Ask HN: Why don't FAANG have a larger remote work force?

For small companies remote work allows for a much larger candidate pool. Compared to looking only at local hires it allows you to offer competitive compensation, and hire people with more experience. To have an effective team with remote work requires organizational level changes compared to a local only team

1. Remote work forces are still scary to a lot of people, especially if they've spent their whole careers thinking it's impossible to manage.

2. Some percentage of workers enjoy being on-site, especially at a nice office. Large companies have so many qualified job applicants that they can select only people who want to work on-site. In my experience, it's very hard -- though still possible -- to staff a growing startup with only local workers (unless you make some compromises).

3. Large companies have already built large buildings or signed long leases for office space. It's a lot more expensive for them to transition to remote work.

> If the top companies do not do it, why should the smaller companies?

It seems like you're suggesting small companies should imitate large companies. This doesn't make sense for several reasons.

Large companies with massive reserves of cash can tolerate lots of overhead (office space being one of them).

Further, large companies have fewer employees operating in silos. While a startup might have a single marketing person, a single front-end person, etc., a large company will have many teams for each function.

When you have more decisions being made across larger teams, you have more decisions made by committee, and in-person meetings seem like the most efficient way to move forward.

The more desirable the employer, the less demands employees are able to make to work there. If Google has a candidate that wants to work from home, and a candidate that will stay on-site for sixteen hours including eating three square meals a day fifty feet from their desk, Google has an obvious choice.

A startup, meanwhile, may need to offer appealing options like remote work to gain similar levels of talent.

To properly support remote work you need it to be fair for everyone, which means you need to offer it to everyone and optimise for it. Huge organisations face larger barriers to this because of the amount of change it would require to how they communicate and interact. But all those organisations will have pockets of remote workers even if not officially endorsed.