> In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year.
> “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. “We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range — I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”
As a remote worker I've seen it done well and I've seen it done poorly. I think you have to go remote first, with all meetings and communicating being inclusive for the whole team. If you decide something face to face, send a summary via slack or email.
Anyway details aside, it can be done, it's just it has to be a deliberate effort from everyone in the office.
Totally correct. The default modes of communication should be asynchronous, or if a real-time meeting is required then everyone should be on video in separate places, even if most are in the office. This prevents situations where the remote workers are at a disadvantage because of a bad audio or video setup. If the audio sucks for everyone, they'll find a way to fix it (plus it's way easier to capture individual audio than a room full of people).
The benefits are also there for people who go to the office since there ends up being less tribal knowledge and more written down or documented somewhere.
My employer is going to 2 days a week in-office for the technical staff because WFH has gone so well. Allows us to work and do some planning remotely and to get together to plan large projects so we can whiteboard effectively.
"Facebook will reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas."
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
I agree with this in some ways, but I could see how it could heavily skew local job markets against companies that can't match the FAANG salaries. Now, that's assuming that FB can hire enough people to shift local salaries like that.
Spread across the entire country/world? Unrealistic to think FB alone moves the needle. Maybe if all of FANG+ followed Facebook's lead, you'd see this effect.
Companies (e.g. Mozilla, Gitlab, now Facebook) often forget another side of the coin - "less expensive areas" most of the time means worse quality of life.
Also, all of those companies say "less expensive areas" while they really mean "lower wage areas" - which doesn't necessary align with the former preposition.
It's all personal preference. I love cities due to the density, walkability, and different types of people and events you can find, and have lived in rural areas and cities alike. I get depressed in suburbs generally as there isn't much happening and you have to drive everywhere. Rural areas I can live with in stretches since you at least can get more adventurous outdoor situations with more property and areas to wander
In the context of this discussion (silicon valley employers like Facebook and Google), these offices are in the suburbs. Good luck walking to the FB headquarters.
That's fair. I've been to FB HQ and agree, not city-like at all. I currently live in Seattle and work at Amazon HQ, which I walk to (normally, pre-covid :) )
Where do you get that idea from? Everywhere outside of major tech hubs the cost of living is significantly less and "quality of life" is actually better. I moved to Cleveland and yes there's less "trendy" things like restaurants but there's so many parks and places to go and activities and casual events
I meant the planet Earth rather than one particular country. The cost of living in Bangladesh or rural Somalia might be less than SF, but I suspect the living conditions are worse.
As for low-wage/high-cost place - e.g. Italy is a great example.
The living conditions are worst on average but if you're bringing in CS money then you can afford to live luxuriously in whichever country you choose and it would cost you less.
This surprised me a year ago when I was looking at Boulder as an option to relocate to from the SFBay.. You can get a single-family home there for roughly the same price as much of the Oakland Hills.. nearly everything on the cheaper side was ~$800k.
> Companies (e.g. Mozilla, Gitlab, now Facebook) often forget another side of the coin - "less expensive areas" most of the time means worse quality of life.
Exactly. Also, if you live in the “middle of nowhere” or even outside a major metro area on the east and west coasts of the US, the quality of healthcare substantially declines. Considering that the third leading cause of death in the US is preventable medical errors, living outside of these areas can literally be a death sentence. It is only a matter of time before it is likely to become the case for an individual, healthy or not.
As somebody with 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, plus type 1 diabetes, remote work helps tremendously. But, living in the boonies would literally, in no exaggeration, kill me. So, I need a salary that allows me to live in a major decent metro area, plus allows me to pay for my healthcare. That is non-negotiable. Every day, working in the US is looking less appealing. I can legally work in select places in other parts of the world, and plan on leaving the US. There are other places in the world that have universal healthcare, that do not have huge disparities in quality across similar geographical areas.
You can find out more about healthcare quality worldwide and the US by examining the data on http://HealthData.org
Moving from "daily commute distance" to "occasional long trip distance" would still be huge. Moving 2-3hrs out from major east and west coast metros would massively increase affordability.
You are missing the point: I still need a lot of care, and the quality of it allows me not only to work, but to stay alive. I have at least 1 appointment per week for my medical care, if not a minimum of 2. Sometimes I can have 4 appointments per week. It is not just a matter of having to commute, however long that may be. In an emergency, where I am located matters, and living 2-3 hours outside a major metro area can easily hasten my death, with my medical issues. Rare diseases tend to be systematic, with limited treatments. They are also not easy to treat either. In my case in particular, I am technically more susceptible to having other rare conditions too. My rare diseases are immune-mediated.
But, where I live absolutely matters. I also require a lot of healthcare contact, where living 2-3 hours outside of a city just does not work.
If the money is more equally distributed, the quality of life will also become equally distributed. I imagine the next "Facebook city" at the border of "nowhere" and "farm ville" will get immediately a huge influx of hospitals, gourmet restaurants and private schools to supply its citizens.
This happens already in medicine a lot. A surgeon in a small hospital in Kansas actually makes more money than one in NYC. The reason is because nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere.
where did you get this idea from ? my advice travel around more. & spend less time on the internet. and then you'll see plenty of places where quality of life from clean air, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, culture, friendly folks etc is much better than the american metros. nyc & sf.
Because you, the laborer, begin as a fungible commodity to a company that very much operates on a short-term, quarterly basis. But with that said, it's certainly possible that Facebook will need to functionally do as you described and "keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world" because otherwise, they won't be able to effectively recruit. They'll get outbid by startups that don't attempt such hare-brained schemes, and maybe they'll dislike it enough to raise wages where required.
Secondly, it's not likely the case that Facebook needs the "absolute best talent" across the board -- it's more likely that they do for some positions (and will pay appropriately) and not so much for others. And for where it stands there, I'm pretty sure Facebook knows what that Pareto frontier looks like -- at least in recent history, they have generally outbid their weight class competitors [1] in terms of total compensation.
>Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income.
Obviously, you're free to work wherever you want but I simply fail to understand the sentiment here.
The "same" house that costs $1M in the Bay Area costs $300k in Atlanta. A pound of chicken or gallon of milk is also half the price. Day care for children? Twice as expensive in CA. Why should FB pay Bay Area living wages to someone in Atlanta, when they can pay them top dollar for their own market?
Does this suggest a company should have to pay the entire workforce, whatever they pay the individual in the highest-cost-of-living area? These are businesses, not charities.
As a side note, Bay Area inflated prices will probably drop as a result of this.
Personally, I would not move somewhere with half the cost of living if I'm getting half the pay. At higher incomes (ex: senior level FAANG engineers and up) you don't spend a lot of your income (stock + salary), you save a good chunk of it (as long as you haven't had major lifestyle inflation issues, you should be saving a lot). This means that it's more important to find a balance between pay and cost of living where you can maximize saving. It's why I prefer Seattle to SF. SF pays a little more, but the cost of living greatly increases. Seattle is much more expensive then many other places you could live, but then I'd be saving a lot less due to pay drops. There is of course quality of life that has to be brought into the equation, which is more about personal preferences and what makes you happy, so I won't get into that part, but $1M on a house in one location vs. $300k for Atlanta is not the deal breaker at higher pay (btw, those are Seattle price ranges, $1M will not get you much of a house in the Bay Area from what I've seen).
Actually, I don't think this is true - especially for Seattle.
Facebook pays the same payscale for Seattle as the Bay Area. Combined with no state income tax, lower property prices, and lower cost of living, you come out far ahead (financially) by being a Facebooker in Seattle instead of SF.
From what I heard from friends at FB, it was either signing bonus or something else that was slightly less in Seattle than it was in SF.
But overall, I am in full agreement with you. You will be able to save noticeably more as a FB engineer in Seattle as opposed to SF, while living around the same lifestyle level.
Is 50% of total comp realistic? I find it hard to believe that someone would be paid $250k in the Bay Area and work with someone at the same level in Boise getting paid $125k. I can buy $250k vs $200k or something similar.
That's the big question mark for remote -- There just aren't many jobs at an equivalent level of a $250k engineer in Boise. So often if you want to work as an engineer in Boise, you work for the airport or hospital or whoever has a 'real' business that needs software help -- and their pay scales are muuuch closer to $125k than $200k. Outside of engineering, I know a friend who did design for a web dev shop in the Midwest who 5x'ed his salary by moving to the Bay Area and joining Facebook.
Then all facebook needs to do is pay the programmer $150k in Boise if the premium market rate there is $125k, no? Facebook saves $100k, Boise Engineer gets a 20% increase to their salary.
And $150k in Boise likely results in a higher quality of life than $250k around SF.
But that isn't how it works, at least at any company I have seen that implements remote relocation (and I assume FB too).
If you move to a place with a 50% COL as NYC or SF, you retain 70% or so of your salary. You still come out ahead. I think you've set up a strawman fallacy here. People come out ahead financially when relocating to lower COL, even with the downward salary adjustments.
That can certainly work out then (depending on your expense to income ratio), all I'm saying is you need to do the math on what you can save based on the new income to compare saving rates rather then cost of living to pay ratio. I have compared offers from Seattle, NYC, SF, Pittsburgh, and Philly, for multiple big well-known tech companies. Pittsburgh and Philly were way cheaper cost of living, but pay was substantially lower as well so I would save more in other locations. SF paid the most, followed by NYC, followed by Seattle, but SF and NYC would have had reduced saving rates after looking at everything. Granted these were not all the same company (some were) so it's hard to do direct comparison and know what places like FB will do. I'd be interested in seeing more data as this occurs
You've got it backwards. They aren't going to pay the Mobile Alabama employee a Bay Area salary. They will pay the Bay Area employee the Mobile Alabama salary and tell you you're welcome to live wherever you like. If you choose to live in the Bay Area, that's your problem. Pizza delivery drivers don't get to demand a higher wage just because they prefer to drive a lambo.
Wouldn't that just end up applying to whatever subset of employees are up for living in Alabama?
Sure, if you can grow that subset to 100% then you can keep all the pizza for yourself, but the reason tech salaries are so high is the companies are that profitable.
If Zuckerberg is paying Alabama rates to everyone, it will be trivially easy to poach talent from him, and he knows this, so while he might have in mind a pool of "superfungibles" making $ALABAMA in $WHEREVER, you will not see Big Tech start slashing the compensation of the people they want to keep.
