Thanks for tracking. Maybe commercial real estate will have to become residential to survive the shift in demand? Economics of a skyscraper vs. residential are different, but the building still exists (I can see how not opening could be cheaper, but still, I'd like to ponder this situation.)
Whoa there silver. Just because a few tech companies are giving up their space doesn’t mean commercial office space is doomed. There are still plenty of non-tech companies and local businesses (like law firms) that I doubt will be going away.
Tech companies have a huge incentive here - they can now start hiring engineers at non Bay Area prices. Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
I agree this not a private sector overall trend, but seed for the thought experiment.
Recent news and surveys do indicate significant change expected in remote work changes and real estate footprint changes.
"Large companies already expect more of their workers to continue to work remotely and say they plan to reduce their real estate footprint, which will, in turn, reduce the foot traffic that feeds nearby restaurants, shops, nail salons and other businesses." [1.]
This is part of data from a deport by Deloitte [2.][3.]:
> "In a year, 75% of CFOs expect more of their workforce to work remotely and nearly half expect a smaller real estate footprint."
> Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
There would be a transition period, probably on the order of years to even decades, before they would cease considering the cost of living in where their remote workers live. Hopefully by that time, rents in the Bay Area will have dipped as people slow moving in/start moving out because of flexible remote work situations.
Interestingly the law firm our company uses has converted to permanent remote only just now. So it's not just tech companies.
I think, once the boss gets a taste of working from home, they too want to enjoy their fancy homes and spending times with their kids instead of sitting in traffic all day. And Covid now provides them a generally acceptable way to push that change through.
Hard to know what net impact will be. They aren’t getting rid of space, just allowing digital first. Fewer people in the office, but Covid19 may result in people in the office getting more space per person than previously.
The productivity gains of WFH might be only in comparison to awful open office plans, and may disappear when compared to more private office layouts. There are still major questions about long term impact to new hires and their growth, where retention takes a hit (employees feel more like free agents and consequently switch jobs more frequently), etc.
It seems incredibly short sighted to be making these decisions on the basis of a 3 month experiment with confounding factors (to say the least!).
As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
I hope this mindset carries over to other companies who are committing to allow employees to stay home. There's more to remote working than staying at home. The whole culture of the company has to embrace it.
This has been a solved problem for many years. Many or most larger remote-first employers do. Here's an example from Automattic (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/):
> Home office setup and coworking allowances. Working from a coffee shop? You can use your coworking allowance for the requisite latte!
> If you don’t enjoy working from home 100% of the time, the company will give you up to $250 per month to rent a coworking space. Also, if you don’t want to have a permanent place to attend, you can use that $250 to pay for whatever you drink while you’re working from a coffee or similar places.
> You can get a completely equipped home office on the company. For example, I got an Aeron chair, an Ikea Bekant standing desk & a desktop lamp even before my first official day in the Automattic.
The cost of a home office setup is pretty negligible relative to a Shopify employees compensation, so I don't think it would change anything if they did. But I would be surprised if they didn't give them anything towards it.
In March, Shopify offered a stipend of $1000 (which is quite low) for workers to convert from office to home, with a note that they should take home their office workstations and install them there.
Presumably that implies that, at the very least, new employees will be offered the same measly one-time $1k payment. Hopefully their restructuring of offices will include a more appropriate reallocation of that spending to cover the true costs of remote working.
I really hope this doesn't become a bigger trend. Shopify was a company I was seriously considering working at in the future, but this would probably disqualify them. Working from home once a week sounds great to me, but doing it full time would drive me insane. Virtual meetings are awful for me, and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting - I think most of the important discussions I have with people are informal, either walking to or from meetings or just sitting in the office and talking for a few minutes. Communicating over video is also a lot harder for me since you miss out on a lot of the nonverbal cues that come across a lot better (and with lower latency) in person.
Outside of just being harder to communicate virtually, I really need the change of scenery and social interaction that comes with an office. Sure you can get that by joining different social groups outside of work, but that requires lots of intentional effort, and I actually enjoy hanging out at work and going to lunch with my coworkers. And the office has lots of perks like snacks and meals which can't be easily replicated at home (I mean I don't mind cooking, but I get much better lunches at work than the sandwich I would make for myself). I can't think of a working situation much better than going to an office where I have all of the food I need, a properly set up workstation, and coworkers I am able to talk to in person and go to lunch/dinner/social activities with. To me that is far better than sitting in my home alone all day (and I don't even have kids, which would be a whole other set of distractions).
No, but I would do a half hour commute for it. For some people I'm sure remote works great, but it's not for me, and I am fine with paying higher rents in order to live close to the office and have a short commute.
Am I the only one who enjoys my commute? To be fair, I bike or take the bus in the winter, but I listen to audiobooks, podcasts, music, and get a good amount of exercise.
I tolerate it. BART is hit or miss. Sometimes it's nice, and sometimes it's hella crowded, and there are those assholes who blast their music without headphones. I do like my reading time, though.
I certainly don't. The bus I was taking was a double-long that ran every 3 minutes and I'd still end up standing outside in the rain while a half dozen buses went past before I could get on one because they were all full. And once you get on, you're on a bus that's ass-to-crotch packed for an hour. And that's never mind the actual behaviour of the other people on the bus.
And this was after I modified my work hours to take the bus during less-peak time.
So now I drive. It's about the same time, but in mostly stop and go traffic. I can listen to podcasts and don't have people literally sitting on top of me, but I also have to deal with being constantly hyper-vigilant because (1) people drive like fuckwads and (2) traffic patterns in a lot of places are really screwed up and being in the wrong lane at the wrong time can wind up easily adding 30% to your commute time and (3) the cyclists have this bad habit of trying to weave through moving traffic instead of using the bike lanes and following the traffic signals and then physically assaulting you if you don't notice them and give way.
It's possible there will be a shift from offices dedicated to a certain company to offices where anyone can pop in. You still get the social experience, although you do lose the ability to have in-person meetings with your actual coworkers. The upside is that people get more freedom.
Yup. It's "digital by default" not "digital at all costs".
Seems they'll keep their current offices but reformated as spaces for people that really want to work amongst each other physically, instead of expecting the majority of workers to come in every day.
I really couldn't disagree more. While I understand the desire to work with your coworkers in person, the benefits of working from home are huge for me.
No commuting, which on its own is reason enough for WFH since it's such a massive waste of time. Commuting would add an extra 10 hours to my workweek, and I don't get paid for it. Add in things like control over your own workspace, no "open office" nonsense, access to your own kitchen/bathroom, together all outweighs the benefits of working from the office.
