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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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 :)
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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 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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 fas...
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadOne other benefit to companies - maybe they won’t pay a premium anymore for people who live in expensive areas.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
-- 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just my 2c, obviously.
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.
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.
But now that the industry is on the other side of that barrier, it seems to have no reason to go back.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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.
i.e. it's typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.
> "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."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/at-kic...
> i.e. it's typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.
Many states require payout of vacation time accrued at time of separation. How does that work for unlimited vacation?
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.
[1]: https://open.buffer.com/minimum-vacation/
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.
[0]: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-rules-vac...
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.)
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.
Can you just say "i'm taking the next week off" to your manager and that's it ?
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.
I would have guessed folks would just start leaving...
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.
Aren't salaries different in different locations? (ie. same company with offices in Vancouver Canada vs Seattle vs SF?) I've heard they are...
If pay was purely about talent, everyone would be paid the same.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wegreened.com/o1-visa
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh you're right I'm so sorry :P
> 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.
Ah, I somehow missed the (emphasized) do in your original sentence. I'll just leave now.
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.
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
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.
I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.
Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that.
Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help.
I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.
A $20 USB gaming headset with a mouth mic arm might work, too.
How are you using the xlr mic? I have one but am using the USB output because I don't have a xlr port on my laptop.
USB mics like Rode NT-USB (or NT-USB mini) or Blue Yeti are fine, too. They are the equivalent of a very nice sedan.
I went for the next level up the Clarret 2pre but I do use that for my dnd streams and want to process my voice and to mix in audio.
Main problem with entry level class compliant usb is your at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft making your interface obsolete and you cant change your microphone to suit.
When I looked it, it was for the microphone (400 EUR) + focusrite 2i2 (150, yeah, I looked at dual) + cloudlifter (150) + boom arm (75) + cables (let's say 25) => 800 EUR. I tried not to think about GoXLR...
Compared to that, NT-USB + boom arm (PSA1) was only 200. Plus the space saved on the desk.
I don't really understand, what you mean with being at mercy of Apple and Microsoft. The only problem with USB mics that I'm aware of might be timing/lag, if you need it to be precise. That could be problem for singers singing to instruments, but not for spoken word.
If your in the uk the SZ-MB1 was only 17.99 compared to 150 for a cloud lifter and for mics I use some 10 year old entry level sure dynamics which where £25.
[1] https://focusrite.com/en/usb-audio-interface/scarlett/scarle...
This setup costs ~400$ 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.
There are really good USB mics these days that are just plug and play. The Blue series for instance (Yeti, etc).
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.
https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot
Communicating is 1/2 of business; it's really odd that so many people have difficulty with this.
I think because as Engineers, we measure value in 'code' then we tend to diminish all the other aspects of the business or process.
Meetings can obviously be a waste but they are also critically important.
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
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.
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?
The Google of today is different: multiple billion dollar business units, all well-staffed with managers.
(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn't deep down coding, but requires communication)
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.
I dont think that is hard to replicate. Group chat / slack / teams is a common feature and can easily be used to fill this void.
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....
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'm pro WFH but pretending it's the same just seems foolish to me.)
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.
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 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.
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 take 5k a day or so, Trader Joe’s has for $5.
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.
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.
Here is an well-documented analysis of a specific outbreak in an office:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/8/20-1274_article
"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%."
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.
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.
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.
Amen
or it turns into a perk again if you think of it as a way to train yourself against temptation.
This mentality is weird to me.
"employee stock options are an anti-perk if you want to maintain a gambling-free lifestyle."
"airbnb travel stipends are an anti-perk if you want to maintain a body free of traveler's diseases."
"free on-site dry-cleaning is an anti-perk when they lose a button on your jacket."
everything good in life can be viewed from a dark angle, but it gets pretty tiring to do so.
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!).
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.
If my office was 10 min walk away I would not want to work at home, but it is 1h by car ...
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 guess its office/lifestyle timeshare space.
I never pursued it beyond thinking about it.
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...
Product and Design so far doesn't seems work well without close face to face collaboration.
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.
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.
https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2014/h...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/when-wo...
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.
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.
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.
https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/02/remote-workers-are-lonely...
https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2014/h...
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.)
Go about 3 miles west and you'll find beautiful mountain forests :)
(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.)
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.
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. :)
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.
(Yes, there are larger apartments, but they are somewhat rare. Maybe this will change!)
In NYC, 2/3 of households rent, according to a 2017 government survey: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html.
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)?
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.
Also, you can eventually and typically write off big expenses (if you rent out part of your home, or sell it later and keep good records). https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-home-improvemen...
I don't think your problem with quitting has anything to do with WFH policies.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157538
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.
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.
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?
Sounds pretty nice to me.
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 don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
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.
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.
We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.
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.
This is giving me the stressies.
My day is basically split up into maybe 20m at a time where I can do something before being distracted.
I end up working during the night to catch up (just got done), but this is unsustainable long term.
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.
Best investment I have ever made.
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
“I don’t have an ergo chair / etc” => stipend
Fun times :-)
I don't think you know what you're asking for :)
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.
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.
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 think this is the right balance.
The former opens up more options, but it only opens up a tiny percentage of the options that the latter creates.
This is the best of both worlds for a company.
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.
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?
He grew up that way though, so YMMV of course.
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!
That’s helped in most if not all cases.
Outside of all that, it comes down to self-discipline.
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).
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).
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 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?
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!
But we have kids, and it gets hot as hell here, so summer after-work activities usually involves something with water.
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.
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.
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.
... that want to live in NYC or SF. For everyone else, who doesn't want to live in places like that, this is awesome. (And that's a word I never use)
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
Seattle is also as expensive as New York and the Bay Area.
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).
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?
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.
[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/first-second-and-third-person...
"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.
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."
It’s only difficult to hire developers anywhere because you don’t want to pay what it would cost to get a yes.
I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.
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.
None of the salaries I've seen there seem remotely "senior/architect" level if you want Bay/WA talent.
That's the way I see the company, at least.
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.
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'm not really serious, I can probably get a better offer from a US company, but it still irks me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Care to name some?
In my own experience throughout my career I've been both severely overpaid and underpaid relative to my economic impact.
Anyone have thoughts about this?
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.
Or maybe practical beats ethical.
It's interesting that folks envisioning a globally uniform payscale tend to posit SF salaries in Hanoi rather than Hanoi salaries in SF.
Also, employers always pay employees less than the value of their work and pocket the rest. This is called profit.
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.
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.
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.
Are you suggesting that that's unjust?
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro%E2%80%93Stiglitz_theor...
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.
That is very short sighted. Your dollar value is highly dependent on where you live, that's just reality.
1. That is very short sighted.
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.
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).
- Work hard
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 fas...
I think your perception about salaries outside of the valley is skewed.
For example, are you equivalent to a L3 with 0 years of experience at google making 200K, or an L6 with 10 years experience making 600k?
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.
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).
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)
How do Open Source projects achieve it?
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?
We communicate extensively through video calls and Slack.
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'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.
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.
Other users have mentioned white-boards and brainstorming sessions .. those are harder to replicate but still.
1/ The tools/processes/humans can only get better at it
2/ It will cost the companies much much less to have remote employees, so even if each individual employee get less done it is still worth it.
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.
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.
[0] http://www.crenews.com/general_news/general/barclays-lent-%2...