To be honest, my OP was a little hyperbolic. It's more like you'll be less able to demand a wage premium because you're willing/able to live in a high COL place. But you still have lots of other attributes/skills which are valuable.
I already live in a low COL location and successfully demand Bay Area salary. So obviously I don't see a problem with this. Most people all across the country will see no appreciable change here. The only people who need to be concerned are people who are unable to demand a high salary based on their attributes other than geography.
This to me is the real argument: those who can demand a high salary regardless of geography, and those who can only demand a high salary _because_ of geography.
The mistake is many people in the latter group think they are in the former.
Like many, I think I'm in the former group and will allow myself a little Schadenfreude if the latter group gets an "adjustment." Unless it turns out I'm wrong. :-O
This concisely captures an important element of the dynamic. I am often offered extremely high wages, even by Silicon Valley standards, to work remotely from wherever I wish. And some of these companies are not in expensive locales. They aren’t always paying for geography.
There are many skills and levels of talent for which there is always a global shortage.
I doubt it. I've worked for companies with remote cultures and generally the way it is done is regions are encoded based on cost of living. This creates the salary band and people with the same job title/level will be paid differently based on this. Generally equity is not considered though, only salary.
Who knows what will happen over some time if this really becomes big. Lots of people will leave the Bay Area and the cost of living will drop, in some places dramatically. Those 2m starter homes will get cut in half or more if this becomes wide scale.
Regardless, companies will still want to attract and recruit the best people they can and if that means having to hire from an expensive zone then they will. Or their competitors will and they'll be out competed. If anything though, over enough time if this becomes the norm than I'd expect places like the Bay Area to see the cost of living decline.
>Those 2m starter homes will get cut in half or more if this becomes wide scale.
And then people will start moving in because CoL is suddenly cheaper and they get to enjoy all the nice stuff Bay Area offers without suffering through the daily commute...then CoL will rise again.
Then the top companies' headquarters will still be here, and there will still be a heavy premium placed on top of physical presence, especially for management/senior level employees, in fact I wouldn't be surprised to see the average income going up in areas like the Bay Area after the lower level rank and file employees move out.
I think it's silly (and borderline divorced from understanding how business works) to expect bay area salaries when you're living in Nebraska or Uruguay. After all, when you move to the bay area, you don't say "give me my Kansas salary". No one gets paid that way. Pay is always tied to comparative salaries in that market.
Why should I hire someone and pay them a bay area salary if there are equally talented folks in that geography that are perfectly happy making what's market for _their_ location?
This is only a perspective that highly paid engineers living in the bay area share. The rest of the world doesn't work this way.
I think you fail to recognize what you’re competing for as an employer. If you just want average engineers from city X, go ahead and pay the reduced wage. However, if you want top talent, you have to pay what other companies are willing to pay and some are willing to pay Bay Area salaries for remote.
When someone good is on the line, it’s not hard to justify the Bay Area salary when you were willing to pay it if they were in the bay.
Source: kept Bay Area salary when moved remote and was able to easily negotiate Bay Area salary at future companies.
That's good for you. And there will always be companies that are the exception. Some companies will do it simply to keep you because they're already familiar with you, know how you work, and have trust built. But it won't be the norm.
I might still say if someone is doing a 6-mo/1-yr temporary change of scenery, it makes sense to not dock their salary. But an actual move and keep my $300K FAANG salary while working in Thailand? I don't see it happening. If the difference is < 20%, may be sure. But a > 50% difference? I doubt we'll see that world. But who knows...stranger things have happened.
Every profession gets paid this way. Tech is no different, or some special snowflake.
Actually if you move to Thailand with your FAANG salary it's likely that the HR team will have a conniption fit. Thailand is--or at least was until recently--considered a prime location for dodging taxes. That is a problem for any company that wants to be SOX-compliant.
Thailand is a different country in a significantly different timezone. That has real administrative and logistics implications. I wouldn’t expect a company to pay me the same in that scenario.
> Some companies will do it simply to keep you because they're already familiar with you, know how you work, and have trust built. But it won't be the norm.
I’ve negotiated into a new company a bay salary and I had never worked with any of them before. The interview was a little extended to talk about remote work background but that was about it.
The problem is most remote employees fold on salary negotiation when the company lowballs them because they don’t know any better. If they company is actively hiring bay area salaries, they enough to offer you the same as remote.
Remember, good tech companies can’t even find enough good employees in the bay. They are realistically just as happy to have a remote employee that’s as good as a local even if it’s for the same price.
You’ll see this standard change pretty quickly once companies realize how many other techs are now remote friendly.
Bay Area SWE salaries are bimodal. Negotiating a high salary that's part of the lower peak (which I'm currently part of) is easy. Doing so for a salary that's part of the second peak is not.
If Facebook or Apple or whoever are still willing to give you 400k+ TC outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, or Los Angeles, it's because you're truly exceptional. Most people who get around that much in compensation working for those companies in the Bay Area will have to take a reduction in pay if they go to another office in a major city, and an even bigger cut if they go full remote.
I am expecting Bay Area SWE incomes to fall in the next few years, as housing & rent prices fall. But I could be wrong, and they'll continue going up despite cost of living going down. We'll see!
> Why should I hire someone and pay them a bay area salary if there are equally talented folks in that geography that are perfectly happy making what's market for _their_ location?
Right now, you wouldn't. However, if going full remote turns into a trend, then you're not competing with other talented folks in that geography making what's market for their location because they don't have a location, but rather with every other company which offers remote work. They're remote. Won't this drive up market standard prices for engineers in places where markets are less populated by tech right now, while lowering the market price in places like the bay area? After all, if I'm a company, why would I pay $BAY_AREA_ENGINEER more money for the same job I can get done by $KANSAS_ENGINEER for less? Remote work, if taken to the furthest conclusion, will obviate any discussion of "location" based payment because every engineer would be in the same location: the Internet.
Comp today varies per city because job markets are per city: at every moment each city has a fixed number of applicants and jobs, which creates a market rate.
In the long term with enough companies doing remote work though, this starts to blur the boundaries between job markets and we might expect salaries to start to be affected by other cities, in the same way that different suburbs within a city share the same comp rates.
I'm curious how this plays out in practice. Should every company just start offering bay area salaries to everyone, since bay area salaries are at the top end?
How do you decide what a software engineer salary (since we're talking about pure skill and not location) should be? Is it $30K, $80K, $150K, $400K?
Do you see the problem and why I don't think this will happen?
No, companies offer the least amount and still be competitive with the other employers in the area. This amount currently varies by location because job markets are segmented by city. Over time if job markets spread across cities, then this would change.
> No, companies offer the least amount and still be competitive with the other employers in the area.
If Facebook will now hire permanent remote employees anywhere with excellent internet they are now hiring in the area. They pay new grads in SF $200K a year. If they pay $100K for people with seven years of good experience, Seniors, in Vietnam they will have them all in under six months. Even at $50K the market price of devs will get bid up quickly.
> Should every company just start offering bay area salaries to everyone, since bay area salaries are at the top end?
No, but FAANG and other extremely profitable companies might try it. If you offer Bay Area salaries to everyone who’s currently in a top 20 CS PhD programme and tell them they can live wherever they want you’ll get a pretty good yield. Even better if you make a standing offer to everyone who completes X hard classes on GA Tech’s OMSCS. This wouldn’t be worthwhile if the productivity differential between remote and office was high enough but in the long run wages approach the marginal product of labour absent employer collusion. Might take 20 years but eventually the top end of the market will be getting comparable numbers whether in NYC or Bangor, Maine.
It's odd to me that they would give current local employees living in high-cost areas a significant incentive to not transfer to remote when a remote worker arguably costs significantly less to employ. The costs keeping a building in a high-cost area are huge and increasing constantly. Moving those costs (rent, utilities, etc.) to the employee is a major cost savings.
Then your job will be eaten up by those in other areas who will be willing to do that work for whatever their standard of living requires. Good luck in your future endeavors.
"Facebook will reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas."
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
> Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
Because people living in those other markets will be more than happy to take a "reduced pay" for SF standards, since that's way higher than any other local wage.
All (most?) big companies already set pay based on local market conditions. This is actually based on what pay levels are in the market, not cost of living.
What I don't get is why you would pay Bay Area salaries for someone living in Bay Area when you could get an equally good remote worker based in Iowa on the cheap. Like just don't hire in Bay Area at all.
Is it any different from say a kg of rice, will feed the same still would cost diff in a village of Vietnam then Whole Foods in silicon valley. Price is by demand / supply.
The market dictates your price for the value you provide. You can't charge $1B/hour and get away with it. There is an optimal profit-maximizing price for your services, regardless of whether or not you acknowledge that fact. Yes, you can change more than this amount, but you will get fewer clients and be making less total profit as a result.
That could be totally fine and rational since there are other utility-maximizing considerations for you like how much you want to work, the kind of work you do, the kind of clients you're willing to take on, etc., but that doesn't change the fact that you can't arbitrarily set your price and not expect a change in the amount of business you can conduct.
You may not be profit-maximizing, but companies certainly are, and as a result, they'll pay whatever rates the market allows them to.
If you're able to dictate your income, then why even worry? Go ahead and live somewhere else and dictate your income. It's a voluntary exchange and if someone takes the other end of the deal then good for you!
No, we're comparing human labour to rice. Let's be honest. If you're essential you'll negotiate your rates to be what you want.
It's obvious we're not comparing humans to rice here since we're not buying and selling humans. It's so obvious that I can only conclude you're acting in bad faith intentionally.
Cost of living is higher if you live in a major metropolitan area. That higher SF salary gets you the same amount of goods and services as a lower salary in Utah. This is a pretty basic concept.
If you want to get paid the big salary, move to the big city. Don't complain about higher rent and cost of food. Or live frugally.
But there is value in living in those higher CoL areas (hence them being higher CoL) that you sacrifice living in a lower CoL area. You sacrifice on space to live in SF, but you get all the other benefits which is why people do it. If I sacrifice the SF benefits, why do I then also have to sacrifice my CoL/pay ratio without any additional gain?