The ideal situation for me would be WFH by default, with the option to work from an office if you want to or for specific situations.
Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH. Not always of course, but chores like a quick grocery trip, laundry, cleaning, errands in your immediate neighborhood no longer crowd your weekend.
This is a recipe for disaster, at least in my experience, chores pile up and before you know it's 4pm and you still short on hours worked/output emitted..
Not in my experience. I'm not saying disappear from work for 3 hours to clean the whole house.
When I'm in the office, I often take breaks - 20-30 mins. Sometimes a longer walk during lunch time. I'm simply doing the same here but instead of being on my phone I'm maybe doing a quick vacuum sweep, trip to the bodega for some hand soap, or dropping off my laundry somewhere.
I do have friends that work for companies that expect them to be "online" all the time so this may not work for them.
Do you have so many chores that you spend every day until 4pm doing them? Of course not. Because when you worked at an office, you also did not spend that much time on them. I love to mix chores with work, because your mind gets a break and you're still doing something useful. And most of the time, in the back of your head you're unconsciously still solving the problem that you were working on. So when you get back at your keyboard, you can continue right away. How can anyone not like this enormous productivity boost?
I think that working from home will stay and that some kind of work discipline will be a skill people are just required to have. You know, like being able to communicate professionally and to keep promises.
I don't want this to come across as overly harsh. But a helpful rule of thumb to understand what life is like after having kids, is: there is no free time. None! It's like being in the military, where you wake up at 6am, shower until 6:30am, do calisthenics until 9:30am... and so on, with every single hour occupied, until bedtime, promptly at 9:00pm.
If you tell a person like that 'just watch a movie during your free time,' they'll look at you blankly and say, 'I don't have free time, not on my schedule.'
Why are things so different? Because not only do you have another person(s) making messes who do like 0% of the cleanup, they require much more care than adults. So free time trends to 0%. There's no 'weekend' in the sense of no work (there's always housework), in a sense there's no 'after work.' There's only work, as far as the eye can see.
So for example, with commuting, I don't have enough time to do housecleaning, so the house stays in a permanent state of ugly messiness. Without it, I can apply that time to cleaning, so it becomes only moderately, to slightly, messy. There's no big block of free time - nowhere - where I can do stuff to bring back the time that's lost by commuting.
Wait a sec, who takes care of your kid when you are away? Most ppl with kids would pay for day cares or they have school as well. I’m not understanding how your day can be occupied unless the kid is 0-1.
> Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH
I am saying:
> If my commute time is removed, some amount of necessary chores cannot get done. I can't do chores in any time other than the commute time. There is no real 'weekend' or 'after work' time, when I can do them 'later'.
All time is accounted for, and removing time necessarily knocks some items (like 'morning/midday rooms cleaning') off the list permanently.
I'm now left even more confused. Are you saying that you do a certain number of chores during your commute, and that you wouldn't be able to do these chores if the commute time was removed?
There is an hour of my morning and night, 2 hours a day, which I am calling 'commute time.'
I can commute during 'commute time'.
Or I can WFH and stay at home during 'commute time'.
If I don't commute, I can do chores during that time.
If I do commute, those chores are never done, and are permanently knocked off the to-do list. The house is just that much messier as a result.
I can clean during the weekend, but I would have cleaned during the weekend anyway.
During the week, the house looks trashed, because there isn't enough time for chores as it is; the time that is available will instead go to even higher-priority chores, like washing dishes and clothes.
Basically if 'commute time' goes towards trekking to the office and back, it comes out of the chore time budget, meaning a really, really messy house during the week.
I will just point out, in closing: 2 hours a day is a really big amount of time to subtract out of the time budget. It can't be recovered.
Even if I don't play games and don't do anything 'fun' - I don't, incidentally - there's no compensating for that loss.
Just to clarify for you because you're not getting the point:
People are getting confused because your reply is structured like you disagree with him, because your comment is written like a rebuttal and your tone is derisive.
However, in your original reply, you're not disagreeing with the above commenter. You're agreeing with them, and ALSO, you take issue with another small thing they mentioned, the comment about how this person would do the cleaning on the weekend.
---------------------------
To your original point I say this- lots of parents have free time. My mother had hobbies in her free time. My aunt has hobbies has hobbies in her free time. I'm sorry you don't, but the fact that you don't does not mean much about young people that do.
I think that is totally reasonable - for me the benefits of WFH don't outweigh the cost but for a significant percentage of developers I'm sure they do. I think where you get problems is cases where a company only has a minority of people WFH, or working in an office. Whenever you have a team that is primarily in an office, with only a couple of people remote, the people working remotely seem to miss out on a lot of important discussions and don't really feel as much a part of the team, at least in my experience. Ideally you would have both types of work fully supported, Stripe having their next engineering hub be remote [0] sounds like a good compromise to me. I'm interested in knowing how managers and PM's find working from home, to me it seems like being in management would magnify the problems you have with working remotely, but I've never been a manager so I don't really know.
I actually can't believe how many people are crying because they miss talking with their coworkers. Sounds to me like they're the office distractions ruining everyone else's productivity.
You may like your office conversations, I like not having to commute to work, not being distracted, and making my work space mine.
Try picking up a phone or hop on Slack instead of attempting to sabotage WFH because you're a social butterfly.
Different tastes. With all due respect, for every guy like you who doesn't want to work there, there are 10 that do.
I understand that remote first doesn't work for everyone, nothing works for everyone.
Sure, everyone has different preferences, which is why I think it would be ideal to both have a substantial amount of people working in the office full time, and also have a substantial amount of people working remotely full time. From the tweets I have seen, it does not seem like this will be the case at Shopify, since they said "The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup."
Unfortunately, this creates two classes of workers, with in office workers being better politically connected and preferred over remote workers who are treated akin to contractors.
I'm biased as a remote worker; I want more orgs going remote so there are more jobs to choose from, and commutes are soul sucking. If you want an office, rent a coworking space near home (with an employer picking up the tab, with a reasonable ~$300-500/month coworking stipend). A local library near me offers one for free, coffee, desk, wifi, printers, and free parking included.
You are quite delusional if you think the ratio is 10:1 in favor of WFH. One thing that the recent lockdown and forced WFH experiment has revealed is that while people are strongly in favor of flexibly WFH the ratio is closer to 10:1 against having no office at all.
