video latency: a rolling-shutter in the camera, a line-by-line display (CRT should do well), and up-to a few lines algorithmic delay for e.g. running non-buffering JPEG (8x8 DCT and an online entropy coder (no pre-analysis for optimal Huffman tables or such) to save like 80-90% bandwidth). Analog TV camera+screen hardware should also work, but it's really inefficient and not easy to emulate with digital hardware.
Some companies agree with that and some don’t. For companies that disagree with you statement, the rationale is really simple: the company is ready to pay top $ because cost of life is high. They know that the rent you’ll pay is high hence the money. They’re reducing their net profit (ebitda) to lay the high salary you need to pay your rent. They do that because your rent in SF is what it is. But for those companies, there’s no way they reduce their ebitda for you to profit off that.
The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.
I would think that most companies pay based on what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates. Location should not matter beyond what the manager in charge or salaries think it matters for the employee willingness to stay at the company, and as such it depends.
Managers, probably.
Companies + investors = less likely.
>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates
Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.
Google files 6.5k H1-B applications per yr which includes transfers (https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...). To assume all of this goes to new employees is misleading since Google has attrition too. So assuming 10% attrition, Google needs to fill in that 10% and add more employees. Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.
> Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.
I also conveniently assumed that global 40k headcount increase was sufficiently representative of the US headcount increase, even though it inflates the denominator. It's the nature of back-of-the-envelope calculations to be convenient.
H1B and GC sponsorships come from the same pool. In other words, a Green Card application is sponsored for H1 candidates. You are double counting your numbers.
I do agree that this expectation that one sitting in Ohio will command the same salary working for a FAANG company is just wrong. Very likely, the companies will adjust their salaries based on where the person is.
My understanding is that sponsorship on at least the E-3 is difficult or impossible; that visa is not "immigrant intent", which ostensibly means something in the statute with respect to paths to permanent residence.
Just because a visa isn't dual intent doesn't mean you can't apply for a Green Card. TN, E-3 etc can all lead to a Green Card but you have to time it right.
> FAANG salary is a pretty damn strong incentive to overcome that geo-friction to begin with.
This is really only true for certain segments of the population. In my early to mid 20s, I moved cross country numerous times. Now I hope I never have to move again. And if I did, it wouldn't be to the Bay Area or Seattle.
So I'm not sure your statement that "more than half of new employers[sic] are supplied internationally" is true, because the H-1B numbers include renewals.
If anything I suspect a large number of remote jobs will lower demand for visa sponsorship since the candidate pool is no longer localized. One huge advantage of visa employees is that they tend to be more mobile, as in moving to where the jobs are, which is important when there is a divide between candidate selection and geographic availability.
FAANG companies have already been trying to hire in US cities outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle in order to cut costs. Austin in particular comes to mind.
It turns out to be fairly difficult to recruit engineering talent in the United States outside of major metropolitan areas. It also turns out that when tech companies start to hire people in a new city, the cost of living in that city rises substantially -- again, Austin in particular comes to mind.
In the end, if tech compensation decreases substantially I don't think it will be because of remote work, but rather because the recession will kill a lot of startups and the same amount of engineering talent will be chasing a smaller number of jobs, thereby giving employers more leverage.
> It also turns out that when tech companies start to hire people in a new city, the cost of living in that city rises substantially -- again, Austin in particular comes to mind.
That is inevitable if more housing is not built. If demand rises and supply doesn’t, or rises slower than demand rents and house prices rise. Or you could be like Tokyo with population growing 50% over the last twenty years and flat housing costs.
Do you know anything about Austin? There are cranes all over downtown, mid-rise apartment buildings sprouting up everywhere, etc. We’re certainly not perfect in terms of housing, could use more “missing middle” housing such as duplexes/triplexes/etc., but the idea we are not allowing new housing is crazy. Costs are still going up, definitely the most expensive big city in Texas at this point, but obviously nowhere near Bay Area levels.
The parent, responding to a comment that mentions Austin, never suggested new housing wasn’t allowed—you seem to have inserted that thought yourself. They simply observed that housing supply—and how well it matches (and avoids lagging behind) demand—has an impact on cost of living. They don’t even make a point about Austin specifically—Tokyo is the place they call specific attention to as a point of comparison to the GP’s thoughts.
I find it interesting you chose to defend Austin against an attack that wasn’t made.
Of course, I also think there may be more than housing supply at work to explain why cost of living increases in a place that starts to see a new uptick in tech hiring. I’m not sure if anyone has studied and documented the extent to which increased tech hiring in a new location leads to a surge of new people trying to live in that area before cost of living begins to increase. If that isn’t the case, and cost of living and goods starts increasing before population does, it seems likely there’s more than housing supply to blame— perhaps all the existing property and business owners start raising prices to get some of those sweet tech dollars in their pockets?
You are reading too much in to my psyche here, and I am not defending Austin. Like I said it has a lot more work to do, and it’s arguable whether much of the housing being built even constitutes a net social good or not, given the issues around gentrification and running minorities out of town, etc., etc.
My point was, responding to a comment that “housing costs are rising in Austin” by explaining it as “price rises are inevitable if you don’t build enough housing” is a very misleading statement. Maybe that is a true statement, but Austin does not satisfy the antecedent so it says nothing about the situation here. Unlike in many places, the housing is being built here, yet the prices are still rising significantly and forcing many out or into homelessness.
So clearly development is not a sufficient condition for keeping housing prices in check. Like you say, it could instead be totally driven by the job market. Or maybe development is a necessary condition, along with other things such as subsidized/public housing, job programs, etc. We have to move beyond armchair economist statements that are basically “har har har it’s supply and demand duh”, that don’t even capture all the straightforward/first order economics of all the various buyers and sellers of housing (demand for what type of housing? What type of housing supply is allowed to be built? etc.), much less the second order effects tangential to the economics. Your speculations are on the mark here, and we do need good studies that look at exogenous shocks to try to tease out cause and effect, along with lots of small-scale experimentation by governments.
Finally, I don’t know enough about Tokyo to comment in any way on that part of the post, so I did not.
I assure you I wasn’t reading into your psyche. Just observing a single curious point: you specifically called out and disputed that the idea Austin wasn’t allowing new housing supply was crazy—and yet neither the parent or GP had suggested such an idea. You suggested and responded to that idea yourself.
I think it’s interesting that we both seem to have read the parent and GP posts quite differently. You read that the parent was responding to a post that said housing prices are rising in Austin. I read that the parent was responding to a post that said FAANG companies are hiring in new areas to cut costs, and cost of living seems to increase wherever tech starts hiring (and Austin was just a city that came to the GP’s mind as an example of this phenomenon). Yes, the parent’s comment about housing supply was a rather shallow retort that I think we both agree provides little insight and comes up too often as if it possesses sufficient explanatory power on its own—but they weren’t quite suggesting what you responded to.
To put it into a different space, what I found interesting and pointed out was that your comment read like others we’ve probably both seen where Programmer A says Erlang has a great concurrency model that enables developers to easily build fault-tolerant distributed systems, and Programmer B comes along to argue that the idea that Java doesn’t allow you to build fault-tolerant distributed systems is crazy. The idea was never suggested by A in the first place, so B’s response stands out.
Anyway, this has been fun. Thanks. Apologies for my original response coming off the wrong way.
That’s a great example of why restricting to offices doesn’t work for expanding your labor pool significantly.
If a company starts a new office in Austin and they had one in the bay, now they are realistically only tapping the additional talent in Austin. There isn’t a huge chunk of people willing to relocate to Austin that wouldn’t relocate to the bay.
Removing location restrictions all-together is a completely different ballgame because it opens the entire country up, not just one city.
I think most of the best tech workers are already living in major cities. Before the virus lockdowns started, those people were required to work in offices just like everyone else, so they had to move to where there employers were located.
I don’t really buy the argument that there is a major untapped pool of talent living outside major cities — if there is, what have those people been doing for work until now? It hasn’t been easy to have a good career in tech in rural areas, for example.
There are definitely markets which attract strong tech talent that have been largely ignored by the tech industry proper as a source for recruiting. A sibling mentions oil & gas, I have personally worked with two former Schlumberger engineers who had been employed in rural areas and were excellent software and systems talent. At least one I know only left the position because he wanted to move to a city due to family, Schlumberger had been paying him a rate that was hard to match in the city though. Subjectively, too, I think both people had a certain oil-field scrappiness, the tech industry might call it "bias to action," that is a great value in any environment.
I would add, though, the defense industry. My city has a huge talent pool of engineers, software and not, employed in the defense industry. Many have top academic qualifications and long experience. The tech industry struggles to recruit them mainly because the tech employers in the area offer more or less equivalent pay and significantly inferior benefits (leave, retirement, etc). On a cost-of-living basis, at least at entry level, I would say the FAANG companies offer inferior pay and benefits - coming from someone who left San Francisco to work in this area and make, cost of living adjusted, twice what I made in SF, with significantly more paid leave.
My point is that it feels like part of the tech industry's recruiting problem is that there is a tendency to look, for recruiting, only within the tech industry and within its established centers. I have had offers from Bay Area and NYC companies for remote work which I have declined because their pay was actually below what I can get from local companies here, I think because they viewed this area as advantageous primarily due to low cost of labor. The cost of labor actually isn't as low as they think, and I suspect in part because their salary analysis did not incorporate what I can make in 'adjacent' fields like cybersecurity R&D and fundamental CS R&D, which are major sectors here compared even to the bay area in terms of per capita employment.
Or let me put it this way: this city is considered to have a total dearth of the tech industry, defined as startups and explicitly software companies, and it is largely ignored by tech recruiting. Yet, the third largest employer in the city is a science and engineering R&D institution with extensive software divisions, the second largest employer has large software and engineering sections although their employment numbers also include general labor, and the second largest employing industry in the area after services is defense, and the primary defense work in the area is currently shifting from aerospace engineering to software and systems engineering.
I left that industry and have actually been working for various startups in the area. I am often asked for recommendations to fill openings, and I have plenty, but the startups generally do not offer sufficient pay and benefits to dislodge them from a very comfortable career with a level of benefits, not to mention job security, rarely seen in the tech industry.
You are wrong that FAANG companies will pay the same salary as you make in SF if you are in a low cost state like Indiana. I have a friend at one of those companies and they were running a survey to gauge employee's keenness for permanent wfh - and they were very clear that employee's salary will be adjusted based on which city they are based in. So, while this is still healthy, since FAANG pays pretty well, but don't expect half a million dollar working from your house in Indiana.
Just want to point out that there's no rational basis for this argument unless the employee in SF is much more productive.
To put it another way, do you currently see pay adjustments based on housing costs for employees living in SF? Have you ever heard of differences across employees simply because one of them has a more expensive house?
"Cost of Living" adjustments are a red herring, what they really are is really "competition density".
There are plenty of tech companies paying great salaries in the bay because they have to, otherwise they would just go work for someone else. On the other hand, if you lived in Oklahoma you aren't going to say no to $LOCAL_OFFER+10k just because bay area salaries are $LOCAL_OFFER+90k.
As long as this disparity exists, I forsee bay area salaries and CoL still being high. Until companies move headquarters out of the bay, the trend will continue.
FAANG doesn't determine salaries based on cost of living, but cost of labor, which maps to your concept of "competition density".
There is no rational reason for Google to pay bay area salaries for Indiana employees - will they really say no if Google offers 300K instead of the 500K they would get in the bay area? Sure, the person could reject it to make a statement, but most people would gladly take a salary that would buy them a small castle.
All FAANG needs to do is to beat local salaries by a significant margin to get well qualified employees - that would still make these people WAY cheaper than bay area employees.
the rational reason would be they want to hire those people. Hiring top talent is a very competitive thing. Your avg dev at a small company in a small town might or might not be as good as that person who made it in sf. If 100k people leave sf and a good number of them keep their high salaries (or almost) then guess what, those companies will hire people from the other companies that cut pay too much.
If you're working remotely, then you just tell <big tech company> you live in NYC/SF. If they still offer a subpar salary, then you get an offer at <big tech company #2> and bid them against each other. Salary negotiation is a two-way street. Companies that hire remote workers care more about results, which has nothing to do with the cost of living in your location.
Doesn't matter. An employee in Google London is paid lesser than the employee in Google SF. So while you can cry about injustices and rationality, salaries will likely be paid based on cost of living and even geography (based on London example).
> So while you can cry about injustices and rationality
Strange reply. I'm not talking about injustices. I'm saying a company would be pretty dumb to pay someone more just because of where they chose to live. Profit maximization and all that.
They'll pay more to people living in SF because those people have better alternatives and can negotiate harder, and the factors that cause that are the same factors that make housing in SF expensive.
You would have to pay me more if competing employers are willing to pay me more. Right now that depends on which job market I live in. Remote wages seem relatively lower, which isn't surprising when few companies have embraced remote yet.
You should ask yourself: do I want to hire people who decide relocating to Silicon Valley would be good for their career, or those who can't or won't?
Yeah. Google makes like a million dollars per engineer, so it's either "make less money on this engineer than you'd like" or "don't hire this engineer and make nothing". It would be stupid if they were doing it for no reason, but competition is higher for engineers in SF.
Not OP but the $1m figure doesn't really matter. Their point is google makes $x per engineer, you can make $x - (large number) or $0. Whether it's $1m or $10m, it doesn't change the fact.
if a lot of top companies let people work remotely, then it will be a new competitive world for remote workers too. that hasn't happened yet, but it could.
> do you currently see pay adjustments based on housing costs
Yes, it's commonly referred to as "cost of living adjustment."
The rational basis is that the employer sees strategic value in having a physical presence in a given locale, and are willing to pay a premium to have employees actually located there.
Note that I've been working remotely full-time for years, and never plan to go back. I am, however, under no illusions that my salary is a permanent thing.
> Yes, it's commonly referred to as "cost of living adjustment."
I think you missed the point I was making. Have you seen two employees living in the same city, with one paid more because he decided to buy a more expensive house?
I'm aware that there are regional differences, but they can be explained by factors like different productivity levels. This discussion is different - it's about the same employee living in two different locations.
If living in a nicer house caused engineers to have more job opportunities at higher salaries, then Google probably would pay you more for living in a nicer house.
Yes. All the time. Its standard practice to pay more at high cost of living areas. I've not worked at a company with offices in different cost of living areas that did not do this.
Dude in SF is more likely to bump into other dudes in SF and talk about system design, math or AI or competition or best practices or stacks.
Dude in Indiana doesn't have that opportunity. You'd say but Internet, but things like motivation, inspiration, innovation comes from a certain external factors (which we still haven't figured out).
That's why even with massive internet penetration, it's the tech hubs that keep pumping winners and hits
> Just want to point out that there's no rational basis for this argument
The argument is that people in lower cost-of-living areas are willing to work for less, a public company's main motivation is profit, and companies lower their profit by paying employees more than is required to hire and retain them.
Google pay varies by office (quite a lot) and they're upfront about it but it has nothing to do with housing costs. It's based on the cost of hiring in the local market.
I am voluntarily transferring from Google SF to Google London and I am taking a significant salary cut. London isn't really any cheaper to live in, but you can hire good developers for much less in Europe.
I'd be really interested in how they plan to implement this. I'd certainly hope it would be more sophisticated than a linear adjustment of salary based on differences in the cost of living.
I live and work out of St. Louis at the moment, and I've spent a bit of time evaluating FAANG salaries in relation to the cost of living in their relevant areas. While in most cases it seemed I could maybe get 1.5x to 2x my St. Louis salary, I was looking at around a 5x increase in housing costs alone. It never made any sort of financial sense to make the move (as much as I would've liked to).
Of course the most sensible approach would be to offer just above market rate in whatever the local market is. That can be awfully hard to determine though. It's much more a function of local supply and demand than anything that correlates to cost of living.
They didn't say that though, so the whole "you're wrong" is unwarranted.
They said local companies will have to compete with FANG salaries. To your point these would likely be cost of living adjusted, but would almost certainly be higher than the current average in most Midwestern cities.
You are again completely misreading what I said, which clearly states that there will be cost of living adjustments, but that the salaries are still likely to be higher than non-tech hub averages.
Not every online conversation has to be a fight with winners and losers.
So they were running a survey gauging whether it's possible to pay people less to work from home, but do we know the result of that survey? Maybe they find out that they cannot hire the same talent for less money in Indiana.
No - they were running a survey to figure out employee's interests in wfh permanently across US - but at the same time being very clear that the salary will be adjusted based on where they are.
1. I'm sure there are software engineers in Ohio working remotely making 500k and more, but no it's not the norm.
2. That's not the point: we're talking about a hypothetical shift where top software engineering talent is fleeing the bay area. If that talent moves to Ohio, and there is no cheaper alternative of similar quality, Google might not have a choice.
Again, not pretending like I know what's going to happen. My point is that big-tech doesn't have total power in setting prices. If at any point in the last 20 years they could have hired qualified engineers in Ohio for $100k they would have already done it.
I think you are thinking about this too much. I know you would like to earn these big packages in Ohio. But honestly, what is more likely to happen is that companies will optimize for themselves too and if they are able to find good talent at cheaper prices (since cost of living expenses for employees are down significantly), they will do that. So on average SV salaries will go down as employees spread over US.
Can't have it both ways. SV pays top $$ because of 1) top notch skills and 2) cost of living. Now you are taking #2 away - so things will ease a bit
I'd never want to live in Ohio. "You are thinking about it too much" is a weak argument.
Again, if companies could find good talent at cheaper prices in Ohio they would. Existing talent moving around does not increase the amount. It's not a given that market rate will decrease.
What's stopping someone from moving to SF for higher comp on hiring, then getting a P.O. box or friend's mailing address in SF and moving back to work from lower cost area after some time?
Is your employer really going to decrease your salary after the fact? Can you file taxes in your lower cost of living state after you lock in your high SF comp package and never notify your employer but still pay your taxes in the state you moved back to?
Note: I don't condone illegal behavior just thinking of edge cases that benefit us tech workers.
That's the most interesting part to me which will play the major role in how WFH situation will evolve. I 100% understand the logic in such situations, but:
1) If company like Twitter is saying: "From tomorrow our default is work from home, but you all get 20% salary cut". This will be essentially a salary cut, nothing more. If let's say Facebook says WFH=on-site developers from Twitter will be flowing to Facebook because of 20% salary cut
2) In order for everyone in FAANG to say simultaneously that we have to cut salaries 20% simply because it is WFH now - there should be a strong evidence that productivity in remote workers is 20% less and they will need to hire 20% more engineers to have the same amount of work done. If it is not correct then companies have incentive to drive this number down to 10% or 0%
3) FAANG and overall Valley residents must also consider the long term effect on their community. I doubt that Silicon Valley will survive going 100% virtual and concentration of innovation can be lost if people go 100% remote. So they might impose 10-20% cut on a premise that they want to create a community on-site. Not sure how C-suits evaluate such factor.
Overall I suppose if companies go WFH by default they will need to reevaluate their incentives structures to be competitive.
You are making some questionable assumptions about our economy. It doesn’t really matter what incentives theoretically exist if there isn’t money to, say, maintain your current staffing levels at their current pay.
Perhaps Twitter is leading the pack in an industry-wide pay cut? I hope not, but that seems to be what the rest of the workforce has experienced in recent months.
My full time job is producing video for YouTube. My revenue from ads is a straightforward calculation: I get 55% of whatever advertisers pay YouTube/Google to run ads on my channel.
Despite having posted record growth in every other positive metric, overall revenue (read: advertiser spending) has tanked in recent months.
Facebook. Google. Twitter. YouTube.
They are all internet advertising companies. And if my personal observations are any indication, I suspect they may be hurting for cash right about now.
Would it be tax fraud if you’re still in California? You record your address when you file with the state, I don’t think the state cares where you get your mail.
I guess the employer could have some contractual terms requiring your address to be at some location. I’ve never seen that though.
I think you just change your address if you move within the state. I don’t think companies track your address as long as you’re the same for taxation. That’s why people do insane 2 hour commutes.
This is true but salaries aren't based on cost of living exclusively they are based on demand as well. If more companies shift to remote work that will spread demand across the US driving up salaries in low cost of living areas and reducing them in high cost of living areas.
Most FAANG have a high cost of living band and a regular band. The high cost of living band pays 15-30% extra for living in the Bay Area/NYC. Everywhere else pays the same whether it's Boston, Detroit, or the middle of the desert.
most faang don't hire remote - but they do allow people to work remote in certain circumstances, they also tend to maintain smaller engineering offices all over the country so transferring isn't as difficult once your in.
Maybe it's the other way around: due to increased supply, total package of FAANG engineers will drop. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. We've been enjoying unprecedented packages for many years. It may be a good time to distribute some of the wealth to other parts of the country.
There's no wealth there. All Google employees get something like 25 billions a year. The US budget is measured in trillions and to cover up just this recession alone, Fed created 6 trillions, or 240 years worth of wages for those employees. Do I need to say that in ten years there will be another recession, where Fed will create 20 trillions?
The pool of qualified software engineers outside of high-cost urban areas is pretty shallow. I run a 100% remote company in the midst of staffing up. We're looking for database internals people. There are not a lot of qualified candidates in, say, Oklahoma.
If COVID-19 really helped people to work from the Ouachitas at reasonable salaries, it would be completely awesome. But we're a long way from that. I love remote work and would like to see more people do it. But the past history of epidemics (e.g., 1918, the 1665 London plague, etc.) indicates people will go back to previous behavior--favoring urban areas--once the crisis passes.
I have fantasies about a homestead in the shadow of Cavanal Hill. If I could raise chickens and goats, and maybe a family, all while working remote, I'd truly have the best our age has to offer.
There are a lot of us out here in the middle who want that.
I get your skepticism, but I'm going to hope against hope that telepresence technology will continue to improve and make that possible.
I really hope I'm wrong, because working remotely is great.
Pandemics historically have not had a big impact on the political economy unless they kill an enormous number of people. The Black Plague in the 1300s is an example.
That assumes they restrict remote work to America for work that was done previously in the states. If this picks up, and there are no legal restrictions on what country a remote employee must be in, then the low end might just go much lower than what it currently is in small cities.
> there are no legal restrictions on what country a remote employee must be in
Working remotely from another country is easy. Paying somebody in another country is not easy at all. Even with specialized providers it is a substantial hassle. Without it you pretty much better give up - the chances you get all the payments, taxes and paperwork right is minimal, and that country's tax/regulatory authorities would be more than happy to fine you and/or your workers if you don't. In the best case, in worse case they might just seize your money intended for payroll and keep it until you figure things out.
This is one of the reasons why, in my somewhat radical opinion, all taxes should be some form of sales tax. No income tax, etc. If you live in a country, you spend money in that country, and so you pay taxes in that country. No workarounds, no loopholes, no tax returns, no cognitive load, just extremely simple tax law.
(I know it's not quite that simple, but I think it's interesting to think about.)
I couldn't reply to null0pointer directly. Sales tax is considered regressive because it is a flat percentage X% of spend. Poor people spend close to 100% of their income, so it is basically an X% tax. Rich people might spend closer to 10% of their income so it is an X/10% tax on rich people.
That's why basic, necessary goods are not taxed, only luxury items. We have a GST in Australia and poor people effectively do not pay any tax on purchases.
Most sales tax proposals I've seen will exempt food and other "necessities" for exactly this reason. With how complex income taxes are, I'd love to get a serious discussion going about a sales ax replacing it.
It's not as regressive if you charge sales tax on housing.
In point of fact, the US mortgage interest deduction is highly regressive. It favors those who can afford a down payment on a house over those who can't, who by definition will be poorer.
If the sales tax applied to buying a house, it would be quite progressive. It could even only apply to the cost of the house less some amount (say, $100k) which would make it even more progressive.
Property tax already does this, right? China has a sales tax on housing but no property tax, which seems to exacerbate wealth inequality there as people can speculate on property without penalty for not putting it to use.
Compare the person earning $10,000 and the person earning $1,000,000. If they both consume $10,000 worth of goods and there's a 20% sales tax included in that, the poor person's effective tax rate is 20%, while the rich person's effective tax is 0.2%. Even if the rich person consumes 10x more, they're only paying 2% of their income.
Then again, if you stuff 98%+ of your income into a mattress are you really advantaged
over the person making $10,000 to justify paying more tax?
One you exchange the money - where an advantage can be gained - then it can be considered a sale and thus taxed. A sale does not necessarily need to be towards consumption.
I see what you're saying -- money isn't useful until it's spent. But I think the argument is that a wealthy person doesn't put that extra 98% of their money under a mattress, they invest it. Now they have passive income on top of their previous income, and their effective tax rate from sales tax is even lower. Until eventually they have so much well that they don't have to work at all, and neither do their descendants, and you have an aristocracy.
But, if such a system was in place, the money would be taxed during the purchase of the investment vehicle. A sale is a sale. Unless the money is literally stuck in a mattress, it is going to be taxed upon doing anything useful with it. If it is simply stuck in a mattress for all of eternity, one is really no further ahead. Money only has value when you can use it to facilitate a sale; and when there is a sale there would be a tax.
Poor people spend a larger fraction of their income on things that get taxed. Ergo a constant tax rate on consumption is regressive. This could be paired with UBI though.
While some hassle of paying someone in another country is real, this level of pain seems to be pretty extreme. I am sure it depends on the country (good luck hiring in North Korea :) ), but for most countries there are enough options, from the employer opening a subsidiary to hiring employee as a contractor and everything in between (e.g., a local organization handling paperwork for a small salary cut which is a lot less than US recruiters would charge). My 2c.
It should still be strictly easier than opening up a branch in another country, which large tech companies are already doing a lot. When the gate of remote working opens, you no longer need to fix a head count with a particular location, and that opens up tons of possibilities.
And just to make your point explicit, if everyone moves to local-remote, then the move to hiring cheap and top-notch Bulgarian or Romanian programmers is even easier.
If you hire in the Americas, you keep the same time zone. There's a whole world of English speaking programmers, core contributors to node, to ruby, ML engineers, data engineers south of the border. All the same time zone.
> This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction.
I think if it's widespread it would be a little of both with some extra effects to consider. Not only will FAANG organizations get a wider pool of applicants which will drive down salaries for FAANG orgs, AND other businesses will how have to deal with the fact that their technology workers are part of a much larger market than they were previously, which will drive up salaries for those workers remotes, but there could be some very interesting delayed effects. How many FAANG workers now would opt to move farther away and keep their position, which will depress (that is, realign with reality to some small degree) the real estate market in areas like Seattle and San Francisco? What does that do to salaries later (likely a much smaller effect, but maybe non-negligible)?
Telecommuting has been hailed as one aspect of saving the suburban and rural life for a long time. Maybe we'll actually see some of it now.
What happens if there's a net reduction in people living in San Francisco and surrounds over 10 years, say 10%? I mean, it sounds unlikely, but so didthe idea of so many people staying inside for months at a time, and everyone switching to telecommuting so fast. All these things are related, and with major changes in one, relatively rapid change in things that related to it can be expected. At this point I'm actually thinking it's possible we could shift to UBI of some sort, and just a few months ago I didn't see any way that could happen without a major economic disruption, but hey, we've already got that.
Personally I would not move away from west coast. Mediterranean weather is gift from god. Plus it's so close to many good ski resorts. Being able to enjoy outdoors throughout the year and being able to go out to ski every week is priceless.
There's a lot of area on the west coast a couple hours from the major metro areas that's much more affordable. I was born, raised, and have worked all my life in Sonoma county an hour north of SF, and even that is expensive. If I could move another hour away for significantly reduced cost of living while still having the security I enjoy now (where I know likely at worst I have to deal with a commute to SF for some other job if something happens to my current local job), that would be real tempting. I already live an hour away from SF, what's two hours, if all I'm doing is going there for special occasions? And that's still a very minor change compared to what this might allow.
Nah, I never get city life anyway, especially the culture of frequenting bars. But the bay area is wonderful. Yes, commute is horrible there, but being able to find many people who are passionate about CS, engineering, math, startups, and geeky stuff in general, that's hard to get anywhere else.
There’s a lot of areas that are cheap on the west coast but there isn’t much there. I guess Humboldt is an option if you want to grow as a side gig.
Rural California is also pretty red and not as friendly to outsiders. I have a friend who grew up on the rural coast. He basically drove around on trails and shot guns for fun.
If that’s your thing more power to you but most tech workers I’ve met aren’t into that.
That's fine. And I get it notwithstanding a lot of the issues with SF and much of the South Bay. But you may be increasingly expected to pay a premium for your preferences which employers won't compensate for.
It will be the opposite. People who are wfh from other cities will likely see their salaries adjusted based on their cost of living. SF overtime will get less heated as people move out, so it makes sense for the salary to reflect that too.
We will see how things play out, but WFH success is not guaranteed. Managing remote workers requires different skills which most managers today do not have.
For now, most big companies have enough cash and are primarily focusing on making sure workers are not going crazy rather than on turning out new software. Give it another 3-4 months though and those companies will have to pivot back to real development which may be harder than they expect if WFH is still practiced en masse. My 2c.
Planning-related. Onsite teams allow first line of management to muddle through many issues in an ad-hoc way: walk over to see if A is stuck, if so go and ask B to help A, etc. This is not good: most engineers hate constant interruptions and best engineers' most productive time can get decimated. But this type of management mostly keeps the ship afloat.
This does not work with remote teams. There, a manager needs to have a longer-term plan, parcel work in a larger chunks, clearly write the tasks and minimal thresholds ("this task is done when you can confirm X"). The manager then sees when someone is blocked, what tasks are getting behind, etc.
This setup is actually better for the worker bees, too, who get clearly identifiable tasks and are not tracked on how they spend their time as long as their task is completed on time.
Everyone is thinking about picking talent from across the country. We should be thinking from across the world. Get ready for high salaries to start going down once everything starts to get stable.
This is so absurd. We struggle to hire even remote work around the country. There just aren't enough qualified people for some of these more senior positions.
"Never lose your edge."
How about, enjoy your free time. Enjoy your friends and family. Work hard at your job, but maintain the division.
This hyper-productivity porn is a net negative. There is competition in this industry, but nowhere near enough to leave talented engineers fearing for anything. Not on a near time-horizon, at least.
At the end of the day there’s a pay band in HR and while COL may be 3x in SF than Oklahoma, but either it’s 600k in San Fran or 250k in Oklahoma, which is nearing physician’s pay in many smaller states. Pay will go up in smaller states and pay will come down in SF/SV areas. People in LCOL areas will make top end salaries in their respective geographic areas and will see the best quality of life improvement. $250k in Oklahoma is going to be much better quality of life than $600k in San Jose for some people who have a spouse and 2 kids. And then over time they can hire a lot more people at 200-250k rather than 600k.
And of course all of this assumes a traditional W2 employment agreement.
If the person in Oklahoma pays $1k per month for a 3,000 sq ft home with a 1Gbps fiber connection.... why work full-time at all, or exclusively for one employer?
I just don't see why from a company's perspective you would pay two equally qualified/titled people massively different salaries based on the city they choose to live (which is completely irrelevant to the company). If I were an employer and one person wanted 125k and the other 400k, that seems like a no-brainer to me when they are both remote workers and equally qualified.
If they offer to raise the person getting 125k to 400k if they move to an expensive area, then at least it's fair :shrug:
Companies do not pay based on CoL. The 400k guy is going to be looking at competing offers in that range. If Google decided they would only pay based on Kansas salaries, and Apple only hired local, why would you ever consider a Google offer when Apple pays 3x as much?
That's a great point, although from my experience working with teams on the other side of the world, the language barriers (and even time zones) are enough to make it so the work is not equivalent. Theoretically though it could be. It's more difficult in practice however and may end up costing the company more, so could be cheaper to pay someone more who is local to headquarters and the target market, than less on the other side of the world.
It seems likely local salaries in smaller cities will go up, since they already have in response to the first wave of remote friendly startups and companies. Now, most of them can't offer public company compensation options but can compete in other areas.
But what about hanging around the water cooler so I can colab on some random ideas I overheard!!! my whole go to market and product strategy depends on this!!!!
I'm having trouble finding it now, but there's a paper that studied white collar promotions as a factor of how physically close the promoted subordinate sat to their manager. It was pretty correlated.
In a remote-first culture, those meetings still happen, even though it needs some more effort to facilitate those situations. It's when the team is split between onsite and remote that remote contributors have a disadvantage and might even miss out on important things going on.
It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools.
To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
Maybe, but it would also be good if more (tech) companies offered a decent working environment.