I think the attempt is to tie you value as an employee to you disposable income instead of your housing and basics income.
I find them usually often inaccurate, though.
For companies that don't pay at the top of the scale, the people in the high-cost areas are comparatively screwed (software engineers having to resort to living with roommates!?), whereas for the companies paying more, sometimes it tips the other way (like failing to account for how most costs don't scale with area the way housing does, so you could end up with a $500+ disadvantage in disposable income in one of the cheaper areas).
This is an extremely self-limiting and myopic viewpoint on employment.
For instance, the only person who can classify income as disposable or not is me. No one else is allowed to make that decision, or is even deserving of knowing the information at all.
If your hiring manager is giving you the song and dance about calculations on your cost of housing and milk, you need to turn around and go elsewhere.
If you think you’re a cog in a machine, yes, you can determine your value this way.
If you feel you have inherent value in and of yourself, your attitude will change about work and employment.
The value I provide to a company has absolutely nothing to do with where I live. If I’m a good hire, I’m a good hire.
Did you notice the "I think the attempt is..." part of my post, which positioned it as an attempt to understand the employer negotiation position, not as my own views?
It's a view on negotiation, not on employment.
But I think feelings like yours get in the way, regardless.
"Determining your value" is internalizing things way too much. Failing to convince the opposite side in a negotiation is very different from "your value".[0]
Being a cog in a machine - or, more directly in this situation, being seen as replaceable by the next candidate who would accept the offer you don't like - isn't about how you feel or think of yourself, it's about what you can do and what you demonstrate. That holds true for far more than just the initial interview and offer negotiation, too.
[0] I'm tempted to suggest the person who's happy to be a "cog" - show up, do some work, get paid, and define their life and their value in non-work terms - may value themselves more than us maximizers!
If the company can get an equally good hire at half the cost, it can and should replace you. As a shareholder I would not only expect this, I would demand it.
I'm sure most of them do. This is standard practice for companies that operate offices in multiple regions, not just tech, but any company over the past century at least.
So if I get a remote job working from a high COL area and move, and then I move, do I get my pay reduced? If so, I might as well reduce my effort accordingly ;) you get what you pay for
EDIT: And odds are, the employer won't notice enough to fire me.
1) You're upfront about it and tell your manager, they update workday, HR schedules a meeting with you to explain the multiplier effect and how your salary is being reduced.
2) You're kind of sneaky, you update your state tax withholding, it updates workday and put you into the appropriate COL bucket for next year's performance review, your salary slowly falls in line with people in your COL area.
3) You keep it secret, allow the company to keep paying taxes to your original state, maybe pay estimated taxes or something to your new state? Don't develop any relationships with coworkers that'll eventually leak your true situation, get away with it?
Add me to the pile of those who don't like my salary adjusted arbitrarily based on where I decide to live.
I don't think companies that want to attract upper-tier engineering talent will be able to get away with it either.
Good engineers:
A) Are outnumbered by job openings non-trivially
B) Return many multiples in value of their total
compensation cost
C) Are well aware of A and B from a negotiating standpoint
If I'm operating in the same market orbitals as Facebook, I see this as an instant hiring advantage. Simply tell candidates:
"Not only have we shifted towards remote-focused teams, we won't arbitrarily grade your salary based on where you or your family choose to live"
The increased costs will be a pittance compared to the potential 8-9 figure market advantage gained in 18-36 months by having consistently won hiring battles.
They want to have their cake and eat it too. The interesting thing is that I know of several smaller companies that don’t do this, so it’ll be interesting to see how this decision impacts their attrition.
This is just the reality of remote work which people are ignoring. Facebook (or any other company) has zero reason to pay Bay Area salaries if they can hire anywhere.
Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world. They will just be a lot lower than you are used to.
> This is just the reality of remote work which people are ignoring. Facebook (or any other company) has zero reason to pay Bay Area salaries if they can hire anywhere.
Are they paying "Bay Area" salaries, or "Skills With The Most Obvious Correlating Signal Of Living In The Bay Area" salaries?
> Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world.
Does a Mercedes and a Honda Civic cost the same?
No?
Well why not? They're both cars.
They're paying for the skillsets, and for salaries to be the "same everywhere in the world", the skillsets would have to be the same, and we're not at the point where they've been commoditized to that level(which is a different discussion versus geography anyways).
It actually works quite the opposite. You will be way better off financially moving from the SF/Seattle/NYC than to. The wage adjustments just don't come near handling the extra expenses.
Depends on how frugally you live. If you are young and ok with room-mates. You'll save more money with the higher cost of living in SF than other areas.
Not really. The majority of things cost the same regardless of where you live besides real estate, which is extraordinarily distorted from actual value.
A car costs the same no matter where you live in the United States. A computer costs the same no matter where you live in the United States. A phone costs the same no matter where you live in the United States. A refrigerator costs the same no matter where you live in the United States.
I could go on, but you get the point I'm trying to make here right?
You seriously chose THAT as your hill to die on? lmao. You absolutely understand the point. High COL is better. Easier to max your 401k, easier to pay healthcare minimums, easier to save money in general since the only great cost is your rent. Besides that, perishable foods, electronics, damn near everything else will be a similar price. I moved from NC to SF and don't regret it. Entry level TC in NC is $70k, here it's $150k+. The max salary for a Senior IC is NC is about $120k, here it's fucking $500k. You people aren't thinking critically at all. The best bet is to suck it up and work in a high COL city, save up, and then go buy a mansion wherever you want outside of SF/NYC.
I think if you are working for a Google / Facebook and getting a wage adjustment, the end result would be about even. If you drop from $400,000 to $300,000, but your rent goes down by $30,000 a year, and also your taxes go down from California rates then in the end things might even out give or take a few percent.
However, if the choice is between working for a local company and working for a high end bay area firm, then absolutely the best financial move is to move to SF/Seattle/NYC. Local companies here top out at $150,000 for a senior engineer, so if I can make $400,000 in a big city, then even with the higher cost of living, I still would come out way ahead living in SF.
I am watching it live and the way Mark said is, "We will be basing compensation on location like we always have and still paying top of market". I think that's fair right. If you can get a better quality of life with less pay, then thats fine. It's a choice that you are free to make.
This should really be the pinned comment, as it does tell you everything you need to know. You've always had to move somewhere more expensive/with a heavier tech center gravity to have your career take off whether it's in terms of clout or total compensation (both of which are inextricably intertwined).
Where this development fascinates me is that it vastly increases the pipeline into the FAANG BigCos. I'm sure that, not to be outdone by FB, other members of FAANG will be having serious conversations that are along the same lines as this. Even if your career at a certain company plateaus because of satellite syndrome, you at least have the door open to moving to where the action is if that's what you prioritize.
But for me, so long as the real world reflects the asymmetry of capital allocation at central nodes, so too will salaries reflect that. I don't see any point in protesting that. I feel like it's more valuable to try and figure out a way to speed up the diffusion from central nodes outwards which already appears to be happening, and which this story is part and parcel of.
I've never had a software engineering position in the US that had a contract. For me it's always been we'll pay you X, we reserve the right to change X at any time for any/no reason, there might be bonuses but who can say, and we can fire you without notice at any time for any/no reason.
These are written, not oral. The point is it's written in the agreement that the company can unilaterally change the compensation without notice or reason.
Hm. I've been an independent consultant for too long I guess. Back in the day, we signed a dozen forms to get hired including one indicating pay and duties.
I don’t know why this opinion is so widespread. The only reason why salaries are so high in the Bay Area is because of the high cost of living. If companies didn’t factor COL into salaries, it’s likely that they’d be lower across the board.
In fact, developers everywhere benefit from the high salaries of the Bay Area, as it sets the general expectation for the profession.
high pay -> solve all your big problems -> biggest problem is your neighbor -> zoning rules -> high col -> only wealthy people can live there -> companies that hire wealthy people set up shop nearby -> competition for workers increases pay -> goto(1)
The baseline salary is still based on the cost of living, which is my point. Competition doesn’t drive salaries into the stratosphere entirely by itself, especially in a market with a fairly large supply of workers.
I suspect as this scales within and across companies, "location fraud" will become common, where employees claim to live in a more expensive location in order to collect a higher salary. There's probably a b2b opportunity for a company to enforce honesty with respect to something like this.
They can get the absolute best talent in every market across the world WITHOUT paying Bay Area salaries - just pay double whatever the local average is!
This is THE reason driving all these companies to announce the shift to remote: it’ll be a massive cost saving. Access to talent that can’t live in a center where they have offices is nice, but hardly justifies the overhead of remote work
It's a market-clearing price. If Google is willing to pay more for remote workers in Pocatello, Idaho, then they'll be able to poach them. If not, wages will fall.
Tech companies have always paid less to staff in cheaper cities like Pittsburgh, but the ratio usually still favors the employee (i.e. they make 90% of the Bay Area base salary and their cost of living is 20% as high). Workers can also hack the system by getting irrevocable, long-term RSU grants and then getting transferred to cheaper markets.
The thing that really sucks is that higher base comp is usually always better, even with higher COL. If you consider things like 401ks, IRAs, out of pocket maximums - having higher base comp is just better. Even if in SF vs. Boise, you're taking home 50% of your paycheck (and spending 33% of that takehome on rent), you're still paying more into those things in SF than Boise.
Companies set prices in accordance to labor market supply and the marginal salary they need to offer to get someone. Not some specific idea of egalitarian fairness.
It's a bit more complicated than "paid less for doing the same amount of work". Compensation isn't purely based on amount of work done, there are other market factors involved like supply of talent.
If a company suddenly allows working remotely full time, they've suddenly increased their supply of talent, as moving to another city will no longer be a roadblock when they consider Facebook.
At the same time, if more and more companies go with a remote friendly approach, the supply of job openings that applicants have access to will also increase.
Theoretically, this will lead to some sort of equilibrium where compensation is actually based more on the value/output of your work than other factors.
To make an analogy, an apartment building in SF serves the same purpose as an apartment building in Ohio, yet they charge vastly different rents. You're paying less in Ohio for something that provides the same utility (shelter), because of factors outside of the direct utility of the apartment.
I think I agree with you on the surface, but at the same time I wonder what impact Bay Area salaries would have in low cost-of-living areas. What about gentrification? Isn't one of the biggest complaints about tech workers (and especially people moving from CA) that their high income is making life less affordable for those native to a particular area?