It's really not fair to describe the current situation as a "forced WFH experiment". We're trying to work and be even remotely productive during an unprecedented global pandemic, and also happen to be working from home.
yeah, I like having the option to WFH, but I definitely don't think I can WFH permanently. At least, not right now. If a person is living in an urban city, I doubt they have space to have a proper WFH setup to begin with. I had to move my desk from my bedroom to my living room, which is fine when everyone is social distancing, but I definitely don't have space it for under normal circumstances.
The current situation isn't a good barometer for WFH for two reasons:
- Companies that previously laughed at the idea of WFH were forced to implement it without much time to prepare. Their technology, culture, and processes are bad.
- We're in a pandemic, so I can't go hang with my friends after 5pm at a bar or do any outside hobbies. This slight cabin fever is making people dislike WFH which is ironic because usually WFH means you have more time to go outside and do fun things.
I don't know what the preference is for the general developers public; obviously someone who is 40 with 2 kids and lives in Ohio isn't the same as someone who is 23 and lives in SF.
What I do mean, for a company like Shopify, they can do what they want. Tons of people will want to work there, whether they are 40 or 23.
Im in a smaller company of a few hundred employees. We had the option to go back to the office this week. Exactly 3 people are in the office, the same 3 who have remained at the office the entire time. Everyone else chose WFH until it is mandatory to go back to the office.
You might like it or not but that's the direction the tech world is going. A lot of people hating WFH hate it because they always worked in an office and don't want to change what they are used to.
In 10 years you will have a whole new generation of engineers that always worked from home and by then I would be surprised if the ratio is only 1:10.
As another comment mentioned, this current pandemic makes you hate a lot of aspect of life, regardless if you worked from home or from the office.
The world is moving in that direction. Adapt or become extinct.
Do you really think that with the world being more connected than ever, so many collaboration tools being created over the last years and VR evolving non stop, the office is still going to be a thing ?
I would be very surprised if in 50 years the concept of an office even exists anymore.
My office (small site within a big company) sent out a survey
about working from home.
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
I couldn't agree more. Remote meetings are useful, but I would quit if my company made it the default. I've done fully remote for a total of 3 years. I found it stifled communication and limited my ability to develop friendships and personal connections with the people I worked with.
Even as an introvert that enjoys my alone time, fully remote would be a deal breaker for me.
I agree completely, but wanted to emphasize something regarding: "and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting."
IMHO, ALL of the chat services make this problem worse, not better. None of them let you easily and fluidly say "I'm interested in this topic for the next few days" or whatever. They hide, rather than render discoverable, important discussions, either (due to GUI structure pushing people to do it) threads moved to 1:1 chats or just lost in the sheer volume of text scroll.
The future of UI is bounded attention: "alert me for xxx _for the next { hour, next few days, this week, through next week, this month, for quarter, as long as ..., forever }" attention filtering. UI right now assumes that the doesn't change and that users actively correct it. But we aren't even at the point where that basic level of automation even exists.
Well just like Open office plans became trend without anyone asking employees working in them. If permanently working from home or away from office becomes trend it will be only because people who control payments for office real estate decided that way.
Yeah, I concentrate a lot better at an office. I hate being in my home all day every day. The little distractions are what make me love a job, some of my best memories are the random interactions and happenings with my coworkers
BUT I want the flexibility to WFH 3/5 days a week. I don't mind living within an hour and a half commute, and coming in 2 days a week. Going every day... painful.
In theory I could WFH before, but as things weren't really set up for that, I only did it once a week if that.
So in that regard, I welcome this kind of thing. If companies can work out the logistics.
The issue I see here is that because of that one day per week you will need to still be in commuting distance from the office which limits where you could live and increases your cost of living dramatically. In other words the company saves on office spaces but you still need to pay a premium to have an office at home.
Going full remote with trips to the office once per quarter for example allows you to live wherever you want. That's the way I see this working well in other companies. Remote first and once per quarter everyone gets together for a couple days.
I got a new job right before the pandemic, with a big enough prior notice that pushed my first day into the pandemic. It may be related to the fact that the company I now work for wasn't doing any remote work before, but it now feels so impersonal working. In an office I can easily chit chat, get to know my coworkers, but remotely it seems so hard. I could see it happening more easily in the kind of place that has a casual channel on Slack, but most workplace doesn't push that kind of things. I may try to push some kind of virtual 5@7.
I would personally trust Shopify to do it right, to allow that kind of social interaction remotely.
The people who like to work in offices will still work in offices. There will be more of them, they will be smaller, and they will be wherever their employees want to live. Some will be official, and some will be coworking spaces.
What is the long term downward pressure on salary and compensation with all these companies going full remote? It’s true many companies are paying SV salaries for remote work, but how long will this last when the labor pool opens up?
>we now have the opportunity to be joined by a whole lot of incredible individuals from around the world that otherwise couldn’t because of our previous default to proximity.
Wow, so they'll be hiring non-Canadians by the majority now?
Interesting. I wonder how this will affect the economies of places like Ottawa, with Canada not having the type of Tech Sector the US does.
Well, Canada has a robust tech sector, equivalent to the US but proportional to population size.
The question is whether Americans can compete in a global marketplace against the rest of the world who don't expect SV-level compensation and also don't need US-level private health insurance. I'm trying but failing to see the value proposition to hiring American outside of the USA.
It's possible. Lots of people don't like working remotely. They might lose a lot of valuable employees. I suppose over time they might also attract people who prefer working from home exclusively, but they would be losing many older employees with valuable knowledge. One way or another, there's going to be some kind of pushback. Many people threatening to quit, many actually quitting.
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling. We so care about your well-being and we're so forward looking!
Will they? In my little view of the world I see younger workers who use the office for a social atmosphere as the ones who want to go back. Those of us that are older with older kids/wives seem more content at home. At least that's what I'm seeing in my current company.
Long before I ever even considered starting a family, I've always preferred working from home. I very much prefer keeping my social life and my work life separate. I'm close with a few people in my industry, but only the ones I really enjoy spending time with, personally.
I also have a great deal of respect for my teammates, some of whom I've worked with on multiple projects and companies over the past decade. But I'm especially glad not to complicate our relationships beyond our work together.
Is any of this forced? I can't read the article (paywall) but it sounds like work-from-home at Shopify will be optional right? The employer is 'letting' it happen, not forcing it, correct? Why would this make so many people so angry that they would leave? Or am I misunderstanding?
It sounds to me like the office is simply closed for remodelling and cleaning and will reopen at partial capacity in a few months. This is the vibe I get from the intro, can't read the whole article (paywall)
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling.
100% this. Will be interesting to see what employers do when workers start requesting part-time coworking space.
In my experience, team effectiveness in different remote vs in-office scenarios plays out like this:
Most effective - All of the team physically together in the same space.