That's coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs / assignments I've had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements.
I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It's a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don't have their employees' best interest in mind.
My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn't have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.
I'm an ardent supporter of remote work, and I wouldn't go back to non-remote work without a hefty pay raise, but I think I probably would have considered office jobs during my last search if the offices I'd worked in previously had actually been pleasant.
Open office plans, low cubicle walls, cubicle sharing, frequent noise and disrespect of focus, flimsy banged up office chairs and equipment, no budget for standing desks, the lack of real employee lounges and couches to both work and chill out at, strict clocking in and out, and insufficient meeting space are chasing away good employees, especially now that we're all forced to work remotely. More people won't be willing to go back if they can help it.
Notice I mentioned nothing about free snacks, foosball tables, beer on tap, etc. I'd trade all of that for some semblance of serenity in the office.
Free snacks & beer are an anti-perk if you want to maintain a healthy BMI, and a healthy body. Alcohol is a drug with side effects (even if you don't have a hangover), but most people don't think of it that way.
This right here is my beef in a nutshell. My attention should be under my control. For example, I can't believe that leaving audible cell phone notifications on is becoming normalized.
Yeah, that's the worst thing for me. Whenever I've brought this issue up to employers, I usually get a blank stare. To me, it's just self evident that I can get more done with fewer distractions, but a lot of people seem unwilling to imagine a workplace without chaos.
Granted, remote work isn't free from distraction. Far from it, in fact. At least I can control the noise level and close Slack and email, if need be.
Nothing makes me rage more than people who leave audible cell phone notifications and ring tones on in places that are supposed to be quiet (offices, library). It's one of the most selfish and disrespectful things I can think of. Especially if you are getting 20 messages in a row...the phone is right there you don't need the sound!
> My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn't have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.
Don't forget it removes the work/home barrier. Now you are at work 24/7 and on call at all hours. Work and productivity has consumed most of modern life. The last bastion of freedom from work/productivity was the home. Now people are celebrating the loss of that precious personal space. Strange.
with an outlook like this why would you go anywhere? an office you have at least a chance of professionalism which is far different than what you can encounter in the open
Offices are great places to spread infection. I'm not sure how to quantify how much it matters to me that I become diseased in a respectful manner, but it isn't very much.
Here is an well-documented analysis of a specific outbreak in an office:
"We described the epidemiologic characteristics of a COVID-19 outbreak centered in a call center in South Korea. We identified 97 confirmed COVID-19 case-patients in building X, indicating an attack rate of 8.5%. However, if we restrict our results the 11th floor, the attack rate was as high as 43.5%."
I'm not sure that I understand this sentiment. Is the worry about COVID specifically (and hence would be abated by a vaccine or herd immunity), or is it about increased awareness of all infectious diseases? My lack of understanding stems from a (perhaps naive) assumption that social distancing will eventually go away along with the threat. I'd be glad to hear others' opinions on the matter.
I was already sick of getting sick 3-5 times a year just being in an open office, the fact that I'm more aware now that I can get something that will do more than knock me out of being able to code for a week is a huge deterrent to me ever wanting to work in a hamster cage surrounded by hundreds of other people with hundreds interactions with whoever.
I mean, I'm not a germophobe or something but I already thought it was gross how often I got sick and I'm 100% certain it was from my office environment, now I have a real reason that "suck it up stupid" doesn't just brush away. Every winter someones kid gets sick then it just blasts through the open office. Then it happens 3 weeks later, then again, then again..I'm pretty sure I got sick 3 times earlier this year, maybe 4.
Do they in yours? Every office I've ever worked in has offered unlimited sick days, and in every one there was a segment of people who just insisted on coming in sick anyway. When coronavirus was ramping up, the executives at my current place sent out series of increasingly severe messages that you must not come into work sick.
And if you don't have unlimited sick days, it's much worse because people refuse to stay home so as not to use up their allotted time off. My wife used to work at a place that lumped PTO and sick days together, and it definitely created a culture of coming into work no matter how sick you are (especially if you already have plans to use your PTO).
What difference does it make if you did the "right" thing by using up all of your sick days by September and then have to go into work with a cold in November?
You don't know if you will or won't use sick days in the future, so IMO, you should use them as soon as you get sick, instead of "banking" them and hoping you need them later. But either way, I was arguing more against companies that don't offer unlimited sick days than employees who don't take them. I think having a limited number (or worse, lumping them in with PTO) actively encourages people to come into work sick.
Sick days aren't a real solution because people only take the days that they are the most sick off. But will happily work while contagious and 'just starting' to feel sick.
That's a culture and policy thing. A business could easily say "if you're feeling a bit under the weather and not sure, you are instructed for the good of the people around you to work from home those days just in case". In fact, I would be intensely surprised if businesses did not, in the present situation. It'll take a long time for people to stop being "evacuate the room" level jumpy about even minor symptoms.
>A business could easily say "if you're feeling a bit under the weather and not sure, you are instructed for the good of the people around you to work from home those days just in case".
In my personal experience companies have always said something like that, in particular in email or other forms of recordable communications, but then don't really back it up. Employees come in obviously sick their boss says "are you sure you should be here today?" but subtly indicates their approval for being in the office.
Companies need to move to actively disciplining employees who come in sick instead of either working from home or taking paid sick days.
I'm going to make a guess that the attitude is going to change when "someone came in with a temperature" means everyone gets sent to quarantine and the office gets deep cleaned by a team in hazmat suits.
In my 20+ year career I only recall working at one place that provided paid sick leave, and that company only provided two weeks of annual vacation. Even if everyone worked from home the full 2-3 weeks they were feeling the least bit off from a cold, the office would be a ghost town for at least 2-3 months out of the year. Which maybe it should be, but that would clearly defy the common expectations of the world pre-COVID.
Few jobs ago I had "desk neighbour" that no matter how sick he was (seasonal flu and so on), he was coming to work. One time I've asked him why he wouldn't take sick leave (which is paid leave, 80% but still) and he said, that he's not staying home so he wouldn't infect his kids...
Of course every time he was sick, I was getting sick. Which is natural consequence of sitting 1.5m from someone sneezing/coughing for a week.
I could take off about three months of vacation right now, but I don’t because I’m so busy that I know that taking time off and then playing catch up is worse than not taking time off at all.
It will go away. I'm in Europe where things are closer to normal already. I meet friends, people go shopping (with hygiene measures and masks), schools and gyms are opening.
Also keep in mind that there was always a threat of infectious diseases. And it will persist until we find a universal cure for all viruses. Being somewhat of a germophobe myself, I was always aware of it.
Hopefully, people will stay at home when they are sick, though.
Europe tech has always been different than US tech scene.
The societies are very different. Here, the armed protesters demand haircuts and tattoos. In Europe, the French are flooding Spanish border towns in search of cheaper booze and smokes.
Yes, hyperbole, but a lot of Americans have legit apprehension about cramming into elevators to ride up office towers to work. It's seen as glamourous in the UK to work in a Canary Wharf office tower with a view. In the US, notsomuch.
Edit: I know people who still won't go into tall buildings post 9/11. Something that Europeans don't have in their psyche.
My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.
Where I work we have been moving at 150% pace over the last month. I suspect its related to working from home not actually slowing anyone down and everyone not wanting to look like they are slacking while not in the office. Personally I have been starting work 40 minutes sooner than I normally do since it just takes me 40 less minutes to get to my desk.
With COVID-19 it depends on your family situation though. People without kids are probably working more, but people with kids (and who don't have a live-in nanny) are really struggling to juggle their work with child care. I imagine many people in that situation are less productive.
It doesn't depend only on your family situation. I am a PhD student working for the last 6 weeks from home without kids. And and also without a good income. I never expected my makeshift desk with the cheapest IKEA chair to become my work environment for 8+ hours per day, and I seriously worry about long-term injury resulting from this.
This isn't meant to diminish the difficulties of people who need to look after their children. But I work in a laboratory where the senior people blithely complain about how hard it is to manage shared child-raring duties in a well-equipped home office, while junior employees are more or less expected to magically have a productive home office in a shared flats, often in less-than-ideal environment (e.g. with noisy room-mates or building sites next door), with RSI staring us down.
> Right, good point there. People without kids definitely have way more time and energy to devote to work than those with.
Definitely? I have no kids and live with and fully support my father who had a brain tumor the size of a walnut in his head a couple years ago. Just because someone doesn't have kids doesn't mean they don't have responsibilities (goodness so many negatives in one sentence!).
I feel your pain, currently taking care of both parents I'm fortunate to still have around in mid 70's, one had a bad hemorrhagic stroke and is still recovering and can't walk, other has cancer and is completing chemo with a positive outlook after radiation. We have aides but with Covid-19, I am beyond paranoid they will infect my parents and send them to an early grave so I run this place like a high security compound and check temp and have a scrub in protocol I'm enforcing. I'm in my late 20's, no kids, no siblings. I feel blessed to have my parents around who had their mobility and independence snatched away from illness in the span of a year and I will never put them in a nursing home to die.
Maybe it's different for me because my organization is one of the last holdouts where everyone at least has there own assigned cubicle and many have full offices, but every single person in my team has complained about getting far less done than normal. Most of us had a tremendous amount of time and money invested in making our workspace productive, and it's very hard to replicate that at home.
I think it is safe to say that a proper office is always best. It can be at home of course, but it need to be proper. (Desk, chair, shelf, door, flower).
If my office was 10 min walk away I would not want to work at home, but it is 1h by car ...
The evidence is not in favor of long term WFH though.
The evidence shows that WFH work creep is a thing - you get people who dont know how to turn off, and bosses who think they can get more out of you since you are a few feet away from your laptop.
There is also a decrease in creativity and networking - evidence again shows that a good team has someone who is very tuned to the emotional and mental states of the people around them doing a lot of bridging.
Finally - the people who work at office get more money over time, unless the firm takes active measures to combat these biases.
As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR's, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools.
It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There's something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.
Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.
Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we're just sort of feeling our way though it...
It sounds like the product people are sitting in long meetings. Have you considered the idea that people were already disengaged in those meetings, they were just putting up a better front because they could tell everyone was watching them closely in person?
And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?
And now they don't have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.
The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.
Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.
He is correct - the evidence overlaps with his experience.
Creativity is better face to face.
WFH works perfectly for routine non random event related work.
When you need to communicate fast, need to come up with insights - essentially when you need that high bandwidth node to node interaction of working together - then face to face is significantly superior.
We are designed to work with other humans - chunks of grey matter exist only to interpret non verbal cues. Heck we actually suck at symbol manipulation and math, those are learned skills we force our species to pick up.
It should not be surprising that when working face to face, we end up using those default programs installed in us to get more work done.
Just being able to clarify something is faster if done in person because you have access to body language, eye direction, and tone.
Video goes only so far, and is still not as immediate and in person as physical presence.
There's some kind of work that's best done by individuals (writing a novel). There's some kind of work that's best done by teams (planning an invasion). The work that's best done by teams is currently much better performed in meatspace than over any kind of digital communications channel.
As you move up the chain in global companies such as Twitter, it becomes more likely that you'll have a superior or direct report based in a different location than you, and this has been true for years. The "people person" executive theory only holds for companies that do not already have a substantial number of teams that are not all located in the same place.
I'm not sure how your conclusion follows - it's undoubtedly true that more and more folks are involved in teams that at least partly remote. However, the skills needed to manage these effectively are mostly the same as co-located teams. To whatever degree "people person" was needed, it seems mostly the same to me.
If a coworker or employee comes in to work distraught for some reason, it's far easier to reach out in person and find out that their dog got ran over/relationship broke up/parent is in the hospital. It's not impossible remote, but it's harder, on all levels. A manager that has strong in-person skills but is weaker on digital communication skills may result in poorer outcomes all around.
(I'm pro WFH but pretending it's the same just seems foolish to me.)
I guess I don't buy the idea that there is such a strong dichotomy between in-person communication skills and digital communication skills.
Sure, there are adjustments to new needs and technologies. But fundamentally, that's the easy part, I think. Communication skills are needed, and they mostly transition well. I find it plausible there are some people who don't make the transition well (in either direction) but that hardly points to a paradigm change.
Do you really think there is a big pool of people who would be effective at these roles if they just didn't need to communicate in person? Doesn't match my experience at all. Certainly agree that people are stronger or weaker on various types of communication, but in my experience that is definitely a 2nd order effect, compared to whether or not they are skilled communicators at all.
I totally agree that all of this stuff is harder remote, but if anything that leans harder on communication skills.
We are an adaptive species ... just because some folks are strong in-person (due to years of experience at it), doesn't mean they won't adapt to have better digital communication skills when it becomes a more prevalent practice. I think people will be fine ... even if there's an adjustment period :)
you have to fly a lot though, live in hotels for weeks here and there. and compensation is aligned to performance in a much deeper way than at IC level
We are a small SAAS startup that is funded by a slightly larger architectural services firm. My partner was staunchly against WFH until he saw productivity rise and employee satisfaction go through the roof when the business was forced into WFH. While he will continue to come to the office (because he is an old dog), everyone else is WFH forever. He owns the building so i'm sure he'll attempt to rent out the vacated office space. When he realizes nobody is going to want his office space due to severe oversupply, I wouldn't be surprised if he sells the building or converts the land into something more profitable. You might ask, what changed? He assumed that people who work from home won't be effective. He lacked trust. The employees proved to be trustworthy.
Frankly, I dread the situation where working from home is the norm and suddenly a core part of my job is building remote working relationships that I find easy to build in person.
People are underestimating the issues which need to be overcome with WFH
Infrastructure:
Do homes have chargers, desks, screens? If not people will soon get carpal tunnel or lose productivity.
Internet/VPN security costs are real.
Productivity creep :
Some of the main issues with WFH have been work hour creep. Managers and other employees feel its easier to make requests for more time given that you are now a few feet from your laptop. Lack of discipline also means that people now work longer.
Rewards and promotions
I can't find it right now, but I recall WFH resulting in lower pay relative to people with the same qualifications who went to office.
Mental costs:
One of the main issues with WFH has been loneliness. Fixing this requires immense effort to recreate physical proximity.
Creativity is also lost when you cant engage in banter and catching up with people.
I work from home as a software engineer at a major tech company.
Infrastructure: my company provides money to setup your workspace. Buying a desk is the most expensive part here but really you can get a solid setup for < $500.
Internet costs: I was already paying ~$120/mo and I get some of that reimbursed. This seems like a standard living cost though, not something unique to working remotely.
Productivity creep: I define my schedule based on my deliverables. At least with my team, no one expects me to be available 24/7. I work a full day but if I need to run an errand or take care of something during work hours it is no big deal. As long as I am getting my work done, everyone is happy.
Rewards/promotions: who knows - anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much here.
Mental costs: if you live alone, this could definitely be very lonely. I am lucky enough to have a wife, kid, and dog so loneliness isn't an issue. But this really depends on a case-by-case basis.
Personally I love working from home. It is more comfortable, I am paid incredibly well despite be scaled for a low COL area, and the work is super interesting. The most important part of this is now we can move wherever we need to for my wife's career. This flexibility is hard to put a price on.
Anecdotally I'm not really sure how much of people persons higher ups are, at least in engineering. Pretty much all of the SVPs / CTOs at the medium to large (but not huge) companies I've worked were not really people people. They've been somewhat socially awkward and naturally introverted. They can stand in front of a crowd and speak of course, and present in relatively high pressure situations, but I don't think they actually enjoy dealing with people all that much.
> I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
This might also be a trust thing. Studies have found that in-person social interaction leads to increased levels of trust among the group, but remote social interaction doesn't have this affect. The higher you go up the management chain, the more trust is required to perform your job effectively. ICs usually work under well-defined, measurable conditions: you can determine from their work product whether an engineer, salesperson, or designer is being productive. Executives do not work under these conditions, and arguably the job of an executive is to define those metrics. To get everyone rowing in the same direction requires an immense amount of trust and collaboration amongst the high-level leadership of the company, and it seems like it'd be challenging to achieve that virtually.
A potential compromise I am hoping for would be an increased willingness of companies to open satellite or smaller offices in secondary or tertiary real estate markets.
Maybe even for the whole world. There surely is talent some places you dont expect, that cannot move to bay area but would love (and could do) a top it job and cannot move out. In ok countries, with few salary differences from USA, even.
I live in Wyoming. A few years ago, I was debating about trying to build up some decent 'tech spaces/small campuses' in some of the more remote/less populated and desirable area's.
Some of my thoughts were:
- Make sure there is good high speed internet
- Good conferencing
- Good office / working conditions
- Great outdoor activities nearby
For a flat rate per month, a person could have a furnished apartment, a working space nearby, and access to the great outdoors. If I had multiple locations, you could switch locations after a week or two.
Why wouldn't someone in the Bay area want to go live in Sheridan, wyo for a few weeks, then possibly Laramie, Wyo. Maybe some Zion in Utah for a bit. Royal Gorge in Colorado.
Every few weeks, you just pack up your laptop, clothes, bikes, and go to the next spot.
I would love for more companies to embrace this just to open up the candidate pool for positions.
There are so many positions at Microsoft, for example, that I would have loved to apply for, but they require you to be in Redmond, and I'm just not in a position to relocate.
Just so you're aware, it is possible in Microsoft to some extent, just not very publicly visible (the careers site doesn't help you find these jobs).
I started working in one team and switched to another team internally because they are pro-remote and I plan on moving back to Australia. Broadly across Microsoft there are also about ~30 other engineers already working from Australia for Redmond-based teams.
> switched to another team internally because they are pro-remote and I plan on moving back to Australia
I don't know about Microsoft in particular, but from what I've seen it's much easier to find a remote position while you're already at a company working onsite than it is before you get hired.
Completely agree - I've tried and failed many times to move from Orlando to Bay area. FAANG (finance work) wasnt willing to pay to relocate so they always went with local candidates over me. There are little to no interesting companies in my area. I want to work and help build the future. I was willing to take a paycut from MCOL to HCOL area for jobs and willing to go down in seniority for a chance to work at a big company in the Bay area. It would be nice if they finally start opening the applicant pool to those in other cities.
If you are willing to take a pay and level cut, why not just pay your relocation yourself? It's not expensive long term if you think you will do well and be rewarded at the new company.
It's more about being effective managers. There's tons of writing and proper follow up and prep work necessary to make remote work happen and most people aren't just that diligent to do it regularly.
Most managers especially at the top are also not the most diligent people, they have employees to do the stuff that they dislike doing so when they are faced with having to do more prep work and move at what they consider a slower speed (they are wrong, all that prep work and due diligence pays off, Bezos and Amazon are a great example of that) they recoil.
There's lots of communication which is hard to do remote. The water cooler is o e thing. But even in a meeting when presenting something the feedback is limited. When sitting in a room it's simpler to see whether people are following and one should go faster or iterate on a point. Also one can simpler intercept with a question or comment. The text based back channel is limited for that.
(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn't deep down coding, but requires communication)
Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.
Yes, in my experience the key to a highly functional remote environment is async collaboration.
By this I mean written roundtables/stand-ups (with a focus on putting the detail in the tickets and just bringing up blockers), written RFCs and review periods for larger initiatives, comprehensive action logs (admin logs, etc), detailed documentation, detailed commit messages, etc etc.
Deadlines are fine, but people need to be able to be aware of the timeline up front and have autonomy to work within their own schedule to meet it.
This becomes especially important when multiple time zones come into play.
Essentially it's a matter of replacing as many meetings as possible with recored (written and/or multimedia) versions that convey the same content, focusing on maximizing transparency and collaboration.
The hostility that many programmers have towards managers is short-sighted.
If you’ve ever worked somewhere where the manager has way too many direct reports, you know it’s usually a shitshow.
Can you name some companies of more than a few people that don’t have managers? If you think they’re all a waste and a drag, what’s your explanation for why manager-less competitors don’t rise up and eat their lunch? Better yet, why don’t you start your own company staffed with only ICs and take over the world?
I hate to tell you but one of the reasons why google ate the world was their hands-off management and peer-to-peer project management and feedback schemes, which are efficient and effective. I know experiences at large organizations can vary, but for years at that company I had managers who existed, yes, but never showed their faces and were there chiefly to make sure that everybody had desks and chairs and computers. This style scales extremely well. I also had managers who were just other ICs to whom I reported, because there had to be a path from Larry to everyone in the org chart, but who were otherwise peers. Not every large organization is choked with weekly/daily meetings and org charts full of useless functionaries.
I hate to tell you, but the only reason Google “ate the world” during the times you describe (which I’m skeptical of, but that’s a separate discussion) was that they figured out they could sell ads against their search results. Almost everything else seemed exactly like what you’re describing: a bunch of ICs with no managers building cool stuff that didn’t affect the bottom line, had bad usability, didn’t have a clear use case, overlapped the work of other teams, or all of the above.
The Google of today is different: multiple billion dollar business units, all well-staffed with managers.
Meaningful communication happens between your ICs. The weekly hour-long team meeting where the manager polls the room and nobody has anything to say is just a waste of everyone's time. Reducing what you have to say to an email has the effect of distilling and refining it, and in many cases leads to the realization that it was wrong to begin with, or doesn't warrant saying.
Judging by the sheer level of resentment the poster holds for management, as a whole, it sounds more like it could easily be a case of their manager needing to replace a report.
I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0 though.
How exactly does it help to pass communications through a person (the manager) that, for the most part, does not understand the technical details of which they are speaking? We literally pay for slack for communication. No one needs an arbitrary human to act as a gatekeeping communication conduit.
I guess that's why you have multiple slack channels instead of one. You're trying to justify paying someone over 100 grand a year to be a worse form of communication than the software you're already paying for to communicate.
I don't think I'm trying to justify any San Francisco salaries, lol. The point I'm trying to make is that a single person can only have so much organizational knowledge overhead. Facilitating communication between the right people without spamming the wrong people is tough.
The github corporate move from a flat structure to a hierarchical is probably a good case study to read if you're interested: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800
Pretty much anything related to the work environment. This can include maintaining a safe work environment, accommodations for specific employee needs, handling employee disputes.
That's a fraction of what HR does. Compensation, benefits, hiring, wellness, training, performance reviews, etc, etc. I doubt that even 10% of what HR does is tightly related to a physical space.
If you plan on working from home full time then invest in a decent camera/microphone. I already had focusrite audio interface for guitar, an XLR mic gives amazing sound, decent interface and will probably get a usb camera (is there an action cam like GoPro that can double as a webcam ?)
I have Focusrite Solo [1] audio interface - I got it for guitar capture initially - then I plugged in my headphones in it and the DAC/AMP in it is amazing - this motivated me to go for studio headphones (beyerdynamic dt 990 pro) and now because of this crisis I went for AT 2020 condenser mic
This setup costs ~400$ so if you are just in to calls I'm not sure if it's worth it - but for me it was just getting a mic and now I sound like a radio host on calls :D
I don't own a GoPro so if there is a clone that has this functionality out-of-the-box it would be ideal.
Problem is the camera has to be sitting in the middle of your screen or it will be looking like you are looking away. Even the built in camera on the bottom left of my dell xps looks stupid. And then video conferencing tools compress the video to shit anyway. Also most of us don't have fancy looking home offices. I'm currently working from a desk in my bedroom so a video call would have my bed and an unpainted drywall covered in plaster lines/patches.
The scarlet focusrites entry level are pretty cheap you can get the solo for £100 less than a nice mechanical keyboard and a decent mouse.
I went for the next level up the Clarret 2pre but I do use that for my dnd streams and want to process my voice and to mix in audio.
Main problem with entry level class compliant usb is your at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft making your interface obsolete and you cant change your microphone to suit.
It is not just the soundcard; but the entire solution.
When I looked it, it was for the microphone (400 EUR) + focusrite 2i2 (150, yeah, I looked at dual) + cloudlifter (150) + boom arm (75) + cables (let's say 25) => 800 EUR. I tried not to think about GoXLR...
Compared to that, NT-USB + boom arm (PSA1) was only 200. Plus the space saved on the desk.
I don't really understand, what you mean with being at mercy of Apple and Microsoft. The only problem with USB mics that I'm aware of might be timing/lag, if you need it to be precise. That could be problem for singers singing to instruments, but not for spoken word.
MS depreciated something in a fall update that stopped my £50 alesis core 1 working and both apple and mac no longer support my TASCAM which is why I needed a new sound card
If your in the uk the SZ-MB1 was only 17.99 compared to 150 for a cloud lifter and for mics I use some 10 year old entry level sure dynamics which where £25.
It seems silly, but I think one of the biggest reasons to have an all-MacBook shop is the microphones built into the laptops. Their far-field noise cancelling just beats the pants off of any alternative I’ve tried.
You can also just issue $200 AirPods to each user that doesn't already have them (which will pair to anything that speaks Bluetooth), which may be a simpler/cheaper solution to this problem.
A $20 USB gaming headset with a mouth mic arm might work, too.
I love this online free self-hostable open source collaborative whiteboard: https://wbo.ophir.dev/ Unlike many others, this one is nice and lean and hence works smoothly even on old hardware.
If you have an nVidia GPU, look into RTX voice- you can install it on any CUDA-enabled GPU with a simple tweak, and it's good enough to kill dryer noise and keep your screaming children from being heard.
Video conferencing is pretty bad IME. I think that all too many companies view Slack as an acceptable option for communication most of the time, and I think that's an extremely inhibiting factor for most remote work. I think some innovation around the tools we use for remote work would be great, fwiw.
For example Teams and Outlook have terrible search. Documents basically go into a black hole to never be seen again. We need the same search quality we have for web searches.
that's why you shouldn't use _either_ of those as repositories of information ... they're great for the ephemeral discussions, but once consensus is reached, you should have other ways of tracking that, whether it's: github/devops/jira issues and tickets, or some kanban board somewhere, or design documents, or a wiki. The discussion itself shouldn't be the artifact that records the decision.
What I can think of is a smartphone app that's always listening and transcribing, best-effort, all it listens. This can capture in person speech and make it searchable.
Also, are any of the current videoconferencing options offering machine transcribing out of the box? I know users could always hand-feed recorded video to a separate tool, but ease-of-use matters.
Emulating face-to-face-ness remotely is precisely the hard problem. As pg once said, the real world is incredibly high-bandwidth.
There are tools like automatic captions + manual tagging that can make search much better. The tools are out there, just not well adopted at this point.
Training people, both workers and management, how to work in such environments. Plus for many companies expanding the bandwidth and security for their entry points for the corporate network. This can include locking down connected equipment to block high data volume sites and activities; you cannot believe the number of people who try to stream across their vpn connection.
Not everyone wants to be remote, where I work they asked for volunteers for the first wave and had to turn people down for some groups. For these the separation of work and home is line they don't like to cross.
It's hard to force WFH people to create non-job related relationships. Like if your jobs don't overlap, you'll probably never talk in a WFH setting. In an office setting, forming relationships is both personal and functional. Maybe some of this communication isn't efficient but it probably has value.
There are ways to do it with out "HR Drone" spying
and further if you are saying things that would get you in hot water with HR then it is unlikely that a verbal conversation is better, in fact in many of these instances having a record of the conversation can be helpful....
Yeah, it is harder to be friends with your coworkers when you are remote. You do end up developing relationships though. My mom, for 30 years, spent so many years on the phone with other people, when they finally met up, it always ended up in friendship.
I work from home exclusively. I am in the same boat.
Earlier in my career, it was easy to make friends at work. I miss that. Lets go golf! Lets go drink! Lets go do this... etc.
I do think that ended up creating 'cliques' inside the groups though. Its probably better in the long run to try to establish a more professional relationship with coworkers. Just my opinion - and i'm likely wrong.
I've always wondered if that was a side effect of them being slow/bad at typing. Higher ups usually don't end up having to type a lot themselves, and many are bad at it.
That’s mainly because they have better things to do. Where do you think more money is to be made? Worry about your typing or be very good at meeting people?
It is generally an oversight to assume that people have ideal work conditions at home and could be more productive. Going to a reliable and steady office is absolutely salutary for many people. There are trade-offs, yes, but no one-size-fits-all. Physical work location and conditions is one potential issue, and emotional/relational conditions are another. Would we want to overlook these issues while still searching for the best talent for our companies?
It would be good if AWS and GCE were leveraged by workers at home as generic data centers to store their private data
Working on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collection
Sell or donate access to specific data in your account on your terms.
The web is dead. With the right tools anyone can leverage the cloud to regain a ton of privacy and control of their data. Maybe we can dismantle through free market effort, the technocracy middleman now that building such software is trivial
Yeah, I get what you mean. Native applications store your data locally, which is privacy-friendly, but sharing is hard. SaaS brought easy sharing of data, but it also brought data mining. So the goal is to have data in the cloud, but isolated, rather than in a big shared database in some SaaS provider.
If you trust the privacy of cloud providers, you can spin up a server and use https://sandstorm.io/, which is designed around that: private infra, with granular sharing of data.
If you don't, you need local compute and encryption. Keybase would be a decent example - while you can't use your own cloud account, they only see encrypted data.
That said, there's a reason a lot of people deleted their Keybase accounts when they got acquired by Zoom. Data mining is very enticing, so outside of projects ran by idealist volunteers - which will always have a hard time competing with funded companies -, how do you keep developers from adding mining abilities even to the native/self-hosted applications?
I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no responsibilities outside of work, in this situation WFH loses a lot of its lustre.
If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.
I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or small house, and settle in. Currently, where I live, despite the fact that I make almost 30k/year more than the medium average income I still can only just afford a one bedroom apartment spending the suggested 30% of my income. Imagine being able to buy a house!!!! What a world that would be!!!
What's the guarantee that say your San Francisco/NYC employer will keep paying you city rates when you are living in a small town in mid-west. At some point they will catch up and start saving money this way. Everyone at a tech company is not a crucial employee. Don't get me wrong, I am all in for getting paid SF rates while living in a cheap Texas suburb.
Bingo. As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the availability of talent in a particular market.
I work for a very pro remote work company, but that’s still how we did things. You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move. People usually weren’t jazzed about it but understood.
Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it right. Is the employee contributing less to the company based on their location in a cheaper market? I think not. So why should we as workers allow a company to extract more profit from our labor based solely on our physical location?
Markets never pay you what you contribute, they pay you some number between "what you contribute" and "what you can earn working elsewhere". Your contribution sets a ceiling on your compensation; your opportunity cost sets a floor. What you actually make is whatever you can negotiate in between.
When you work in an area with fewer jobs in your field, it's far less likely that you'll have a competing offer that'll jeopardize the company's ability to keep you. That means your opportunity cost is much less, which means that the floor on what they can pay you is less.
(A similar dynamic on the investor side is why startups end up starting in the Bay Area to begin with. In most other regions of the company, there are very few investors willing to invest in high-risk tech startups. That means that a prospective startup needs to take the only financing option they can get, which means that the investor ends up owning the majority of the company. The Bay Area has a liquid and competitive market for funding, which means that there's a real chance of a VC firm losing the deal, which is what allows startups to raise capital on fair terms.)
It does feel quite bizzaro doesn’t it? The manager here says
Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move.
my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers.
I’d love to sit down to coffee with a hiring budget manager one day and get into the weeds on CoL against present value and just do all of the math until the cafe closes or one of us has to take the first coffee induced “bio break”.
Or at least, this is how it would go if my company tried to sell me on this. Hell, I might even be amenable to the pay cut if the company was otherwise doing right by our relationship as employer and employee and I felt sufficiently invested in continuing that relationship, but we’re going to get real mechanical and be VERY thorough about it.
I mean CoL is a thing. There are some talent asymmetries in DevOps and InfoSec, that could command high salaries/remote work. Remote work in security vs. salaries support this.
But for your run of the mil developer -> senior developer, a large chunk of that $150k Bay Area pay for non-FAANG is COLA, no way around it.
> my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers.
It doesn't have anything to do with your skills. It's just that they believe they can replace you in Indiana with a lower salary.
I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense, just that they're probably thinking about it in that way.
Or that there is less demand for those skills in Indiana so the market for those skills in Indiana pays less than the market for those skills in a separate location. This raises the question of if "remote" is its own "virtual location" in terms of market. Unfortunately, there is not yet enough remote work for there to be an established "remote" market distinction.
For people where there is only a handful of people with those skills in the world, they command ny/sf pay wherever they live.
This is an interesting take. I am a remote worker (technically in Chicago), but my employer is headquartered elsewhere. We have offices in Chicago. But I live in Indiana.
What's my 'demand market', as it were? Is it Cali where my parent company lives? Is it Chicago where the subsidiary division I support operates? Or is it Indy?