"Facebook will reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas."
That is ridiculous. A job is a job. Also what prevents anyone from keeping a California phone number and a PO Box in Menlo Park or wherever? At what point have you 'moved'?
Note: I don't advocate doing this. I neither work in CA nor at Facebook. I just wonder if this doesn't open things up for being to game the system.
You could still live in a much cheaper area of the same state. In the case of CA, drive 4hr out of SF and you can find houses for $100k that would be $1M in the city, with much more land.
What's interesting is that if you stay in their Menlo Park office, you cost FB your salary + office sq/ft + office maintenance/security/cleaning/etc. But if you chose to work remotely you cost FB your salary - colo adjustment.
The incentive is clearly to stay and cost FB more money per head.
And a market is a market. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, your salary/wage is, to some degree, determined by where you are, among many other variables.
This point comes up again and again. On the one hand, I want to agree. Why should my moving to a lower COL area mean that my employer is entitled to capture a higher fraction of the value I produce?
On the other hand, you are almost definitely reading this comment on a device that was manufactured in a "low cost of living area" (namely: China) by people who get paid far below Western wages. Likewise, most of the clothes you wear were manufactured in a "cheap" country by people who get paid next to nothing. If you had bought these goods from a US- or Europe-based manufacturer, you would have paid far more, and the people who produced the value would have received higher wages.
So if Facebook shouldn't be allowed to reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas, why don't we apply this logic across the board? Why is it okay for you (or me) to reduce the pay of our own workers (by which I mean the people who work who work for us indirectly, by creating the goods we consume) just because they live in less expensive areas?
Is this the start of the end of Silicon Valley (and other major tech hubs?) I know I'm being dramatic, but they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world.
You could say what works for them won't work for a young startup but I'm not so sure honestly
Not sure what you mean, this isn't outsourcing. This is remote first...two different things. In outsourcing the development is done by an entity which doesn't belong to you, that's a different thing.
Timezones matter. There's large benefits in having an entire team in the same timezone.
If you've ever tried scheduling a call between India, East Coast US, Europe, and West Coast US...you've dealt with the fact that there's only a few hours a day such a call can occur, greatly limiting the ability to schedule last minute meetings.
I dunno. I worked on a team of 3 with one in SF, one in Europe and one in Singapore. If you're OK with repeating meetings and work mostly async it's doable.
You'll never get everyone together (unless someone takes a midnight meeting, but that's just cruel) except on special occasions, which sucks but it can be done.
In the last 4 years I've learned about the Americas. There is a wealth of engineering talent in Central and South America and its basically all within US business hours.
They are about double the price of Asian and Eastern European developers. Which is about the price of a junior US developer. (Independent freelance devs try to charge about the same price that development firms charge you).
This solves the time zone problem. The distribution of English proficiency amongst developers is about the same as the other places, where only occasionally you will encounter a real language barrier with one or two devs.
Now that all big tech workers are digital nomads against their will, there are two entire continents that can chill on without stretching the time zone issue.
Chile is an hour ahead of EST, and Argentina and Brazil are two hours ahead. Always wondered if they could serve as a good bridge between North American offices and Western Europe.
In a world in a pandemic and climate crisis , asking people to drive long distances, or worse, fly so that middle management can “observe facial expressions better” should be met with disapproval
It's not middle management that benefits the most from in-person work. It's new hires and new grads (like me) who are just starting their careers and benefit a lot from knowledge gained passively in the workplace.
And--wouldn't it be great if our cities were designed so that people don't need to drive long distances to work? Density + mass transit in cities would go a long way towards reducing emissions.
(and no, we should not use the threat of a once-per-century pandemic to double down on isolated, suburban lifestyles--instead, we should work to make sure cities are clean and support a safe, sustainable density of people)
If you've ever played or watched a social VR game like VRChat, I think you'd come to believe as I do, that complete social expressiveness is impossible to achieve with current technology. The most experienced and skilled players today can express themselves with their avatars nearly as well as they could with a human body (not to mention the exciting ways they can communicate in VR that they couldn't possibly communicate in person), but the learning curve for that level of expressiveness is akin to learning a proto sign language.
More to the point, VRChat really makes you appreciate the minutiae of physically proximate human communication, like the lengths of pauses between various speakers. The "mute" avatars in VR also make you appreciate how much we communicate with high dimensional facial and body gestures that can't be duplicated with existing video conferencing. I highly recommend interacting with a mute player in VR if you have the chance. Watching a video isn't the same experience, but here's a short clip of two mutes communicating if you have 30 seconds: https://clips.twitch.tv/CrackyMushyAntelopeBloodTrail
The technology to enable next-level social interaction in VR already exists.
- eye tracking
- facial muscle sensors (that sit between your skin and the rest of the headset)
- deepfake ML
- high resolution scanning
Combine all four, and wala, you can inhabit a high resolution deepfake model of yourself in real time. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a thing, maybe one or two generations of headsets. It will be mind-blowing.
> but they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world
Sure they can, but the Silicon Valley has an immense human capital in skills, talent and knowledge that you can't find easily in the rest of the world.
The type of complexity, the scale of the systems and the engineering culture that you can find in SF is not common around the world.
My experience as a developer in an European country is that it is really difficult to encounter engineers with a real experience in developing truly complex systems and companies with true engineering cultures. This is simply due to the fact that the majority of the companies that need that high quality of engineering and are willing/capable to pay for it are based in the Bay area, therefore creating an ecosystem that is unique in the world.
Of course there are a lot of exceptions, but I don't think the "they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world" is as easy at it may look.
I don't agree with your Europe observation.
Shopify could have easily been a European company (in fact, it's Canadian).
Scaling is hard but is a very known problem.
What Europe is missing is VC money and entrepreneurs. Many many European entrepreneurs flock to the U.S due to no VC money, not lack of engineering.
And even if you think the U.S has a tremendous engineering advantage over Europe, it's still unclear to me why U.S tech companies have to set base in Silicon Valley and not Anywhere else in the US?
These high-quality engineers and researchers have moved from all around the world to be in SV, it's not like they love to live in SF, LA, NYC or even in the US. They would easily work from their homes and close to their families in their countries, even with half of their current compensation.
The effects of such decisions are going to be immense; people in the developed countries still live in a bubble thinking they are not going to be affected, but things will probably change dramatically the next couple of years.
> They would easily work from their homes and close to their families in their countries
But what if they wouldn't? For people from some countries, getting to live in the West is a major benefit on its own. (I have to say I'm a bit afraid that the WFH shift will make immigration way more difficult than it is now.)
Moving to the west might be a dream for a lot of people but also requires sacrifices. Removing the "immigrate to work" factor from the list of sacrifices will make a lot of people to return to their roots and still work remote to their dream jobs and companies with a great compensation which is probably 2x the local one, unless they have already created a family there. I can't say this will be definite for every country worldwide, i am more biased from the crisis-hit European countries, e.g. Greece, Italy, Spain, which faced tremendous talent migration to richer countries during the last 10 years and i can say that most of them would easily return back home if they could work remotely to top-notch US companies.
It all comes from a large concentration of excellent CS programs, not just in the bay area but also all up and down the west coast. It is nearly impossible to replicate that research output anywhere else in the world, and it's what drives every technology.
I see very likely Bay Area salary is now peaked. It is not like companies prior to the pandemic aren't looking for alternative. Now this is just in full acceleration mode.
Even if it wasn't for this quarantine and the economic fallout, you'd think the tech bubble would have eventually popped in a natural market correction anyway, and those salaries would have fallen in the same way that getting 6-figure jobs for "knowing HTML" fell after the original dot-com bubble.
I know a couple of people who live out of their vans. I believe them when they say it's not actually that bad and they like it.
But at the end of the day, while I doubt they'd admit it, the main reason either of them do it is because they can't afford anything else, even though they have full-time jobs and work just as hard as the next guy.
Isn't this a sign of a broken housing market? What kind of world are we creating where significant numbers of people are forced out of economic necessity to live in vehicles?
Similar to other people on Twitter and Shopify’s announcement thread, I think this might be an excuse for corporations to reduce their commercial footprint and save money by opening applicant pools to larger areas of the country with cheaper CoL (and perhaps the world, different time zones are tough though).
What about work visas? Will this encourage more visas, or will citizens become unsettled after more cost effective labor is remotely hired while they’re left competing against far cheaper world economies. I can see arguments for both expanding H1B program, and making it more difficult/selective.
Something about this doesn’t feel right, the pandemic isn’t nearly as bad as was predicted. It’s been devastating, but nothing like 1918. That is to say, perhaps these drastic actions of mass WFH will have implications we can’t predict yet, especially at scale.
Will cities become less congested? How about home life, if WFH becomes standard in 5 years time, and some positions that are easily remote are hard to find physically, will home life become disrupted? (Currently domestic violence, child abuse has soared, though this is most likely due to the stress of the pandemic, and not the WFH itself. Through school, work, etc tends to allow those at risk to form social networks, and reach out for help from their abusers.)
There is something to say about spending time away from immediate family. Some people need the break, others are synergetic and can spend all their time together. Depends on the persons involved. But let’s not celebrate just yet, there’s obvious economic incentives, and it isn’t clear this can be reliably reversed. We’re rarely given the full list of motives, which may not be in our best interest.
It's still nowhere near those numbers though and I doubt it will be. Some of the cleaned up code from The Imperial College has been released and it's just tragic that just wide sweeping decisions were based on a model that is objectively a nightmare of illogical statements, random ideas, and something that honestly looks more at home in SimCity than in something used to decide policy.
I doubt we'll get anywhere near the numbers most models claimed with mitigation. Even the 90k/US currently will have to be re-evaluated at the end and pruned (or possibly added to) for any inaccuracies.
Predicting the future is often foolish, and I hope this is a cautionary tale. We'll have to wait until March 2021 to look at the average deaths per year and compare it to 2020 to get a real sense of the picture, but from what I've been reading currently, my hypothesis is that it will be no where near what was predicted a few months ago. (I could be wrong though, but we won't know until 2021).
It's all guessing at this point though. This whole thing we're in, was a guess, and the costs are high.