2nd most effective - All of the team remote.
Least effective - A mix of in-office and remote team members.
Most companies that try out remote work start with the least effective option (the mix). I don't know enough details of Yahoo's attempt to say if that's what they did, but I expect so.
The 100% remote option can save some office space cost, but some of that gets eaten up by increased travel. Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
But one less-appreciated possibility opened up by 100% remote is the ability to draw talent from a much larger geographic area. We had engineers from all over North and South America. On balance, I think that makes it easier to retain older employees with valuable knowledge, who might want to have a house in the suburbs in a non-coastal state, instead of limiting your hiring pool to people willing to tolerate the congestion and cost of living in a big city.
> Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
I guess my take is the hot one, but if a remote team is routinely travelling to meet, I do not think that is 100% remote! It's just mostly remote. I recently had a 'remote job' that required 6-8 cross-country airline flights per year. The stress from those trips dramatically decreased my productivity in the weeks leading up to the trip (via increased personal costs not covered by the company, via harassment at airport security, etc). When hired, I was told it was 2 trips per year. This was okay with me, but the increase was not.
Perhaps some teams who work remotely can and do benefit from frequently meeting in person, but I honestly do not count that as 100% remote. It just...isn't 100%.
For those seeking the office experience, it will feel a lot different when everyone is maintaining 6 feet of distance. Not going to be the same experience people were fond of, IMO.
I can't find anything about mandatory no-office-work in that tweet thread anywhere. I see that the offices are reopening in a few months, with reduced capacity and an expectation that most employees will want to work from home. I don't see anything stating that you will not be allowed back in the office. Maybe I misunderstand. I don't know.
Revenue is king. Yahoo pulled it as a last ditch "I don't know, maybe this is the problem" attempt. If companies going full time remote find that they're struggling to perform they'll probably switch back. I think if they just continue the same or improve, definitely not.
I disagree with this. I think anyone who came in to the Yahoo CEO position when Mayer did would have been absolutely insane to allow the work from home policy to continue:
1. It was obvious from the data that tons of people were taking advantage of WFH at Yahoo (e.g. never logging into the corporate network)
2. Easy to make the argument that the problem was Yahoo management didn't manage WFH well, but even if one takes that as a truism (I'd say especially if one takes that as a truism) seems like the fastest way to fix that would have been to at least get everyone in the office.
WFH can work great, or it can be a total failure, but the worst in any case would be to come into a specific situation and not make decisions based on the data for that company at hand and instead base them off some broad "industry trends" standards.
I doubt it. I'm betting that the unstated parts of this is that the office isn't going away completely, it's just going to be downsized and shifted to something like hoteling.
I don't know if they will, and don't even know if they know, but I think you are 100% right that they are leaving that on the table privately. There is really nothing to stop them from undoing the policy or altering so that particular teams (which end up being a large portion of the workforce) need to come in.
For now, it saves tremendous costs as it could be over a year before their typical engineer wants to come into an office.
If I were to bet, it'd be that this is a knee jerk reaction to feeling helpless currently with everyone forced to WFH / lack of clarity on timeline and won't become the norm.
Sometimes I wonder how long "permanent" will be for these decisions. Off topic, but if the permanent work-from-home trend continues, I cannot imagine what is going to happen to commercial real estate. Convert to residential? Is this equilibrium needed for overheated housing markets?
If the glaring problems with SF were fixed, this is still one of the best places in the world to live quality-of-life wise. Weather, accessibility to some of the best nature in the world, great food, entertainment, etc.
Sure, not denying that, but I think it's uncharitable to question why anyone would want to live here. There are many reasons. You personally may not strike that ideal cost-value balance but it's certainly there for many people, especially if the biggest reasons why people leave SF are gone -- cost, homelessness, and possibly politics (mostly related to homelessness and cost).
It might just be the current situation but I have seen maybe 4 homeless in 3 weeks in my day to day and I take a lot of walks. Could just be looking in the wrong spots but there were literally 20 tents on my block near Bart in the Mission so its an upgrade.
I think I heard Pioneer Square is bad, just walked there the other day and it's not anything like SFs bad areas. There could just be better options for homeless during the shutdown here than SF though. I will reserve full judgement until things are back open.
People are going to be surprised by the state of the FiDi in SF when things open back up. Many tents have gone up there with everyone gone and WFH. Going to be interesting when people go back to the office there.
Definitely true, also the anything near 16th Street Mission Bart is out of control. There are definitely nice parts of SF, usually on a hill, but the bad parts are BAD.
I think you might see companies considering hiring people who live in Bakersfield, Sacramento, maybe even Nevada instead of San Francisco, but there's a vast difference between "usually working from home", and "Needs an international flight to get to the office" and "Literally works in a time zone that doesn't share any office hours with their boss".
Some commercial real estate will be leased out as individual offices to people who have WFH jobs but want to have an office (don't have space at home, etc.).
I have been crowing about this for years now. WFH by default could easily relieve pressure from the housing market at least in places where there are lots of people who have a job where they can WFH.
I would absolutely live 2 hours from an office if I only had to go in once every week or two. I'd live further if it was once a month.
Square flew under the radar compared to Twitter coverage but it too is on the same policy as Twitter given Jack is CEO of both. Noteworthy because it has a similar number of employees, an even larger market cap, and HQ'ed in the same location.
As Shopify? 35b (SQ) market cap vs 86b market cap (SHOP), SF vs Ottawa HQ, guess 4000 vs 6500 employees (based on linkedin numbers) is fairly close, but Square and Shopify are quite different.
The biggest positive to companies going all digital especially at Spotify's scale is the cost savings.
The problem with companies that have started in Urban centers is that many of their employees don't have the "extra" bedroom in their house to be able to accommodate for this new work from home scenario.
This is especially true in NYC. Where apartments are usually significantly smaller than anywhere else. And if both adults in the house hold are working from home, often times one of them ends up in a closet taking zoom calls.
What's surprising isn't that a company like Shopify is going remote-first.
It's that it was ever not remote-first in the first place.
The now-passing era of startups and big tech companies centering their workforce around physical offices will be looked back on as one of the most strange and illogical aspects of early 21st-century business!
How does corporate security handle permanent work-from-home? It seems that there would be vastly more risks added.
E.g. When Joe Employee walks into the office, we know it is him and what he does and where he works. At home, Joe Employee might have a friend who looks over his shoulder at the project launch document he is completing, at the financials that are being submitted to the CFO.