How does one negotiate salary taking in all that when negotiating a permanent full remote transition?
(This is just for the sake of the hypothetical, I’m very satisfied with my current actual arrangement, but we’ve crossed into a new working world and consider me a career “prepper” or something)
i think there are reasonable arguments for each permutation of answers!
Ultimately, every negotiation comes down to BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement.) You have to demand from the company you think can/will pay the most the amount of compensation you are confident (but perhaps not sure) that you can get from the second-expected-highest company. This is similar to a Vickery auction -- the winner is the person who is willing to pay the most but they pay the price the second-highest bidder put forward.
In tech labor, the distribution of compensation for the same work is much wider than almost any market participant realizes.
To your last point, what would be the closest comparison? Is there even one? I’m sympathetic to the reality that there are lots of variables at play here between work sectors, but do you think a reasonable analogue exists in another industry, and could any actionable models be taken from, iterated upon and applied to tech labor with the effects of equalizing the demand curve and negotiating change through all of this?*
Appreciate the back and forth on this, it’s an interesting set of conditions we’re wading through as a society and I enjoy the thought experiment.
———
* there may be a better way to phrase this question, unable to figure how to put it, at the moment-if you’ll accept the pleasantry as far as the hypothetical will warrant it.
yes, your skills did loose monetary value. That's because it costs X less to hire in that location. The reason people are will to accept X less is because there's a lower COL.
But, the crucial thing to remember is that people's calculation of ROI of compensation to COL is way off. And so they're being under compensated in places like the bay area relative to other areas. Bay area is 50% more than the rest of the country but the COL is x4 to x8 (heck even day care is x4 more in SF than houston).
> yes, your skills did loose monetary value. That's because it costs X less to hire in that location.
I disagree. Your skills didn’t drop. Your value didn’t drop. They weren’t going to hire anyone in <location> anyways, they’ll hire <local> if you quit. So you’re negotiating between them wasting time & money hiring for someone of equal value locally
That chart is completely ridiculous. I moved from one of the cities at the top of that list to SF. My pay went up by 3x, my living expenses went up by 4x and my overall savings increased by 3x.
the compensation numbers I put up are averages based on Stackoverflow salary postings.
You're pay going up by x3 could have many reasons. If you're in the early part of your career, that's very much possible but it's not typical of an average SE in SF vs an average SE in the rest of the nation.
> my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers.
It’s a bad idea for a company to pay you significantly more than you could earn at a different job. Because then you’ll never quit even if you’re miserable. You’ll stick around and be a toxic presence.
This framing is merely convenient. I work in a company that has workers in several countries, and an equally valid framing is "Those in poorer countries are as productive as the Bay Area folks, it is unfair they get paid less. Therefore we will pay everyone equally".
The outcome is that Bay Area folks will get paid less than their current pay, and those in India get paid more than their current pay. Because there's no way my company can afford to pay all their developers Bay Area rates.
That would be using exactly the same rationale as your comment: Equal pay for equal productivity.
I agree that workers in other countries deserve to get paid the same high wages I get paid for doing the same labor I do. If a company can afford to pay me those wages just because of the passport I carry then they can afford to pay, for instance, my Indian colleagues the same fair wage.
Let's not pretend that all companies are cash-strapped startups. The FAANGs of the world and the Fortune $x companies and the multinationals can absolutely afford to pay their global workforce uniform wages, but they choose not to because it's not maximally profitable to do so.
> Let's not pretend that all companies are cash-strapped startups. The FAANGs of the world and the Fortune $x companies and the multinationals can absolutely afford to pay their global workforce uniform wages,
I'll contest that. FAANGs are extreme outliers. I can assure you my company, while it certainly can pay everyone an extra, say, 10%, definitely cannot pay all its SW engineers Bay Area salaries. And then Non-SW engineering companies - even the top ones - rarely have that much money. Their operating expenses and capital costs are a lot more than a SW company's is.
> Those in poorer countries are as productive as the Bay Area folks, it is unfair they get paid less.
That does not really make sense. Work does not have some inherent value, its value is based on market situation, and different markets have different price equilibriums.
Honestly, if you go 100% remote, you are now competing with a much, much larger pool of developers. You are not going to command Silicon Valley prices.
i don't think morality is really useful here: right or wrong, it doesn't matter. labor is labor; that software engineers are a talented, "woke" (or at least perceived as such) group of labor doesn't change anything. you trade your time for money, which you use to buy stuff and then continue to trade your time for money. that's the game.
software engineers have it pretty good, anyway. this manager's example is perfect: sure, people grumble, but they typically eventually accept a reduced salary. why is that? even at a reduced salary, most laborers will be OK with a non-physically-straining, intellectually decent job that lets them live where they want to live and largely earn enough to not worry too much.
Prices aren't set (solely) by value provided. If that were the case, toilet paper and other essentials would cost 10-100x more than it does today.
Prices are set by supply-and-demand. More to the point, companies will pay you the least amount of money they can, while still retaining you. Just like you pay the toilet paper company the least amount of money you can get away with, even if you get vastly more value out of it.
You're welcome to reject the above on principle. But then you'll have to settle for the next best alternative. And if the company's done its homework right, your next best alternative wouldn't be any better.
I mean really you already nailed it on the "anyone can clean a toilet or cook a burger". This is only from my own experience working in a chain restaurant kitchen, but to a pretty high level. You don't need to be a great chef or anything to be a standard line cook, even if you don't know how to cook they can teach you in one or two training days, everything is timed to the second and all the equipment beeps to let you know when it's done. I was 18 at the time with no experience, my interview was "what days can you work, and are you comfortable staying until the bar closes" and for every one of me there were 30 people ready to take over when someone quit, including high school kids and people fresh out of jail without many other options.
What is there to debate? As the person you responded to explained, people don't want to pay $10 for a roll of toilet paper because people can buy one for $0.50. People don't pay a janitor or cook $200 per hour because people can buy one at $15 per hour.
If UBI existed and no one "had" to work, then people would probably have to pay a janitor or a cook $200 per hour.
Employee compensation has very little to do with contribution. It has to do with labor competition. The only way to capture more compensation is shut out workers willing to work for less.
People need to understand that salaries are set based on cost of labor, not cost of living. Companies will pay what it takes, but that value is preset by what employees are willing to accept in any given market.
> You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move.
It seems like nobody wins in this situation. If my goal is to maximize savings, I'd move to the Bay Area to get the maximum salary from you and find the cheapest housing in the area. I'd be miserable because I'm living in a place I don't like in a shitty apartment. On the other hand, if you offered to pay the same amount while I live in the midwest, I'd be happier with my living situation and be pocketing more cash. This would make me more productive and make me stay at the company longer, with no additional cost to you.
>"As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the availability of talent in a particular market."
It's standard practice for your company maybe. This hasn't been my experience at all. I have had three jobs where this was not the case. I've had colleagues who have experienced similar as well. People should be paid for their time. I can't even believe a company would want to engage in salary reduction negotiations with employees they value.
That doesn't make sense though, 'the market' isn't wherever they decide to move to, it's 'remote'. And yes, that will be less than SF rates, but it may well be more than non-remote rates wherever the employee happens to live.
It's not paying less that's silly, it's paying an artificial amount less. The only way in which location should come into it is restricting candidates to those located in (or willing to work to) a particular time zone(s).
Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole. You may make more if you're in SF but housing is still going to take a significantly bigger chunk of your paycheck and you may or may not come out ahead at the end of the day.
Being on the periphery of a high cost area is probably the best deal. For most companies, for example, I imagine that Boston/Cambridge will be considered the same as Boston suburbs--even though within an hour drive you can get to vastly cheaper housing than in the city proper.
I wanted to add: If you live in SF and make $150k/yr and are able to put away 10% on investments that's $15k/yr. If you work somewhere else and take a move and make $75k/yr and are able to invest 20%, you haven't made a financial change. But a pay cut that big likely means you're somewhere that has less going on, less access to food, less for different types of activities, lower quality schools (that are funded less because property tax is lower), lower quality hospitals (big cities can afford all the fancy equipment and big time doctors), etc.
So to be honest, moving to a cheaper area with the exact same COL might not be better because of other factors involved.
Price, as it turns out, is a signal of value. Some of the value might be access to jobs which you may now be able to access from elsewhere, but certainly not all of it.
How many places in the United States have the immigrant communities of the Bay Area, for example? And how do you recreate such communities in cheap places without making them expensive?
> Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole.
Only if you don't live frugally, or if you aren't a senior engineer.
If you do, a lot of the high costs of a high-CoL area can be avoided.
If you are a senior engineer, that XY% raise over a junior is free money... Applied to a larger starting salary.
Oddly enough, high-CoL areas have the same, or higher % raises, when you are promoted, than low-CoL areas. In the mid-west, the wage difference between a senior and a junior may be $30,000. In the bay area, it can be $150,000. Your CoL doesn't go up just because you have a better job title.
It creates an incentive to establish legal domicile in a high-rent neighborhood and then always be somewhere else, "traveling", and taking care of all your business over the network.
So you can own/lease a broom closet or pied-a-terre in Expensiveton, maybe rent it out intermittently or to a "roommate", and actually work and sleep in Cheapsville.
If home address has an impact on take-home pay, it will be gamed just as hard as all the other metrics.
Yes, on the flipside, it works exactly the same way in reverse if someone is moving to a higher cost market. We benchmark against data from Radford & Comtrix (salary/pricing data providers) and adjust upwards on a regular basis too.
To simplify, it seems like either you want developers that are physically present in London, in which case you have to find some and pay them London rates, or you don't particularly care if they are physically present, in which case I don't understand why you would pay someone working remotely from London differently from someone working remotely from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
Presumably in both cases your company is getting the same value out of the employee. So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area?
In other words, it seems like if I decide to work remote and lie about where I physically spend most of my time, it would make no difference to the company but might make one to my compensation, which, ignoring any moral judgement, just seems strange for the company.
>So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area?
Companies do this to a certain degree. My anecdotal observation is that a lot of tech companies that aren't in the Bay Area or only have a small presence there don't in fact try particularly hard to be competitive with the big Bay Area employers--unless there's someone they really really want. People may still join for various reasons.
Because not everyone wants to work out of the Welsh countryside and the number of developers available there is limited. Which is a factor because developers still have some power. Because the market isn't completely flooded with developers.
For a business a "GOOD" engineer is one who is able to deliver business value at minimal cost. If by "GOOD" you mean talented then you have to realize that the US doesn't have a monopoly on talented coders.
The greenback goes far in many places within your timezone. If borders are opened up via remote work companies will be forced to re-evalute the axes by which they quantify "GOOD" (talent, cost).
>Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X
This seems logical, but determining X is still in your authority, so let's not pretend this is fair. It's usually not a granular break down of skills either, or worse, it's calculated by job title plus a single primary skill, e.g. "Senior C#/.NET Developer".
Make remote protected. Substitute your argument for any protected class and see how silly it becomes[1]. Just because the market (actually people) [2] can discriminate against group X it does not make it right.
Do these transitions actually work? I can't imagine taking a massive pay cut because I need to be closer to ailing parents. That is going to generate a lot of bitterness. What is the turnover like at your company?
If I deliver enough value to receive salary X, I don't see how my personal living arrangements factor in. There are stories of Google engineers vandwelling in company parking, by that standard they should have their salaries reduced.
I'm sure that if one of your directs asked for a raise because they moved in to a more expensive apartment you would politely refuse.
CoL adjustments have always seemed like a bit of a foreign idea to me, as someone who has been a freelancer for 20 years (WfH for 15). I'm not sure I would be able to sell my customers on the idea that I should get paid more because I live in X county. (Since my value proposition would be the same, assuming the customer wasn't in/near X.) On the other hand, if I lived in an area with a weaker tech scene, maybe my ability to negotiate would be weakened if they knew I didn't have a wealth of local options to fall back on?
So, as a director of a big team, you also offer to increase the salary of employees who want to move to higher col areas like, say London or Tokyo right? I mean, it's only fair. You pay what the market rate for the talent in that area is.
All places I've worked that have multiple locations adjust salary both up and down when employees move to different markets. It's all about the prevailing rate for labor where you are located, and not some measurement of the "value you provide".
Yes, but I assume these are all markets where these companies have physical presence. I doubt many are adjusting up because you want to move to London because you like the fog.
I'm mixed on the cost of living to salary argument. If I provide X value to a company. Say I complete a project that generates Y revenue. Why am I now docked on pay, because I'm choosing to live in a lower cost of area. Have I contributed less to compete this business item that now generates revenue. I find I'm more productive working remotely. So I'm doing more to drive that revenue line for the company.
I think this comes down, we're not paid based on revenue we generate. But to keep us out of the talent pool. Or how much an adjacent firm may be willing to pay us. I don't believe it's based on what I can offer.
The next argument is on market salary demand. I live locally in a market that makes no use of my technical skill set. If I need to keep cash flowing I find any three month contract to keep the lights on. But then I go back to being remote, and compete on a remote pool.
Now we're on a remote pool set. America, or another cheaper to live country. If it's an external firm, do we have a middle company that can handle that tax implications. So we can hire a developer in Southern Asia or Europe. That role can now be filled for a drastic monetary reduction. But at the cost of management over head. Time zone difference, communication lag, better remote processes / documentation, etc. I've helped a few teams acclimate to these off shore changes.
As an aside I always found it odd companies that outsource a majority of their development to an off shore firm. That will never be on site. But if a full time, on site, employee asked for a wfh to watch a sick kid, they had to burn a PTO day.
Compared to an off shore developer there is one thing a country local developer may offer. Better communication with stake holders. Working in the same time zone. Communication especially remote is a big deal. I've seen a number of teams not be able to adapt to the time zone difference or communication differences.
I went to work for a FAANG company several years ago. I took a 35% pay cut off my last local job, while my rent increased by about 60%. I did it for the experience. I've never seen the high FAANG salaries people talk about, but that's just me. I'm also horrible at leet code / hacker rank so there's that, and I studied for over a year on hacker rank to get that job.
As to my experience with cost of living adjustment frankly they've been border line insulting. Locally, on site, if I find a role that uses most of my skills I'm looking 150/180(full time / w2 contract). I had a fully remote contract role, that used all my skills and challenged me. That paid me 245. I always look at my rate as what is the given task and job duties, because I generally work medium to long term contracts. Senior Software, vs Dev Ops, vs SRE, vs Product manager all have different salary bands. I don't have a blanket salary, it's always what's the role you're asking me to do.
When I first got a COL adjustment rate, I laughed. Then I became frustrated, and then I ignored COL adjusted salaries. Coming off a local contract role at 165, I was in talks for a more senior position, full time remote. A company out of a high cost of living area no less, started at 95. I'm not against being paid a bit less, but that drastic of a pay cut is insulting to senior staff. If you're going to pay me less, I want to know why.
Regardless of locale, I'm incurring more costs. I pay for better internet, stocking of coffee/pantry, electricity, and the big expense space. I still live in a city. Getting a second bed room can help a lot ensure a better work from home environment.
Globalization is going to become very interesting. I moved from New York for about a 10% salary reduction, while halving my rent. The determining factor is politics, and how people can adapt to working remotely.
> But if a company is fully remote, why should it adjust for costs of living at all? Candidate A lives in an expensive place and Candidate B has an expensive hobby. Neither is the company's concern, is it? The bottom line is that each is worth $X to the company and wants $Y in compensation.
Because if it wants to hire workers that live in SF, it has to pay SF wages. It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa.
Think about it flipped around a bit. Let's say that instead of hiring employees, you're buying candy bars. Someone running a bodega in NYC isn't gonna give you a discount just because you're going to have the candy bar mailed to Oklahoma.
The bottom line is not the $X value and the $Y compensation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just like the company's bargaining position is a complex mixture of the value that different employees provide and the opportunity cost of leaving a position unfilled, the employee's bargaining position is affected by the salary the company is willing to provide and the opportunity cost of accepting this job offer instead of another.
> It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa.
Not yet. When Tulsa engineers wake up to their value, they hold the cards.
I’ve been on the hiring side for good senior engineers. They’re hard to hire, period.
They take a ton of time to properly screen and by the end of the interview process, the company has wasted so many resources that could have been used for development if they don’t land that person.
I work for a company based in a major west coast city from a non-major city in the southeast.
My employer has different buckets it puts cities in and then limits your base pay based on those buckets.
Even with that limitation, my compensation is much higher than what I would make at a local company but not the rate I would get in a 'premium' market.
The most impactful benefit for me is I get to work on $big_city problems with $big_city talent. $Small_town problems and the $small_town talent are mind-numbing and deeply frustrating to work with
Short reason is because the market is driven not only by what value you provide, but how strong your negotiating position is.
As an analogy, imagine someone from NYC traveling to Mexico City to get tacos from a cart on the street at 9 pesos a pop (about 50¢ US). Those tacos are better than the tacos in New York, so why aren’t they paying $4 each?
The market is / will be self-balancing in this case. If companies can't hire people they'll have to come up with more than you're offering. If you're unemployed, you'll have to accept less than you're asking.
It depends. Many engineers will run elsewhere once they start getting paid less than they deserve, and the company is cutting paychecks for profits. The more extreme the difference, the crazier it will get.
Not forever, but it'll be longer than most people think.
We've tried to make a vaccine for the original SARS. It's been 12 years now and there's still no successful, safe vaccine for it. For COVID-19, if a vaccine is released within the optimistic 18 months, how safe will it be compared to vaccines that went through all the trials normally?
I believe rconti was not talking about the duration of COVID19 issues, nor the duration of WFH. Rather, the evolution of economic norms given the assumption of sustained normalization of remote work.
I think you're mistaken, since WFH gained massive adoption due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It's also what I believe he's referring to by, "Yeah, it won't last forever." I don't appreciate the downvote either for a reasonable comment.
The same reason they didn’t hire someone from the Texas suburbs rate in the first place.
An employee’s rate depends on how much they would be going for in the market, and living costs are part of the employee’s expenses—not that of the company’s.
There's a bit of a spectrum. Companies have learned to have employees working from home, but they're all in the timezone they were in before, they already got to work together in-person before being in this situation, and entire teams were put into the same situation at once. That's a step toward full support of remote people all over the globe, but the further you get the more you have to factor in legal overhead, cultural and situational differences, time zone difference, etc.
To be clear - I'm a big fan of remote work, I'm just saying that companies have been forced to solve only a subset of the problem they face before the market really can scale to be that large for everyone.
"Remote work" is globalization of white collar jobs. It is baffling to me highly paid tech workers do not see it.
"Work from home" is the first step. If a company embraces work from home, it embraces completely asynchronous communication. As soon as that becomes an acceptable way of solving problems, Vlad making $50k/year in Ukraine who will do 65 hours a week will become a contender to replace Jackson in SF, who is making $250k/year and refuses to work more than 40 hours a week because of work/life balance.
I do not know if its my non traditional background (no degree in computer science, big emphasis in history and philosophy since middle school) but I'm baffled by how politically naive many people in software can be. I understand why you might not like it but in pretending politics do not matter or won't affect you, you are letting other people decide and most importantly, think for you.
How many people think tech companies are just completely well-intentioned in everything they do? Curb your enthusiasm, a healthy chug of skepticism is needed.
I chose CS as my major in 2001. Yeah, during the dotcom crash and the outsourcing frenzy. I was told I would never have a job.
I'm not saying it will never pass. But history has shown it's much harder than you're making it out to be. We already had a great outsourcing attempt 20 years ago which had questionable results. And now pay is higher than ever.
Maybe they will be successful this time. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I haven't based my life around earning an SF bay area salary. My retirement is already paid for. My house is 80% paid for. College funds for children are mostly paid for.
I think this is, as usual, specific to the Bay Area and maybe NYC, and also limited to the top 10% of developers at tech companies.
I don't think tech salaries are all that great even in other big cities like DC or Denver, especially as home prices have also passed their 2007 highs, while salaries were stagnant and bonuses or equity are nothing like in FAANG companies. This is especially true when non-managers salary cap at about 40, which is when many professionals in other industries are just getting started making good money.
A lot of small cities might have no real tech companies and only a few large Fortune 500 companies that employ half the software engineers in the whole city. All it takes is one or two of them to decide to offshore half the IT department to Bangalore while signing a big deal with Cognizant or Infosys for the other half in house (i.e. H1Bs brought in from India). If you're stuck in that city, you're looking at wage stagnation for a long while.
It's still okay if you're a good developer - top 25% - at age 27 making $90K in a low COL city, while most of your peers are barely out of grad school. But it's not when you're 40 making $120K and all your peers - nurses, government workers, sales, lawyers, entrepreneurs - have caught up, often with far more stability and better working conditions. I think software engineering has gotten to be a dead-end career for a lot of us not working at tech companies in big cities, and globalization and H1Bs have continued eating away at the industry for the majority of us working as contractors and at big corps.
> I'm not saying it will never pass. But history has shown it's much harder than you're making it out to be. We already had a great outsourcing attempt 20 years ago which had questionable results. And now pay is higher than ever.
The technological barriers in the last 20 years prevented effective outsourcing of tech jobs. Since the technology did not work, the cultural acceptance of it did not matter.
I did one of the first live streaming events over the internet in 1995. It involved a convert venue, a dedicated T1 line to the data center hosting the web server, a Cisco 2501, a computer camera that i rigged to a frame grabber, and a "beefy" web server running on Sparc10. After we got the telco to install the line it took about 2 days to do the rest. The "broadcast" lasted between 11pm and 3am. I think it had about 9 concurrent viewers at its peak and 12 total. The promoter of the venue paid ~$4k to do it. That's the accessible "telepresence" at the time.
I was at a company that had offices on the West Coast, NYC, DC and UK in 2000 or so. We had a video conference system and IP phones. It was possible to do a "meeting" with the other offices and it worked pretty well -- sound was fine video a bit jerky. It helped that we had our own network. Someone tried to take a headend home and use the his at home cable connection. It sucked. The video barely did 5-10 frames a second.
Today I can walk into most of random coffee shops and do a professional quality video call. The technology is here. The only blocker for leveling playing field is cultural. The circumstances are forcing companies to remote the cultural barrier. Would they put it back when the lock downs are over? I seriously doubt, especially if they save $200k/year per high paid employee.
And an employee in the Texas suburbs will generally be "going for" less, given it's a different market. Sure, as more people are working remotely, the gaps will close more, but someone living in a cheaper area is generally going to be willing to accept less pay. As such, the going rate in the cheaper area will generally be lower.
That is a conflation of cause and effect. Employees in general may be paid less in Texas, but that doesn’t mean the location is the cause.
As companies go remote, they will depress salaries as a side effect of no longer having a locality-sensitive hiring constraint. But again the cause is the hiring constraint—not the location the employee is in.
A straightforward legal fix is to make location one of the things you can't ask about during hiring, like age, marital status, or disability.
All they should be able to ask is what fraction of their work hours you're available for. It could be that everyone must be online 9-5 PST, or there're a few hours of overlap, or there's no expectation of common work hours as long as you "get your work done."
If that really happens, the next order effect will be cheaper rents in the bay area.
Even now, there are some good rent deals. I moved to a new apartment a couple weeks ago (mainly because I needed a better WFH space to work effectively) and got 6 weeks free on my lease, which isn't normally seen in the bay area.
When the pandemic passes though I do hope to be able to return to working from an office, if just because it's less lonely and there is usually better sunlight in business spaces than what I get at home. Maybe 2-3 days a week in the office and 2-3 days from home would be a nice balance, when it is safe to do so. Employers may also see the value in at least providing some additional financial incentive for living closer to the office and being willing to come to the office (if safe), although enabling full remote work for those who choose it is something I also fully agree with.
At a certain point people will move to the bay area for the higher paycheck, so that keeps it adjusted pretty high. Companies are not competing against local-to-the-employee employers, they are competing with all employers globally.
Even with regional adjustments, the math usually works out in your favor to not be in the bay area.
"What's the guarantee" - There is no guarantee. Then again, there is no guarantee that the person who bought my drink didn't spike it with molly either...
The problem is that I've seen the pay difference be far larger than that. I worked in the midwest and people getting paid $100k moved to the bay area for $300k+
No, it doesn't. Or, rather, it doesn't while also leaving the same amount of money for savings and discretionary spending: which is the same thing. It may get you a bigger house, but you pay for that in terms of opportunity (not just jobs, but savings, culture and recreation).
Maybe Indianopolis isn't the perfect example for everyone. Portland, perhaps. Better proximity to great nature, still a lot of things to do, great weather (and getting better every year thanks to climate change, while California gets drier and drier), somewhat lower cost of living, etc.
Portland sees the same cost of living trends as the Bay Area, so enjoy the arbitrage while it lasts I suppose. (For what it’s worth, so does every similarly desirable metro area in the USA outside of Houston.)
Agreed. We jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) talk smack to Californians moving north to Portland in hopes they won't come, because along with the steady influx of people comes steadily increasing housing prices. As much as I have said for years I never want to live some place like Seattle, I have to admit that Portland isn't really that far behind.
I doubt you'd be able to keep that current compensation, though. Most people I've talked with who have moved out of the bay area (or another HCOL area) to somewhere with a lower cost of living have either gotten an immediate pay cut, or their company has told them that they won't be getting pay raises until their pay is in-line with their new local market.
Companies don't do this. They will adjust your salary down based on your city of residence. Square is one example of this. You're not compensated for the value you provide, you're compensated for the cost of living near the office.
You're also now competing against a national talent pool vs locals only
Some do. I've gotten this deal in the past personally and know others that have as well. Always for employees with tenure that they want to keep around.
Remote salaries in tech are typically well-above "local" rates, either way.
If you want to hire A, you have to compete with local SF company that pay high wages.
If you want to hire B, you have to compete with local small town companies which pay low wages, plus a very small number of remote companies which are in the same position as you from a game-theoretical perspective.
I think it's obvious that in the long term, if remote work becomes widespread, wages (and thus cost of living) will level out, but in the short term if few enough companies do it they can beat the prisoner's dilemma and keep remote wages lower than the ones in Silicon Valley.
I meant that a lot of the top talent in Canada is already working in the US. There's a skill gap between top talent in the US and top talent in Canada.
Well, they may lose their jobs to folks still in Canada then. You can get a seasoned dev in Canada for less money than a fresh grad in San Francisco. If the company switches to be distributed a-la GitLab, there's no reason not to do it. The reason why offshoring nearly always failed in the past is because teams weren't fully distributed/remote. If a company re-tools around distributed, it can operate just fine as long as there aren't any "hallway conversations" remote workers don't have access to.
Remember that in this case it'd be "offshoring", not "offshore outsourcing". That is, the company would be able to maintain the hiring bar at that reduced cost.
Spent 20 years WFH on various personal projects, earning money on my own, and now I am hired and working from office. Too much freedom can be hard to cope with. A little bit of structure can be great.
Largely the compensation in SV and NYC was high because those were the cultural centers, it is expensive to live there but "everyone" wanted to be there.
Make no mistake - work from home means the salaries are going to regress to the midwest level of pay.
I would imagine salaries might dip because your new "competition" would be anyone in the same timezone (with the requisite skills). However I'd also imagine, if you are good, the offset would be well in your favour.
I got covid and was (and still am) as sick as hell. I'm going to live (not sure if I will get back to 100% yet), and I never thought this kind of sorely needed decentralization would happen in my lifetime. It almost feels like a fair swap, as this is going to be so, so good for humanity. If we can get a decent handle on covid, I'm actually feeling optimistic for my children, for the first time in years.
I want to live in a city with an abundance of arts organizations; but it does seem a bit odd to live in a place that has those things, but can't be accessed.
My understanding is that this has big tax implications (since presumably said low cost of living areas are outside of California). I would love to understand better what sorts of complications WFH bring to the table for those cases (and how they can be mitigated).
The company needs to do payroll in a different state and you, as an individual, now pay taxes in your state of residence which isn't where company HQ is.
From a tax perspective it's mostly no different than if they had a small office in that state.
For big companies, in particular, it's not that big a deal as they're probably using a payroll service like ADP anyway. There may be some paperwork--and certainly more so if other countries are involved.
You’re vastly underestimating the work of “setting up an office” in a new state. Every state has a bunch of paperwork, like setting up your company as a foreign corporation in that state. Then there is state licensing. Also every state has its own worker’s compensation requirements and some have other requirements too.
Your payroll provider generally tells you that you’re on your own for all that stuff.
For every additional state there is a ton of overhead.
I’ve had employees in California, Washington, and New York. It took two years to unwind Washington after the one employee there left, and it took a year and 20 hours of lawyer time to unwind New York, who was trying to charge us $5,000 as a penalty for missing paperwork we didn’t think we had to file (we ended up being right after paying the lawyer).
Payroll companies handle all the workers comp and payroll related duties for all different states and they do it for near nothing.
The only thing you are on your own for is tax filings and registration as a foreign entity. And that is only in some cases in some states. In most states, having a few remote employees is not enough to even trigger a filing requirement. In CA, which is probably one of the most draconian, we had to register as a foreign entity and then we have to file corporate taxes there and allocate taxes proportionally according to percentage of revenue that comes from CA, I believe.
And actually, they want your corporate income tax even if you don't have employees there, just because you sell to Californians. But they have had a hard time collecting for those that have no employees or other presence in the state.
> Payroll companies handle all the workers comp and payroll related duties for all different states and they do it for near nothing.
I know for a fact this is wrong. Payroll companies don’t do worker’s compensation in Washington because the state runs the insurance program. You have to register with the state.
The state runs most workers comp programs as far as I know. How is Washington any different than say California? I may have had to follow some one time instructions to initially setup a workers comp account in California, but I haven't touched it since. And my $50/month payroll service handles all of the payments and filings for me.
All 50 states have a different process. Many require you to get a private policy but some have state run funds.
As an example, I have to deal with my insurance agent annually for my worker’s compensation in California and then deal with Washington separately for their scheme.
I admit to having been naive on the issue. I know that bureaucracies are involved but it still seems as if at least the 90% case would be pretty cookie-cutter/repeatable even if there are a lot of steps and potential gotchas.
Unemployment insurance, family/medical leave, workers comp, and health insurance are all different by state. That can be a lot of overhead for the first employee in a new state, but then the second is trivial.
I had two different scenarios in mind: one happened to an acquaintance, where they negotiated a pay cut (because presumably the company doesn't want to pay Bay Area salary to a remote worker in a location in an area w/ lower salary base), and there was the question of taxes involving part of the year in one state and part in another (plus the math for RSUs and options, of which the person had vested both in both states).
The other scenario involves visa workers. The I-140 is predicated on not being able to find local candidates that match a criteria. More broadly, the H1-B visa grant pertains to foreigners being able to work in the US at all in the first place. I'd imagine that if you had everything setup to be remote from the beginning it'd probably be fine to keep things humming along, but I imagine that switching surely must pose some sort of logistic challenge?
Absolutely! In that long comment, mitchellh briefly talks about the impact of employing folks in different states on potential corporate tax.
Now imagine you ran one of the big billion+ USD revenue tech companies, and you're not talking about different states in the same country but a distributed workforce in many countries and the political pressures on taxation of e-commerce or similar business models involving intangible goods. One of the key arguments in many a tech company's tax/legal toolbox (usually for arguing they should pay taxes on one jurisdiction instead of another) is in which countries their engineering efforts reside and to what extent.
It's really no wonder that employment legal & finance wins out on totally flexible work arrangements in that situation, for better or worse. Politicians aren't taking any hostages in this context, see eg. France.
To provide an example from sufficient years back: I had to represent the stance of a past employer on compliance with Russian privacy laws to Roskomnadzor[1] in their HQ in Moscow. Through a carefully planted trick they tried to get us to commit to establish just the right kind of representation to be able to tax our revenue from Russian customers. In many countries, the narrative would've been "you have engineers here, you therefore build your products here, you should pay income tax here". Curiously, there isn't really obvious right or wrong in all this since the goods are intangible.
(Disclaimer: experience entirely from prior to my current employment at Google, I don't speak for Google in any way and have no insight into these matters at Google.)
> The company needs to do payroll in a different state and you, as an individual, now pay taxes in your state of residence which isn't where company HQ is.
This is not always true.
I'm remote. I pay my state and CA taxes for my CA based company even though I have never set foot in CA for this job.
Like others have said, check with an accountant, I have worked remotely for the past 11 years in NC, for companies in GA, CT and NY, but because I'm 100% remote, I only have to pay NC taxes. None of them ever had an office in NC
I confess I don't know what the laws are then. Presumably you don't pay both your state and CA taxes on your whole salary?