To show how quickly things move that article from four weeks ago is already woefully out of date with the CDC having since revised down numbers and Dr. Birx herself criticizing the CDC for inflating them. The number of cases is exploding upward because of wide spread testing, but deaths are plummeting despite states opening up.
Over half of US counties have had zero coronavirus deaths.
Plummeting? Sure, deaths are down, but at a quick glance it looks like ~1000 people are still dying a day. There is a lag in deaths from people socializing, and a lag in people socializing from states opening up.
Unfortunately, I'm almost certain things will get dramatically worse in the next 2 weeks. Come laugh at me in 14 days if I'm wrong :)
I suppose I've seen the two extremes of this. People who are really annoyed with their family, and others (mostly women) who probably won't go back to work when this is over because they actually get to see their kids. Not sure which cohort is larger but I do see some benefits with people, who want to I guess, having an avenue for spending more time with their family.
That said I personally hate working from home. Never ever thought I'd say it but I long for my office cubicle as my work has totally monopolized what's usually my own personal space for side projects and zoning out.
I wouldn't expect anyone to enjoy wfh in a tiny apartment or anything like that.
I'm watching mountain houses that have sat vacant for months get rented and I'm quite tempted myself. It's not like I can walk to anywhere that's open and I'm paying all this money to live in a hip area with bars and stuff.
> my work has totally monopolized what's usually my own personal space for side projects and zoning out
I would like to see an increase in flexibility. Many people will choose to work from their own homes, and some may choose to use a flex working space near their homes, and some may commute to the office. Maybe you'll do all 3 depending on what's going on in your life or at work.
I sort of have a "half" cubical, with a ~5' high wall divider to my right and in front of me (and my back is to the wall). If I worked in a true open office you're right I'd probably be more reluctant to return.
>I never realized how many people relied on work and school to reduce contact with their family until this pandemic started.
Perhaps its less malicious than you make it sound. Isn't it pretty unprecedented in human history for families to be restricted in such close quarters, cut off from community, for such an extended period of time? People need personal space
In recent history in developed countries? Yea seems so. In human history? Most other cultures place way more importance on family than we do in the west, in many even today, kids continue living with their parents until marriage.
>Most other cultures place way more importance on family than we do in the west, in many even today, kids continue living with their parents until marriage.
Hunter gatherer and agricultural societies often have labor segregated by gender roles, with men, women and children spending more time apart from each other than a family in lockdown.
I suspect as with anything relating to human cultures, there's plenty of examples and counterexamples to go either way. For instance in many places people live in a single room, parents and kids [1]. In others I'm sure people live very segregated lives.
That's maybe a bit uncharitable. I like my kids, but some tension will arise when they are shrieking & running circles around me while I try to suss out a bug or pay attention to a meeting.
There are no eggs to collect or cows to milk in tech work.
For some reason I feel like this is more of a way to reduce payroll and eventually outsourse most of the company. If everyone is working remote then it is only a small step to offshore everyone at that point.
However, it's also the case that the free market seems to now be only in play when it comes to reducing wages, off shoring, and other cost cutting.
The free market isn't at play when it's time for bailouts, subsidies, and government contracts.
Rugged individualism for all, except the wealthy elite.
I'm not sure the person who you replied to has a frustrated / discouraged tone, but that's what I read it as. I share the sentiment and the above is why.
> Rugged individualism for all, except the wealthy elite.
This is a direct consequence of considering money to be free speech: those who have more of it have louder voices, and this matters a lot when it comes to elections, and when it's time for politicians to pay back their debts to the donors.
You have to compete with the same Amazon, Twitter, Google, etc whether you're hiring 5 star engineers for $300k+ each or 3 star engineers for $100k and under. I don't buy into the theory that one engineer is innately 100 times as skilled as another, but you're going to have a really hard time competing with FAANG if you just randomly scoop up a bunch of mediocre engineers willing to accept 50k a year each.
If I leave Silicon Valley to settle down in rural Vietnam, I'm not going to work for $50k a year. If I couldn't find something paying at least $150k+, I'd start my own company and live off my savings until I get it up and running.
There's a real market-based reason engineers get paid as much as they do. It's easy to lose sight of that here on HackerNews, but just look at what your white collar, non-tech friends do at work all day. Their productivity can often be easily doubled or tripled by better tech. That is to say, someone generating $30k in value per year for your business could suddenly generate an extra $30-$60k a year with better software to help them.
1) 5-star engineers are not exclusive to the bay area/Seattle/NY. They are open to earning more than they are currently (but less than bay area engineers)
2) Some 5-star engineers in the bay area are willing to take a pay cut to work from low-cost areas
3) I agree there are market-based reasons, but there are also geographic considerations as well as WFO momentum - why fix what ain't broken? Companies were not interested in experimenting/implementing remote work because it costs money and had unclear benefit. Their hand has been forced and they had to tackle remote work
Google outpublishes most (maybe all) universities if we restrict to AI research. Not particularly surprising given they have several hundred AI researchers and likely over a thousand (deepmind alone is a couple hundred). They also do interesting distributed research. Multiple landmark papers come from (sequence to sequence learning, mapreduce, attention is all you need, etc). They have multiple major frameworks (tensorflow, angular). Facebook similarly has a ton of AI research and is one of the most prestigious labs you can work at. Talking to top AI researchers they see less and less of a motivation to choose academia over industry beyond teaching. Both facebook/google have a ton of freedom for their researchers. I'm focusing on ML just because that's the area I work in, but I know other research happens too, Microsoft has some programming language theory people and I think both microsoft/google have quantum computing research.
My first real software job was at a 10 person firmware consulting shop. Some guy from Microsoft got burned out and joined us, and it was mind-blowing. The dude barely came into the office. Even when he was there, he was half-aslseep at his desk 75% of the time, and he still singlehandedly got more done in a week than everyone else in the company combined. Some of us had been theoretically doing the same work for 5-10 years, and our company was well-respected in its niche as an expert on what we did, and we still just couldn't compare at all.
10 years later, I was burned out from working at my crappy FAANG job building platforms to spy on people, so I went into consulting on my own. Sure enough, it was a really similar situation.. I don't want to break any NDAs or sound like a jerk, but I was rolling in and doing things in hours that teams of my clients' best engineers had been failing at for months at a time.
You could grab just about any mediocre nobody from a FAANG company and drop them into any tech company somewhere else that normally pays sub-six figures, and they'd be the top performer there. I think it's something that can be taught, and maybe we'll have a tech renaissance now where everyone goes back to their comfortable hometowns, but there's a very real skill differential between the big tech hub cities and the rest of the planet. (And yes, I'm including other countries where even super hard-working geniuses make $35k a year or less.. because a lot of those geniuses eventually tend to either make their way to the USA, or start their own successful companies. If I found out I could eventually make $3.5 million/year by learning Chinese and working my way over there, you'd better believe I'd get it done)
It feels like innovation theatre. Everyone wants to be seen to be doing something innovative in response to this, so they all jump on the obvious “innovative” thing.
I've worked remote before and it was fun, I got more done, and I could go into the office once or twice a week if I really wanted. I worked with a guy in Colorado I never met in person for over a year, but I did eventually meet him while driving through on a trip.
If you've never worked remote before 2020, this is not what remote work even remotely feels like. Everything is very different when it's not a choice. I think we need to keep that in mind.
> If you've never worked remote before 2020, this is not what remote work even remotely feels like. Everything is very different when it's not a choice. I think we need to keep that in mind.
That's true. But I'm damn happy this is the direction we're moving in, the commute is never fun, open offices are usually draining if you're not with a headset stuck in your focus bubble (which defeats the purpose of the open-office in the first place). Of course, we'll need to find a medium for this, but even an option for remote work is great.
> That is to say, perhaps these drastic actions of mass WFH will have implications we can’t predict yet, especially at scale.
Something that I haven't yet seen discussed much on this or similar threads are the support and amenities staff. Most of the developers will be alright, maybe even better off, but the Bay Area is full of chefs, shuttle drivers, janitors, and who knows how many other roles that probably won't exist anymore. That's a big permanent shift in employment opportunity for those people.
I don't think Facebook should adjust pay of workers who move to less remote areas based on the area. Why compensate differently for the same value creation? If they do go this route, I hope they make it so that remote works still come out ahead (on net savings) of the big office sites. The cynic in me views this as a purposeful policy choice to PREVENT most people from taking on the new remote work allowance. In other words, this may just be a free PR splash to show they're onboard with the trend.
> Among the advantages of a dispersed workforce, Mr. Zuckerberg said, is that it will enable more demographic and ideological diversity if recruits aren’t required to work in tech strongholds like the San Francisco Bay Area.
This is of critical importance in tech, especially with companies that control the digital public square such as Facebook or Twitter. Allowing employees to live in different political climates, near family, in different lifestyles (more rural), etc. is badly needed. Otherwise, the world's digital public squares fall victim to the ideological monocultures of San Francisco and Seattle.
This is basic supply and demand. Compensation isn't based on "worth" or "value", it's based on market competition. This is the way that your compensation is currently decided, and it's the way that most goods and services in all of existence are priced. People want to have their cake and eat it to, but that's not how the world works.
Let's just say they keep pay the same. All the employees who stay will look at those who moved to Pennsylvania and bought a 2br 2bath 2,000 square foot condo for $300k and say "hey, that costs $1.5 million in SF. Why am I not being compensated for the higher cost of living?"
you can buy a nice new house in most of the country including many of the largest cities in the country. Only that people always try to find reasons why the cities that are cheap are not cool enough for them
Here's an interesting quote from the verge version of the article
"We ran these surveys and asked people what they want to do. Twenty percent of our existing employees said that they were extremely or very interested in working remotely full time. And another 20 percent on top of that said that they were somewhat interested"
Another way to read this, is that 80% employees are not interested in remote. Companies doing this at large will probably realize that remote work is not popular as it made out to be.
remote work in the current COVID conditions with outside restrictions, home school, 24/7 juggling between work and babysitting for parents is not the same as your usual remote work conditions. I think the numbers drawn from this COVID WFH are far from the reality.
+1 and beyond those specific examples I don't think people have had a chance to fully setup a successful work from home "environment" which might include: dedicated room/office, better connectivity (internet/webcam/headphones), and proper routines/habits.