The security risks aren't any different in permanent work from home vs "once in a while when I have to watch the kids" work from home, and most companies have long since allowed the latter. You just don't give sensitive documents to people who can't be trusted to protect them.
Well, many Joe Employees take work home, so how is that different? And also, Joe Employee can be decide to take interesting docs/info for his own use, I don't see much of a difference.
disclaimer: I work for Shopify as a lead on our "corporate security engineering" team (not real name of it).
Shopify follows the the zero trust networking/Beyondcorp model, and we never had the physical office spaces as part of our threat model. Not much can be done for shoulder-surfing (aside from privacy screens, and our security training), however we have built out robust systems that build trust modeling out of identity and device security.
Nearly all companies allow you to access documents remotely, so you could do the same thing over a lunch, in the evenings, whatever. Or he could memorise the key points and tell him/her on a call!
Bad actors will always be able to get round these controls imo.
For some of the large clients I have, they require (and pay for) an independent company to come and audit my home office to make sure it meets their standards. The auditing company was provided with a litany of requirements from our shared client.
The first time it was a little odd, but it's routine for those companies who have sensitive IP.
"A survey of senior finance leaders by research firm Gartner found that 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting company Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the entire workforce will work from home at least a couple times a week. Before the pandemic, that number was in the low single digits."
This is kind of terrifying. I started working from home a few months before this mess, and i've found that work-life balance hasn't really improved. Yes, my day is more flexible — i can spend a few hours in the morning with my kid and make up lost time in the evening when she's down — but the days stick to one another, and i'm having trouble disconnecting completely. I used to get home from the office at 4:30, hang with the kid, get her to bed, and then have a few hours to either write or go to the gym or hang with my wife. These days, work is always on my mind to some degree, accompanied by low-level anxiety — and not just because of this surreal and disorienting pandemic.
I've found that my work-life balance has simultaneously improved and worsened - I have more free time to relax, but I still end up working at like 10pm because I end up spending too much time binging Netflix or whatever and have to quickly make up the work. It's like I'm slowly reverting to my college days
Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake:
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
I am curious about the sustainability of work from home for truly team-based work.
I get to develop features independently, so if I am given the spec, I have no need to speak to anyone for the rest of the day except for a couple messages with QA. For me, it is great.
But I am essentially a microservice with defined inputs and outputs. For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
Anecdotally, while productivity seems to remain at a high level, a lot of that seems to be enabled by employees working more hours and being always available.
The things you're describing don't go away with a remote team. It's not like going remote means all your employees just never talk to eachother in favor of working independently. It just means you use technology to solve in-person problems rather than being in person.
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
But your description of (C) reflects a presumption of what I would call working independently. In many work cultures, and on many kinds of projects, that freedom is important and mostly unavailable in a culture where people have to stop to put on pants and hop on a call.
> Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.
I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.
Can you describe why you couldn't spend a day in a boardroom _virtually_? Or how developers involved in "requirement analysis" need to be in the same room?
It isn't impossible, just more difficult, mostly based on human factors.
Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.
On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.
I think that blaming remote work to mask people/team problems that existed in person is unwise. If your team isn't comfortable being legitimate and honest during requirement analysis, is it worth having? If, in person, the process breaks down into "What the team lead can notice about the team's body language/behavior during requirement analysis", I would probably suggest that there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of that meeting. And this is why, I think, the problems being blamed on remote work are usually much larger/harder problems that can get swept under the in person rug.
I don't see it as a fundamental problem with remote work, but remote work requires that many things work a lot better than they on average do. You can try and fix everything from team dynamics and documentation or drag everyone into the office and have the problems kind of be fixed by default.
You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.
I think about (and struggle to value) point C often. The disruption can be very annoying but the knowledge transfer often has a huge multiplier attached to it. One person's small piece of knowledge can give an entire team major traction. This model also promotes tribal knowledge and weak documentation...which is acceptable for a small company, not so much for larger companies where people are spread out across geographies.
I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?
I think that it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking. Having a distributed team means you have to remove the "I'll just walk over and ask" mentality from everyone involved. You must resist the temptation to use slack as an alternative to in-person communication. Communication must be frequent, documented and public - someone else needs to be able to see the decisions you made.
Exactly what alexbanks said, at least in my experience my team does a lot of team work that you mentioned that requires us to be in sync. For that we use remote conference tools to discuss and sometimes pair program and it has been working really well.
It also removed a lot of distractions that we had in the office yet we miss the "coffee breaks" we had to discuss and unofficial align what tasks we should address next and the best way to approach these. We are quickly adapting to these.
Yeah, after going through forced WFH for extended period of time, I think I see the point that Nadella is making on the impact that this may have on mental health.
Work from home could be harmful for employees, warns Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
But what about the mental health of people sitting in traffic hours a day, in a loud open floor plan office? Seems like a pretty terrible excuse to me.
Really big companies like Microsoft use their massive campuses as a recruiting tool - which obviously means nothing if you're remote-first.
But back to mental health: I've been doing MUCH better since I started WFH years ago. Going to an office every day was just too draining. Everyone would walk to hang out after hours, take extended lunches, etc.
I'm hopefully that remote presence tech (VR, etc) will really step up to make up for all the subtle things we lose when we work across the digital divide <3
Right now, I find WFH pretty tough, and in my experience so far, I get markedly depressed and collaboration challenging without all thes social cues of meatspace
Also our team has been working together for a while so can work from home without too much interruption. But its changing, we have some new guys on the team and no one wants to train them. People are trying out new things but coordination is a mess. Morale is bad but maybe that is just virus and economic related.
This too. We have a new guy and he is having trouble getting up to speed. Normally they would just hover our someone's shoulder for a while. That can no longer be done.
I advocate for remote pair programming where the less experienced person is in control of the keyboard and sharing the screen and the more experienced person just explains what he has to do and watches him learn and apply that knowledge.
My team and I have been doing this, I have been in calls with a more senior team member that was helping me (I even got some Vim tips alongside with the explanations I was getting for completing the task).
I also recommend doing pair programming with people on somewhat the same level as yours as you can help each. You can divide a task in two and work in half the task yourself while the other person just watches and comments and then the other way where you watch and comment and the other person has all the keyboard and mouse control. This helps with reducing distractions and it offers the same advantages of Code Reviews but in real time.
Do not do this every hour or even everyday as this is more mentally intense then focusing alone and I think focusing alone also offers great improvements in learning. A balance of the two is key!
> For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
I work in a Support Engineering group, where we often need to collaboratively debug. Remote forces us to clarify our thinking (you get better over time at writing your thoughts that way) and video calls work solidly well for most of the world. We have new hires that have come in and have said "people are surprised I work here remotely, because I like to talk to people but actually I talk to people ALL DAY."