I confess I've never been in the position of being officially completely remote. I certainly don't pay taxes to the state where my company's HQ is but then I'm officially in an office in my state of residence. (And maybe the existence of that office would make a difference even if I weren't actually assigned there.)
I've also heard of stories of people getting in trouble for "moving residence" to Incline Village (Nevada) and doing taxes in Nevada while working in CA.
I can imagine more companies adopting a cost of living adjustment. There’s also a non trivial tax burden complexity with an employee base spread around the country/world.
If you have great skills you can do that today. If you don't have great skills and a company has made itself amenable to remote work, then why would they hire you at a Bay Area salary instead of firing you and hiring someone already in that location for half your salary?
This makes sense. In my team it’s the same: the young guys like going out together after work and also often don’t have the space at home to set up a good workplace. They also need the most handholding. I remember some discussions a while ago where the conclusion was that it’s hard to onboard juniors remotely and remote is more suitable for experienced people.
When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.
You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.
At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.
This is why assigning an "onboarding buddy" is so important (even on-site) ... a new team member isn't going to feel empowered to ask questions and interrupt people right off the bat usually. Their more-senior onboarding buddy can make the introductions and get their questions answered by the right person without feeling awkward about it.
I'm sure people will respond with the obvious need for an onboarding guide or helper, but even this is harder to do remote. When I onboard in-person I can watch the new hire, judge their mental state or know if they're busy, check in with them often - at the right time and get to know them personally. All do-able remote but much harder.
>I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time
is this just a lack of understanding that (or a lack of your company embracing) chat/email is asynchronous communication?
I work remote, and all of the people who don't want to be disturbed have snoozed notifications and I understand that they'll get back to me when they're ready.
At least in my company, many folks leave it on snooze always - with a status requesting for an override if there's something urgent. Else the intrusion is very real. I personally used to get a ding from groups or PMs every other min or so. muted groups, still got one every 5 mins or so - very painful.
I prefer the onboard buddy / mentor approach: I just tell my mentee to override this.
I don't know that in person always works better, lots of people in tech aren't good in person actually or hate it when you approach them. Could be that in writing they'd have better patience.
I am middle aged, have a family to be around, and a long commute (60 mins morning, 40 mins evening). I have a spacious house and room for a separate office. Yet even I do not like work from home. I don’t like assigning space in my home for my employer’s use. I don’t like having work in my house. It’s probably actually more bearable due to current circumstance-I watch my daughter in mornings, and my wife is here too. If this were normal circumstances and I were here alone all day and connected only through phone and video, I would like this even less. No way I want to keep doing this if I don’t have to.
And some of my staff can’t even do phone calls if their roommate has one at the same time because they have small apartments. I don’t even have that problem.
Not interested in providing rent-free space to my employer.
I perfectly fit the profile you described. I live in SF in a small apt. I can easily afford a much bigger place for the same amount. But working with collegues @ office is a soo much fun. if the company gets fully remote, its really hard to connect with coworkers and hangout.
I used to rock climb around lunch time, do yoga at 3 and go for a cycle with some people in my neighborhood during my last remote setting. Was more social than any office setting.
And here I'm stuck in so many zoom calls to the point where I need to shut off my webcam and take my laptop in the bathroom with me just to relieve myself.
What about if all of society did this, and you all had a great webcam, and for lunch you went out locally with your local friends, then when you knock off at 5pm you have all agreed to play soccer down the local park at 5:10pm ?
We can have a nice local life that flourishes, once the utterly stupid situation of having everyone converge at the same time on a fixed point is forever slain.
I think work and commuting adds to this. Like in the bay, imagine if people stopped commuting going from sf to oakland wouldn't be a nightmare. Now you can visit people.
Or if you have flexible lunch time and free time from commuting you can do local things, take classes, visit stuff, do social things. Instead we're stuck waking up early to get ready, commuting, eating lunch at work, commuting back, prepping dinner. The day is almost shot except for an hour or two in the evening.
Commuting is a choice for most tech workers in the bay area. It's easy to get your commute down to 30 minutes or less if you want. I've got mine down to 20 most days.
I do what you say: take classes, do social things. And yet my most lasting friendships have come from work.
Maybe I'm the minority, or maybe it's the constant excuse to be around together that forms more lasting relationships.
A 30 minute commute doesn't really tell the whole story though. Theres still the hour of getting ready, waking up, alarm clocks. Ive used an alarm clock maybe once or twice and thats because someone scheduled a meeting at 9am. now i make breakfast while doing things like check email in the morning.
I'm not sure how that has to do with WFH. I still have to get ready, wake up, set an alarm clock. Except now I have to cook breakfast, clean the resulting dishes, and brew my coffee. Even more work before the day starts.
Are you saying that your company cares more about if you're in your seat at a certain time during normal days? Because that's a completely separate issue than WFH or not.
I think it just depends on your personality type. my closest friends are mostly people that I just happened to spend a lot of time with and realized later that I really enjoyed their company. I find that if I do some activity with the explicit goal of making friends, I end up making shallow connections at best.
The actual demographics matter. A mid 20s software engineer in SF would probably not be interested in hanging out with his suburban neighbors in midwest in their mid 40s as much as they would with young professionals living in a city.
So they would live in a neighbourhood full of young people.
That is once we stop making buying a home the most significant financial decision of everyone's life, also, as real estate collapses after centralisation is removed as a key ingredient.
>So they would live in a neighbourhood full of young people.
Do you know many young people who would love to live in a quiet suburbia over a busy city with lots of things to do? They, of course, exist, but they aren't the majority. I doubt that remote work will suddenly make every young person appreciate the quiet suburban lifestyle, and lead to suburban towns being heavily populated by young people.
Sure, and we can technically build another Silicon Valley somewhere in the midwest as well.
The thing is, do young people want to spend their youth and efforts "reimagining" this (the effects of which they won't even see, even in the most optimistic scenario, until they are well past their youth)? I know that I, personally, don't. And it seems unlikely that a lot of young people would be willing to latch onto this kind of "opportunity" either.
It isn't even about "white picket fences", it is about the number of opportunities around, which you only get with high population density. Which is the antithesis of the suburban style of living.
If you think young people don't want to completely change the system you are out of touch. Sanders was hugely popular with under 30s. People want change.
they want political change, not physical change. I can't imagine many young people want to give up a bustling city with lots of culture, dating opportunities and things to do for a place thats cheaper with a slightly lower risk of contracting a virus from pandemics that only come around once or twice in a lifetime
Yes but not the change you are describing. Young people reinvigorating small towns was not one of Bernie's platforms so I don't know how it's relevant.
Why would I have local friends? I spent half my day at work, obviously most people I know are at work. half of my home awake time is with my online friends.
I still remember being such a young programmer -- and I much preferred WFH. I have no car and commuting on foot and via public transport, only to turn up at a noisy, productivity-sapping open-plan office, is tiring. I would rather save that hour and a half each day and just work from home.
Imagine you're 22. For the last 17 years you've showed up every day for an institution. It provided a schedule, a routine, social interaction with a community of peers who share common ground, even explicitly structured extracurricular events.
One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now?
Of course it's possible to build a life from scratch, without the benefit of an institutional attachment. You can enforce a schedule for yourself. You can go chat up strangers in bars or meetup groups or whatever, and build a social network that way. But it's not hard to see how this level of flexibility, so suddenly, could be suffocating.
Contrast with a mid-career professional who already has a spouse, a well-developed social network gathered from the many communities he's been part of over the years, and the structure/routine of childrearing.
I did this. Started my first "proper" job in London (in an office). Used to go home at 5:30 and fiddle with my linux machine (that I was learning how to use) then go to bed.
So, I started going out to the London Linux User Group. I made friends there, and a few of us ended up going out for weekly curries/tech markets together, getting drinks, and eventually attending each others weddings (John, if you're reading this, we're all still sorry we laughed when the offical said your middle name was "Leonard").
I live in Manchester now, and have worked from home for about 12 years. I ran the local Ruby user group, and run the local Go group, and these groups have provided me with a group of great friends. Even in the relatively non-tech heavy NW England there's a tech event on most nights, and lots of non-tech groups to find.
I don't think the situation is as dire as you make out :)
I'm basically in this situation but I'm very confused about your assumption that my friends have scattered and that I need to build a life from scratch.
I have plenty of friends and family around me, from the various communities I've been apart of before my current workplace, and I'm loving being able to spend more time with them (online) during my less-packed days than when I had to commute to and from an office full of people in different stages of their lives than me, hence less likely to become actual friends of mine.
I don't see why turning 22 should hit the reset on your entire social life.
The workplace is one of the last places where you're forced to interact face-to-face with a diverse range of people multiple times, on a regular basis. If you're young, and from out of town, you get a lot from that.
Certainly, there are different clubs and groups out there, but the people they attract are fairly homogenous, and monofocused on their topic of interest. There are coffee-houses and bars, but you'd be lucky to interact with anyone there repeatedly in such a way as to form any durable social bond.
The only other quick option for gaining automatic access to a well-rounded social environment that I can think of is a church, but educated young people tend to enter the workforce with a contempt of organized religion that ranges from passive to visceral.
Churches vary greatly, but one of the largest associations of evangelical congregations in Austin was birthed from young adults, grew from young adults, and plants from young adults.
Our congregation (not part of that network) is one of the rare places where I interact deeply across generations, economic classes, and social classes from professor to auto mechanic. I couldn’t reliably predict someone’s politics. No congregation is perfect, but a common mission crosses a lot of divides.
lets say you can usually interact with 5-10 people closely everyday. Even a tech company is going to be more diverse than the average person's 10 closest friends/family members.
I am of that age and I can say I have hated the last few weeks working from home. I feel isolated and I like talking at work, I also have an easier time actually doing work at a workplace rather than sitting at home, also I just like going out grabbing a few drinks after work.
Of course the latter is more an issue of the pandemic right now than just remote work in principle but I have the sense that remote working also leads to less spontaneous interaction.
Maybe this is true if you are stuck with roommates, but given how terrible most open offices are now the bar is pretty low for home to be better.
My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Have you told them (or have they been told) that they can work from somewhere besides there home?
Obviously there is an exception right now, but normally "working from home" means you can work from anywhere you want (different country, parents cottage, coffee shop, outside, where ever).
I work for a tech company and we have people who regularly go to Europe/other places for months and work from there just getting up/working later depending on timezone.
Most people assume that working from home or working remotely means sitting at home at a desk and working the exact same as you would an office. In which case you lose the office communication. But that's wrong.
Working from a separate country isn't usually allowed based on the labor laws of that country, since you are still paying your taxes to your home country while using the infrastructure of another. You can certainly do it, but your company may not want to know you are doing it.
Exactly this! I'm not sure why people assume WFH must mean you're literally confined to your home/apartment for the entire duration of the work day. Unless you have to frequently get on calls requiring a quiet space, you should be fine working from cafes, co-working spaces and yes - even other countries if you so choose to (for short periods of time at least). I've been doing this at my current workplace as have a number of others I know.
Before the current situation, I've had this discussion with various people in the context of space getting tight in some offices. Basically, I was told that a lot of the younger people (mostly not developers in this case) would be looking for another job if they could no longer come into an office. I do know I would probably have hated being forced to work out of my apartment right out of school.
WFH also works for those young people that don't quite live in the middle of the city - say, they would like to live closer to where they play (the ocean, the mountains, on the road, etc).
Im firmly in that demographic. Working from home has been pretty awful; don't have space for a secondary office in my 500sqft of nyc apartment, and have found the whole experience to be terribly isolating. Maybe it's different for people with families, but I'd never give up the perks of city living and office connections to be so alone (regardless on how much extra money I'd be saving).
That assumes my compensation is already at the upper bound of my cost/benefit axis for the company instead of close to the minimum bound to keep me from looking to advance elsewhere. Better question is how much more would I be looking for to move to a full remote workplace.
The tools and processes for remote work are completely different than co-located though. This will force the in-office folks to essentially adopt all of the remote protocols.
IME blended teams are by far the hardest to make work.
Now that everything's written down, what was the point of the meeting again? It makes a lot more sense to have an asynchronous process for problem exploration and decision making with one or more deadlines for statements about a given topic and then a final vote (possibly just one individual deciding on a given topic).
In part, I think some of the young there are on to something. I love working remote now, but one thing remote is bad at is training, especially the intensive training you want at a junior level. I would've had a much harder time learning core work skills (how to do actual work, but also time management, communication, ...) without the super close contact you get in person.
Imo, remote is a big perk once you have a couple of years of professional work under your belt, but a real challenge before that point.
> I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged
Yes, and there is some correlation between age and seniority. If companies are so eager to hire senior developers, they might consider the preferences of candidates who have been working long enough to fit that description.
I'm one of these people and I want to be able to do both. Work used to be 10min subway from my place, yet I want to be able to stay home when I don't want to be disturbed at work.
Yeah, I have to be pretty skeptical of the above take, for this reason:
1) I live in San Francisco. A ton of residents here commute to Mountain View and environs for work. A ton.
2) Most of those residents are young.
3) One of the few things that has been reliably proven to improve your happiness - even more than a salary bump! - is reducing your commute time.
4) With WFH (work from home) everyone who commutes from SF to elsewhere could cut their commute from 2 hrs round trip, daily, to 0.
5) Ergo, a ton of young people would quickly see the logic of this: WFH and cut your commute time to 0. They would want this option, and they will take it.
I know this complicated somewhat by the fact that you can work from the buses, but I still don't see the overcoming this widely shared preference, for no commute.
You mention this in passing at the end, but I think it’s worth emphasizing: Reducing commute time driving yourself to work has been well studied to have a very large marginal improvement in happiness.
Reducing time commuting on a comfy megacorporation’s arms-length-contracted-carriage-provider bus has been studied much less, and it’s not nearly as clear it improves people’s happiness that much.
Also, taking your commute time to zero isn’t obviously an improvement in happiness; there’s a lot of psychological benefit to having a separate space for work and home life. It’s possible for some people to prepare a home office that successfully feels separate, but it’s not automatic.
I completely respect wanting to live in SF ... I have personal reasons why I can't move away from where I'm at, but I also have a full time job with a company headquartered literally as far as possible from me in the continental united states. So I get to live where I have to live and make a good salary to support my family, and they get to use my talents as long as they continue to feel I bring them value.
That's the thing ... this discussion isn't saying everyone has to move away from SF, that's ludicrous. But if you want to live in SF, my point is why would you want to have to be on public transit for four hours every single day? It takes time you could use for living your life, and contributes to pollution.
In an ideal world, you could live in SF, work for google remotely, and maybe pop into campus every few days or even weeks, as needed. And then google can also hire from the millions of developers that live elsewhere as well. That way: you could live on the beach, live in socal, live in norcal, live on a farm in Iowa, live in Hawaii, live in New Jersey ... whatever kind of life you want to build, would not have to be linked to whether there is a company you want to work for in that place.
I'm pretty much the demographic described above: on the younger side, and optimized for central location in housing.
I have a fairly small 1BR. I don't really have a proper work environment set up--what's the point of cramming a desk in if I'm going into the office every day? I have no yard, so at the moment fresh air is limited. I work, cook, eat, and sleep within the same three rooms.
That's not even touching on people who paid out the ass to get studios in trendier neighborhoods. Personally, I'd lose my mind.
Contrast this with my parents in the suburbs. It's normally a longer commute, but there's a dedicated office, a back yard, and just generally more breathing room.
I think a lot of this is less WFH-related, and more, y'know, apocalypse-related. I could work from a coffee shop or coworking space. Go to the park. Go out for dinner/drinks in the evening. Hell, I could've gotten a bigger, cheaper place if commute time wasn't an issue.
But for the time being, the sprawl of suburban living seems to have its perks.
Also generally if you live in the suburbs you probably co-habit with your family and probably spend your commuting life wishing you could see more of them (this is orthogonal to the city / suburb question really - it has more to do with the older / younger split).
I work in FAANG and I am really not convinced this is the start of a trend.
First Twitter was already moving towards permanent WFH before the pandemic, it only accelerated their plans. I highly doubt (m)any other companies were also seriously considering that move before the pandemic.
Second, working in a remote only team is very different from working in an office, or even from occasionally working from home. I have seen the best managers get completely clueless when managing full remote people.
Third you lose a lot of things by going full remote. You can no longer have hallway conversations, sharing new ideas over lunch, trying to pitch new ideas organically. You lose a lot of spontaneity by going full remote, which I fully expect to impact innovation potential. Some of the best ideas in my group are things that came up from organic conversations that we have been productizing.
Fourth has to do with company culture. I can't speak for every company, but I know that at my company there is a very clear favoring people local to where the HQ is located, probably at least in part for the reasons above. I don't see that changing easily. East coast to West coast in the same team means you have 3 hours a day where you can't have your whole team available at the same time.
What I expect to happen is most likely much greater flexibility for companies that were not open about it before, but full time remote for everyone seems like a huge stretch even over several years.
I have been fully remote for about 2 years. My personal experience is that collaboration is way easier when being remote. When I need to talk to a team i just drop a line in their slack room and I usually get an answer within minutes. So much easier than walking down the hallway and hoping that someone is in the team office area (not to mention no social awkwardness involved). Also when most people are remote in your company, you are in most hallway discussions! Just subscribe to the channels and read it. Not to mention lurking when high level engineers talk about stuff. I never really interacted with principal level engineers when I worked in an office. Now I just need to know which channel to listen to.
Having a culture that discusses in public channels definitely helps, though many remote organizations aren’t this way unfortunately and silo chatter to known relevant parties vs any interested group.
What do you do about folks who's first language isn't English? Face to face communication is somewhat doable because body language helps to convey the real message but communicating over text is a completely different ball game. So much nuance gets lost
I find it a lot easier to communicate with polygots whose first language isn't English. A lot of the body language issues go away because everyone actually uses words to say things.
It works better in my opinion. My ESL friends can re-read the words and use a dictionary. They don’t miss things if the conversation is too fast. And you can still video/audio chat if you want. It is the best of both worlds
Yes. Is that an answer, or just a dismissive insult?
Do you have co-workers who never have need of any detail or specific nuance? Or do you just mean water-cooler social chat?
Implementation of a task requires broad technical knowledge of what is to be accomplished, as well as specific technical details. How will body language communicate either of those?
I am talking about the process before even starting to implement a task - architecture, designing and brainstorming. We used to do that on giant white boards with markers in our hands. It's not the same when using online diagram tools with trackpads as pens. It's slow, frustrating and not flexible. Ideal solution would be giant touch screens but that's not feasible.
> The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat.
Is it, really? I always hear and read this, but I see very few anecdotes.
In thinking through my own interactions, I'm not sure anything that happened in the hallway, break room, or at lunch table actually contributed much more to the bottom line than conversations I've had over VC and Slack.
Parts of the story may be apocryphal, but one of the most famous case studies of office design contributing to collaboration is the Pixar office. In the late 1990s (and to this day) the modal layout for larger companies was dividing teams into dedicated buildings by function withn a broader campus or office park.
Per the story, Jobs had the notion of designing an office that encouraged interactions between teams with broad open areas, communal social resources and bathroom placement in central atriums to encourage unplanned interactions between teams.
'Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.” ' [1]
> "Many offices are arranged in U-shaped units of 5-6 individual offices..."
And then they went back to private offices to get stuff done. Both are requirements to the formula for this success.
I've worked from home for about 6 years, but I still went into the office for the occasional meeting and white boarding /idea session. I don't think total remoteness will work very well. You have to have in-person interaction to collaborate effectively. It's just human nature. The delay of voice chat deteriorates the spontaneity of communication.
But going back to work to the all-open concept, where there are, effectively, no private/personal spaces, is also not the way forward. We need to get back to the old-fashioned idea of having offices for knowledge workers, and not just the VP's (who are never there any way).
Depends on you role and where you are in the ladder.
In my experiences, all the big decisions are already made before scheduled meetings take place. Spontaneous one on ones, hall way chats, coffee walks, etc are where those discussions are made, and very often meetings are just an official "let's get everyone on the same page for the record" exercise.
I find the same is true for me too. It's much easier to talk about the idea over Slack rather than during some random encounter that is probably the product of either or both parties heading to a meeting somewhere. With Slack, you even get the bonus of having time to think out the exact words you want to use to convey your thought, rather than rush through a simple and undeveloped initial response to some idea.
That's what they say, but I just don't buy it. In practice even if you get people together in a place with hallways they always tend to stay in their own departments and even at their own desks. Those vibrant conversations you see with carefully selected people from all demographics exist only in marketing brochures.
I'm not super convinced. Most people have never been given the chance to adapt to full-time remote work. And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."
A lot of people are probably more creative in a textual medium or even talking on the phone where they can't be overheard (I hate the feeling I might be distracting someone).
I wouldn't be surprised if the office squelches a lot of creativity. Of course, it all depends on the office environment and individuals.
>And there are many ways to have "hallway conversations."
At the start of all this I would have agreed but as the weeks go on my coworkers are just getting more and more introverted and you really have to push to get any sort of discussion about product and strategy, everything ends up into a meeting format you can't just do the sitting down, riffing and chatting which is where the actual creative work happens.
Might have a different perspective because I'm more on the design side than the engineering, but I'm very aware none of the most transformative moves in my company were all born out of discussions outside of work in more social settings between designers and engineers, I know some people don't like hearing that but that's the reality at my company at least.
Yep, I can see how FAANGs would be reluctant to adopt remote work. While it can be a fine solution in your run of the mill software team doing boring web or backend work, FAANGs are all about innovation and, often, very technically complex products. The f2f interactions could really foster creativity there (just imagine scientists trying to work out the Manhattan project remotely over Teams...).
Working is not just about work, we're spending a good amount of our time with our colleagues. I cannot imagine me sitting alone in a room, working every day 8 hours for 10-20 years and never meet anyone in my team. All the team building, get a smoke together, off-work activities... are gone. Sounds scary like a chapter in Black Mirror.
In theory you would be trading hanging out with your coworkers for hanging out with your friends, you neighbors, others in your community + a lesser commute. You would definitely lose some and gain some, the question is whether that gain would outweigh the loss. For some people, their lives are organized around work (makes sense, mine defiantly is) so it would be a big shift.
Yeah, calling this a trend would be stretching this a bit. From what I have seen myself and heard from friends in other FAANG or other medium/big tech companies, a lot of
employees prefer to work from office and are not liking the current WFH situation. I know of one survey inside a big company where majority of the people voted for being in the office for at least a few days of the week once the situation is better.
I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)
I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.
I agree. I would quit. This basically forces employees to get another room as an office. If my employers pays for it, fine. But if they don’t, it’s bs that I’ll have to continue to work from my living room because we don’t have a dedicated office space. It’s driving both me and my SO crazy because we want separate spaces to do our work but we are in a studio/open 1-bedroom.
I prefer working from home, but I also totally agree with you. Especially since they got rid of the uncompensated business expense deductions for individuals in the tax code, they're really just outsourcing the expense of maintaining an office.
However, I fully believe I can build a home office that's better (for me) than most employers can, at a fraction of the budget. It's a more efficient solution than a centralized office, but it's coming out of my pocket and not theirs, so it hurts me more.
Of course, your direct complaint seems to be the square footage, not the hardware (desks, etc). That's a tougher one to solve for, because larger square footage is opex instead of capex, and it'll be more challenging to get your employer to part with opex dollars.
It's interesting that adding square footage is opex for businesses (leased commercial real estate) but often capex for individuals (purchased residential real estate). And then the capex is mortgage-financed back into a monthly payment that is effectively opex....
(Yes, there are larger apartments, but they are somewhat rare. Maybe this will change!)
Not to take away anything from your point: it is an interesting thought experiment. For people who have an intuitive understanding of opex v capex, it's also a very convincing argument for owning your apartment (since your mortage "feels" like opex, but is actually capex, and it's always better to spend capex dollars).
This is especially true in markets like NYC, where you might never reasonably expect to pay off your mortage (since it's a coop, or the principle is 10+ years of untaxed salary).
Would it matter the interest/equity proportions of the mortgage payments?
Also what about the other costs associated with owning the real estate (taxes, maintenance)?
In a word, yes, but oftentimes the factors you mention either break-even between renting and owning, or tilt the table in favor of owning, on a long enough time horizon. This is especially true if you're a high-income employee with a lot to gain from itemized deductions.
Interest in most loans is front-loaded (i.e. your payments are mostly "interest" rather than equity in the earlier parts of the loan), and you can write off payments towards mortgage interest on your taxes in the US. So, while interest is technically opex, the government currently allows you to treat it as capex, tax-wise, because they want to subsidize home ownership. If you aren't in a top income bracket, this won't affect you much.
Other costs are tricky because, in competitive markets at least, taxes and maintenance cost are usually priced into your rent, so you're usually paying them whether or not you own your home.
The big difference is that when you own the home, the taxes and maintenance costs arrive all-at-once (when your home floods, or the boiler falls apart), rather than amortized over years of residency. That's why mortgages are almost always "cheaper" per-month than rentals: rentals price these costs in, mortgages do not. If you have a good chunk of liquid savings and can afford good insurance, exposing yourself to occasional all-at-once payments are not very risky.
But the point was more about forcing people to WFH most days and then having to come into the office some others. It would be the worst option for people in HCOL areas because it forces most of the office expenses onto the employees. (And the cost is ridiculously high per capita for employees)
I still don't think it's about forcing anything. I think a lot of companies will start to give the option to have employees come in 1 or 2 days a week, but there is no need to force that. Tons of people will take advantage of it for the reduction in commute alone, and thus the company will still need considerably less real estate.
still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance
If you don't have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.
The average American spends 4.3 hours per week commuting. If you go into the office every day, that gives you a 26.1 minute commute radius. If you go into the office twice a week, now your commute radius extends out to an hour.
Take a map around the office where you work. Look at the kinds of home prices you can find an hour out. See how much closer you can be to nature or other particular amenities that matter to you. Would you like to have those with zero total change to your commute time?
It's absolutely huge in Austin. There is a very high correlation between distance from downtown and housing prices because our traffic is so abysmal and our public transportation is a joke. Price for "equivalent" houses 5 mins from downtown vs. 35 mins from downtown is 2x minimum.
Yet, many workers prefer it. For example, my team is 18 persons fully in-office and 4 fully remote (I'm one of the latter). We've been all fully remote for two months now, and today the manager asked: what do you think about making this permanent? And all the 18 colleagues agreed that their preferred solution would be partial remote.
People like their socialization at work. Many also like living in the city anyway (granted, most of my colleagues are young and childless). And outside of extreme cases like SF, a tech salary is enough to rent a decent apartment.
This is already a pretty common situation for many companies (in NYC). A 1 hour+ commute to be more tolerable if you only have to do it twice a week. Fully remote companies, you might see your coworkers in person once a year. That's a big leap for a lot of places to accept.
Yeah I just took a WFH job and if I HAD to be near one city that would really limit my flexibility and is a huge negative. My company does bi-yearly get-togethers, or did.
I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional / mental health stress due to the current scenario.
I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now.
In short I hope companies don't use this interlude to evaluate WFH productivity, because I think it isn't the best representative.
As a childless person with a great home office, this is exactly how I felt being forced to work in an open floor plan office. There was no time to concentrate on my work unless I got in early or stayed late. There were constant distractions from the crush of people around me. I would take the distraction of a couple of children over 100s of my colleagues elbow-to-elbow any day.
Could you imagine how rad it must be to work from home without kids?
My wife and I both work full time with a 3yo at home, so rather than put him in front of a screen we work in shifts - one of us does 6:30 ᴀ.ᴍ. to 12:30, then we switch until 6:30. It's really tough.
What about when this is over and you have access to your regular childcare?
I imagine a thoughtful approach to “everybody WFH” would include a coworking space credit if needed, a stipend to equip one’s home office if needed, etc.
“My home is too small / distracting / I like to be near people” => coworking space
Personally - I'm thankful for you. The parents with kids at home are dragging down the average amount of work done. So - the rest of us look good in comparison - or my preferred choice - I get to work less. :) I just blame corona for lower productivity - not the fact that I hate my employer and am actively looking for a new job.
My partner is home and doing most of the stuff with the children, which is great... but it's still going on in the background. With lots of conflict. Two kids -- including an adolescent going through some serious adolescent stuff right now -- and a border collie rampaging around the house.
> work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out
The ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm.
> Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted
In my experience, working at home isn't much different from working at work. If you don't have a private office with a door, it's going to be very challenging to focus regardless of whether you're sharing space with your coworkers or your family. Long ago I worked in a cube farm that had the depressing gray regularity of a low-effort DOOM wod, and I'm not sure that wasn't better for productivity than the attractive, high-end open plan offices I've worked in since then.
In a couple of years, my wife and I will be living in a different house, and we will both have private offices, cost be damned. I've decided mine can be as small as 10'x6', as long as it has a door and a window.
Yes, it is not representative at all. It's a stressful period, kids are always at home as schools are closed, the lockdown requires more organisation than usual in everyday life and there are less options to relieve stress.
We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.
My employer gave us the clear message early on that personal / family care comes first, take the time you need to deal with crisis, etc. And we have indeed had plenty of family issues to deal with and it's been very difficult to concentrate on work.
The problem is going to be when performance is evaluated -- no matter how much leeway has been given now, I will be compared in some respect to my coworkers who have been able to manage this transition better, who haven't had a turbulent home life, etc. etc.
>we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
I think it's very important to realize that if we are or are not productive WFH, there will be others who feel the opposite.
Working from home doesn't work for everyone, or it doesn't work in every case. Maybe it can be further optimized to work better for most cases, but currently it's not.
* Speaking as someone who recently started a new job two weeks before the government SIP for the Bay Area and has had to mostly virtual on-board and ramp-up. It has not been an easy experience. Maybe it's the on-boarding/ramp-up for my team that's not optimized, or maybe it's not easy simply because I'm not already a full-time remote worker already. Some people who enjoy WFH and get remote jobs probably don't have the issues I've had, and that's okay too. But I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone joining a new company during this situation to be properly productive through it and potentially WFH indefinitely. For my company in particular they've already mentioned we'll get to WFH for this through the end of the year.
The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.
I would consider a much longer commute to be acceptable once or twice a week compared to having to do it every day. You could still have the benefit of having a lower cost of living without increasing the number of hours you spend commuting per week.
I wouldn’t say that partial WFH is of no benefit, but it’s of significantly lower benefit. If I’m coming to the office once a week, I still have to live in a ~1 hr ring around my office. If I’m full WFH I can live anywhere.
The former opens up more options, but it only opens up a tiny percentage of the options that the latter creates.
I guess it depends on the invidual. Personally if I only had to do it once a week I would be fine with a 2 hour commute. Small price to pay for actually being able to own my own home.
Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week "meeting day" but really try to focus on socializing than "this is the day we do all our meetings" since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)
I've done this in the past - I live in Portland, and worked with a firm in Mount Vernon, WA, which is about three and a half hours north, one way. I didn't go in every week, more like a few days a month staying in a hotel, but I found it very agreeable. I quite enjoyed having a few days to collaborate intensively and then private time to finish the detail work.
That said, I'm notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I'm probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we'll see about 20% of people who won't want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I'm really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn't work well for some people.
Are you kidding? Traveling economically by air is one of the worst travel experiences you can have. If you're going to do it weekly, then it needs to be relatively cheap to make it worthwhile. Don't forget, too, that if this does become the norm, companies will start decreasing comp to make up for not having to pay people to live in high CoL areas. In terms of comfort, I'd rather stand on a BART train than fly for an hour.
I don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
I've known a person or two who flew twice weekly to commute. Honestly I rather an hour flight twice a week than commute an hour each way 5 days a week on BART.
> people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office.
I sort of had this setup before covid: the company I work for does consulting and my coworkers and I will often be at client's offices. When we write our contracts we make sure to always designate Friday as the day where all employees come back to the 'home base' for meetings, catch-ups, socializing, etc. It works quite well, and we'd always look forward to Friday's because of it.
If I could continue to WFH 3-4 days a week and then go into the office on Thursday/Friday, that would be great.
I work for another pretty well-known company and management just asked us how we were feeling about a future were we could chose to have a designated desk in the office or not. This is crazy, our wildest dreams are being answered.
I quit a great job to work remotely 4 months ago after about 15 years of trying to do it. I feel like the universe is having an absolute riot at my expense right now. This is not a fun time to be new at a company. It's so hard to focus and sip the koolaid when the world feels like it's falling apart outside of my skype meetings and facing customers and selling products is the last thing I'm energized to do.