I imagine most people have moved past the "throw a desk in an unused area of the house and work mainly off a laptop" phase of WFH and in to the "have additional monitors, a quality chair, and access to basic office supplies" phase... there's definitely more phases that need to happen and to use the current/limited/reaction based setups as an example of what full-time WFH is is shortsighted, IMHO.
Also, there's a company/team culture shift that needs to happen too, which to the parent's point, is hard to just magically do while also balancing all these additional "challenges".
Wouldn't that be 60% are not interested. 100% - (20% very interested) - 20% (somewhat interested). People who are somewhat interested do not count towards being not interested.
I don't know how the survey was worded. But if they asked me, would have said "somewhat interested", in that I want to work from home 1-2 days a week, but no way all 5 days a week
Correct, but it sounds like there was no option for "strongly interested in working remote part-time".
What other option is this person supposed to pick then? Saying "not at all interested" skews the results of the survey to mean that this person is not interested in remote work whatsoever.
Imo in the absence of "strongly interested in working remote part-time" answer, picking "somewhat interested in working remote full-time" is the most rational choice.
Sure, I think that's a likely outcome, but this is a great time to make that realization. We're trying to get people to slowly trickle back into offices as a public health measure; if it happens organically as people decide remote work isn't for them, that's a win-win-win for all parties. (I haven't heard of any companies making plans that they're gonna, like, sell all their offices.)
Keep in mind, they are surveying existing employees who chose to work at a job that doesn't allow most people to work full time remote. If you interviewed the entire pool of potential employees -- ie people that live in topeka, kansas -- I imagine the number would be much higher.
Working From Home is a change, and it's not at all surprising most people want to avoid change.
It definitely involves learning new habits and skills as part of the adjustment, which does involve some effort and possibly pain on the part of employees.
So I'm sure most people aren't interested up front. That doesn't say much about what their preference would be after some time to adjust.
That may have been true in the past. But right now most people have gotten a very good taste of WFH, being 3 months in quarantine. And AFTER that experience, people are rejecting it. I am not surprised. I have been WFH for 3 months now and absolutely hate it.
It's repeated here and there kind of everywhere these days, but the correct statement is "most people have gotten a very good taste of transitioning to WFH over night, without time to prepare, in a global pandemic". This is not traditional WFH.
Wondering how many of those rejecting it are sadly adults sharing a home with other adults, live in crammed rooms or just have empty lives. These are aspects to be taken into account - and wfh might give them the opportunity to live in better conditions and maybe move where they can finally live on their own and make actual friends.
"Internal Facebook surveys show the option of working from home is popular with employees, Mr. Zuckerberg said, but only 20% said they were extremely or very interested in working remotely long-term. More than half of employees said they 'really want to get back to the office as soon as possible,' he said."
That coupled with Facebook not reducing its office footprint and this transition supposedly taking a decade makes me wonder if people are making this a bigger deal than it actually is.
I suspect it is. During COVID, companies need to say a lot of things. But FB has spent serious $$$ on building amazing campuses. Also, Zuck was a firm believer in office space and open office. I doubt he has had a revalation suddenly
I might be in a minority here, but I really don't feel like full time WFH is more productive. It could be indicative of my work place's culture only, but I feel like there are many more meetings now & communication is much harder. Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.
As an employee, it doesn't matter if it's more productive. You greatly increase your pay per hour of work given that you don't have to commute and you definitely don't spend 8 hrs of work consumed by work like you are forced to when in an office.
Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar (that you partially define along with your employer). Caring about maximizing productivity is the goal of your employer. But you have some leverage in this job market so it's not like they can squeeze you dry. Remote only helps the employee side of that adversarial relationship.
Why do you see the employer/employee relationship as adversarial? Perhaps you are working in the wrong company. You need employers as much as they need employees. It’s a myopic view.
I think you may be reading something into the term “adversarial” that isn’t there. A relationship can be both adversarial and cooperative at the same time, that is just the nature of human behavior.
My personal take on things is that if you don’t recognize the adversarial part of the employer/employee relationship, then you will suffer for it. It’s more healthy to recognize where parties have competing interests, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them.
I’d also say that the people who can ignore the adversarial aspects of employment can only do so because of a fair bit of privilege. For example, people will throw around the saying here that “HR is an advocate for the company, not the employee,” but many of us will never really have to deal with HR in a way where it really matters.
An employee/employer relation is mutually beneficial but that doesn't stop conflict. The employer is still going to try and optimize to get more out of that relationship than it puts in. The employee should also do the same.
Just because you're working together in a circumstance that benefits the two parties doesn't mean each party is not also working against each other to some degree to better optimize their self-interests.
An employer may need an employee to create something and by creating and selling that thing, an employer and employee may both get a cut and benefit. None of that prevents the employer or employee from attempting to get a larger cut or do less work (invest less time) to receive their cut. Extremes to either side cause the relationship to collapse but there's definitely wiggle room in the margins beyond a 50/50 split.
I've yet to meet a single employer that doesn't try to optimize on labor costs in that relationship through some component or another, directly or indirectly.
This is a pretty fascinating perspective to me, one I had never considered. I had always thought of the employee who is paid more than the value they provide as being lazy and a leech. But that’s exactly what the corporation is doing: trying to make a profit by paying for less value than they capture from their employees.
I don't see my employer as paying less than the value they get from me. I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept. If I go do things on my own I have so many things I have to deal with. Assuming you start a business then insurance, taxes, deductions, payroll (gotta pay yourself from your company) plus I have to market my skills, network, find customers, negotiate contracts, and always worry if I don't I'll go hungry or miss rent. Or, I can just show up at some other company as an employee and in exchange for getting less than the full amount they take care of all of that and all the risk.
>I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept.
Which is also true. At the same time, risk is highly relative which is why this situation is feasible at all. What's risky for you to do as an individual is not of the same order of magnitude of relative risk when you consider scaling of available resources.
Example, Alphabet, Amazon, or Company Y decide to invest $1 million in a new SaaS 'X' effort with some monthly fee in an attempt to build a successful product/service. These companies have arrays of pre-existing successful products/services they've built (typically diversified) that generate stable profits. Relative to that sort of expected profit, SaaS 'X' is a drop in the bucket. If 'X' fails, it's the same absolute monetary loss ($1 million) but the relative risk of losing $1 million isn't significant to any of these businesses, it's small relative to their total resource pool of disposable assets. Loss recovery will also take significantly less time.
On the other hand, if I as an individual go through the effort to form an LLC, develop SaaS 'X' myself and fail, $1 million is nothing to scoff at. Even if you're in the higher income scales of our industry and making $300-500k+/yr for labor, you're looking at ~3-4 years or so of potential losses and values that are probably near or a bit more than your total personal assets, at the very least I'd say 10%. If you start an LLC and get a loan or have some investor drop money on you, $1 million is still likely going to be a lot relative to your loan. It's highly likely that if 'X' fails your business will fail. There's high relative risk here (there are some mitigations strategies from your personal assets but it's still significant). You're probably going to face noticeable financial hardship or have to revert back to the labor market due to business small failure rates.
Risk is mitigated through scale, snowballed growth, and diversification (amongst other strategies) in our economic system through initial successes that often occur either through true innovation/market creation/penetration and/or sheer luck.
2 things: we’re going to see pay cuts (because convenience and it’s easier for the drones) and your life quality is also going to be impacted (work/personal life separation? bye bye and good luck)
The companies that abuse work/life separation have been doing so without remote work and will do so regardless of the situation. Generally, these companies tend to pay more because if they didn't, nobody would do them.
So just as always, you have a choice, what's worth more to you? Money, or free time? And pick your job accordingly.
That isn’t strictly true and depends highly on the applicable labor market. For example, the worst paid software job I ever had was for a defense contractor that demanded 10 hour workdays 7 days a week during “crunch time” to meet deliverables and overtime frequently the rest of the year.
They paid poorly precisely because of the relative lack of opportunity for software in the region at the time. That meant anyone who’s livelihood was in software had little recourse other than to move. That was the option I took, but others can’t for a number of reasons.
How would this be any different than now? Companies that have a culture of disrespect towards their employee's time by expecting responses to after hours emails and calls will continue to do so, as they always have. The onus is on the individual to determine if they're going to put up with that or not.
it’s always a push and pull kind-of thing. if you answer your email after hours you will receive emails after hours. if you work on your free time more work is going to show up on your plate. as with everything in life having boundaries is a must. if your boss makes you work nights or weekends make sure this is explicitly done (ie have them ask you formally) and ask for a raise to compensate for your time. if they don’t back off find another job.
Work-life balance is a necessary thing that each person has to work on for themselves. Learning to say 'no' while delivering on the things you're asked, and delivering well, is one of the most important things an employee can do to gain respect and to give the company boundaries.
Maximizing productivity can be a shared goal of employer/employees if the employer pays fairly for higher performance (which many tech companies do). At that point it becomes a tradeoff for the employee on cost of going to the office (commute, wasted time) vs. cost of remote (potentially lower chances of future higher pay). That tradeoff is probably worth it for some people.
And this change isn't going to improve employee leverage, it's going to decrease it substantially when all companies develop processes to have a significantly higher pool of candidates to hire from. Long-term employees will look at having a company-provided office with a good work environment as a luxury.
Not if I use the time gained productively for your own purposes & goals that your employer cannot satisfy. This can involve more income, more life satisfaction, etc.
I've been able to be well above mediocre in west coast tech for years now with this strategy /shrug For FAANG, startups, and other BigCos.
FYI, the bar can be the bar needed to get a promotion & bump your pay grade. It can also be to keep your current job & stay the course. And it can change over time strategically.
Let me elaborate a bit. If you are a top performer at tech companies with an obvious outsized impact, it’s easy to make 4x your original comp in spot bonuses, additional RSU grants, etc.
Unless your side hustle brings in $300k+ a year, you’re better off becoming critical at the main job because it becomes very lucrative.
I don't think this is guaranteed to happen. Another possible outcome is that tech salaries will pin to the lowest common denominator, such that employers will "outsource" much of their engineering work to engineers that live in low cost-of-living markets.
Yeah, it's great news for engineers living in places where people don't pay more than a dollar per day for food. "Eat the rich" is one of most unintentionally-ironic phrases ever muttered.