The style changes a bit due to the technology, but you can choose the fidelity as needed. It's not for everyone, and sometimes remote slows things down, but even then, you get ruthless at prioritizing, because sync time becomes valuable.
Seems like permanent remote-optional is rapidly becoming the competitive equilibrium in tech.
As tooling improves, there is some point at which gains from expanded recruiting pool + real estate savings outweigh coordination/culture costs of remote. Beyond this it will be irrational to force physical presences (for many roles, at least) and there'll be no going back.
People have commented the impact of this shift on SF/NYC etc, but based on this announcement the impact on smaller tech hubs will be even more devastating. Why would you now open a office in a smaller tech hub when you can hire someone from anywhere ? The impact of this in Canada can be huge
So Twitter, Square, Coinbase, and now Shopify. I wonder how many other companies will allow this and what this shift will lead to. I imagine this will lead to an exodus out of the Bay Area and possibly to places like Tahoe, Santa Cruz, Marin, and a corresponding shift in real estate prices. No real advantage to living in a tiny apartment in a city if you can't go to concerts, bars, restaurants, and now can WFH where ever you want.
My question is how companies will handle cost of living differences and if salaries will be adjusted based on locations? Or can I take my California salary to Seattle and pay no income taxes?
Salaries will almost certainly be cut. If you can go 100% remote someone in the Midwest can do your job on $80k/year. All the places you listed are still expensive and if you are remote you don’t need to live there.
Non-compete clauses are illegal (or at least not enforceable) in California, but they're legal in Washington state. The savings from state income tax (bulk of your taxes are federal anyway) are not enough to account for the non-compete clause.
446 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 425 ms ] threadI'm keeping track of announcements here: https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7
Tech companies have a huge incentive here - they can now start hiring engineers at non Bay Area prices. Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
Recent news and surveys do indicate significant change expected in remote work changes and real estate footprint changes.
"Large companies already expect more of their workers to continue to work remotely and say they plan to reduce their real estate footprint, which will, in turn, reduce the foot traffic that feeds nearby restaurants, shops, nail salons and other businesses." [1.]
This is part of data from a deport by Deloitte [2.][3.]:
> "In a year, 75% of CFOs expect more of their workforce to work remotely and nearly half expect a smaller real estate footprint."
[1.] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/economy/coronavi...
[2.] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-cfo-signal...
[3.] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/finance/articles/reope...
Regarding salaries due to support expensive city lifestyles: True, I would like to see how remote-first companies handle hiring people in such cities.
There would be a transition period, probably on the order of years to even decades, before they would cease considering the cost of living in where their remote workers live. Hopefully by that time, rents in the Bay Area will have dipped as people slow moving in/start moving out because of flexible remote work situations.
That hasn't happened yet either. It's more like "we're going to stop expanding".
I think, once the boss gets a taste of working from home, they too want to enjoy their fancy homes and spending times with their kids instead of sitting in traffic all day. And Covid now provides them a generally acceptable way to push that change through.
The productivity gains of WFH might be only in comparison to awful open office plans, and may disappear when compared to more private office layouts. There are still major questions about long term impact to new hires and their growth, where retention takes a hit (employees feel more like free agents and consequently switch jobs more frequently), etc.
It seems incredibly short sighted to be making these decisions on the basis of a 3 month experiment with confounding factors (to say the least!).
As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
— Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO
I hope this mindset carries over to other companies who are committing to allow employees to stay home. There's more to remote working than staying at home. The whole culture of the company has to embrace it.
> Home office setup and coworking allowances. Working from a coffee shop? You can use your coworking allowance for the requisite latte!
and from https://javi.blog/2016/01/10/automattic-perks/:
> If you don’t enjoy working from home 100% of the time, the company will give you up to $250 per month to rent a coworking space. Also, if you don’t want to have a permanent place to attend, you can use that $250 to pay for whatever you drink while you’re working from a coffee or similar places.
> You can get a completely equipped home office on the company. For example, I got an Aeron chair, an Ikea Bekant standing desk & a desktop lamp even before my first official day in the Automattic.
They did already gave out $1000 for WFH setups: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-shopify-gives-em...
Presumably that implies that, at the very least, new employees will be offered the same measly one-time $1k payment. Hopefully their restructuring of offices will include a more appropriate reallocation of that spending to cover the true costs of remote working.
Heating/air conditioning as well
Outside of just being harder to communicate virtually, I really need the change of scenery and social interaction that comes with an office. Sure you can get that by joining different social groups outside of work, but that requires lots of intentional effort, and I actually enjoy hanging out at work and going to lunch with my coworkers. And the office has lots of perks like snacks and meals which can't be easily replicated at home (I mean I don't mind cooking, but I get much better lunches at work than the sandwich I would make for myself). I can't think of a working situation much better than going to an office where I have all of the food I need, a properly set up workstation, and coworkers I am able to talk to in person and go to lunch/dinner/social activities with. To me that is far better than sitting in my home alone all day (and I don't even have kids, which would be a whole other set of distractions).
And this was after I modified my work hours to take the bus during less-peak time.
So now I drive. It's about the same time, but in mostly stop and go traffic. I can listen to podcasts and don't have people literally sitting on top of me, but I also have to deal with being constantly hyper-vigilant because (1) people drive like fuckwads and (2) traffic patterns in a lot of places are really screwed up and being in the wrong lane at the wrong time can wind up easily adding 30% to your commute time and (3) the cyclists have this bad habit of trying to weave through moving traffic instead of using the bike lanes and following the traffic signals and then physically assaulting you if you don't notice them and give way.
Seems they'll keep their current offices but reformated as spaces for people that really want to work amongst each other physically, instead of expecting the majority of workers to come in every day.
No commuting, which on its own is reason enough for WFH since it's such a massive waste of time. Commuting would add an extra 10 hours to my workweek, and I don't get paid for it. Add in things like control over your own workspace, no "open office" nonsense, access to your own kitchen/bathroom, together all outweighs the benefits of working from the office.
The ideal situation for me would be WFH by default, with the option to work from an office if you want to or for specific situations.
When I'm in the office, I often take breaks - 20-30 mins. Sometimes a longer walk during lunch time. I'm simply doing the same here but instead of being on my phone I'm maybe doing a quick vacuum sweep, trip to the bodega for some hand soap, or dropping off my laundry somewhere.
I do have friends that work for companies that expect them to be "online" all the time so this may not work for them.