I think some of the replies here are misguided, I've interviewed (and turned down offers from) some well-known companies who were doing remote work and renting office space for face to face meetings 1 day a week while they were constructing a new office in my city.
Before COVID I lived this, and it's really the best of both worlds. You have one day a week where you meet with your coworkers and demo stuff, talk about stuff, grab some good food in the city, grab a smoke outside, ride the train. It's a nice "day off" as-in out of the ordinary.
Typically the company will then reassess the office capacity needed to provide enough flexible space and accommodate all teams and their needs. But there's plenty of time to do that, since you cannot break (or not renew) a corporate lease overnight.
Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.
> when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary
What makes you think this is true and not just a post-hoc rationalization? Let me put it this way: offer that salary worldwide and you will still have difficulty finding top-tier talent, as many remote-first companies are finding out the hard way. Having been a hiring manager in such a position before, I will tell you that you are still competing against every other remote tech company to find and hire from the same global talent pool.
Secondly, you're not accounting for communication ease and timezone differences. A huge amount of the world is cut out if you optimize for remote candidates within +-1-3 TZs.
Finally, the assertion that the average valley firm doesn't need a $200k+ in 2020 USD terms engineer is also not necessarily true. Demand for senior talent is significantly higher than for mid range and junior talent, because mid-large size firms want it (to bolster their senior roster and make it easier for teams to subdivide), and small firms absolutely need it (they simply do not have a senior engineer and need at least one).
The current gig I've got, if they'd had a senior engineer - even as an advisor - from the outset, basically the last ~8 mo of work split between myself and a different senior engineer would have been unnecessary.
I wasn’t asserting or claiming one way or the other. I’m asking the question. Your response assumes some stance I might have - I don’t. I found your response pretty unpleasant and combative even though there is truth in what you’re saying.
> I wasn’t asserting or claiming one way or the other.
You verbatim asked "why pay $200k for a software engineer same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary" and you got a response. If you think there's truth in what I'm saying but find that response "unpleasant and combative", I have two suggestions for you:
1. Communicate more clearly. If you are meaning to express an argument rhetorically or as a "devil's advocate" but it's easy to misinterpret your statement as if you simply support it, consider rewriting your comment for clarity.
2. Rethink your premises. If you actually do believe what it is you're saying, consider that you're the argument of "same talent for 1/3rd of the price" is the original offshoring argument, which has well known conceptual issues.
If you're more thoughtful about checking your assumptions when you could be wrong, it will be much less likely that you end up in a situation where you find yourself saying "Gee, I found so and so's response unpleasant and combative, even though there is truth in what you're saying." If you put your hand on the stove, do you criticize the stove, or do you realize that maybe it was a mistake to put your hand there and then move it away?
I accept the first suggestion - yep, should have be more clear. I reject the second one - now that's just pedantry.
My feedback is to learn how to write in third-person grammar [1]. It is one of the most important skills in effective communication and it puts the issue at the forefront.
If you only meant the statement as a rhetorical device or devil's advocate then the second part doesn't really apply to you. For what it's worth, I do think there's value there, so here's how I would have phrased that statement if you're curious:
"The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area. From a company's POV, if they have to pay a 2x premium for the local talent, what are they getting for that price, if anything?"
First of all, I switched around the order so you're leading with your priors. This sequence makes it clear that the statement "what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area" is not your conclusion, but your starting point. I phrase the second sentence that way rather than "same for 1/3rd of the price" because it focuses on why people are _already_ paying the extra money when they could buy the cheaper "substitute" product rather than leaving unquestioned the presumption that the two are substitutable.
Sorry if this advice is unwarranted, but given that you've clarified what your intentions were from your post, I think the underlying curiosity is still pretty valuable, and I believe it's worth exploring. I would just personally take a different stylistic approach as described to explore it.
Remote positions are not monolithic. Some are highly selective and highly compensated. Others are the opposite. If you're looking at a random cross section of the global remote opportunity pool, you're likely going to see reversion to mean that reflects that.
Upvoted because you ask a great question. I'm just speculating here, but here are a couple points for further questioning:
1) How many people transfer to rather than from the Europe or India office? I'd wager that it's mostly in one direction, which is towards the higher wages.
2) Are RSU grants are adjusted downwards after the transfer? I believe the answer is no. Which means that the total package is not decreasing significantly until cliff.
3) What's the pre-existing financial situation for folks that move towards a lower CoL area? If you've already made a significant enough amount of earnings in the US that you could survive off of them in your destination, the base salary is going to matter a lot less.
4) Is there lateral incentivization in terms of trajectory? If you get to start a new office in a different country (or head a new team or something along those lines), the clout you develop long term may be enough to balance out the temporary salary loss, as when you return back to your origin country, you could have leveled up substantially and retain your level. You're effectively engaging in arbitrage here.
Suffice to say, I don't have a great answer, but I will note that this is a pretty specific exception, enough to make me repeat that platitude that "it's the exception that proves the rule."
Isn't this a win-win-win though? Salaries become more normalized across the country so people can work from where they choose, SF rents will go down as techies start streaming out of the Bay Area, hiring pools for companies become inclusive of people who don't want to move to the Bay Area (or the other 2-3 tech cities).
The rest of the country also certainly doesn't pay 1/3rd of your salary.
Will people start streaming out of the Bay Area, though? The thing that always interested me about the Bay Area was that my friends in Mountain View would be posting long bike rides throughout the winter. Where it's snowy and below freezing in New York, it's 55 degrees and sunny there. I imagine people like that a lot, and is part of the reason it's a popular place to live.
There are other places in the US that are warm in the winter, of course, but less of them are also nice in the summer. Then among those, very few of them match the Bay Area in friendliness to things like LGBT causes.
I have a feeling that many people will continue gravitating to the Bay Area.
Is the Bay Area unique in the US for being progressive, relatively walkable/bikeable, and having great weather?
This is a sincere question, by the way. (It's also a practical one - I just accepted a fully remote position, and I'd move to the Bay Area in a heartbeat if it weren't so expensive.)
I think its too progressive where you cannot be a centrist or people will look at you like they look at centrists in alabama.
Bay area has one of the most closed minded people when it comes to politics. Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) talked about it in his interviews with Joe Rogan and such - how do we make sure that voices across the spectrum are represented on Twitter and just not what silicon valley thinks is acceptable? There is definitely bias.
I don't want to open a can of worms, but I personally don't like living in the bay area.
If by unique you mean in the vast minority, yes, if the only one, then no. Bay Area isn’t really walkable as it’s really vast. Mostly just San Francisco.
If you remove the requirement of having to commute into the Bay Area, finding a place where you can bike every day of the year just becomes even easier. The American Southwest probably has a dozen places that are LGBT friendly and you can bike all year in beautiful nature. For half or less rent.
If it's anything like Seattle, there are great and beautiful communities a few hours away - you get the same weather and even better nature but it's too far to commute. And they're a lot cheaper.
But isn't the rest of the world coming around on LGBT causes as well, and that you don't have to live in NYC or SF for LGBT friendliness? So I think most cities with decent weather is viable.
I wfh and I won't work for a company that bases my pay on my zipcode (Gitlab). I want complete flexibility on where I live. There are plenty of remote companies that don't do that, especially now post-covid.
I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.
I'm with you. GitLab would be near the top of my employer targets if not for their bizarre location-based salaries. I want a remote-work job in large part so that I can move around. I relocate every 2-3 years, all over the US and internationally. If I get hired in the NYC area I'm not willing to take a 50% paycut because I want to spend a year living somewhere else.
Their calculations and reasoning are completely irrational. Rent is more a lot more in NYC, but utilities are the same; medical costs are the same; groceries are roughly the same (I found them cheaper in Manhattan than in nearby suburbs); you don't own a car (or two, as a couple); you don't have the expense of maintaining a large home and yard; etc. It costs a lot to live in NYC, but you can't compare the rent on a 1BR NYC apartment with a 1BR suburban apartment and say it's three times as expensive. It's a completely different lifestyle, and the choice for people like me is between a shoebox in the city with the perks of city life, or a comfortable 3BR home with a yard in the suburbs and a car and maybe a swimming pool or a boat or something. It's not a cheaper life, it's just a different life.
Is this a popular thing inside of gitlab? Personally, I'm conflicted: it's an interesting experiment, and I get where it comes from, but it's perhaps a bit too nearsighted.
In the end, I think zipcode (and COL) is a weak proxy for talent. It's very easy to measure zipcode, compared to talent.
But, think about it from the other angle: if you have a history of this talent (earning high salaries in high-COL zip codes or otherwise), why on earth would you accept anything less than that, when moving to a lower COL area?
To me, it seems like a decision that would hurt the employer more than help them, since the people with proven talent would work for companies that don't discriminate on zip codes. And that costs more than the investment in assessing incoming talent levels.
Gitlabs salaries are historically low compared to what I'd expect, but their talent is also much more global than a lot of big tech corps so while you won't find someone from CA expecting a "high" CA salary there you'll find a lot of great global talent that probably has a more difficult time working at a $big_name since they might not have offices in their country.
None of the salaries I've seen there seem remotely "senior/architect" level if you want Bay/WA talent.
My company generates revenue and my talent directly affects the revenue. The salary that you give me is correlated to that revenue that I help to generate. The company figured out my value when they made me an offer.
My location during any of this transaction bears absolutely zero significance. If I'm worth $300k to generate $5mill for you don't worry about whether I'm living in NYC or on a ranch in Wyoming.
If you're willing to take $60k for a remote job you can make $160k at because that's the actual global market value you're doing all of us in the field a disservice by working for the low COL wage. It's bad enough salaries have barely risen for other fields since the 70s. Our field can work anywhere but we need to make sure we don't let our salaries slide by letting the Gitlab style take hold.
Often on hn I see people thinking they need to take a pay cut to work remotely. You don't! Same thing.
Agree 100%. Same employee, working remotely, but they move somewhere else? Great, we pay them less even though it affects their performance in no way at all. Makes sense /s
When I was looking for remote work I had hard time finding any offer beyond 60k.
Don't forget that there's a really high competition among applicants so someone will take those 60k offers. And when it's 8-10x their average salary in their home country, then you can't really blame them.
I live in Barcelona which is almost on par with Madrid. My plan for my next job is to get a remote job with Barcelona salary, then move to Canary Islands which is much cheaper but way nicer.
I'm not really serious, I can probably get a better offer from a US company, but it still irks me.
Yep. Gitlab's salary formula is publicly available. You can go take a look. I'm currently in the bay area, but I would love to permanently move to Southern Oregon (where I already own a house). Gitlab's salary is normalized to the bay area (i.e. the bay area gets a 1x multiplier). If I wanted to do the exact same job from Oregon, my hypothetical salary at Gitlab would arbitrarily get multiplied by 0.6x... and that's why I'm never going to apply to Gitlab.
I think you have things the wrong way around. If you are able to pass the interview bar for a selective company that pays market rate in a tier-1 tech city, then yes, you get to move. But, if you don't, you won't get the job whether you move there or not.
No they're saying for a Gitlab employee moving to a higher COL area is essentially getting gitlab to pay for the mortgage (assuming the higher wage actually covers the increased mortgage of course).
Adjusting by CoL is only good for the employer, if a worker is worth X working remote in SF they're worth the same amount in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah I get it, I just don't buy it. Move to a higher COL area, and you tend to get access to a market with expanded labor demand. So, it's $HIGHER_COL_MARKET_EMPLOYER (or $HIGHER_COL_MARKET if you catch my drift) increases your wages which pays for your mortgage.
But the competition tends to be fiercer in a higher COL area, so you are still not guaranteed even a median pay job in that area if you cannot get it. Many do not. The "higher COL area = higher pay" equation seems magical except it hides that it also includes higher competition.
But we're specifically talking about someone who already has a job at Gitlab here and how the CoL adjustment affects them and the weird situation it creates, so the competitiveness doesn't really matter, they've already got the job.
> But we're specifically talking about someone who already has a job at Gitlab here and how the CoL adjustment affects them and the weird situation it creates, so the competitiveness doesn't really matter, they've already got the job.
Of course the competitiveness matters. It informs the level of optionality and leverage they have to negotiate. I would say that it's the only thing that matters. What about the CoL adjustment is weird besides it being reflective of the somewhat ugly and distasteful truth that to the company, you are a human resource and fungible cog? That's what they're paying for.
This employee will have to think about what happens if they do not come to a favorable agreement with their employer. Their BATNA completely depends on 1) the demand of other firms in the area (or remotely) and 2) their relative ability to compete. If they can perform well enough to move to a competing employer in the same locale that pays better, they will.
This is a good list and lets you know if they're globally competitive or not. I'm not sure how much it's been maintained since covid so ymmv; https://github.com/yanirs/established-remote
I work for places that pay me for what I'm worth, I don't work for places that pay me based on where I live.
I'm not cranking out code that is somehow less effective while living in the NW England, and so to pay me less than someone else is downright insulting.
I also, to be clear, don't have any hard feelings about people who live in even cheaper[0] places than me, it's their choice. I used to work with a guy in the Phillipines who was on the same as me. Good for him!
[0] It's not that cheap in the NW England. It's clearly not SF, NY or London, but it's not cheap.
How do I find a job that pays me top dollar independent of where I live? I'm a software engineer in a lower cost of living area of the US and I've considered moving to the bay area because wages stagnate here pretty early on in your career, and are generally far lower than in other areas of the world.
Reputation is a thing. You don't have to kill yourself, but the industry isn't that big, so getting a reputation for being a slacker isn't going to help.
- Be a nice guy/gal
This can be a reputation thing too. No-one that is worth hanging out with expects you to drink, or stay out late if you don't want to, but the more you get to know people and the more pleasant to be around as a person you are the more likely you are to succeed. Meeting people if you can (conferences, meetups etc.) and convincing them that you are a nice person (bonus points if you are) can kinda remove the first stage of interview.
An ex co-worker invited me and a friend round for dinner a couple of years back while we were travelling. It wasn't some polo-shirts-tucked-into-slacks and golf networking type thing, he just did it out of the kindness of his heart. I remember that, it's good for people to remember you like that too.
- Convince people you are smart
Being smart is one thing, but you have to market yourself too. Don't be obnoxious about it, but don't hide it away. This can be anything from emailing/slacking the company "Hey, check out this cool thing I did that you might be interested in" to just chipping intelligently (but respectfully, see the nice thing) in conversations/meetings. Going to conferences and talking intelligently to people about stuff helps, or the harder route, contributing towards open source. "I have three rails commits" a lot more impressive than "I have no rails commits" (if you're into Rails, check out the Rails github issue tracker, you can literally create PRs and get them merged).
- Take an interest in people, and listen
Even if it's hard, like it is for me.
- Focus your attention in the right places.
Like on upcoming or hard to hire for technologies that smart people are starting to use but that aren't ubiquitous yet. No-one with a "bums on seats" mindset is going to consider a remote PHP or JS dev if they tripped over 5 walking from their car to the office that morning. For me this was Rails. It's still hard to hire Rails devs and that means that companies are having to consider remote people, and the wages are good.
Go is another wave. Popular, used by some smart people, hard to hire for. There are others I'm sure.
- Apply anyway
Just like it's totally possible to get a job that asks for a degree when you don't have one (my first job ever for instance), you can apply for jobs that don't allow remote then ask to work remote. Let them tell you no if they want (don't get too invested of course), but I've worked at companies that have tried to fill spots for over a year, good developers for a lot of technologies are hard to find, and at a certain point companies that aren't friendly to remote working, with the right candidate right there, but who wants to work remotely might just re-consider.
- Apply to companies that are remote
Gitlab famously pays location based wages, but might actually be a decent stepping stone to somewhere else. Shopify does remote, I don't know if they do location based wages. Basecamp pays SF rates. You can apply to all these places, and maybe be rejected, but then apply again in the future. I know that there's at least one person who didn't get into Basecamp on the first application.
- Meet people, if possible
It helps that when people see your CV they think "Oh hey, I remember ngngngng, they talked intelligently about threads vs processes at that conf". If you're shy, that's tough and you'll need to work round it. I was shy and worked round it, so it was possible for at least me.
- Become a contractor/consultant
You need skills that you can market to a company (I do Rails performance/scaling and upgrade consultancy, I made someone's controller in the critical path 1500 times faster and orders of magnitude smaller the other day, that's good marketing).
You also need to market yourself. Reputation helps, but then so does a website that tells people how much you've helped other people in the past.
- Once you are there
Make sure to tell people about your successes. If you're working at a company that is not fully remote this is even more important. "Hey peeps, I thought you might be interested in this thing I did" again.
- Have an idea where you want to be in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years.
Mostly this is about not letting yourself get stuck in a rut rather than having a fixed plan. Don't let yourself get used to the grind.
- I don't know, maybe do move to the Bay area
Are you young and single with no kids? It might not be a bad move. It could be a stepping stone. I have visited SF a few times and loved it, but then each to their own :)
Once again, this is I think what I did and I think what worked for me. It's all cumulative though, and I'm 40 now, and starting the local Ruby user group maybe 13 years ago was a long time ago, and a distant first step on the path to where I am now.
Short sighted? You mean, the area-independent wages I've been earning for the last 10 years or so are going to stop? I can't see that happening, if that's what you mean.
2. Your dollar value is highly dependent on where you live, that's just reality.
Only if I am doing something that requires me to be in a certain place, because that's where the value is created. There is a local market for drywall fitting in SF, and there is one in Bunghole, Montana. You can't make the CA rates in MT because you can't provide the value in CA while still being in MT.
As a programmer though, I can provide value wherever it is needed from pretty much anywhere I want to be. I'm not providing value in my house, here in England, I'm providing the value at the place I work for.
It's for this reason that I'd fully expect to be able to charge Polish rates to a Polish company, and SF rates to an SF company.
I think you're missing the context here, we're talking about remote positions. Maybe what the company expect to pay depends on where the company's HQ is, if they have one, that kind of makes sense. But the company's cost for an employee shouldn't take the location of the (remote) employee into account because that has nothing to do with the hiring/work whatsoever.
Yeah, I think that's partly my fault, I didn't go into enough detail.
If I applied for a job/contract in Poland for instance, I'm not going to stamp my foot and throw a tantrum because they won't pay me SF rates. I'd expect them to offer me Polish rates. I also wouldn't expect them to pay me NW England rates (which are likely much higher).
I've had a related thought: is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live? I understand that there are different cost of living factors for different places, but that's on the employee's side and should be none of the employer's business. If they employer can pay $200k/yr for a remote employee, it shouldn't matter where they live, and so scaling that value seems discriminatory to me.
Not really. I think we just assume that the situations where housing can't keep up with employment would shift the `income minus necessities` equation in our favor, making the massive assumption that we're willing to move somewhere cheap, or that enough other people are willing to move somewhere cheap, or just not move here in the first place. If the necessity of commuting to SF goes away, SF housing prices are less impacted, so it's more like Portland salaries in SF, and closer-to-Portland cost of living in SF.
The US Government, normally a very conservative org, has cost of living increases for federal workers and (I think) military service members. Based on that, I think it's pretty well accepted (perhaps incorrectly!) that it is ethical.
What if we took that thinking and turned it around:
The minimum wage for a McDonalds cashier in NYC is $15/hour.
McDonalds also operates in India, and hires cashiers that do essentially the same work. If the employe was able to pay $15/hour for the same type of work in NYC, then shouldn't they pay the Indian cashier INR 1,125 / hour? Or what about the other way around, why shouldn't the NYC cashier get paid at the Indian cost-of-living?
And forget wages, how about the cost of goods and services? A 4BR house in Columbus, OH can cost about $300,000 — but the same house might cost about $3M in Palo Alto. Is this unfair / discriminatory? The house itself might be identical.
I disagree with both of those examples because the physical location of the job/house is the important factor affecting the cost. In the McDonalds example, the physical restaurant is embedded in the community and partakes in the market forces of that physical location. In the house example, same thing, the physical house is embedded in the community and partakes market forces derived from the demand of others wanting to live in that community. The location of the job or asset affects its value.
However, in remote work, this is no longer true to the degree of other jobs (disregarding regional taxes, paperwork, etc). The job can exist anywhere and the value derived from it (all else being equal, like worker quality, etc) does not change.
> In the McDonalds example, the physical restaurant is embedded in the community and partakes in the market forces of that physical location
Wouldn't this be true of remote software engineer jobs too? Market forces would drive wages downward. If you live in Minnesota and demand SF-salary, your neighbor (who is similarly qualified) might accept a lower salary, and their neighbor might accept an even lower salary, etc until you find the local market equilibrium.
The difference is that the equilibrium reached from SF-based neighbors undercutting eachother, would be different from the equilibrium reached from Minnesota-based neighbors undercutting eachother, for the same job and qualifications.
The net result of that is that software engineers in Minnesota get paid lower than software engineers in SF.
My question is: how is this unjust? By your own argument, the difference in salaries for physical cashiers across the globe can be attributed to market forces. I'm making the same argument re: remote software engineer salaries.
I don't know that it is or is not unjust. I am suspecting that it is because the employer has an information advantage (knowledge of the employee's location) granted implicitly by government regulation (employment paperwork). It is not normal market forces. This information advantage doesn't exist in the same way for non-remote work.
That's not really an information advantage — the employer can demand that information even without the need for employment paperwork (ignoring the impracticality of that for argument's sake). An employer has an interest in knowing in which time zone their remote employee is situated. If there is onsite work to be done with clients in different geographies, knowledge of where employees live so as to be able to efficiently deploy them is also another use case. And finally, the employer can simply demand that the employee divulge that information through negotiation leverage — the same way that they can force an employee to divulge their name.
Also, this argument can be used the other way around. Why should an employee know what the employer's finances are? Perhaps the employer has the raw ability to pay an employee more (even if it's not economically expedient), but why should the employee know this? Why should the employee know where the employer is physically situated?
In every market, the employee and employer both have information on where the other is situated and how much they are able to pay / receive. That's not really information asymmetry.
Also, at this point, remote software engineer salaries are some of the most well published in the industry, though there is definitely room for improvement in salary transparency. All that being said, I don't think you can convincingly argue that ALL remote software engineers ought to be paid exactly the same, regardless of their local cost of living. They can certainly try to negotiate their wages up, but there will also be downward pressure on wages if the labor market is loose enough.
I disagree with the idea that an employer can demand information that the state does not require. If an employer asks for salary history, a candidate can simply tactfully say "no," and walk away if necessary. Saying no doesn't preclude working there (except in how it may agitate the negotiator). Where a candidate lives is not something you can convince the employer to negotiate without, because the state requires that information. You cannot have the job without revealing it. So I still think it's different.
Just playing devils advocate: is it ethical to pay someone SF salary despite them living in a third world country where they are essentially richer than kings and can wreak havoc on the economy/culture if they themselves aren't ethical (paying off government, etc).
Salary is not a number, its a "standard of living". But paying two engineers in two different zip codes the same number, you are technically paying the person in the cheaper location more. They have a much higher "standard of living".
My main PoV for this is it doesn't particularly matter to the business where the employee is if they're working 100% remote, they're getting the same value out of the same employee regardless of where they happen to live. Trying to judge how much a salary is worth to the person just lets businesses justify getting similar value for lower cost when they're already coming out way ahead.
> is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live?
It's not just rent/mortgage price differences, there are also different laws regarding taxation, healthcare and retirement.
On the other hand you can't offer someone in the Bay Area a Eastern Europe level salary. Nobody would come, but you can offer a slightly higher than average salary in E.E. and they would definitely come. It's just that a global company needs to hire in both regions to be competitive.
Definitely an interesting point. What happens when you are remote in one expensive city then move to a cheaper city? Does the employer need to know where you presently reside? I would think not.
the pay is based (as it should be) on market conditions, regulations and contractual obligations. Should not be based on ethics - those can vary in surprising ways.
I would be inclined to agree with you if your residence wasn't information you were required to give to your employer. It takes the normal market negotiations out of the equation.
It's like if your rent was information you were required to give to your employer. They could then make lower offers to people with lower rent, because the market conditions are now warped in favor of the employer.
Looking at the disparity of incomes of tech workers across regions, makes it abundantly clear that wages would be 50% lower if they could hire anywhere in the country, and probably 80% lower if they could hire anywhere in the world.
We've all worked with highly qualified offshore resources (as well as many bad ones). Do they really deserve that 20k salary when we're making high six figures?
I've started hiring abroad. It's a different form of management, sure, but you absolutely beat the return on investment.
My advice is to try to stick with the same timezone, and the same language (or roughly anyway).
> Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary
That is a pretty ridiculous assertion. Rent and taxes are higher but they are not $130k/year higher.
You can even save >$70k of the $200k you make in the bay area without being exceptionally frugal, which you obviously can't do if you're making $70k/year.
If i can work remote at facebook for 200k or work remote at google for 210k who would I pick? Salaries I expect would dip slightly as the pool of engineers grows then go back up as it gets more competitive. Salaries would only go down if the supply of jobs goes down. I don't think that happens in the short term.
Regarding raw talent, didn't Google, Apple, etc. form a cartel a while back to suppress the wages of engineers? I highly doubt wages are tightly bound to value output.
In my own experience throughout my career I've been both severely overpaid and underpaid relative to my economic impact.
Bingo! I often talk about how you can rent a 3BR apartment in my home town (Nowhere, Michigan) for like $900. This is true -- I've verified it recently. The drawback is that you have to live in my home town.
I can certainly see companies wanting to pay less based on CoL simply to make the bottom line better. Given the way capitalism works, I'd say this is a near inevitability. The end result will probably be that the big tech companies are going to start "offshoring" work to the Midwest, and other low to very low cost of living areas. ("We'll pay you $70k per year, but you can live wherever you want in the US!")
I can't see this being good for employees, because there are significant benefits to living in a place like NYC or the Bay Area, and those benefits would be lost if people had to live in the middle of nowhere to make it worthwhile.
Is it awesome? It raises the cost of everything everywhere else (because for the majority of young, educated people there aren't _that_ many desirable cities). We are already seeing that in places like Austin or Colorado.
"Desirable cities" for me, as a 30-year-old software engineer, include Brevard, North Carolina and Dahlonega, Georgia. Notably, that list does not include New York City, Los Angeles, and definitely doesn't include San Francisco (I'd quit a job if it required me to move there, without a second thought).
"Desirable" is a multivariate subjective assessment, not an objective trait (or even a mostly-consensus one).
One of the best DBAs I've had the pleasure of working with would, from what I've gathered, prefer to be in a boat on a lake somewhere in rural Alabama than to be in many of the major "tech hub cities". Being a software engineer doesn't mean you have the same opinions as other software engineers (as a quick search of programming language trends might show, at least on a superficial level).
There aren't enough people employed in tech for their escape from SF to raise cost of living meaningfully across the globe. There are enough places to live in (with no shortage of real estate), so bring it on.
And I think there'll be more desirable cities to live in in the future if remote work becomes the norm across fields where it is possible. People will start to liven up locations that nobody would otherwise look at as long as the jobs aren't there.
And, yes, maybe there are not enough software developers in SF, NYC, Austin, and other tech hubs to drive up prices, but this move will certainly drive down compensation. I have a hard time believing such a move would end up being good for workers.
If the scenario you're describing happens, some startups will appear and pay SWEs 160k/year to live wherever they want, and the good engineers will leave to work at those startups.
The fundamental problem (for the cost-cutting employer) is that good engineering orgs really do generate that much value.
This happened with the wage-collusion attempts in the valley. Facebook was willing to give more raises than Google or Apple. In the latest roll of the dice, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and friensd were willing to pay more. It's the cycle of business.
The market already included people outside of SV (big companies have many satellite offices). That hasn't depressed SV compensation because the best engineers cost a lot of money anywhere you look.
But in the end it is reality. The question is who is actually in a position to be able to modify it? Because, this rate was reached by the cummulative effects of many many individuals optimizing their decisions for their own particular situation.
I’ve worked from home for a number of years. It’s all about having a normal schedule. My family knows when I’m in the office, I am at work. There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
I've been working from home for about 16 months, and I'm afraid my partner doesn't quite get what a different head space I am in when I'm working, when she comes for a friendly visit if she isn't busy herself. I can seem cold and even abrupt, sometimes, when she comes to see me. But it takes so long to get in that space, it is hard to be brought out of it.
Ironic thing is, she also works from home about 80-90% of the time. Guess she inhabits that mind-set more easily than I do!
This is the biggest issue for me. Work puts me into a very different mindset(i.e. an asshole) and without obvious signs of when I am or am not working my wife doesn't know how to interact with me.
That’s really difficult in the beginning. Like others have said, boundaries are awesome. One thing I did that helped a lot is simply asking if I’d pop into their work to sit and ask a few questions. The answer has always been no. So I ask that they not do that when I’m at work either.
> There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
It's the same for me – at home, and the opposite at the office. I live alone.
Yeah, I think many people don't realize that working from home during a pandemic is not a normal work from home experience. Normally, that someone popping over your shoulder would be at work, school, day care or otherwise outside playing during most of the working day. A lot of people working from home today are responsible for a lot more than their work, which is distracting in and of itself.
Outside of all that, it comes down to self-discipline.
this is exactly the reason I prefer the office .. I have 2 kids, 5 & 2, and if I'm home they are very much used to me being around them or doing something together, working from home is not ideal
My son is 5 and he knows what my door is for. He still comes in occasionally but it's pretty manageable. The 2 year old is a different matter, but soon we'll get daycares back so no biggie.
It may seem crazy to some, but kids aged 2-5 can actually learn things and be taught that when a parent is in their office, they are not to be bothered. I have a 2 and a 4 year old at home, and they know what my office is for.
That being said, their games in the other rooms of the house are occasionally pretty loud, but is it really worse than an open office?
Yes, we watched my nephew from birth to just over 3 years old for 16 hours a day while I worked. He learned that if the door was closed it meant I was busy. At times when I had on music he knew he could come in and sit and listen while I worked as long as he didn’t talk.
Before this, I was just not able to work at home. I was always distracted and would only get a half day of work in at best. But finally had to actually buckle down and set up my desk. And set boundaries for interruptions. I could really use an actual KVM, but otherwise working from home is finally nice for me.
A normal schedule helps, but there are a number of other things which need to align in order for it to work. I'm guessing you have those things and take them for granted or you would have listed them.
A proper work environment is key, including limiting distractions and proper ergonomics. You also need co-habitants which respect and understand the boundaries and work rules. It really helps to have a house. I live in an apartment and can't control the distractions(literally as I hit 'reply' someone started a power saw in the garage below my office).
In person teams are easy, and fully remote teams are easy too. A blend is extremely hard to get right. If you are in a meeting and some people are in the room while others are beamed in via a projector, the remote folks will always feel like second hand citizens. Depending on what kind of person you are, you might have enough skill to still participate in the discussion, but it will always be harder than just being in the room.
The best way to do partially remote is to have even the in-office people dial into the meetings individually as well. This also means trading in your whiteboard for remote collaboration tools like Lucidchart to allow remote folks to contribute as well.
If you actually do this, then I find that over time, the in-office people will begin to question why they are in the office and slowly drift off to be remote, leading to a 100% distributed team.
If you don't do this, then the remote people slowly get isolated and cease to become valuable contributors, eventually either leaving to fully distributed teams, or coming back into the office. Either way though, the partially distributed team eventually gravitates one way or the other.
I’m not sure why it took a pandemic to make this a real option for major tech companies. At my previous company, the bulk of my team was in NY and I would commute an hour plus each way to sit on endless video chats and conference calls with people in other time zones. But working from home was frowned upon...unless you were a contractor, in which case you had to work from home bc there weren’t enough desks.
Your anecdote reminds me of the time a company I was interviewing at flew me half way across the country for their "onsite interview", and 75% of the sessions were me, seating in one of their offices, zooming/skyping with the interviewer.
One company did that to me twice, the whole while telling me that they never allow remote work and I had to relocate to Mountain View, especially despite neither team I was interviewing with was based in Mountain View.
The team I had the most face-to-face interaction with was because I managed to talk the recruiter into to allowing me to interview in the SF office, where some of the team actually worked, despite continuing to insist I'd have to move to Mountain View if I got the job, that "no one" works in the SF office (despite the closest thing to a majority of the team I interviewed with did), and that remote work was also not an option. That trip the worst interview I had in the day was remotely with someone with "regularly works from home" seniority despite "it's not generally allowed". So much about that interview I suffocated in dumb mistakes because I was angry about a lot of details about that interaction given conversations I had had with the recruiters immediately before and after.