As someone whose friends are mostly blue collar workers who were scolded for being concerned that "poor people from other places will steal our jobs", I'm finding all of these posts to be delightful.
It's pretty funny. Though it's misguided for the same reason. Making high-productivity jobs available to more people is good. In 2015 it was estimated that US GDP is 9.5% lower than it could be as a result of housing shortages in just San Francisco, New York, and San Jose.
Remote definitely does not help only the employee side. Because of remote I have hired people that I would not be able to hire. You vastly increase the talent pool when you cast the net wider.
I absolutely don't care about productivity. I care about
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.
I like showing up at work to work together with my co-workers. If you don't then maybe you should get a new job where you like the people you work with.
Am I really not looking forward to the new remote work future. Maybe someone will come up with a way to restore the socializing I got from work. I don't just want to hang out with friends. I want to work together with people on a common goal, and by "work together" I mean I want to do this in the same space. Just like eating lunch on zoom or going to a virtual bar via facetime is not as good as actually siting at the same table with friends neither is remote work as fulfilling "for me" as actually being in the same space as my co-workers. But then again I like my co-workers and I like the things we are building together.
I think this will be increasingly popular. You can minimise your commute while retaining the social aspect. I've worked out of shared offices for 20 years and enjoy it.
you’re a disgusting normie if you prefer having to be around coworkers while coding. if we kicked you weirdos out of the office we could all finally be WFH master race.
I am a hobbyist machinist and I work in software development. Software development for me is good paying but boring work where I feel like I've sold my soul to devil and this has literally sucked all excitement out of my life.
Now that I work from home, I've more time at my hand so I am working on my hobbies which make me more productive at my work.
The truth is somewhere in between. Through wfh you gain an hour or two commuting and get rid of a lot of distractions but you lose the face to face contact. I think 80% wfh or something similar should be close to ideal. One day a week for meetings and watercooler chat, and four days of wfh.
I’m on my 10th year of wfh with just a handful of days per year in the office and I notice how each time I’m in the office I realize I actually like that guy who is professionaly the most annoying one. This is extremely important for an organization to work. I do it too little and while I wouldn’t want to go 100% to the office I realize I’m not doing it enough.
I think this is the right answer. For me, I work in embedded and have to talk to lots of people with different backgrounds. Slack communication and even phone calls just don't work when you're trying to learn or explain something really complicated. I think a 1-3 days in the office (depending on what a company needs) would be awesome.
I worked at a setup like that, and it was really bad because people were coming on random days. In a set-up like this, people need to have agreed upon days to come back to work
One of the big benefits to companies of WFH is dramatically reduced real estate costs (plus all of the support services required - cleaning, security, maintenance). If you still need your office capacity to support 100% of the staff in the office at a given time, you lose most of that benefit.
So my company takes a somewhat similar approach to those who can, and those who want to.
We are 90% remote. Most remote employees are in the same area though, so sometimes they commute to the office for weekly meetings or just to hang out and work together.
I don’t live in the same country so I’m 100% remote. However, I still travel to the office ( when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic going on ) a few times a year.
I think giving people the option to work in the office when they want to is the best solution. Keep meetings on skype/jitsi, whatever, but give people the option to attend in person. More people will come than you might think.
For me, WFH let's me have a much better work/life balance. I have a family with 3 small kids. I was racing against the clock in the morning to pitch in around the house, arriving at work already stressed out usually late, put up with all the work place distractions, had to suffer through rush hour traffic, arrived home stressed out and found it difficult to switch to family mode. Very rarely would I get into a grove of deep work. I tended to hit that grove after 2PM, which was only a few hours before I needed to start watching the clock and dread the traffic back.
Now, WFH I'm free to set my own schedule. Sometimes I do my best work later in the evening, something that I never had time or energy to do while following the "9-5" schedule.
I don't miss the socialization much, probably because of the roll my family fulfills. The most important difference now is that I have a lot more patience with my family, because I don't feel the constant stress of my old commute and schedule.
It's really important to recognize that the current way people are Working From Home does not reflect how WFH works under "normal" circumstances for remote first organizations.
1. Companies have to invest in work from home practices and they have just started to do that. Using zoom and creating more meetings to replace in person experiences is not sufficient.
2. People have in effect just brought work into their home, into a house with no child care and generally no prepared work spaces
So please don't use this period as a reference for what WFH looks like when an organization is dedicated to doing it.
On the other hand, my most negative impressions of WFH have come from environments where a minority of employees are doing it. When a majority is FTF, it’s much harder to manage communications and expectations because so much of the critical information makes it to the remote workers slowly, and they miss out on decision-making opportunities.
So in some ways, the current situation is actually an improvement over a more typical split environment.
Work from home is an old term from decades ago. What we have now is best described as "pandemic lockdown office". The actual state of the art is mobile work. With mobile work, you are in control of where you work - whether home, in your garden, on a nice place, in a shared office near your home, or in a company office that should be available when you need it, even if that's every day.
Also, ideally, you should be able to meet your colleagues once in a while to discuss important matters and keep a human connection. But surprisingly lots of trust and friendship can be maintained at distance.
Take time to refresh, slow down during the day and try to maintain social contact despite the lockdown (whatever your local conditions are, you might have to use remote methods of course).
I've been able to work well those last two months but can't wait to hug all my colleagues - miss them as well.
On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them.
I manage four small development teams and the one metric I track is velocity or velocity per developer (VPD). If you're familiar with scrum, you probably have a sense of what this means. (Note: this data is tracked in an open spreadsheet and not used to reward or punish but rather to adjust and adapt.)
Anyway, we went full-time remote from in-office 9-10 weeks ago. We did have some experience being partially remote (team members in different offices) before this. A comparison of avg VPD for last 3 sprints in-office (WFO) vs last 3 sprints (WFH):
This the first time I've actually compared them and I'm mildly surprised WFH is lower. Of course this ignores all sorts of caveats and qualifiers (like adjusting to a major change of environment and a pandemic!)
My impression is that productivity has held more or less steady and VPD will eventually not be too different from where it was.
I've also talked about this individually with members of my team. The consensus seems to be leaning toward a flexible mixture of WFH and WFO. That's the future I'd like to see.
One thing that stuck out to me is how consistent the numbers became between each other under WFH. I am not familiar with the metric or scrum, but I wonder what the cause is?
I noticed that, too. I think that's mostly coincidence. Velocity is based on story points. Here's a definition of story points as a unit of measure that I like:
A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of effort for completing requirements.
It is generally recommend you not include time as a component of that unit. For our teams, we kinda do. (Basically, for us, story point = time + uncertainty + complexity.) So there is a common standard. But with scrum you're supposed to size stories relative to other (previous) stories and I feel it's ok for the standard measure of a story point to drift apart between teams as long as its internally consistent to the team.
So maybe there's some kind of leveling force at work. But probably not.
Any trend up or down on the past 3 months? Until lockdown, WFH for me meant coding on the couch. After lockdown, it took me some time to get a comfortable chair and ergonomics worked out. I'm still adapting, just ordered more office equipment that arrived on Sunday. When layoffs hit my company, that definitely made feel worried. Now that's over and I've been tuning out the news. I feel like I've been much more productive the past 2 weeks than when this started.
VPD is a bullshit number easily game and highly prone to politics. I read this as "people in office have an advantage with politics". Which is a real thing. A bad thing, but a real thing.
Suffocating Agile, as is the standard these days, is about pushing away risky, but really valuable tasks, in favor of fine grained, easily estimated and understandable tasks that are only of minor importance but "feel" like progress. They are more amenable to Bad Agile, and so are the tasks that get selected increasingly in the long run.
WFH is far, far better at deep work, which is much more important to the long term value of a company.
Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.
"Velocity is the sum of the estimates of the stories that were completed in an iteration. If the programmers estimate perfectly, it's simply a measure of the number of hours that the programmers worked, minus interruptions. The number is often confused by estimates that aren't 100% accurate. Velocity measures a strange combination of estimate accuracy and hours worked. It's a great planning tool, but as a metric, it has serious flaws."
* multipliers, like infrastructure work or pipeline improvements?
* fixing of technical debt that may have no immediate benefit?
* projects of uncertain monetary value?
* projects with great short term value but so much technical debt that they crumble the company a few years later?
* moonshots that may revolutionize the company?
How would organizations like the entirety of Microsoft Research where some guy got to play with coloring problems for a long time and that just so happened to end up requiring him to solve a subset of the halting problem, which just so happened to have benefit in driver validation? (It’s going to take me a looong time to find that source somewhere on the internet.)
This is where the right answer is "you do you", since only you and your team know what works best in your operating environment. The previous poster is correct, though, that working backward from business value measurements in order to drive IC behavior is almost always the smartest path.
Given this, I don't believe the this person's original argument is, to use their words, meaningful, then.
> Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.
They were responding to someone that was using their average story point completion rate to track their productivity.
This person seems to be talking about what sorts of work to work on - the kind that makes the company money.
If it's already been predicted or measured that a certain project is going to earn the company money, then you need to know how long it's going to take to complete that project, which means either estimating it as a whole, or breaking the project into parts and estimating each part.
Assuming two projects of similar mathematical proportionality of size and value, you can then estimate velocity based on how much projected time it's going to take to complete each step of each project, as estimated by story points or similar.
In this way, story points can still be a meaningful metric that you can estimate velocity on.
In short, the discussion is on two separate things and their initial premise of velocity being meaningless is not correct.
There's a difference between productivity and prediction.
Velocity is a great prediction tool. Given a total estimate, it can tell you approximately how many weeks it will take to be done. It's a unit conversion factor: velocity = 25 points / week, therefore 100 points = 4 weeks.
Productivity is defined as output / input. Effort and time are both "input." Velocity is a way of converting from points (effort) to weeks (time). To measure productivity, you still need to define "output."
OP said, "On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them."
But OP didn't define "output," so they weren't measuring productivity. They just showed that their effort --> time unit conversion factor had changed. Given that there's any number of possible reasons for this—changes in hours worked, changes in overhead, changes in estimating technique, changes in estimate accuracy—the numbers probably aren't meaningful.