I think that working from home will stay and that some kind of work discipline will be a skill people are just required to have. You know, like being able to communicate professionally and to keep promises.
I don't want this to come across as overly harsh. But a helpful rule of thumb to understand what life is like after having kids, is: there is no free time. None! It's like being in the military, where you wake up at 6am, shower until 6:30am, do calisthenics until 9:30am... and so on, with every single hour occupied, until bedtime, promptly at 9:00pm.
If you tell a person like that 'just watch a movie during your free time,' they'll look at you blankly and say, 'I don't have free time, not on my schedule.'
Why are things so different? Because not only do you have another person(s) making messes who do like 0% of the cleanup, they require much more care than adults. So free time trends to 0%. There's no 'weekend' in the sense of no work (there's always housework), in a sense there's no 'after work.' There's only work, as far as the eye can see.
So for example, with commuting, I don't have enough time to do housecleaning, so the house stays in a permanent state of ugly messiness. Without it, I can apply that time to cleaning, so it becomes only moderately, to slightly, messy. There's no big block of free time - nowhere - where I can do stuff to bring back the time that's lost by commuting.
I love my kids of course, but taking care of small kids can be very exhausting.
From my read, he's saying "no commute is good because you can do a few chores during the week and not have as many to do on the weekends".
You're saying "no commute is good because you can apply that time to cleaning and the house is cleaner; but also kids are exhausting".
?
He is saying:
> Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH
I am saying:
> If my commute time is removed, some amount of necessary chores cannot get done. I can't do chores in any time other than the commute time. There is no real 'weekend' or 'after work' time, when I can do them 'later'.
All time is accounted for, and removing time necessarily knocks some items (like 'morning/midday rooms cleaning') off the list permanently.
What I mean is:
There is an hour of my morning and night, 2 hours a day, which I am calling 'commute time.'
I can commute during 'commute time'.
Or I can WFH and stay at home during 'commute time'.
If I don't commute, I can do chores during that time.
If I do commute, those chores are never done, and are permanently knocked off the to-do list. The house is just that much messier as a result.
I can clean during the weekend, but I would have cleaned during the weekend anyway.
During the week, the house looks trashed, because there isn't enough time for chores as it is; the time that is available will instead go to even higher-priority chores, like washing dishes and clothes.
Basically if 'commute time' goes towards trekking to the office and back, it comes out of the chore time budget, meaning a really, really messy house during the week.
I will just point out, in closing: 2 hours a day is a really big amount of time to subtract out of the time budget. It can't be recovered.
Even if I don't play games and don't do anything 'fun' - I don't, incidentally - there's no compensating for that loss.
People are getting confused because your reply is structured like you disagree with him, because your comment is written like a rebuttal and your tone is derisive.
However, in your original reply, you're not disagreeing with the above commenter. You're agreeing with them, and ALSO, you take issue with another small thing they mentioned, the comment about how this person would do the cleaning on the weekend.
---------------------------
To your original point I say this- lots of parents have free time. My mother had hobbies in her free time. My aunt has hobbies has hobbies in her free time. I'm sorry you don't, but the fact that you don't does not mean much about young people that do.
[0] https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub
You may like your office conversations, I like not having to commute to work, not being distracted, and making my work space mine.
Try picking up a phone or hop on Slack instead of attempting to sabotage WFH because you're a social butterfly.
I'm biased as a remote worker; I want more orgs going remote so there are more jobs to choose from, and commutes are soul sucking. If you want an office, rent a coworking space near home (with an employer picking up the tab, with a reasonable ~$300-500/month coworking stipend). A local library near me offers one for free, coffee, desk, wifi, printers, and free parking included.
- Companies that previously laughed at the idea of WFH were forced to implement it without much time to prepare. Their technology, culture, and processes are bad.
- We're in a pandemic, so I can't go hang with my friends after 5pm at a bar or do any outside hobbies. This slight cabin fever is making people dislike WFH which is ironic because usually WFH means you have more time to go outside and do fun things.
In 10 years you will have a whole new generation of engineers that always worked from home and by then I would be surprised if the ratio is only 1:10.
As another comment mentioned, this current pandemic makes you hate a lot of aspect of life, regardless if you worked from home or from the office.
The world is moving in that direction. Adapt or become extinct.
I would be very surprised if in 50 years the concept of an office even exists anymore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
Even as an introvert that enjoys my alone time, fully remote would be a deal breaker for me.
IMHO, ALL of the chat services make this problem worse, not better. None of them let you easily and fluidly say "I'm interested in this topic for the next few days" or whatever. They hide, rather than render discoverable, important discussions, either (due to GUI structure pushing people to do it) threads moved to 1:1 chats or just lost in the sheer volume of text scroll.
The future of UI is bounded attention: "alert me for xxx _for the next { hour, next few days, this week, through next week, this month, for quarter, as long as ..., forever }" attention filtering. UI right now assumes that the doesn't change and that users actively correct it. But we aren't even at the point where that basic level of automation even exists.
BUT I want the flexibility to WFH 3/5 days a week. I don't mind living within an hour and a half commute, and coming in 2 days a week. Going every day... painful.
In theory I could WFH before, but as things weren't really set up for that, I only did it once a week if that.
So in that regard, I welcome this kind of thing. If companies can work out the logistics.
Going full remote with trips to the office once per quarter for example allows you to live wherever you want. That's the way I see this working well in other companies. Remote first and once per quarter everyone gets together for a couple days.
I would personally trust Shopify to do it right, to allow that kind of social interaction remotely.
Wow, so they'll be hiring non-Canadians by the majority now? Interesting. I wonder how this will affect the economies of places like Ottawa, with Canada not having the type of Tech Sector the US does.
The question is whether Americans can compete in a global marketplace against the rest of the world who don't expect SV-level compensation and also don't need US-level private health insurance. I'm trying but failing to see the value proposition to hiring American outside of the USA.
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling. We so care about your well-being and we're so forward looking!
I also have a great deal of respect for my teammates, some of whom I've worked with on multiple projects and companies over the past decade. But I'm especially glad not to complicate our relationships beyond our work together.
100% this. Will be interesting to see what employers do when workers start requesting part-time coworking space.
Most effective - All of the team physically together in the same space.
2nd most effective - All of the team remote.
Least effective - A mix of in-office and remote team members.
Most companies that try out remote work start with the least effective option (the mix). I don't know enough details of Yahoo's attempt to say if that's what they did, but I expect so.