The second time the team was mostly based on the East Coast (closer to my home than Mountain View, lol), the recruiter insisted I had to interview in Mountain View, and the only person I interacted face to face with that entire cycle was a different recruiter (terrible flights and bad traffic included).
I had a very hard time not feeling very personally insulted at how much they wasted my time with remote interviews I could have done from home without needing to fly most of the way across the country, continuing to insist that remote work wasn't possible for the positions I was interviewing when very clearly remote work was already the default if they expected people to be in Mountain View working for teams in other cities. It was not a great way to sell Mountain View to me as an option, and I was already quite clear with them that Mountain View wasn't a city I find interesting to live in, if I could avoid it. (Not that I could probably afford SF or even East Bay, but very specifically if I want to live in the Exurbs of an American city, I don't have to leave home to find equally carbon copied wastelands of strip malls, parking lots, and bad traffic just like Mountain View.)
Well yes, my experiences with Mountain View are dominated by these sorts of interview trips trying to "sell" over-sprawled corporate campuses to me for possible relocations. It's not exactly a tourist destination in any other trip I might take to the Bay Area. These companies clearly aren't doing a good job in selling it to me or why I would want to live/commute there.
(I can directly contrast that in my own experiences with an interview in Huntsville, Alabama that gave me a much greater appreciation for the Huntsville area's beauty far beyond "it's where we went to for expensive space museum field trips in school". It did help a lot with my interest in that position, though that wasn't a position that happened for other reasons.)
Tech companies are so focused on making their interview cycles all day gauntlets and grueling/wearying tests/challenges that so many of them forget that they are also in the process of trying to sell the interviewee on their company, their lifestyle, their neighborhood. If you are asking me to potentially relocate, then of course I'm going to be paying attention to every part of how you sell your quality of life and its surroundings. (Especially, if I tell you I'm willing to relocate, but would prefer remote work and would need to be sold on the relocation. I've asked employers to try to sell Mountain View to me and so far most have failed at making it seem like a place I would like to live. That's a lot on them.)
The pandemic forced it on companies. Before that mass work from home is a Decision that needs Metrics to determine if it was right and if it doesn't work or has issues it could be someone's fault with Career Consequences. Without something forcing their hands conservative managers would have continued to take the easier path of having people come in just because the default decision isn't questioned as much.
Working in the office had huge inertia behind it and it does make things simpler for middle management because they can easily just walk around and look over people's shoulders to tell if they're working on browsing HN all day or interrupt for some face to face.
It's strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100% remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike open offices, they're noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack, and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team. I'd be happy if we just go back to offices or even cubicles. I miss my cubicles with my mini-whiteboard and my own little corner with a desk with drawers. In the bay area at least we've been crammed into ever-larger open spaces like workers in a meatpacking plant, with smaller desks and more noise and disruption.
Get a large house, a swimming pool, a home office room with all the games and gadgets you ever wanted, a nice surround 5.1 system optically connected to a gaming pc, a nice couch to rest now and then and plan your code ahead.
See if you still miss your cubicle (nothing wrong with that, but just what i wrote a thought).
Thats my lifestyle since i starting working remotely. As summer is coming, trees are blossoming, fresh and clean air. My client is pretty impressed with my productivity and most of our e-meetings are held while we all sit in our gardens (most of the team is remote).
I have everything you list above, and I'm not swayed.
I still looking forward to going back to normal. I've never been the social butterfly who sees tons of friends on a regular basis out of work, and yet I enjoy talking to others. Work gives me that, lunch at work gives me that too.
Some of my colleagues are razor smart. I can have lunch time discussions about rocketry or special video coding algorithms or War time cryptography, just random interesting stuff that I'd never have otherwise.
Working at home has some benefits, but how many times do you really use that swimming pool?
That is true - I miss this kinds of chats and interaction. But our team grew up in the IRC days and we are used to long chats about such topics over slack. Tho indeed remote work is a matter of choice - doesn't mean we all have to enjoy it.
Re pool, i occasionally jump in during breaks, just enough to refresh my mind and have a clear view over why that microservice is misbehaving. I only started working remote 1.5 years ago and it may be the excitement of something new, but i am loving it thus far!
I may not like having a tiny desk crammed in a huge team in a loud noisy space, I do still like seeing my coworkers daily and attending meetings with them and going out to lunch with them. Working from home is isolating and lonely for me.
But this is only because you are now out of a sudden in such a situation. If you knew it was like this for ever and its up to you how much human contact you still get you can team up with some friends (or collegues that you especially like) instead of those collegues you got randomly assigned to. I have this that while my contract is running out right now and I am ready to work on something new, I kind of know that I will miss my old collegues and while I will certainly get to like new ones as well, there is something to it to keep up you old team for longer.
Or to put it short: Why do I have to switch my lunch group, just because I switch the employer. Remote does not mean you have to stay alone or with family all day.
I’m far from rich, but see, remote work lets you own a property in a much nicer, cleaner, safer, area than in crowded cities for less money than a studio. A remote engineer doing work for a high paying company can be the richest outside crowded urban areas.
I can't count the number of times, my team has run into a complex issue, be it a production issue or a coming up with a complicated algorithm design that would've been a lot more difficult to do remotely. My current team has 2 members that are remote only and one person who comes in once a week, or every other week depending on circumstances.
I think there's a lot of day to day work that is more productive at home but in an ideal world, you could have the best of both worlds.
What makes you say that remote problem solving is more difficult? I've worked in places that were 100% distributed, and we were able to handle issues over conference calls without much issue.
I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them.
I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
You can join a club, pick a new hobby, learn a new language, volunteer or even start a revolution. Be as social or not social as you want, but the beauty of it is that thats time you have complete freedom over. I choose that over contrived interactions with a random set of people who happened to do enough Leetcode problems to get in the same room as you.
The flipside is that it takes a lot more intentional effort, which many of us may struggle to put forth. The vast majority of friendships are made in incidental contexts: people you just happen to be around and interact with through the normal course of life. Many adults struggle to make and maintain friendships when they no longer have school forcing them to be around peers, and become very isolated. I think your interpretation is quite overly-optimistic.
Yeah. I'm pretty introverted but the number of good friends I've made in my life that I didn't meet through either school or work is exactly 0. I've never quite understood the anti-coworker-socialization sentiment here. For some people it seems to go beyond that they've given their coworkers a chance and they just don't like them; rather they seem determined not to socialize with coworkers as a matter of principle. Why would it be more likely that you're going to enjoy socializing with your neighbors or your disc golf teammates than your coworkers?
We're basically wired to become friends with people we're physically close to or have intense experiences with. You can imagine the evolutionary benefit to that.
> people you just happen to be around and interact with through the normal course of life
My experience in the military supports this argument. I have a few life long friends through this experience. Some of which I disliked initially.
Although, I do agree with the spirit of GP 's argument. You don't have to be in the office to be social and you get so much of your time back it's hard to justify the time cost if the value proposition is small talk.
You're describing the status quo before the crisis. We weren't suffering from excess happiness and satisfaction. It's time for something new. The new things are yet to be determined.
It is easier than ever before to go out and meet people with similar interests to you. In many places, even relatively small ones, clubs exist for climbing, sailing, all sorts of tech, chess, reading, photography etc. I don't buy the idea that people are so feeble that they can't make friends outside work.
> I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial"
Not all cultures are like this. I had a German coworker who would always complain about how much time we spend socializing at work (while socializing with us).
He would tell us, "In Germany, we come to work, we put our heads down for seven hours and work, then we all go out and spend two hours drinking beer together before we go home to our families".
> "In Germany, we come to work, we put our heads down for seven hours and work, then we all go out and spend two hours drinking beer together before we go home to our families"
Definitely not the case here in Berlin. All of my jobs here had plenty of post-work socialising, some even obligatory.
During work itself, people also tend to spend a lot of time in "kitchen area" or browsing Facebook, chatting on WhatsApp etc.
The "put our heads down for hours" thing is not something I have ever observed.
No, there's no age cutoff for Germany. The Blue Card (4 year work visa) requires either earning more than the national average for non-technical roles (currently more than €72k per year pre-tax) and for technical roles more than €33k. There is no requirement to show that the company was unable to find an EU Citizen, if the salary numbers are met.
Germany has a job seeker visa through which you can come and search for job in Germany. I think you need atleast 5 years of experience to get that. There are other ways to come as well( like having a job offer). I mentioned this in particular to indicate there is no age cutoff, since by the time you have 5 years of experience you are in your late twenties.
That’s what someone said someone said. But if true it sounds like alcoholism. But nonetheless it sounds like focus during the day, get that over with then focus on socialising. Maybe this is deep work friendly.
I mean, when I worked at eBay in San Francisco, going around to bars after work -- more than once a week -- was the expected way to socialize with your coworkers. I didn't participate, but that meant I didn't connect to the rest of the team. I didn't find the idea that people in Germany do the same thing to be much of a stretch.
> I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
There's practical reasons for that. Socialization centered at school transitions easily to socialization centered at work. Also, probably for the worse, many people have few connections to communities independent of work/school. Creating those connections can be difficult, and many of the modern solutions to this problem are aren't very good (e.g. various relationship-shopping apps like "online dating").
Forgive me if I get the citation wrong, but I believe I remember listening to Ezra Klein talking how for much of the 40s/50s/60s, communities were organized by churches and community institutions. I would easily add military service to this as well.
If you were a doctor, you would still know your community fairly well; whether they be a farmer or another blue collar worker. As we've replaced the prominence of community based institutions such as churches with elite institutions (primarily colleges and workplaces), we've isolated lots of people who aren't able to participate in these communities (due to many inequalities). Obviously these previous community institutions had major flaws (racism/sexism), but they still provided a shared experience that makes a diverse and broad social group easier.
This is a very important comment. The comment made too many assumptions about the "nuclear family" ideal for many people. Sometimes work relationships are the ONLY relationship for some people.
I completely get the sentiment of this; you can't pick your coworkers, commuting is insanely time consuming and you can most likely do most of your work from home.
I've probably been brainwashed by "popular culture" and the "corporate narrative" that they prob wanna push on us. I'm in my early 30s and my hobby is to build things, I've always loved that, now mostly software, but also hardware electronics etc. My biggest dream is to have something like General Magic or early Apple or some other startup building something crazy with a small group of people that are brilliant and driven.
Again this is probably just because I've been brainwashed, but I really don't see that scenario playing out over a Zoom call for instance: a brainstorming session on a whiteboard where everyone is excited and trying to solve a huge challenge together, building on each others ideas etc; It's right now just not how our zoom calls usually plays out.
I'm all for anyone being able to work remotely, and picking talents from wherever they might be, but I just don't hope this is 100% of what the future will look like.
The current psychological consensus is that critical thing (one of three IIRC) to build friendships are repeated regular meetings/gatherings with (group of) people, forced by some external factor (school, gym, military, office, etc).
WFH will strip 'friendship creation factor' from work. Definitely not to zero, but it will in effect reduce fun from work because 'working with friends' will be less often (unless you start work with people you're already friend).
I've been doing WFH for years. Some of my collegues I've never met in person. I still consider many of them "work-friends" and I feel satisfied with my work/social factor. We are still in repeated regular meetings, even if they are tele/video conference. In fact, thinking back to the last 3 in person teams I've worked with, I enjoy my job and team more with all of us WFH than in office.
The issue is not that you can't or won't develop work-friends on a distributed team, its that those work-friends have difficulty translating to "not work friends" because they may be in a different state/country than you and can't come over for a pizza and beer afterwards.
> I've been doing WFH for years. Some of my collegues I've never met in person. I still consider many of them "work-friends" and I feel satisfied with my work/social factor. We are still in repeated regular meetings, even if they are tele/video conference.
IMHO, the difference between a "work friend" and a "friendly relationship with a colleague" is "do you frequently disengage from work to socialize together." For instance: taking breaks together to chit-chat. I can't see how someone you're in "repeated regular meetings" with could quality as a work friend, unless those meetings are not work related.
I’m the team lead and I’m on the phone with my team members at least half a day every day. We definitely chit chat and talk socially as a matter of course throughout the day.
> I’m the team lead and I’m on the phone with my team members at least half a day every day. We definitely chit chat and talk socially as a matter of course throughout the day.
I chit-chat with colleagues too, but they're not work-friends because it's usually in the context of doing work (e.g. a few minutes of friendly small talk before we get down to business).
A work-friend is someone you go hang out with just to hang out or talk with just to talk. The main difference with a friend-friend is that doesn't happen outside of the workplace or work events.
Working in office is not equal to socializing, but face-to-face communication has great values, at least to some people. I'm just not sure it's a universal truth that working from home is a greater benefit to every employee, as so many comments passionately argued here.
Case in point, I'm an introvert in every way: hate going to loud places like bars to socialize, prefer chatting with small number of friends in a quiet setting, prefer staying home reading , think Americans' obsession with sports is insane (not that I don't like sports. I myself was reasonably athletic and was in school's track and field team for years), can't understand why students in school were so obsessed with being popular... You get the idea. Yet I'm still more productive in office, still prefer 1-on-1s in person, and still miss the days when I worked with my co-workers on a whiteboard.
Absolutely. If I could have one day a week in the office and four days from home, it would be ideal. That 1 on 1 connection ends up being so important, useful, and facilitates much easier communication using remote tools after the fact.
According to The Paradox of Choice[1], more freedom doesn't necessarily lead to more happiness.
Without choice, people can grow on each other. With friends, we move on if it becomes difficult. With coworkers we have an opportunity for personal growth. In a way, coworkers are more like family than friends.
> With coworkers we have an opportunity for personal growth
I read this as an opportunity to act like someone you're not, aka, conformity. With friends, I can be myself, and surround myself with people I actually like, vs trying to convince myself to like people that I'm around.
> With friends, I surround myself with people I actually like
There's a very strong correlation between how much we like someone and how similar they are to us. We like people with shared values and hobbies and opinions on important topics. Our friend group has a tendency towards homogeneity unless we actively try to avoid it.
If we assume that diversity of thought is a good thing, being forced into situations where you can't choose the people who will surround you (school, college, workplace) is probably a good thing. Seeing things from the perspective of folks different from us is the personal growth GP was talking about.
To me, this is the other way round. Since coworkers cannot leave, there is no benefit in being somebody else. The only conformity is towards the boss because it is a non-equal power relation.
The personal growth comes from accepting somebody else the way he is.
Friends on the other hand, also choose. So if I want to spend time with them I have to conform to joined values. It's a non-issue most of the times because friends are chosen among people with similar values. Still, when it comes to conformity, it's the friendship that depends on it.
I think this is the reason people's closest friends often come from school. It's so easy in adult life to avoid the difficult work of connecting with people who you don't immediately click with, and it seems like many people take this easy choice once they're out of the mandatory school environment. This is a problem I struggle with even in the office, and I'm beginning to realize how much worse it can be when working remotely.
Alternatively, my time is a lot more valuable than it was when I was stuck in school all day every day. I am not limited to where I can meet people. Why waste time trying to start a relationship that begins with difficulty when theres so many options that don't.
Agreed, I'm always surprised to see comments like the one you're replying to, and how often they're upvoted. I suppose HN tends to attract a slice of humanity that tends to appreciate casual social interaction a little less, even when compared to the tech sector as a whole. But in my experience transitioning from a very awkward asocial teenager (who would have shared such a view) to a slightly less awkward adult, I've come to really appreciate the trust and camaraderie you can develop even in the workplace setting. After all, humans have evolved to be social creatures and it's not random happenstance. There's tremendous value in being able to really know your teammates, to be able to rely on them, and to have them also be able to trust and rely on you in return. And a lot of that flows from basic social interactions that could be described as "chit chat."
Curious, do you have meaningful hobbies and activities outside of work? I often find that people who are so keen on social interaction at work don't have other things they are passionate about.
I am not saying I hate social interaction. If I had to chose between being locked in my basement and not seeing anyone and going to the office, I would chose the office. However, if the choice is between more time and freedom outside of work vs more in office interactions, then I chose the former.
Again though, if you are the type of person that highly values that in-office camaraderie, you are free to join a coworking space and get that. You can still commute and ask your deskmate how your day went.
Im not like that though - I like to wake up early, get my work done, and spend my afternoons rock climbing with a different group of people who are my close friends. The value I get out of this is way higher than building (often) superficial relationships with my coworkers.
Thats the nice thing about working remotley - you can pick what you do with your time. Forcing everyone to indulge in office socialization just because some people enjoy it is a disservice to those who don't.
Some of my best friends are former coworkers. Given that we work at the same place on the same problems, there's a really good chance that at least some of us share the same interests outside of work.
My family likes to joke that they can tell who my former coworkers are or online friends because they call me jedberg instead of Jeremy.
100%. Not only does strengthening social bonds with your coworkers make work more enjoyable it also makes the work product better. People that have the mentality like they're just a robot cranking out work units do worse work and they make their teammates worse. In many teams a moderately skilled engineer with very high social IQ is worth a lot more than another technically talented engineer with poor social IQ.
But it has an impact on your team's ability to deliver value over the long term. Social bonding increases generally increases trust and trust increases willingness to communicate. If I've had multiple positive social experiences with you over time (IE chit-chat), then I'll be more willing to communicate with you about technical issues as well. If you make me uncomfortable and nervous socially, I'm going to wait longer to bring up a possible integration issue or requirements conflict. Over time that is WAY worse then slower deliver of features in isolation.
Different projects and organizations vary, but I've been on teams where a "brillant" but anti-social person left (or was ejected) and seen overall throughput for the team shoot up. And I've seen people brand new to coding (and without much skill in it) still deliver value rapidly because they are relentless communicators. I've stopped valuing the former and started valuing the later.
> you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
This assumes that work expectations won’t expand to fill the space. I’ve kept pretty strict 9am to 6pm work from home with a 1 hour offline break to eat and clean and I still find the expectations creeping in, especially since some coworkers have migrated to other time zones to be with family.
Overall, given the history of labor in the US, I am sceptical that we will see an opening up of free time because of this shift.
I think there is merit to the point that the "forced" social interaction (of the office) is what makes (a lot of) people even have social interactions at all. For example, it was easier to make friends in school and college because of forced interaction; similarly, anecdotally I see a lot of friendships made among coworkers of mine, some of them became groomsmen/bridesmaids for each other at their weddings.
Having said that, I'm not one of those folks, and I actually agree with your points and I am 100% for remote. I am at a remote role right now and could not be happier.
I think the great group of work friends is largely an illusion, revealed by what happens when you leave the company. Very rarely do those relationships remain intact beyond basic career building/reference things. Some do, for sure, but the vast majority don't. This is a strong indicator to me that these are just "friends" of convenience, and are really just acquaintances and not the kind of meaningful relationships in our life where someone will have your back through tough times.
Working from home has many advantages, but to paint this as an advantage is a disservice.
First, that's a nice way to respect your coworkers that they are a random set of people who work with you because of their Leetcode skills.
Having work relationships is much more than get a PR reviewed, or asking for feedback on documents. Working together, involves interactions that humanizes your fellow co-workers. Since, I've worked with people before, now that we have to remote collaborate I understand the social cues, people can come stand-offish or rude, in remote meetings, because video and voice calls can rarely bring out emotions.
We went from cracking a jokes at the beginning of a meeting and chit-chat while walking to meeting and walking back from meeting rooms to more formal remote meetings, since people are concerned that they won't be interpreted correctly over a call (the fear is rightly so given video calls are inherently bad at this)
There's no reason to detest your colleagues, they're people with priorities and one of them is work. There's going to be weeks where you'll be spending way longer than 8 hrs a day together and nights where you will need to call them in the because of an ongoing issue in production. To dehumanize these relationships would be a great loss.
If you want to build long lasting friendships, you can definitely do that at work. I know people who have made friends on same and different teams, through work related happy hours and hangout casually now (meeting people outside your team is severely crippled with the current remote work culture), heck people get married to people they meet at work.
I have found that I'm more social (and more socially available) with my colleagues in an all-remote company. I chat with them day and night, regardless of time zone. Our kids video chat with each other. We listen to each other's music.
Rather than feeling like statues that live in an office and turn to stone at 5PM, only to reawaken the next morning, my colleagues actually feel more like human beings in this config.
The "best" solution is a mixture of working from home and going to a central office as needed from time to time.
How often will differ from employee to employee obviously.
My hope is that once this settle down companies that are able to have employees work from home without a negative impact to performance allow them to do so freely.
> If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
In practice we might just end up working longer hours.
It sort of did for us since we went remote. In case of that 2 or 3 colleagues I actually like to speak with, it's a shame, other than that, it would be ideal if I wasn't cut off from my other friends and groups.
Exactly this. It is much easier to mute a thread when some colleagues are having a slow day than it is to move desk in an office when those same people are having an all day conversation as you're trying to work.
Of course you could tell them to STFU (perhaps in a more professional vernacular) but that can be difficult to do if you're not an assertive or confident person.
Speaking cynically, you've just outlined the case against a work from home policy. You intend to use it to reduce your integration in the workplace by cutting out an hour of smalltalk with people in the office.
Even the fact that business relationships are fairly shallow - all the more reason for the businesses themselves to encourage them.
Yeah but you still work at least 8 hours with those people. Every time you need someone to review a pull request, split work or bugs, collaborate, all those minutes you mingled or not matter
Why do those interactions matter? Surely the time you work together matter but why do I need to know where you took your vacation to provide useful code review comments? How is that relevant?
sleep takes 1/3 of our day, work takes 1/3 of our day. by your logic we have to fit all of our socializing plus everything else about our lives in that additional 1/3.
Socializing is just as easily possible when working from home. Just meet for a coffee in Zoom or Skype or Whereby and "video chat" for an hour or so. Those are usually my most productive meetings.
Why would I "socialize" with colleagues? I'd rather do that with communities I actually share an interest with. (If a colleague happens to be part of it, ok, but it's rare.)
For many of us, a workplace is a very small piece of our consciousness, and thus, the amount of shared interest with colleagues is bleak.
I think having a choice of being on-prem and/or completely remote is fine
But I'd like to mention that it seems like a few people are forgetting about how they met their friends in the first place -- for a vast majority of us, the answer is school, something we sort of had no choice over and were sort of forced into. I participate in quite a few forums and sub-Reddits, but how many of them turn into actual real connections beyond the digital ones is slim.
Secondly, in response to those that want to only choose who they want to hang out with -- the flip-side of that is group-think and echo-chamber-ism by not subjecting oneself to orthogonal perspectives...
Lastly, as people in technology, we have choices about where to work -- find a place that works on something that you like with people that you like. I have a hard time empathizing with those that say, "we don't have a choice". Yes, getting a job, as a dev can be a grind, but imagine being a musician or an artist or an architect. Honestly, people in tech have it best -- in all other fields you're absolutely stuck and we're here bitching about WFH policies...
It is good for your work to have a rough idea what your colleagues are working on and what they're thinking about. This eventually builds "gut feeling" about who might be able to help you with your current problems if you're stuck. Just chit-chatting with them seems to be an effective way of sharing this information.
This is what I worry about losing with remote work. I'm functioning just fine now because I already knew all my co-workers well before we started WFH. But if I were to go to a new company and start remote, I would feel completely lost. All the chit-chat can feel like a waste of time, but IMO a lot of useful information about the company is transferred that way. And there's no way I would jump on a video call with someone I don't personally know to just talk for an hour. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
Just to add a perspective, I work for a FAANG and we have no plans to go remote and will very much be office based. In fact, most of the company is yearning to go back to work. But our office space is pretty nice as well. I personally am sick and tired of working from home and can’t wait to return to work. I am tired of poor ergonomics of my home office, tired of constantly having to schedule formal zoom calls for every casual chat, staring at the screen all day, and not have any in person connection all day. My neck and back is hurting. And I am putting on more weight simply because I am glued to a chair all day.
You sound so attached to that FAANG office of yours. Use that FAANG salary to get a nice chair, a sturdy table, good coffee and a coffee machine. Home or office, staring at a screen all day ain't good for no one. And that weight is from the eating not the sitting. Try cutting that out a bit and run around your home, setup a home gym, do some pushups. And for fucks sake turn that phone off, shut that laptop and get some good sleep. I'm on my way to get some. Good night and good luck.
Fellow FAANG here. My WFH experience has been the opposite, but I do look forward to leaving the house for social activities of my choice outside of WFH.
Even before COVID I invested in a height adjustable desk, ergo chair, adjustable led lighting and a decent monitor for my home office. It’s made a huge difference.
I personally like that I can’t have hallway interruptions and can be intentional about my meeting cadence, frequency and focus time.
Sure I might put in a couple extra hours here and there but I’m also not spending those hours commuting anymore.
I think the biggest argument for me against near 100% WFH is the space cost of a dedicated home office. Ideally I would need another room for it to be long term sustainable. Right now I live in a small 400 sq. feet (≈ 35 m²) studio apartment in city center, walking distance to everything (including the office in normal times). Property prices here are at around 1k USD / sq. feet (10 k USD / m²). An apartment with dedicated space for my home office would cost me like 100k USD extra.
The only viable option would be to move out from the city, but then I loose all the other benefits from living here.
(Of course the total cost is the same or higher today, but it's taken by the employer. It's not compleeetley unthinkable that the employer would compensate me for it, but it get's really tricky really fast. I would probably have to pay taxes for the extra salary, and how much "rent" would they pay? Are new grads supposed to work from their kitchen table, or far away just to afford an extra room?)
One possible outcome of a more normalized WFH culture might be a dramatic reduction in rent prices for the types of living arrangements you describe, precisely because their central locations have lost a principal source of value (proximity to the office), so demand will wane.
Similarly, centralized corporate real estate is not going to be as in demand as it once was. This will take decades maybe, but it's easy to imagine some of these buildings getting converted to residences, increasing the supply (and therefore decreasing the costs of rent).
Instead of 3-4k/month for a downtown studio in NYC, you might see 2k/month. It'll take us a while to get there.
Conversely, one might reasonably expect suburban rents to jump up, as city-dwellers move there.
Rents might come down due to a reduction in demand, but that demand is part of what makes SF / NYC desirable places to live.
For example, part of what make SF or NYC a desirable location for opening a restaurant or bar (despite the high rents) are the respective cities proximity to high income wage earners and companies.
Take those factors away and the superstar cities of the world (NYC, London, etc.) become as desirable as your average city in the middle of the country.
I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And, people are celebrating how progressive these companies are. Twitter or any other company is not being benevolent by letting employees work from home, they figured out that they can shift a lot of their cost of real estate, utilities, and office furniture and equipment to employees. Will they compensate employees for allocating area of their home to office work, spending more on utilities, buying furniture and other tools for work?
Companies used to provide lot of benefit allowances for using personal items, space and time for company work like, home office, equipment, personal car, phone, on-call, education and training, etc. Slowly, slowly these benefits have been discontinued for everyone, except top executives, in the name of cost savings for the company, and such costs were shifted to employees. Based on such history of taking away benefits from rank and file and giving to top corporate executives, I doubt any of the corporate cost savings from WFH will go to employees.
> I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And, people are celebrating how progressive these companies are.
There are a million and one examples I can think of, of companies repackaging burdens as perks while cynically using progressive reasoning to convince people to go along with it. Unlimited PTO, for example. Unlimited PTO is not unlimited, it's limited by whatever your boss gives you permission for. So say it's de-facto limited at 3 weeks. If you had explicit PTO of 3 weeks per year:
* It's a lot harder for your boss to arbitrarily stop you from taking it, especially if the year is almost over and you haven't taken it yet
* If you don't take, it, they're legally obligated to pay it out
But when it's "unlimited"
* Boss mysteriously rejects it, or puts arbitrary constraints like "no more than 3 days contiguous"
* If you don't take it, it's gone
It's odd how HN does not reflect the reality I see.
I'm at a big (Google/Microsoft/Amazon) workplace and WFH has always been a last-resort thing. I can't even imagine my team moving toward this. Every day I do too many things in the office that are face-to-face. Drop by the architect to get an opinion about XYZ, drop by a PM to ask about their functional spec, drop by a coworker to ask about some comments they left on my PR. Get three people in a room to go over an ongoing incident that's impacting a major customer's operations.
All these things could be pings/video calls, but having done that for a few months now, it's just not as effective as being there.
I wonder if the "WFH" discussion on HN is simply silicon-valley wishful thinking, if it's only possible for highly independent contractors and startup-hopping tech bros, and if it will never actually work in a large workplace environment.
I don't mind when people drop by to discuss things. I may take a small productivity hit in the short term, but I gain a lot of insight into what others are working on, and get a chance to point someone in the right direction before they file a PR that I then have to review and ask them to re-implement things in a different way, which is way more frustrating than just having a quick in-person conversation.
The added friction of having someone jump on a call vs sending a slack message and stopping by my desk has resulted in a lot more tedious PR reviews where you end up having to explain your approach with a wall of text and then still having to jump on a call and re-explain the same things in more depth.
As someone who gets dropped in on a lot.. it's not great. Even when something productive comes out of it it normally has made some other work unproductive.
I work at an old fashioned, conservative, fortune 500 finance company. Our CEO recently had a town hall in which he said he'd done a complete 180 on remote workers. Before, he thought it didn't work, and that those workers weren't as effective, but that being forced into the situation proved to him that he had been wrong all along. He stopped plans to purchase new real estate and was expanding remote opportunities for the foreseeable future, covid or no covid. That's just one anecdata, but it's definitely not just tech bros.
I am architect and preferr slack/video - yeah it's more demanding for people like you who would like to jump in and break my focus anytime.
I encourage even stupid questions but in written form. Myself when writing questions half of then doesn't make sense (I find answer when formulating question). From other ones at least whole team learns.
To make remote/async work one needs to discourage priv communication but encourage threads.
You do all of those things because you can not because you have to. When I worked in the office I would routinely do those things as well, but I knew I just wanted to get up, walk around, and shoot the shit with whoever else was bored of their 3 grey walls.
It's not as effective because we are in a pandemic. People are working at home but also worrying about the future, looking after at-risk people, looking after children during the working day, not properly set up for WFH, dealing with neighbours being at home too during the working day, dealing with not working out, not playing sports, not watching sports, not doing hobbies and not socialising with friends.
There is a point where frequent interruptions are counter-productive. The good middle ground between productivity and socialization that I found was to be heads down except for meetings and lunch. I get long stretches of focus time, and also get to joke around with colleagues.
If this transition does happen (and that is a big if) then I can see winners and losers. Some people that currently thrive in an office environment may well struggle and others that have been suffering could see themselves become more valuable.
Maybe people need to learn to do this better virtually? In theory it should be faster remote than in person. You are communicating at the speed of light, if someone is ignoring you that’s a different issue.
My company is WFH right now, but my team is distributed across 4 cities anyways. I've mentored a handful of junior developers and it seems to have worked well, however, you really need a culture which supports it. Active video/screen sharing time, solid onboarding documentation, RFCs which describe processes, etc.
Good technical mentorship relies on organizational will to dedicate the time and resources needed to make it happen. Documentation(wikis) and tutorials need to be up to date, junior engineers need properly scoped tasks with clear success criteria and access to senior engineers to provide guidance. I don't think being physically adjacent is necessary.
Don't forget about the commercial real estate bubble pop, and potentially a massive pump in prices of family homes as a result.
I think that investors are going to be moving their money out of commercial real estate, and into residential.
Edit: to be clear: I don't live in the Bay Area, and I think the housing prices there could go either way:
1) People spend more time in their homes and spend an even larger portion of their income on their home. Having a "good" home becomes even more important since you spend even more time there, and prices go up even more.
2) People just leave the bay area. Residential prices go down in the bay area.
But there is a whole world out there that doesn't include SF, and I think that just generally speaking you're going to see an increase in residential home values as investors look for safe places to place their money outside of commercial real estate.
There are a whole lot of folks who would love to get away from the Bay Area if possible. The infrastructure is crap, the geography impedes growth and transit, the natives don't seem to like us, tax burden is high, real estate is expensive, and it's a major fault zone. I don't see how paying $1M+ for a 60 year old house makes sense, especially when there are still gang shootouts and high property crime.
If investors want to move into that market, they are nuts. I don't think you can extract any more money from residents than the current market is already doing. It's one more reason not to buy a house here - how much more do you think prices will rise? Will that $1.5M, 1400 sq ft house full of lead paint, asbestos and aluminum wiring go for $2M next year? Probably not.
I think a bit of both #1 and #2, I think you will see a large exodus of people from SF as it is very densely populated and you have people with many roommates who make very good money compared to the rest of the US. I see that crowd leaving for cheaper pastures in droves(#2). There are alot of companies that have positions that are tied to location, hardware engineers, execs, etc, these people will stay and that will point to #1. So I think the prices in SF will drop, and prices in the south bay will at worst stay flat and possibly go up as it is mostly single family homes and the companies in the area are doing very well, (google, apple, netflix, zoom)
Yeah I wonder if this will affect midMarket street development. To the chagrin of pols they might have promise further breaks to attract marquee tenants/HQs to these sorts of areas.
Downward pressure on bay area burbs because of people leaving, but upwards pressure potentially due to the exodus of SF as people start to want more separation from people. Time will tell.
Usually the salaries are based on "market rates" and explicitly do not consider cost of living.
This is why London jobs are not paid more than SF - the "market rate" in London is lower despite living costs being the same or more than SF (especially when in London none of the FAANGs offer free transport to and from work and property prices are so much higher near transport hubs).
Market rates are murky - I guess it is based on competition and who employs in the area. There is some sort of shared database that loads of companies use from what I understand, but they are flawed since they don't include a lot of high-paying employers in finance et al.
At least some of the Bay Area stuff is probably due to proximity of the main office.
At least, that is what was explained by a friend of mine that decided to stay at the Venice office - that it's easier to advance in all ways if you work in the Bay Area.
Cost of living looks higher in Vancouver than Seattle while salaries look higher in Seattle that Vancouver...
High pay requires a competitive job market (employer can't find anyone else to do it to the same standard for less) in a profit making industry (it's worth staying in a line of business even with higher wage costs.)
Honestly I'm quite surprised how little salaries at big tech companies vary by location within the same country. The bigger difference seems to be in opportunities for career advancement with more post-senior roles available at head offices.
There's also a talent gap. From my experience, a lot of tech workers in Vancouver simply couldn't meet the bar for the stricter US immigration. With the current stricter enforcement on H1-B and the lax Canadian immigration system I expect to see a downward pressure for wages in Vancouver as more of the B players are relocated there.
> There's also a talent gap. From my experience, a lot of tech workers in Vancouver simply couldn't meet the bar for the stricter US immigration.
Really? It doesn't seem to be this way to me. The academic requirements are, I believe, the same: a degree. I think in the US you also need a job offer (for H1B), but that hasn't been hard to get for a software engineer in the last 10 years.
The real "bar" for US immigration is a hard limit on visas, which are resolved via lottery. Your "ability" on winning a lottery doesn't say much about your talent for engineering.
Note: I moved from Europe to the Bay Area, I'm a bit familiar with the process.
The job requirement makes all the difference. In Canada, the point based immigration system will reward anyone with a STEM degree with points, irrelevant of the actual market value of the degree. My friends in those market tell me it's not uncommon to have senior foreign graduates incapable of passing a fizzbuzz interview. They often have multi year gaps in their resume where they couldn't land a job upon arriving in Canada. Contrast this to the US where for an application to even get to the lottery it has to be vetted by a business that's willing to spend multiple thousands of dollars to maybe get a visa for the worker.
There's also a lot of workers that simply can't pass the bar due to the Requests For Evidences required by the US government. As an European from, what I assume, a legitimate university you wouldn't experience those issues. Most of the folks who fail at this step will have back-up petitions filled at one of the satellite locations in Canada.
No. As far as I know, exceptional ability is really exceptional. Being a very senior engineer in, say, Google Zurich doesn't really qualify. For an O-1 you need to have received nationally/internationally recognized prizes; published media in major publications...
Right but I think many people just publish one paper at an international conference (they're all international) and then say 'look I'm an internationally published and peer-recognised expert'.
Oh, no. The FAANGs are competing for the group of people who are willing to work in a small chunk of California and, to a lesser extent, small chunks of Virginia, Washington, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. Remove those restrictions and the relevant group expands.
This is as silly as competing for men, or competing for US citizens, or competing for 22-32 year-olds. Demographics like that have very little power compared to testing for relevant skills, or having a visible track record.
A lot of us would disagree with that. Housing is so expensive that lots of talented people simply cannot afford to move to the BA.
Looked at another way, "talented people" are often smart enough to realize that if they do get the same salary, they net a lot more if they live elsewhere.
I'll bite, where, other than the usual suspects (similarly high CoL areas like NYC and arguably Seattle), or Chicago for the slim group of people working at the finance companies there, are making the same take home compensation as someone in the bay at one of the better paying companies (Google, Facebook, unicorns, etc.)?
You're looking at 160K gross for a new grad + the value of the various perks, and that doubles for someone with 5 years of experience. You're correct that for someone who wishes to own a home right out of school/within a year, the bay may not be the best choice (although working there for a year or two and then moving elsewhere probably is), but there are basically no other places where a SWE in their mid twenties can bank 100K a year after expenses.
That first sentence needs to be taken out back and shot. :-)
I agree that "new grad" is the best case for being in the BA. Once you're ten or fifteen years into your career and have a wife and kids, the downsides of the BA are far more painful. And if you didn't spend those ten or fifteen years building up capital while living in the BA, moving there later can be all but impossible. That talent is simply not accessible to BA companies unless it's remote.
All that said, my point that given the same salary, or even a modestly smaller one, you net more if you're not paying for housing in the BA.
Please no, I've worked for a long time to finally put myself in a marketable position for FAANG and other west coast companies. It'd be hella disappointing to miss out now.
well you are going to miss out on the gargantuan salaries, which will likely still have a premium but maybe closer to 10% premium instead of 250% premium, but if you like networking with people working on cutting edge protocols you still can
the cities and towns themselves aren't spectacular though. I mean there are more spectacular ones to immerse yourself into if you are really just trying to relocate somewhere intersting
If I could work remotely, I would gladly take a 30% cut to go live somewhere like the Netherlands. 50% cost of living cut from SF. I could actually have a woodworking shop too!
For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home. Does the company plan to let me live in the office if they let me go? Are we still doing Thanksgiving? What about a family tree, whos going to keep that up after I die?
But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it kind of raises the "sleezy car salesman" flags when I hear it now. Like my emotional triggers (family) are being used to get me to comply (dont quit the company, sign the offer, work 80 hours with no overtime). It irks me even more when I see people new to the industry eat it up.
I saw a bunch of it recently in social media from college graduates. Lots of companies who signed new talent promising the offers are just on pause and telling candidates they have a start date in 3 months. And then watching people actually believe it because they've been brainwashed in the interview by the "family" mentality. It just made me really sad about how manipulative workplaces can be.
"We are a family" is bullshit. You need to be a pretty egregious repeat offender to be ostracized from a real family. A company can fire you on a whim, simply because someone with a business degree sorted a spreadsheet with salaries in descending order, and you were in the top 20.
The more correct analogy is a sports team. Everyone works well together to win the medal, but it's much more pragmatic in that sense.
Perhaps back in the age of B&W TV, when people could spend their entire life with a company, it was sort of more true. You had that one job, you had your pension. It was really like a second family, an getting let go was like death.
I am beginning to see that nowadays, even full time jobs are becoming essentially contract gigs with better benefits. You should treat it as such anyway. Be professional, be good at what you do, but also be detached and non-emotional about it. It can end at any second.
What you take from a job is not that you were "like a family". What you take from it is the experience, what you have learned from your own mistakes, and most importantly - friendships. The rest is ephemeral like a docker container. Be ready for it to go POOF.
I recently read Netflix's culture doc, and they outright said they treat employees like a sports team - welcome to the team, perform at your best, you may get benched, you may get cut. There's no shame in getting cut, and you should be proud that you had the talent to perform at our level for the time you did.
My main takeaway was: fair enough, and when can I get into that interview pipeline.
I want to be on a meat-eating, high performing team with comp to match, and I don't want much more. I think most in the industry are the same.
That is actually a pretty reasonable take in my opinion. And refreshing.
Having been on [edit: sports] teams before, it can be a toxic situation or it can be absolutely amazing and life-affirming. It might sound cold in the language, but it can be so rewarding, so bonding. It's definitely a better analogy than family. Family is family. You can define it as you like, but nothing equates.
For sure! I've spent time in orgs that do this approach inherently, and it's tremendously fulfilling, more than ping pong tables and after-work beers ever could be.
Shared hardship and superior performance that is greater than the sum of a team's individual talents are tremendous motivators and a dominant source of personal fulfillment.
There's a bit of a challenge to get people to seek this environment out, but setting the tone from the top, as Netflix does, is a Step 0 to achieving it.
yeah I'd say the track record of ex-Netflix'ers, the comp they say they pay (top of market for your individual skillset), and supporting evidence seems to indicate they walk the talk.
There's something unsustainable about a "team" analogy... just as there is in a family one. Netflix may be the rare example where an elite sports team analogy applies, but... That can't be more than a rare exception.
Ultimately, sports is different just like family is different and the way those things work relate to those differences. Sports is objective. Work isn't. Managers, players & spectators all know if they're playing in the A-league or the local league. In workplace culture, implying that you're not in the A-league is taboo. Remember that "elite" means very rare, and usually short lived.
People seek out, form, or join teams basically wherever they go, in whatever they do. While every team has an introvert, every team has a lead that works to pull the introvert into the fold. This is largely the "leaders/managers self identify themselves." Or, the introvert that strikes on on their own to do their own thing? Well if they're good..... they end up forming a team to support it.
It's not about knowing you're on the A-league or not, or implying it or not. That issue, while you're correct about the taboo nature of implying one's team is anything less-than, is very besides the point.
It's about how individuals time after time find fulfillment from performing at your (company, in this case) local optimum, with a hearty dose of feelings and actuality of personal autonomy, lack of micromanagement, clear standards that are just far enough of a stretch to be able to be met, etc. The nerdiest of nerds on a CTF team or hackathon will give each other a high five. In turn, to your point, the best players will seek out better teams.
It's a primordial behavior, we all do it. There's a wealth of organizational/leadership science out there. It's a fun read that unlike many social sciences, actually has a pretty well proven lemmas behind it, which control for personality types across the spectrum. The military is a one great source of this, flat orgs are another, and everything in between still displays the same behavior (for orgs that do "well"). The behavior and incentives of A->Z people in high performing, high satisfaction environments tend to be very similar, just the implementation is a little different depending on specific org charts.
I'm not sure we disagree all that significantly. ;)
I didn't mean to imply that we don't work in, join or even thrive in "teams." I meant the elite sports team analogy is a bad idea, usually. That's the analogy I netflix is going for, I believe. They meant it in that context, as you said:
There's no shame in getting cut, and you should be proud that you had the talent to perform at our level for the time you did.
All this has to be thought of as a management philosophy, because that's what it is. A Theory Of How We Do Things Here." Most os the time, work isn't sports-like. Objectivity is one fundamental difference, and actually running things like a sports team requires it. Hackathons are done to create sports-like scenarios on occasion. Trying to go past that, objectivity ends up biting you. ... you'll end up with productivity measures or some other low-autonomy management style.
This was my point about taboo. It's an example of reality leaking into the metaphor, making it unsustainable. Companies mostly don't operate in objective scenarios. Contribution is very difficult to ascertain, especially for the kind of work that requires elite performance.
Ultimately, a sports team is the way it is because of what it is. A team of artists shouldn't try to organise like a team of rowers or a software team like a sales team.
Incidentally, many sales teams run exactly like netflix aspires to... and without much effort. Their reality is objective. A 10X salesman can actually earn 10X, like an elite athlete does. There are elite teams and it is prestigious to have a stint there, even though most don't last.
Well don’t stop there with the analogy. Give me life changing income, public exposure to entice lucrative side hustles, a union with 49% of revenue to employees, and an off-season.
I hear you bro then we can call ourselves a professional team -- don't even stop there! Let's dress as a team and wear a uniform too I mean that with no hint of sarcasm most people can't draw the line between casual and toxic but it's obvious to anyone with any real professional experience outside of the silicon valley bubble
For the average person, the amount of money Netflix pays its engineers is absolutely life changing. Even if you have to live in the hideously expensive bay area to get it.
Levels.fyi says the average compensation is...450k. But that's for the entire software engineer job ladder, so it's probably skewed upwards somewhat. Still, a median of 250-350k would still be a ton of money.
Even so, I'll point out that this elite sports teams pay more than just 2X-3X more than average ones.
For all the talk of "talent" in this industry, it doesn't work like a talent industry. Where engineers do earn major salaries, it's usually on account of the managerial element and not the engineering one.
Lawyering is a talent industry, for example. Top lawyers in top firms do earn on a scale as disparate as pro athletes. The top lawyers may manage people, but their high salaries are for lawyering. The creative industries work that way, obviously.
They pay top-of-band on an annual re-evaluation basis and offer an all cash <-> all equity choice. So pairing that down to the low end new grad scale at Big N ($150, $180k?), but getting that TC in all cash vs. the $120k base, $30k vested equity combos out there, is really life changing.
I don't think the cash vs stock thing changes the calculus much. You could just sell what stock you get anyway (I have mine at Google set to autosell at vest).
The athletes they and their victims are thinking of when spouting that shitty metaphor make a minimum of a million dollars a year, enough to carry them through the hardships of constantly fighting for their position.
I like the sports team analogy. The biggest gripe I have with some people is the "you are not my friend and will never be my friend" attitude because they have a strict work/life separation. It would be nice if more people instead thought of work like a sports team where the working together aspect could disappear overnight, but we're still friends.
I've worked with one of these people. Never attended a single off-site work event, even when it took place during work hours. And then he was shocked when he went for a promotion and it didn't happen. It was a topic of discussion among the management team and a big con on his pro/con list. Since it was a small company (25 people), it was decidedly weird he refused to take part in culture.
That said, culture shouldn't be forced. I think employees should be given multiple ways to participate to find a way that is most comfortable to them.
One of the harshest lessons I, as an introvert, have learned over the course of my career is the necessity of going in and putting up the appearance of being jovial at team and corporate social events, no matter uncomfortable and draining I find it. To do otherwise is to risk my bonuses and my employment.
An additional challenge for me is that I don't like the taste of alcohol, and having even a little makes me do/say things that I later regret.
So even when I do show up at company social events, I feel even more like an outsider. It's hard to stay engaged at a job where all of these team-building events / milestone-celebrations make me feel lonely and excluded.
It is a shame that group indulgence in alcohol is often the measure of how 'cool' someone is. More and more people are going 'straightedge'... My advice is just carry yourself with confidence -- don't shy away from your choices, own them.
100%. As a manager when we were still in a physical office, I encouraged small group lunches, coffee outings, walks to a nearby dog park, etc. Way too much company socializing still centers on alcohol.
I actually had to push back on our in-office boozy happy hours because a few team members were getting too drunk and it was making other people uncomfortable. My boss didn't think it'd seem "cool" if we put together a policy for how these happy hours should be handled. I don't work there anymore. :)
I'm also an introvert and at first found a lot of social events awkward. What helped me a lot was really internalizing that these people are just people and work didn't matter, these people are still funny to hang around with. In other words, really dissociating the fact that we worked together made it so I didn't have to put up some facade, I could actually enjoy the events and choose to go to the ones I wanted but not feel guilty bailing on some.
I still distinctly feel different whenever a VP or higher level manager joins, but when it's just my team it's a lot more comfortable and has led to a lot of friendships that extend beyond our working relationship.
I'm capable of having fun at these events, but I would still rather spend the time getting work done. I just consider these events an investment in building rapport that can help in efficient communication during the "actually getting work done" time that I prefer.
Well... "team" isn't even an analogy. It literally means a group working together. Sports teams are an instance.
OTOH... our gut-definition of teams is a pretty tight group working very cooperatively. It definitely doesn't feel right to describe Microsoft as a "team," family or whatever.
Anyway, I disagree... kinda. I agree that "We are a family" is bullshit, but I don't think "detached and non-emotional" is a viable strategy. We humans can't be detached and unemotional about such a major thing in our life. That road leads to misery.... which is where a lot of us are in our work lives.
You say that like having a business degree is almost something to be ashamed of, or a lesser degree relative to perhaps "computer engineers" and "computer scientists"
> No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home.
Research in industrial psychology consistently demonstrates that managers are extremely hesitant to fire workers, particularly when the human welfare costs are high.[1] They'll consistently keep workers employed well past the point where it's economically justified.
So, I'd say for most people co-workers are not "family". But it's certainly a closer human social bond than an arms length economic transaction in most circumstances.
There are second order effects to firing people. Even if I'm doing a great job and enjoying my work, I'm going to get stressed out if I see 10% of my coworkers get fired every performance review cycle. Sure it would be nice if people who don't carry their weight were replaced but in any profession where productivity is non-objective, that's scary.
I do not trust people when they use culture as a selling point. I made the mistake once, and did meet some great people, but I don't see a single one of them regularly. We ended up having a temporary job and basically just shared mutual trauma. I tried to stay up with the escapee Slack channel, but, it feels more like a support group for people who fled the same cult.
With that being said, I've made some of my best friends in boring coding jobs that only promised me money in exchange for work. It's funny now that people I'm friends from other jobs have met and mixed, that I don't even remember who I worked with where or what the hell we even did.
I can testify—from non-tech job at the service industry—that great work culture and fun colleagues can be a dangerous venue to be exploded by your bosses.
I was working with awesome people and had tons of fun as a particular tourist resort exploded in popularity (and revenue) while us workers only saw union minimum wage increases along a massive work stress with the increased work. We all justified still working there because we had fun with our work buddies, which was promptly exploited by upper management that had us work more for less money.
The moral of this story is: Don’t get blinded by good work culture. We still have our rights and demands as workers.
There is also a difference between a company/management and your peers. There's no such thing as a corporate entity being your friend. Having a boss as your friend... maybe isn't impossible, but is definitely complicated. But it's entirely possible to develop real friendships with peers, even as a group. The differentiator is whether that narrative is pushed from above, or whether it's something that naturally develops from the ground up.
I can count on one hand the number of actual friendships I formed with coworkers. I mean relationships that continue past the time where we literally shared an office.
Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans. Forming friendships in that situation is difficult because at this point many of those people have moved away for greener pastures.
Most of my friends are people I met trough my extracurricular social circles. Personally I like that almost all of my friends have different jobs in different fields. There's never work talk in social settings and I get a more diverse perspective on the world.
> Most of the people I work with are highly ambitious and globally mobile. Our average tenure is something like a year. People who have been at the company for two years are veterans.
That sounds like a highly irregular company. My last company, which wasn't very big (<100), had half a dozen people who had been there 15+ years. The majority had been there 3+. A bunch of us would go out for a group lunch nearly every Friday (not organized by management). We'd do group Halloween costumes and wear them to the office. People would have game nights at their houses and invite people over.
I realize that my anecdote is probably also outside of the norm, but I just wanted to illustrate how wide the range is.
It is a highly irregular company. But based on my experience there I formed friendships outside my work circles and that turns out to be a great thing.
I used to work at a <100 person company and most of those people had been there for years and a decade was common. I had a few friends there but those relationships stagnated immediately after I left.
I've worked at a lot of companies over the years and there are two people I consider friends today that I met at work. Everyone else I consider a friend is a person I met through social circles.
>"For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much."
I'm not sure if I'm in total agreement or in total opposition.
Family is an analogy... At the scale of many of our workplaces "tribe" might be more fitting. I'm also note convinced people quite believe it... It's more that they're learning the language of their new social structure, whether that's "team," or "family" or whatnot.
In any case, it's suspicious that we're using analogies here at all. Workplaces, usually a company, are the main social institutions of our society. Only the family rivals it. Why do we need analogies to describe workplace the relationship?
I agree that it's not a family. What is it though? A purely transactional definition doesn't work in this context. Your workplace is not your bank. You don't have to be emotionally vested in your bank. You can't avoid being emotionally vested in your workplace in a psychologically sound way.
So... going to the OP's point somewhat... Something is very broken, socially, in the thing we call companies. It's often unpleasant and for many people this lockdown is a reprieve.
I think work from home, as a norm, is a move towards a more transactional relationship with work. This may be better than whatever sucks about your workplace, but it's also got problems. We spend so much of our lives working. A minimalist relationship may not be enough.
I enjoyed the Office UK version, where Tim kind of muses on this pint at the end. Offices are a unique social structure, where we spend a huge amount of time interacting with others that we never choose to be with. It seems to me there is definitely some overall benefit there, and I would hesitate to say it can be replaced by spending more times on one’s hobbies.
I think I disagree though. I don't think it's replaceable, unless we're replacing work. With remote work we'll be replacing office culture with online office culture, not hobbies. I suspect they'll inherit some of the problems.
Where we spend huge amounts of time interacting with others that we never choose is what most of our major social structures are. Family, tribe, village, parish.
Work happens to be our most important social structure besides family. It the one that grants you your privileges and titles, so to speak. You can't just replace it with a hobby. Hobby's take much less of your time and have much lower stakes. To be more engaged with what's going in a minor part of your life than a major one.... it's not healthy, IMO.
I'm not crying over office culture getting lost. We can't get rid of it, that's the problem.
I agree.
I come to make money and build cool shit. Company provides money in trade of work. That’s it. Nothing more is owed or should feel obligated by saying that family shit.
(Rewarding coworking relationships is a cool plus I’ll take though )
We had something like this at work recently - a meeting in which all the benefits we enjoy were reiterated to us as if they were industry leading; not a single one of them in reality being significantly different to comparable roles elsewhere. So we have an app that can get me a free coffee once a month, wow awesome, I'll start planning that early retirement now with all the money I'm going to save shall I...
I think just as there are good salespeople and bad salespeople, we've got to do our part as job seekers to sniff the bad ones out. Some of those folks, rare albeit, genuinely mean to help. For me, a focus on company culture is super important but that comes with understanding that it's a business. And sometimes there will be tough business decisions that need to be made. I'd much rather work for a company who at least tries to foster good culture rather than one that completely ignores it.
I can tell off-color jokes around my real family. I censor the ever-loving hell out of myself when I'm with my "work" family. I talk about work, and nothing else.
You nailed it! I never bought the "family" argument. Fully agree with you. Work is work. We are not family.
I don't get it when I see people let go, writing extensive blog posts on how awesome the company "family" was yada yada. They let people go .. it means that they are only "family" for as long as it is beneficial for them. Real families don't work that way.
So for younger folks out there. Don't drink the cool-aid and don't buy into all these family/social bs. Always think about your interests first. And be ready to move on when your work is no longer beneficial for you.
I dunno, mine certainly does. My family extends only to where they're no longer toxic in my life. When they intrude and become a negative influence, I cut them out.
My gripe with the antagonistic "work is not your family" approach is it sends the signal that the people I meet at work will never be my family. That kind of sucks. Sure, corporations cutting people out aren't very familial, but there are other humans at the core and some of those coworkers do care if I get fired or am having personal issues. Unilaterally casting them out as a machine to further my personal interests is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> My gripe with the antagonistic "work is not your family" approach is it sends the signal that the people I meet at work will never be my family.
This seems like a safe assumption? I guess you can marry a couple coworkers in the course of a career but how else are they going to become family?
I don't see that as antagonistic. Work isn't your family. The purpose and circumstances are entirely different. It doesn't mean throw all your coworkers under a bus but the relationship is fundamentally different.
Ok I didn't mean literal family. I also think most people who write blog posts talking about family mean "our team is like family"? I have many people who are like family that I have worked with in the past.
Ok, from context it sounded like literal family so I was confused.
Still, I don’t think “work is not your family” is antagonistic and I don’t think it implies you can’t form meaningful relationships with your coworkers. I interpret it from the other direction more like “don’t expect your coworkers to be your family”.
This is probably just a matter of how one defines "family".
On one level there's my "real", immediate family (my spouse, my children). On another level there's my "real" extended family (parents, other blood relatives). On yet another level there's my "adopted" family (close friends, their children, etc.)
It's pretty easy to see certain coworkers moving into the adopted family category.
If the big tech companies embraced this, one of the big side-effects would be easing of the Bay Area housing crunch. If tech workers did not have to commute to work, they could move to other areas where the housing prices are cheaper while still working for the tech companies. As the demand eases on the housing, prices will fall.
I could see companies not going 100% remote but maybe having 1 day a week in the office. You might not be able to work from anywhere, but it would allow expansion into areas that aren't a soul crushing commute 5 days a week.
I work at a FANG company. And I would gladly take a significant pay cut and work at a less prestigious company, if they offered permanent WFH. I'm only in my 30s, but the grind of sitting in an office from 9-5 everyday, feels positively revolting.
Before the pandemic started, I was counting down the days to my retirement. But now, I'm actually enjoying my work a lot more. And during my 20s, I would have been absolutely ecstatic to be able to travel the world, while still working a full-time job.
To any non-FANG company: take note. You don't have the same level of prestige, and you certainly don't offer the same level of compensation. So how do you stand out in the job market, and attract the best candidates? Giving people the option to work remotely, is your best bet of ever competing with the FANGs.
There are lots of places that are full remote that will pay you less. Why not do it? I have been working from home for almost 2 years now and I will never go back (Didn't have to take a pay cut either, actually a raise).
Golden handcuffs. People in their 30s at FANG make 250-500k per year. I'd be willing to take a ~30% pay cut and work remotely. But every remote-working opportunity I came across while job hunting, required a 50-70% pay cut.
The thing I miss the most while WFH is the whiteboard conversations. It's nice to be able to drag your colleagues for quick tech discussion and go back to work. Pen is much faster than drawing diagrams online.
friendly suggestion, when sharing the URL it's helpful for the reader if you stylize it like the site does (collabUML). Otherwise it's hard not to see a misspelling of "collab album".
I often laugh when looking at companies solving the problems for working remotely, while you look into their job openings to see none allows working remotely, in this case, 7 out of 13 positions aren't remote, not bad but still surprised.
They aren't the only ones. We've always been supportive of people working from home anyway, but from here on out I'll be actively encouraging my team to work from home as much as possible. Apart from anything else coronavirus hasn't magically gone away just because we've passed the peak of infection.
Permanent and forever are different things! Twitter could change this policy when conditions return back to normal.
permanent: lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.
indefinitely: for an unlimited or unspecified period of time.
forever: for all future time; for always.
Permanent just means we don't know when some condition will change; contrast with temporary where we do know when it will change.
Forever means it won't ever change under any circumstances.
For example: a magnetized iron nail is a temporary magnet and will lose its magnetism over a predictable amount of time; a permanent magnet can be demagnetized, but otherwise should continue to be magnetic indefinitely; a forever magnet is not a real thing.
Turns out I dislike working from home more than I thought I would. Video calls and screen sharing is a poor substitute for real life, spontaneous back-and-forths in front of a large screen with no lag, compression artefacts and frame drops.
I've posted about this here before, but since the end of the dot-com era (for me, 10/2001), I've ONLY worked at home except for travel, and a brief period early in one startup when we had an office in a tech incubator about a mile from my house.
(We realized it wasn't worth the rent, and gave it up after about 6 months.)
Some of those years were very travel heavy -- fullish time on the road -- but for the last 10 client travel has vanished in favor of GoToMeeting conferences.
I love it. I love the flexibility of it, I love not having a commute, and I love not having dry cleaning bills anymore. The music in my office is whatever I want. If I feel like it, I can catch a nap. And I love being able to eat at home, where one can make MUCH healthier choices.
People SAY they'd miss the water cooler, but in my whole career I've only had co-workers I really really liked on a social level in one company. It's rare.
My current employer -- where I've been for almost 13 years, which shocks me -- is entirely virtual. We have no office space anywhere, and the closest other employee to me is about 4 hours away by car. I have colleagues that, until recently, I'd never even seen a picture of.
I get that not everyone is constitutionally able to do this. I came to it from heavy travel (even pre-2001), so I was used to working in weird places (hotel rooms or lobbies; airport bars; frequent-flier clubs; taxis) already, and I think that made it easier.
I also get that it's not even appropriate for everyone, and that our success at my current company is tied to the fact that we have never had "entry level" developers. I think it'd be super hard to mentor and acculturate and teach this way.
But as for me, at this point I'd have a very hard time going back to an office.
I've been lucky enough to work remotely since the inception of my career (10 years now) and I was afraid I might miss the whole office culture if I continue on untill the covid pandemic happened.
Companies showed that it's possible to have great office culture even remotely. My company started food/drinks tasting events, small pockets of communities developed around hobbies like video-games and slack got a complete revamp. It has been a real joy!
Right now I'm not sure I don't see any benefits of working in an office other than:
* Sense of inherit accomplishment: I sat here for 8 hours == I did things. Which is of course kinda silly but remote suffers from accomplishment perception issues since you don't have that office sacrifice that you can always fall back to.
* People are fun, and people are more fun in person! Especially in modern offices with ping-pong tables, bean bags and taco tuesdays.
What is Twitter even doing? Like I realize they likely have an infinite number of people working for them, but are any of them doing anything important at all? This is not like the usual "I just don't see how a company needs that many people" laments: this is specific to Twitter, as they seem to have at most one engineer working on new features... it took like five years for them to implement "increase size of Tweet to 280 characters", and the only feature of note I can think of since then was adding a half-assed ability to mute replies (which to me is a critical feature that prevents trolls and hate groups from using my audience to spread their hate; but the feature is somehow designed to take a reply that would have maybe been buried in hundreds of people replying to me and "mute" it by giving it a dedicated icon with a pop up dialog reminding people to go look at the content I muted, so in fact more people probably see the thing I muted now than before I muted it... it is ridiculous). Like I frankly feel the decision here is "I guess send all the employees home as it isn't like their productivity could be any lower, right? hell: maybe one of them gets inspired and finally builds something!".
Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it.
As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.
Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)
I've hung out a bunch at Twitter's offices (in both SF and NYC). It's pretty eye-opening and a good lens into why Twitter the company is so fucked up.
The vibe that comes off is more of a social hangout club than a serious tech company. You meet your friend for lunch and there's professional chefs cooking gourmet meals, you hang out in the social area while the celebrity of the day comes into the office and everyone takes pictures with them. There's breakout rooms where people are filming marketing videos. The people that are hanging out talking to celebrities all day are making $200,000+ somehow. Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse, because it's a "cool social hangout platform" not a serious technology product with mature guidelines of what acceptable speech is and formalized appeals processes. There won't be any productivity loss from everyone going remote because nobody is doing real work anyway.
> Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse
You have a persecution complex. Almost every conservative political figure and media personality has a twitter account that they post regularly on. Only a small number of abusive psychos (e.g. Milo) have been banned for breaking Twitter rules.
> Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored
I've been having very productive conversations with someone on twitter whom I'm pretty sure is a Catholic fundamentalist. I'm specifically following a few other accounts because the provide outside-filter-bubble views, and they're all rather further than "right of center." Haven't heard a peep from any of them about Twitter censorship.
"Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse"
That's just not true - Donald Trump hasn't been "casually censored", neither have any of the GOP representatives who have Twitter accounts.
If you say abhorrent stuff, then yes, their platform, and they can say "you're not welcome here", but just look at the cesspit of comments on the recent "gate" hashtag and you'll see there are MANY right of center (some cases miles right of center) voices on there.
I have a feeling a lot of companies will follow suit. It saves up huge costs in real-estate by not having to provide seats to people.
It also might just open up more companies to hire from any time zone.
The interesting question is, why now? I mean on the surface sure - because we have a pandemic and state ordered quarantine. But the more interesting question is - why is this finally provoking companies and why do we think they will continue the trend in the future post-quarantine? I've been a remote worker since 2006. It's been obvious to me for a long time that companies could go all remote or some version of remote, and it would have all the positive effects we all know about:
-- Reduction of commute, which is good for the environment and good for people's stress levels.
-- Reduction/elimination of the cost of office space
-- Ability to recruit across a wider geographic area
-- Greater employee satisfaction as people can live where they choose
And so on and so on. And yet in the face of this information, plus studies that show higher rates of productivity when employees / workers control their work environment (and schedule), companies have been resistant. I can speculate on the reasons for this (read: control, stuck in industrial era management practices, etc), but the question remains: why do we think companies will suddenly become enlightened and embrace this long-term?
Under normal circumstances, no one wants to be the first mover on something major like this because it's extremely disruptive to the way most people work without a clear example of the benefits. You're mentioning all of the upsides but there's a lot of execution risk in shifting a large organization to a remote setup. There's also a lot of management layers that are largely redundant with remote working and they've likely fought tooth and nail to prevent it.
Companies have touted open desk workspaces as some grand collaborative masterpiece for years now. It's a very big difference to advocate working from home because you also have to acknowledge that was a total farce.