The 100% remote option can save some office space cost, but some of that gets eaten up by increased travel. Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
But one less-appreciated possibility opened up by 100% remote is the ability to draw talent from a much larger geographic area. We had engineers from all over North and South America. On balance, I think that makes it easier to retain older employees with valuable knowledge, who might want to have a house in the suburbs in a non-coastal state, instead of limiting your hiring pool to people willing to tolerate the congestion and cost of living in a big city.
I guess my take is the hot one, but if a remote team is routinely travelling to meet, I do not think that is 100% remote! It's just mostly remote. I recently had a 'remote job' that required 6-8 cross-country airline flights per year. The stress from those trips dramatically decreased my productivity in the weeks leading up to the trip (via increased personal costs not covered by the company, via harassment at airport security, etc). When hired, I was told it was 2 trips per year. This was okay with me, but the increase was not.
Perhaps some teams who work remotely can and do benefit from frequently meeting in person, but I honestly do not count that as 100% remote. It just...isn't 100%.
That rule is to prevent spread from strangers in grocery stores etc during brief contacts
1. It was obvious from the data that tons of people were taking advantage of WFH at Yahoo (e.g. never logging into the corporate network)
2. Easy to make the argument that the problem was Yahoo management didn't manage WFH well, but even if one takes that as a truism (I'd say especially if one takes that as a truism) seems like the fastest way to fix that would have been to at least get everyone in the office.
WFH can work great, or it can be a total failure, but the worst in any case would be to come into a specific situation and not make decisions based on the data for that company at hand and instead base them off some broad "industry trends" standards.
For now, it saves tremendous costs as it could be over a year before their typical engineer wants to come into an office.
But then if everyone is working anywhere why on earth would you live in SF.
And why would companies hire in SF if they can pick up comparable talent at a fractional price from Romania.
Lots of questions!
I do recall some Seattlites mentioning one specific area that is particularly bad by name but don't recall that name.
People are going to be surprised by the state of the FiDi in SF when things open back up. Many tents have gone up there with everyone gone and WFH. Going to be interesting when people go back to the office there.
I would absolutely live 2 hours from an office if I only had to go in once every week or two. I'd live further if it was once a month.
The problem with companies that have started in Urban centers is that many of their employees don't have the "extra" bedroom in their house to be able to accommodate for this new work from home scenario.
This is especially true in NYC. Where apartments are usually significantly smaller than anywhere else. And if both adults in the house hold are working from home, often times one of them ends up in a closet taking zoom calls.
It's that it was ever not remote-first in the first place.
The now-passing era of startups and big tech companies centering their workforce around physical offices will be looked back on as one of the most strange and illogical aspects of early 21st-century business!
E.g. When Joe Employee walks into the office, we know it is him and what he does and where he works. At home, Joe Employee might have a friend who looks over his shoulder at the project launch document he is completing, at the financials that are being submitted to the CFO.
Do they handle it? A heck of a lot of companies are using nothing more than remote desktop from personal machines right now.
Shopify follows the the zero trust networking/Beyondcorp model, and we never had the physical office spaces as part of our threat model. Not much can be done for shoulder-surfing (aside from privacy screens, and our security training), however we have built out robust systems that build trust modeling out of identity and device security.
Bad actors will always be able to get round these controls imo.
The first time it was a little odd, but it's routine for those companies who have sensitive IP.
"A survey of senior finance leaders by research firm Gartner found that 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting company Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the entire workforce will work from home at least a couple times a week. Before the pandemic, that number was in the low single digits."
This is kind of terrifying. I started working from home a few months before this mess, and i've found that work-life balance hasn't really improved. Yes, my day is more flexible — i can spend a few hours in the morning with my kid and make up lost time in the evening when she's down — but the days stick to one another, and i'm having trouble disconnecting completely. I used to get home from the office at 4:30, hang with the kid, get her to bed, and then have a few hours to either write or go to the gym or hang with my wife. These days, work is always on my mind to some degree, accompanied by low-level anxiety — and not just because of this surreal and disorienting pandemic.
The past couple of months have been a very different situation than the "normal".
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
> And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
It does seem like they plan on forcing their employees to work from home in this case.
I think that's the problem that most people have - not having the option to work from work.
I get to develop features independently, so if I am given the spec, I have no need to speak to anyone for the rest of the day except for a couple messages with QA. For me, it is great.
But I am essentially a microservice with defined inputs and outputs. For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
Anecdotally, while productivity seems to remain at a high level, a lot of that seems to be enabled by employees working more hours and being always available.
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.
I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.
Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.
On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.
You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.
I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?
It also removed a lot of distractions that we had in the office yet we miss the "coffee breaks" we had to discuss and unofficial align what tasks we should address next and the best way to approach these. We are quickly adapting to these.
Work from home could be harmful for employees, warns Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/work-from-home-could...
Really big companies like Microsoft use their massive campuses as a recruiting tool - which obviously means nothing if you're remote-first.
But back to mental health: I've been doing MUCH better since I started WFH years ago. Going to an office every day was just too draining. Everyone would walk to hang out after hours, take extended lunches, etc.
Right now, I find WFH pretty tough, and in my experience so far, I get markedly depressed and collaboration challenging without all thes social cues of meatspace
My team and I have been doing this, I have been in calls with a more senior team member that was helping me (I even got some Vim tips alongside with the explanations I was getting for completing the task).
I also recommend doing pair programming with people on somewhat the same level as yours as you can help each. You can divide a task in two and work in half the task yourself while the other person just watches and comments and then the other way where you watch and comment and the other person has all the keyboard and mouse control. This helps with reducing distractions and it offers the same advantages of Code Reviews but in real time.
Do not do this every hour or even everyday as this is more mentally intense then focusing alone and I think focusing alone also offers great improvements in learning. A balance of the two is key!
I work in a Support Engineering group, where we often need to collaboratively debug. Remote forces us to clarify our thinking (you get better over time at writing your thoughts that way) and video calls work solidly well for most of the world. We have new hires that have come in and have said "people are surprised I work here remotely, because I like to talk to people but actually I talk to people ALL DAY."
The style changes a bit due to the technology, but you can choose the fidelity as needed. It's not for everyone, and sometimes remote slows things down, but even then, you get ruthless at prioritizing, because sync time becomes valuable.
As tooling improves, there is some point at which gains from expanded recruiting pool + real estate savings outweigh coordination/culture costs of remote. Beyond this it will be irrational to force physical presences (for many roles, at least) and there'll be no going back.
Why not? The wage differential will still apply: why hire someone remotely from SF when you can hire someone remotely from Ottawa at 70% the wage?
My question is how companies will handle cost of living differences and if salaries will be adjusted based on locations? Or can I take my California salary to Seattle and pay no income taxes?