I don't think all of them will -- it's probably significant that Twitter was already thinking about this. However, I know my CEO never would have run this experiment without the pandemic. Now, he has data he didn't have before, and he's publicly said that this changed his mind.
The trigger event was the forced experiment. Studies convinced me, but I don't have to take responsibility for the health of a whole company so it's easier for me to advocate for risks. Seeing how your company actually behaves in a 100% WFH world is better evidence than a study.
Oh I agree with you. I work for a company making software for utilities. Our company policy doesn't allow working remotely at all! Engineers (not developers) need to work on systems that are isolated and staged in our campus. There's no chance that they can work remotely. Rules for other teams are slightly relaxed, it depends on the managers to let their teams work remotely for some time.
Since the pandemic started, the company has had to adapt and make a mechanism for these engineers to work remotely. The engineers aren't as productive (from what some colleagues told me), but they can manage. On the other hand, our VP has been reporting that there's been 0 effect on software development teams and are happy to consider bringing us back to office much later.
counterpoint - everyone's company is competing against every other competitor who is also doing WFH. they're all on the same playing field. if folks think F2F helps productivity, they'll force that, especially if they know that some competition will stay with WFH.
I don't think that's a counterpoint. It depends on executives continuing to believe F2F is superior.
The evidence already existed that WFH is, generally, better. See Stanford's Bloom 2013.
But executives are afraid to take big risks like that. They doubt studies. They overindex on personal experience. Which this gave them.
Now that they see what WFH actually produces, their worldview shifts to what was already true. You get talent that's more productive. Lower costs so you can afford more talent, or, alternatively, more expensive talent. Fewer geographic restrictions so you can recruit a bigger pool of talent.
Once you're convinced WFH works, these advantages can give competition an edge. An executive doesn't want to be on the wrong side of that edge.
But they have to see it first.
There's no reason they go back to thinking F2F is better, unless it actually is, and currently no evidence suggests that is true.
possibly shouldn't have used the word 'counterpoint'.
c19 has given people an experience of "almost everyone WFH and the company didn't end".
"There's no reason they go back to thinking F2F is better, unless it actually is". It IS better for some people individually - we see it here on HN in comments from people who prefer to be able to go to an office. There isn't a "one size fits all" approach.
To the extent that we see more WFH across the board, I think it'll be driven far more by "get rid of the office expense" - hard $ savings - vs "everyone's more productive!". They'll be "productive enough", relative to the cost savings of less (or no) office space.
There was some kind of artificial barrier to remote-only that COVID forced the industry to break through. Maybe there was some stigma associated with it. Maybe there was natural resistance to a workplace model which was somewhat untested at scale. I think the current mentality held by most executives who make these kinds of decisions is that face-to-face meetings are better than video-chat.
But now that the industry is on the other side of that barrier, it seems to have no reason to go back.
I ve had the same question. I think it's because over the years, companies and employees have gone virtual
-- Companies have gone virtual, they exist in slack, basecamp-type tools etc. In the 2000s it would sound unthinkable to put your corporate secrets in someone else's server. Today it's commonplace
-- Employees have gone virtual. Their CVs are in github, and the flaky silicon valley market has made them conscious of their personal image / website. They prefer a supermarket of opportunities rather than a long-term relationship
These things oiled up the gears for the transition, and covid gave it a big push.
Well, it's not happening now. It's been happening gradually for a long time. All my friends in tech including FAANG have been working remotely to a certain degree. Some only once a week, others twice or even fully remote. And even those in the office work mostly in "remote" mode since they need to collaborate with people in offices all over.
For big companies it's harder to work fully remote. There are too many people and teams and dependencies. Twitter is not small but also not big.
I have the same speculations re: why, so far, they have been so reluctant to do so.
As for why now? I believe it's simply because now that peons have had a taste of WFH and all its benefits (and realized everything you enumerated), it will become one of the most desired "benefit" in a job. It was a massive leap forward from WFH being a "nice to have" to a "must have" to even be considered by a lot of candidates.
Real-estate cost is not an issue for most companies. Also, all fully remote companies that I know have company "retreats" twice a year for all employees, which is expensive. It's not mandatory of course but very important.
The bigger issue for me is what will happen to the US tech market. Why would Twitter hire people in the US if they can hire much cheaper people from Europa and other locations. The US government restricts immigration for the same reasons. They might need to intervene with remote work as well.
Real-estate and cost of living drives compensation which is a main issue for most companies.
Biannual "retreats" for companies that are fully remote sounds like a good idea, and I wonder if there is somewhere between "biannual retreats" and "butts in seats 5 days a week" that companies will meander towards.
> They might need to intervene with remote work as well.
Do you mean all boundary gateways should censor all information and knowledge, that are past without prior authorisation or a heavy tax, by default? Because that is how customs IRL work.
If the time zone difference is San Francisco to London, sure. But I've lived in Pacific while working for a company in Central, and live in Eastern while working for a company in Pacific, and it's not a big deal. You just adjust your daily cycle by a couple of hours.
Domestically, it only gets complicated when you have an entire office of people in a different zone. Then large meetings get hard to schedule around lunch and COB.
It turns into early hour / late hour meetings that your dread and don't want to do. I bet as a result people silently start not working with those big time zone difference teams and it become bifurcated.
These advantages have always existed, and yet most of the FANG have resisted WFH policies until now.
Personally, I find it pretty funny how this "work that can only be done well in person, in an office" can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.
Personally, I find it pretty funny how this "work that can only be done well in person, in an office" can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.
You're spinning things toward your bias with your sentence. Who, exactly, is saying it can be done "no problem"? My experience is that any communication-intensive work is significantly harder and more time consuming. We just don't have a choice now, so we're doing it.
That's the usual argument, and honestly I'm not even gonna put a lot of effort into arguing. People work differently, fine, it's your XP, sorry it's not working that well for you.
My XP is that remote communication is different, seem to take longer, but is also far superior. When you're forced to communicate via documents, diagrams, chat, etc you put more effort into your content. You try to anticipate questions to avoid wasting a few round trips. It forces you to think more about what you're saying, it forces you to think about edge cases, specific details, etc.
That's the usual argument, and honestly I'm not even gonna put a lot of effort into arguing.
That's fine. I would like to explicitly point out that calling something the "usual" argument doesn't make it any less valid. You are both claiming to not bother arguing while also taking a fairly dismissive posture. My feedback is to instead ask people why they feel a certain way. I'll answer as though you had:
For your point about clarity and organization of written communication: I completely agree with you. I suspect you're an IC engineer without many non-technical responsibilities, though, because you're ignoring all things that exist outside of technical design and planning intended for technical audiences.
Not everything is well suited to diagrammed or long-cycle asynchronous communication. At some point in your career, you might need to start handling things like working with lawyers on requirements where they have varying degrees of product understanding, nuanced feedback from a large sales team, tough and iterative product roadmap decisions in the face of revenue shortfalls, personnel issues as they come up, and so on. For conversations that span disciplines or involve career development or crucial feedback, having a high bandwidth pipe through which to quickly identify gaps in understanding or holes in communication is invaluable. That higher level coordination is vital to the success of most businesses, and it became significantly more challenging. We have to do it, though, because the alternative is much worse.
My opinion is that remote work has been great for IC engineers. I generally support liberal use of remote work for IC engineers. The world doesn't work if everybody sits in that role, though.
I'm a director of engineering with a team of 20 engineers. Been successfully remote for 6 years or so now. I guess I make it work, but hey, maybe at some point in my career I'll understand.
I'm a director of engineering with a team of 20 engineers. Been successfully remote for 6 years or so now. I guess I make it work, but hey, maybe at some point in my career I'll understand.
Great. I stand corrected when I suspected you were an IC.
Do you have the same non-technical responsibilities I mentioned having? How have you approached the portions that I cited as being challenging without high-bandwidth communication channels? And if you have you held this role in a non-remote office, how do you know whether you're being as effective as you were then? (I always like to hear more about how people measure their effectiveness.)
Personally, I find it pretty funny how this "work that can only be done well in person, in an office" can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.
This was exactly what happened with my company. When I was hired, three people in the interview process stated explicitly that remote work was not an option, and don't even ask.
Then when the state shut down, suddenly it was perfectly fine for hundreds of people to take their work computers home.
I have worked remotely (from home) for several years now. Almost everyone I work with also work remotely.
While companies can save money with smaller offices by allowing working from home the biggest factor imho is you open the potential employee pool to the whole country, if not the content or the world.
You are no longer restricted to the best person you can get within an hour or two commute of an office.
Find someone perfect for the role who lives 5 hours away? It doesn't matter anymore!
You no longer have to convince them to relocate (and put forward cash to cover the relocation as a condition of the contract).
You don't have to throw away the perfect candidate because a decade ago your company decided this is where you office should be but now you can't find local talent.
I hope when my son starts working (if he works in an office) he says to me "Dad, did you seriously have to go to the same place an hour away every day to sit at a desk and do the same work you can do on any computer with an internet connection? That's crazy!"
So much needless commuting could end if more companies embraced remote working. Not being forced to live within commuting distance of an office would mean more people can live further from "the office" easing pressure on housing, roads, public transport systems, save energy (fuel), reduce commuter accidents (vehicular and public transport), reduce pollution and give everyone more time in their day not mindlessly traveling from A to B back to A again every day.
I’m very in favor of remote work, but I think it remains unfair to compare this current situation with working in the office. The more extroverted types already prefer the social interactions of the office — but right now, most people can’t get social interaction outside the office even if they wanted to. They can’t go to a cafe a couple of times a week for the atmosphere.
A lot of us have small kids at home, so now we’re (mediocre) teachers on top of our work.
But most importantly, this is a national — no, a global — trauma. People might not realize it, but that trauma is there, and it will have to be addressed at some point. It’s another factor which makes it impossible to fairly evaluate the efficacy or desirability of working remotely.
Climate change is another reason work will likely have to change over the next decade. This pandemic has forced us to confront the types of changes we might need to make to adapt to a world of less flying, commuting, etc. Those changes seemed impossible, but we’ve been forced into a trial run. If we can get through it in these incredibly difficult circumstances, it gives us time to design a future of work that’s a bit more balanced. Perhaps a mix of remote and in-office. Perhaps an office that is less crowded. Perhaps a more distributed, regional world, where we can revitalize the lost cities in America rather than crowd into overpriced hubs.
Is it convenient? No. Will we lose certain bits of magic? Maybe. But we’ve ignored problems for a long time that we now need to confront.
It’s time to put on our design thinking hats. We’re the innovators — so let’s innovate the future. It doesn’t have to suck.
Thank God. Hopefully more companies will follow this example and my company as well, and then I can finally move away from this wretched place and buy a nice mansion size home somewhere quiet and with great internet connectivity. Tired of paying too much for a shoebox apartment living like some kind of pauper. And not to mention the piles of shit everyday in the street. Maybe then I would finally be able to settle down and have a child as well.
You can call me cynical, but Yahoo ( anyone still remembers that?) tried work from home, and failed. It simply didn't work out so well so the then-CEO Marissa Mayer had to ban it [outright](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi...)
I don't regret working in an office, especially early on since it lead to faster learning.
That said, it's fantastic to see Twitter do this. Especially given the commutes some are making in the bay area, this is a huge quality of life increase.
Never been more proud of my former employer. This is amazing. Kudos, Twitter! Hope more Bay Area companies follow your lead. The last project I worked on at Twitter was a 3 person affair - me in SF, front end guy in Seattle, our manager in the sky, flying between usa & asia. Manager sent out specs on google doc, I video-confed the Seattle dev, we agreed upon the breakdown of work, I did the backend statistics stuff with apache math & finagle, he did the frontend in mustache.js, then we got code reviews & lgtm. That was one of the very few things that actually shipped with zero friction, because none of us ever saw each other in person. Everything was email & gdocs & git. Really enjoyed that experience.
I've really come to miss the whiteboard walls. While we have digital tools, getting a couple people together and white boarding was super effective. The quality of my office at home is way better - large screens, comfortable chair, and no 'open office' acoustics. Nice to only put on the headset when on a call now.
I had a good bit of December off and did WFH most of January/February because the scrum team I was working with was distributed. Our primary location .. would go into the office once or twice a week to sort/connect on the larger issues (and not plan to get my stuff done, but rather help others). I do miss that.
Any news on how/if compensation will change at Twitter as a function of location? I know many tech companies have fractional multipliers depending on the COL of the area you plan to live in.
I wonder if it’ll come to have the same meaning as “unlimited vacation”, a vague policy that in practice, is used unofficially in job evaluations to implicitly punish employees who take advantage of the policy.
That could be, although the difference between vacation time and remote work is that any loss in productivity/value with remote work is either nil or hard to calculate. Vacation time is different in that it's clearly time that the employer has to pay for work to not be done. So the optimist in me thinks that tech employers will have difficulty credibly taking employees that have performed well as remote workers and coercing them to come into the office, which doesn't really provide a clear benefit.
Kickstarter cut its unlimited/flexible vacation policy because "it's typically not a problem" still can be too much ambiguity:
> "It's always been important to us to ensure that our team is able to enjoy a quality work/life balance," the Kickstarter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "What we found was that by setting specific parameters around the number of days, there was no question about how much time was appropriate to take from work to engage in personal, creative, and family activities."
Re: perks, based on my own experience working remotely, in traditional offices, and those with very nice perks I have to respectfully disagree.
Invitations to "casual chats" over breakfast or dinner in the office cafeteria are IME quite common in the latter, especially if you're seeking access to senior leadership or flagged as someone whose opinion/buy-off is important to a project.
Even without an explicit invitation, if you're at the office already there's no real barrier to someone pulling you in to a project-related discussion. At that point you're effectively on the clock whether you intended/wanted to be or not.
It really comes down to the fact that commitments, decisions, and requests for assistance made across a cafeteria table are not considered any less binding, which means you can't just "relax and enjoy the free food" when it's provided at work by your employer.
(Conversely, if you're someone who tries to protect your personal time and set clear boundaries between work and non-work hours, you miss out on a lot of these ad-hoc meetings, which can result in a persistent lack of access and influence compared to your colleagues who spend 12+ hours a day on-site.)
But see I don't see how that has to do with perks. That seems to have everything to do with your toxic culture at your job, or your inability to push back. I've never ever stayed for dinner or got sucked into breakfast to talk shop at my company (big tech).
I wouldn't be surprised if you were forced to go to a local restaurant or bar to talk shop with your company culture if the free food didn't exist.
Except for I think California, it means no payout whatsoever. Fun!
I've had unlimited policies before and I'm much happier having a specific number of days now that I use every year.
Banks often require that employees take vacation, typically around 2 weeks a year. An employee-focused software company should implement a similar policy of "required minimum vacation" [1].
The connections I have in Germany working in relatively "low-skill" fields are taking over 5 weeks a year of PTO. Even the most generous companies in the US are a joke by comparison to the most barebones companies in many EU nations. Without collective bargaining, we will always be far behind in benefits.
Anectdote, but I've worked for both a company that does PTO accrual and one that does unlimited vacation. I was not paid out anything at the latter (this was less than a year ago).
From my perspective, unlimited policies have a lot of upside on the financial front — they don't have to keep accrued PTO cash on the books. Of course, it has a benefit to workers, but only to those who take advantage of it and don't feel pressured by management or their peers to meet a certain number. It's been my experience so far that my peers at unlimited PTO companies take less time off, and that their "time off" is less valuable (meaning they are not completely logged out/tuned out of work) because it's coming from an infinite pool. At the end of the day, I think the balance of these policies shifts towards the financial side of the business rather than the employee's side.
I was surprised to read California, as I thought the state provides pretty strong worker protections. This site [0] seems to say that you are owed the vacation time upon separation in CA. IANAL and all that.
So many companies see their offices as a cost center. Why do you think we have so many open office plans despite our hate for them?
Prior to the Covid situation, we already had examples of successful remote-only companies (eg. GitLab). Now companies are using the circumstances to experiment with existing hypotheses of going remote-only or remote-mostly. I know my company was already wanting to experiment, and I think we would have done so even in the absence of the virus. Now we know it works.
Why pay rent when you can offload the cost to your engineers? Many already have a home office, and the cost of furnishing their home environment is negligible. Employees may even get a tax write off.
This may be the new norm for everyone.
I shudder to think about what's about to happen with the corporate real estate market, REIT stocks, etc. It's certainly yet another death knell for WeWork.
I also wonder if this will begin making cities with low cost of living and affordable real estate attractive. Who wants to work out of their tiny New York apartment every day when they can have a dedicated room for their office in another city?
A blurred distinction between the home and the workplace could also have legal implications for side projects, 'everything you make during employment period belongs to us' clauses can sometimes be punched through or voided but it's harder to do if you can't show a clear work time and resources vs. personal time and resources boundary.
Some companies make "home office access points" for that use case: a WLAN access point that the employee has at home, which provides a WLAN just for the work devices, tunnels everything back to the company VPN and can be remotely managed.
I work for a small distributed company (~600 employees) that compensates everyone based on their location. I live in NYC and receive a pretty solid salary given my experience / region. When I was hired, HR made it clear that if I move around or relocate, my salary will be adjusted based on the living costs. The company has roots in Argentina, and about 30% of our engineers live there. We are all paid enough to live comfortably wherever we are located, but I imagine that the engineers in Argentina are making significantly less than the ones in SF. Hiring globally is extremely complex, and colleagues I have spoken to who live in countries where we do not have a physical presence (office location) incorporate an entity and contract with a Caribbean firm that the company contracts through. Day to day those folks are operating as normal permanent employees.
I really like the current forced WFH experiment but I have one major issue:
How do you emulate serendipity in work remote. Finding it hard to have ad-hoc engineering conversations when you have to book a 30min cal window to talk about anything : /.
Personal productivity is up, creativity, down.
One challenge about hiring new employees to work remotely. I think many tech companies have managed to make work from home work mostly (modulo issues with kids who can't go to school, etc.) have been successful because the team building that had already taken place pre-COVID-19. With new employees, it will be much harder to build cohesive teames, as opposed to maintaining the cohesion of an existing team.
There are solutions, once it's safe again. You can fly everyone to a common location once or twice a year, but that's not cheap. And so far at least for me, attempts to do team social video conferences have had at least mixed success. It does help with reconnecting socially, but video conferences are tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not.
You have to pay SF rates if you want to hire SF level talent, even if you are hiring outside of SF. The average engineer is cheaper outside of SF because the average engineer is worse, not because you are getting the same quality of employee for the less money. Most of the good engineers move to SF to get access to better career opportunities.
I'm not saying all engineers outside SF are mediocre, but if you want the ones that aren't mediocre you have to pay them the same salaries the SF engineers are getting, so you're not saving any money.
If the average engineer in a non tech hub was just as competent as the average SF engineer at half the price, no one would bother paying through the nose to operate an SF office (but clearly many companies feel the compensation premium is worth the access to better talent).
I'd be curious to see if you have any evidence at all to suggest that the average engineer outside of SF is more competent than the average engineer in SF.
The simpler explanation is simply that Bay Area companies have more money to spend. There is a lot of evidence to suggest this, including the fact that Bay Area headquartered companies pay more in their remote offices compared to other companies.
> the fact that Bay Area headquartered companies pay more in their remote offices compared to other companies.
That just proves my point that companies pay a premium for Bay Area employees because that's where talented employees who can demand a premium congregate, and when they want to hire similarly talented employees in other areas they also have to pay a similar premium instead of downgrading their compensation packages to the local market rate.
Let's say the typical comp in the Bay Area is $200k/year and the typical comp in Nowhere, OH is $100k/year. The fact that companies continue to pay their bay area employees $200k when cheaper options are available means that either:
1. They are willing to pay a huge premium for geographic proximity to their HQ
2. The average developer in Nowhere, OH is not as good as the average developer in the bay area. Not because Ohioans can't code, but because a large fraction of the ones who can have already moved to the bay area to make twice as much money. The ones that are as good make as much as the ones in the bay area, but most are not and drag the average down.
If 1 were the case, then companies would cut people's pay by half if they moved out of the bay area, or offer half as much money to people working in their satellite offices. But many companies don't, so clearly option 2 is more plausible than option 1.
Again, you are making a lot of unsubstantiated claims here. Also, there are more options than the two you have presented.
The only thing you can definitely say about Bay Area developers vs others is that they’re paid more money - a result of there being companies with more money located there.
Finally, your entire premise is faulty as you perfectly correlate developer quality and compensation.
it’s neither. it’s just supply and demand. in the bay you can have offers from facebook google twitter square stripe etc... and they have to all compete for you.
I've seen this movie before. The title should really be:
"Twitter will allow employees to work from home until a hedge fund forces Jack Dorsey to step down as CEO and Marissa Meyers fires everyone who hasn't been coming into the office"
This is great. I've always been an advocate for companies to set themselves up as remote first, even if they have an office, so that people who are remote can still be just as involved.
One thing I predict happening if this becomes widespread is a reversion to the mean on salaries. I think the pay for people outside the Bay Area will go up and inside the Bay Area it will go down, as being in the Bay Area will no longer be nearly as essential.
This will have a nice second order effect on Bay Area real estate prices, bringing them closer in line to reality (but we will still have all the problems of massive undersupply, because it's just a nice place to live, tech employee or not).
I never used to mind working from the office when I had a private space (cubicle) where I could retreat to when the task commanded deep focus. Somewhere around 2010 however the dreadful 'open office' took over and I found myself at a long table in the middle of an open room with little separation between other employees. This is an absolute nightmare and productivity killer for me. I was glad to read the opposite end of the spectrum in many of these comments and it is now even more apparent to me that great flexibility for the individual is needed to maximize their own style/situation/productivity.
Our organization has been working remotely for nearly 2 months. Last week I received an organization-wide email that we'll start to transition back to the office in mid-June. Chances are that my team will be one of the last brought back but I still felt sick about it.
My organization operates culturally at the pace of an insurance company. Despite the benefits of a semi-remote organization to my employer and the opportunity this pandemic provided for proof that productivity can remain high when working remotely, it will choose to have people on-site.
Now I'm searching for remote-only work.
[EDIT: Added "sick" in the last sentence of the first paragraph.]
After trying to make tech workers spend as much time as possible at the workplace with expensive perks became frowned upon - a much cheaper alternative is to have work spend as much time as possible at employee's home.
It should not have taken a pandemic for this to be the new normal for some companies. But at least we're seeing companies that were previously hesitant to allow remote work making things permanent after COVID19. Relationships with co-workers are important, but the truth is, if more people were able to work from home, neighborhoods could be the places where individuals end up socializing. Neighborhoods could be completely transformed thanks to a reduction in the need to commute.
Obviously, this can't apply for all workers, but for a big chunk of the working population, it can.
I want to know how to run a 24/7 company with senior employees spread around the world a few timezones apart.
I just don't think we have the communication tools to support productive collaboration between people who hardly ever meet.
(I think what I may be saying is that while yes, there are Open Source projects that overcome these same sorts of problems, I don't think it's tools or process that are the reason they work. I suspect the psychology of volunteer work - performed and received - lets people overlook some pain points that they don't in a more mercenary setting)
There are successful, fully remote, companies, such as Automattic (Wordpress), Gitlab and more. If they can figure it out, seems more companies can as well.
I love how Automattic refers to their work not as remote, but decentralized. Remote work indicates there is a central location, but there isn't one at Automattic.
My company is on the smaller side, but we're 100% remote work and have employees and a management team spread across the US, Canada, Europe, and China.
We communicate extensively through video calls and Slack.
And you work on things that you want to work on. If something is a hassle you punt and if people complain, what do you expect from free code?
How often does free software - and I mean no paid positions - compete with commercial software? OSS puts companies out of business (because it turns out people think some things should just be $0) but the projects that actually compete are a very small fraction, aren’t they?
Playing devils advocate - if I were Google or Twitter or x or y other Valley-based company I'd do what Twitter did and have everyone work remote. I'd hire the untapped talent in the wider US. And then why not globally? I could get the smartest brains from Russia, India, Indonesia and so on and pay them just 10% or 20% more than they make locally.
If every other FAANG, in fact every other IT shop in the US or Europe did the same the wage bill would still crater in comaprison to hiring exclusively from the valley.
I think being allowed to work from home doesn't mean that people actually will all suddenly start doing that. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much.
Awesome. So happy to hear that. I've worked from home for 7 years straight. And although I recently went back to work in an office, I still think WFH should be allowed to any employee.
Sometimes, I just wanna wake up early, slam out my work, and have the rest of the afternoon to myself. I've done it many times over the 7 years of WFH. Enforcing everyone to be in an office for 8 hours is just silly. It should always be about how much work you get done.
I will go back to my office next week from WFH status. After almost 4 months WFH, I feel excited to work at the office because it's really hard to separate my work from life which made me more tired, although to be honest, sometimes I feel freer to work from home. And when you work from home , it seems like you are always online because the time you get off work is not so clear to your colleagues unless you strictly set your time.
Great move by Twitter. It's a big lift to move from mostly in-office to 100% work from home, so if you've done it successfully it seems like a no-brainer to retain that option as a perk post-pandemic.
Personally cutting out ~90 minutes of daily commuting has been fantastic. The lack of childcare .. not so much, but when that inevitably resolves I don't see myself going back 5 days a week in the office.
Honestly, the tools to remotely onboard employees from anywhere in the world is possible now.
Virtual machines that live in the cloud. Apple DEP. Microsoft InTune. All of these tools allow companies to drop ship computers to employees from a warehouse or reseller to the employees doorstep. Turn it on and the IT tools take over and set the machine up.
I would be wary of all this freedom. Once you are WFH, the variable of expendability will increase. Those companies who have been doing it for decades know how hard it is, I doubt twitter does.
I’ll predict this announcement is step 1 in realignment of staff sizing. Perhaps Disney can buy the FB building and turn it into something productive.
Why is everyone here so dogmatic about this? Work from home is a choice here and just because you really like your choice and think it’s the best choice that’s ever been chosen, does not mean it’s the best for everyone else and that you should aggressively impose your choice onto others. This is how holy wars happen
Our company did a recent survey that asked if people wanted to be able to wfh permanently. I'm really interested in seeing how small the loud minority of "everyone should wfh" crowd is
They should do a survey after several months from the first survey to see how people’s views may change after they own personally experience it. Would be interesting to see what people’s personal takes are on it compared to their assumptions.
We have been WFH for over 2 months so I think it should be somewhat representative. Although "WFH during a pandemic" is never going to be a truly representative time for this survey.
I wonder what this trend -- if it takes -- will mean for all these giant office buildings in downtown areas. How many companies simply won't be returning?
I've also seen the takes re: social distancing requiring larger office space, but why wouldn't companies just send their employees in in smaller, rotating groups?
Smart Move! Twitter employees will be more healthier than others if they utilize this time to focus on health and socializing differently. Local communities will become stronger and will help employees work from anywhere. Personally, I would love to work in a warm place during peak winters.
I look forward to the geographic decentralization this enables. People can move to places that best suit their lifestyle, whether that is low or medium or high density. They can forego commutes. They can have lower costs of living. They can potentially even move away from rigid work hours to a lifestyle that allows them more time and involvement with family.
This move also allows employees to choose locations that better suit their politics. I've always found it highly dangerous to have large tech platforms, which are defacto digital public squares (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Medium, etc.), aggregate in just one or two cities that all share the same culture and politics. This is a risk especially because these platforms have increasingly taken steps to ramp up their censorship. If diversity actually matters to these companies, the diversity of thought introduced by decentralized geographic distribution will be a benefit to society.
I have a friend that works at a mid-sized tech company. He said the CEO was expecting work from home to be disastrous. It has actually proved a time and cost saver. Going forward they're going to do work from home 4 of 5 days out of the week.
I think this will make the extremely expensive cities (e.g. SF, NYC) less attractive. Why not live in a quiet pretty place to raise kids and save on the commute. Life in SF has been kind of crazy over the last 5 years. It could use a downgrade.
Well, as long as going to the office is still an option this is a positive change. However the worst deal is when you are the only one working remote, so I guess the situation will depend on what the majority team preference will be in the end.
This feels like a positive story for Twitter. Especially with the early action in March and the $1000 equipment stipend to help home workers get set up, in addition to their regular IT equipment.
It’s odd therefore to see this announcement come via Buzzfeed.
I'm just guessing, but I think Twitter isn't going to have any trouble finding talent anymore, if it ever needed more. Once you break down the walls of location, you now have access to orders of magnitude more talent.
I'm honestly suprised that home office is as beloved as it seems to be.
While I 100% support it, I'm also on the far side of introverted. I would have thought that half or more would hate not having their social interactions daily.
My work said today we should probably expect to work from home through the summer. But haven’t medical professionals said that there might be a new outbreak next Fall? Maybe I’ll never go back to the office.
One of the interesting side-effects of everyone working from home has been that group videoconference meetings have been more equitable, instead of those in a physical meeting room vs. those calling in.
I truly hope that more and more companies will follow this example. Working from home should not be something to ask or beg for, exactly like having a desk or a laptop shouldn't be a big deal.
Firstly, home is not an effective place of work. I come home mostly to be with my family and not take my problems from work to home.. Aren't there many studies done on the same, why work shouldn't be brought to home and stuff..
Secondly, if the employer provides all the required setup (monitors, webcams, speakers) and support for electricity backups and stuff then I might be willing. The point about electricity backup is very true especially for developing countries.
Thirdly, I'm actually working more (double time) compared to only working 8 hours. This also has to do with my time management but people are actually lazy at home and very hard to be dependent on them..
[begin tongue in cheek rant]
As someone who has worked from home for years, I'm really intrigued by your reasoning behind making blanket statements like this. I had no idea that my company should be providing free backup electricity for me. Should they provide free snacks and coffee too?
[end rant]
Seriously, working from home is a great privilege for some and a tremendous burden for others. It is wonderful that companies are realizing that there are tremendous benefits to giving employees freedom and choices.
This is a huge generalization, and is not true for many people. For me, the office is not an effective place to work.
We should give the option for people that work effectively at home. I've worked at two fully remote companies, and our work output is equivalent or better than any in office job I've had, and I'm much happier now that I don't have to deal with the open office bullshit.
I agree it doesn't work for everyone, but it certainly can be very effective for the right people.
Lots of generalization in here. I find that #1 and #3 are often under people's control. With the right setup, dedicated room, dedicated hours and time keeping it's easy to not let those happen.
What you mention in your second argument is interesting, I always forget about that one. In most of Europe and most of North-America I would assume this not to be an issue.
Is there any mention of them making internal shifts to support people working from home forever or will the practicalities of it mean people still need to work near the Twitter HQ
Any reason why they would continue to hire American Developers? Our shops in Moscow and Bangalore probably have better developers than our US office at <10% of the salary.
> Our shops in Moscow and Bangalore probably have better developers than our US office at <10% of the salary.
Easy answer: No they don't. Foreigners do not funge for Americans for myriad reasons (cultural). Offshoring won't replace USA teams just like it hasn't for the past several decades.
I'm curious if there have been any models of the economic impact if high salary remote workers were to disperse themselves across the US to lower cost-of-living cities.
Dunno if this is good or bad news for designing new ways to put stuff I don't want in my timeline, but good luck with it, whatever you all do during the day.
At some point, unless working onsite is (really) essential — employees & employers that have onsite unnecessary office space should have to pay tax to do so, otherwise, them having an office space just paid for by those who are willing not to have an office.
Having non-essential spaces for people is complete unnecessary — and it: contributes in less health eating habits, traffic, cars, HVAC related energy costs, wasted time commuting, rising real estate costs, economic lost during pandemics due to downtime, etc.
Same principle holds true for non-essential travel.
there is no reason in this day and age for a tech company to have a physical location. if your servers are up in the cloud, there is no reason for your programmers, or any other staff for that matter, to be in an office.
A lot of people seem to support this, but what if the headline was "Twitter Will Allow Employees to Live at Work Forever"?
Isn't living at work and working at home two sides of the same coin? Is the merging of work and home really something we should aspire to? One of the basis of a healthy work/life balance is the separation of work and home.
In an era of mass surveillance and privacy loss, the home is the last private space we have. Is it wise to let work invade that space? Just things to think about.
It would take a heart of stone not to smile at the thought of all those employers that stubbornly refused to contemplate WFH suddenly discovering that they had no other choice. My hope is this turns into a wider trend, and those that want to be are allowed to be unshackled from the office for good.
I think that twitter allows employees to work from home ia great for twitter and his employees. keep it up.But amazon did not do that. I hope you were all agree that amazon no work for his employees.