They're measuring how much work they're getting done based around approximate predicted complexity / work amount using story points and then using that to map overall work output and charting it from between non-WFH and WFH. If the projects they're working on have tended to remain of similar complexity with people that tend to be consistent, then this seems like a perfectly fine metric for exactly what they're trying to discuss: the relative output from WFH and non-WFH.
Yes, that’s fair. I would say that hadn’t measured a change in productivity, but rather a change in overhead, but that’s probably just me being nitpicky about the word “productivity.”
I was super productive in the first month of WFH, but that spike is going away, and I think a large part of it is meeting fatigue. The projects we are working on require coordinating with lots of devs within our team and then devs and PMs on other teams. That means lots of meetings here and there to make sure we're all on the same page.
There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).
My team does have lunches together remotely, but having to be tied to the computer the whole day, I often want to drop out of those and just be outside in the sun.
But to your point about burnout, I find that that's the other extreme as well. In those afternoons or days that I don't have meetings, there's a sense that, okay, I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard. While at the office, you'd have occasionally breaks and conversations in the hall when you were getting up for coffee and you could see people's rhythms. At home, I don't see that, so my natural, irrational belief is everyone must be working hard, so I should too.
For me I don't think it's meeting fatigue, I have about the same amount of meetings as before. But I also noticed a similar productivity spike. Unfortunately what I think is happening is that we are using up a built-up "social capital" from when we were in the office together. Many of the people I know to ask for quick questions/favors I know because of hallway/lunch conversations. As new remote devs rotate onto my team I feel the team is becoming more impersonal and I am more reluctant to ask them things or help them. And likewise I think they are less likely to ask for help to get unblocked, than they would be in office.
But FB people ops (or beyond) aren't stupid and hopefully they can come up with ways to intentionally replace this. Won't be the same but something is needed and will be better than nothing or ad-hoc.
This doesn't sound right to me and reads like 20 people in the team trying to decide on things at the same time. I sometimes had days where it's a meeting after meeting ( I'm in management) but to be honest most of those meetings aren't necessary. Since we all moved to remote work, the number of meetings dropped by 80% and everyone is fine with it.
Yeah, I don't necessarily think the meetings thing is something everyone's experiencing. For my team, the challenge is that the projects we are working on at the moment do span multiple teams, so it's kind of the worst time to have to coordinate remotely. We previously were considering flying people down to meet in person and work together for a week to get up to speed on things (i.e. high bandwidth communication).
How many teams and what's the average team size?
Wouldn't having one representative from each team going to these meetings be better? Meetings with large number of people dilute individual contribution,focus,and deprive those attending from time to do the actual work.
> There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).
This sounds like a normal day in the office for me pre-lockdown :/
I feel this pretty hard. I'm an engineering manager and there are multiple days a week where I will spend _six hours_ in video calls with an hour for lunch and MAYBE a 30 minute break somewhere in the day. It's a nightmare and the days feel like complete throwaways. It's made worse because we try and do "No Meeting Thursdays" which means meetings tend to pile up on Tuesday and Wednesday (nobody wants to meet on Monday or Friday, either).
The feeling of "I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard" can also be pretty hard to shake. Especially if most people are heads-down and there's no chatter on Slack or email or anything going on.
Why does it have to be more productive? It reduces the insane practice of commuting which saves time and energy. Even if it's slightly less productive (which I don't think is true), it would still be better overall. Productivity is not the be all and end all. Happiness and sustainability is what we should be aiming for.
Let me buy a house in a quiet neighborhood with a dedicated office and I'll show you real productivity gains.
Ask me to WFH in a shared room in a tiny SiValley apartment with construction, gardeners and the neighbors music blasting randomly and I will show you how to waste $250k per year.
I work remote from a quiet neighborhood with dedicated office. I’m still distracted half the time with other things and often get bored sitting in my office by myself. I wander around the house a lot — which is full right now with kids remote learning.
I’ve heard kids can make it difficult, but these are kids that have lived most of their lives with mom or dad working outside of home and they’re trained as such. If this becomes the norm, the crazy, loud and annoying child trope I seem to hear about a lot will greatly reduces as the children are raised with ‘work from from home in mind.
There’s really only so much you can do to train small children to be quiet. My oldest is almost 4 and she’s just now getting to the point where she’s able to be quiet on her own for extended lengths of time. My younger kid is 18 months and when she’s awake there’s basically nothing that can stop her squawking.
We are moving to a house next month with a separate office space on the other side of a 2 car garage from the main house. I am beyond excited.
When I am repairing my car/bike, he comes with his bike (small plastic one) and gets under it and starts repairing act.
And he does it for long as I am repairing mine.
It's interesting that I don't live with him but he is copying my action but when I asked his mom if he helps with housework as he probably sees her doing a lot of housework, she said no.
I've no idea why getting under a bike is more appealing to him than doing stuff like cleaning with a mop and bucket.
We taught our toddler that being noisy wakes up his infant sibling from naps, and we tie some of his favorite activities to his sibling's nap time. He quickly figured out how to stay quiet and started scolding us when we made noise. It's not perfect, but pretty good. Straight out of Dale Carnegie, you might say.
Agree. Face-to-face is the highest bandwidth communication medium we have. It's not for everything, but there are definitely certain types of explanation/negotiation that happen much faster and have better outcomes in person.
I agree, and that means that sometimes that kind of communication is indispensable.
Zoom/Phone don't quite replicate that experience - they require focused attention. In person, your attention can "wander" while you are still focused on the conversation. Look how many people maintain eye contact in a cafe while having a conversation. Not many right? But do the same thing on Zoom/Skype/$VideoChat. "Hey, are you paying attention?" When really, wandering eyes are indicative (usually) of deep thought.
I have a heuristic when synchronous communication (phone, video chat) is necessary: When something is:
a) complex, or
b) has a significant likelihood of misunderstanding (which is just a more specific version of (a).
Actual face to face... that's got to be for things that are socially critical. Breakups. Hard messages to people who are close. First meetings with the biggest client of your life. Important deals, if they take more than "Happy? Yep." Etc. Stuff where the physical impression makes or breaks the experience.
Social aspect or no, many executives believe their companies are more productive right now. What I'm hearing from the executive level is that the vast majority of companies are actively working to make WFH a permanent reality for those who wish to do so.
One executive I spoke to put it like this (paraphrased): "the introverts are loving it and the extroverts hate it. Productivity-wise its neutral to positive, but emotionally a lot of our folks are struggling without work so we're still committed to reopening offices when it's safe to do so."
It’s not a fair comparison. Companies are forced to go remote and many are doing it quite wrong. Most companies have an immense amount of experience working in a shared space but only a month or two of remote so far. It’ll get better.
I run a completely distributed company and no one in their right mind would argue that a completely distributed company or even a partially work from home company
can be as good as the same people working TOGETHER in one office
The bonds are much stronger
The interaction is much better
Two superstars together are 10 times better than separately
However, when you do remote, it's only 5 times better
At minimum, it is 50% worse to have a distributed company than have a real same office, same location company
What really makes people say 'working from home is just as good' is a combination of
1) liking it for other reasons (more time with family, less pressure) and rationalizing
2) being able to cut out time wasting things (which they could anyways cut out if they were better at saying no to time wasting stuff
3) not ever having done it for a long time and seeing the long term implications
There is a very good reason that very few companies have become very big and very successful while being distributed companies
I think it’s almost always less productive. I suspect the reason software engineers like to talk about how productive it is, is because software engineers tend to enjoy sitting down and their own code the way the want to do it. Collaboration, teamwork, and anything that involves accounting for the needs of other stakeholders all gets in the way of that. So you can feel more productive, because you get to spend more time doing the things that you think of as productive. But really you’re probably operating much less efficiently from an organisational standpoint.
There seems to be a clear split in my social circle between developers and managers.
The former are generally pro working from home while the latter feel more swamped and are always talking about how busy they are now.
My guess is that for the first group it's pretty much business as usual, while the second (not generally producing visible output) feels that meetings are the only signal to indicate work being done. And as a result # of meetings in their area has gone up dramatically.
Would love to hear a counter from managers, perhaps I'm way off the mark.
You are way off the mark. Managers do have more meetings. The output they produce is not the number of meetings, but the results from those meetings. When done over teleconference, those meetings take a toll on the people involved. The managers were attending as many people interactions as before - just that the medium over videoconference makes it more tiring.
I wasn't suggesting their actual output was meetings :)
More that as we transition to remote, there is a higher internal desire to signal worth to offset not being in the office. Which on the surface is easily accomplished by adding meetings to your calendar.
Well, managers who do that signalling are poor ones,
IMO. They are analogous to developers who split a single PR into multiple frivolous PRs to signal higher productivity.
Producing the results managers achieve over videoconference meetings takes more meetings (nothing as hoc now) and is physically tiring. Maybe that is what managers in your circle have been talking about.
This might be true, but I haven't felt it that way. My experience the past two months has been that my avg meetings/week has spiked from about 30 to 45, with avg time spent in meetings per week at 30 currently. The result is that I don't have any time to do Real Work(tm) because I'm constantly in meetings.
Why has this happened? My estimation is that it isn't "because I'm a manager" or "because I'm trying to create artificial face time to indicate my value", but because the broader organization hasn't matured enough culturally to know how to handle itself when everybody is WFH. Examples of things that haven't happened yet:
1) Top down declaration of any core hours, to reduce need for early morning and evening meetings
2) Adjustment of business objectives
3) Formal recognition that there is inequity across sub-populations when it comes to WFH effectiveness/capability (type of work, family situation, living situation, infrastructure access, maturity, mental state, ...).
The perception most within the org seem to have is that, while we pressed pause on some activities (proactive sales outreach, for example), we are accelerating others, and this is coming without much regard for human experience.
Imho, there's also a difference between normal WFH -- as a previous commenter noted -- and this cv-forced WFH. I think there's real fear, that well-founded, from workers who know they can't be 100% productive right now, but don't know if that fact will be adequately recognized by their employer or have clarity around how it will impact future performance ratings, compensation and promotion decisions. As a result, many folks are struggling with balance because they feel obligate to structure their lives in an unbalanced way.
With all this remote work going on, does anyone know whether this will affect whether companies are willing to relocate people to the USA? Would be a real shame if that was to go.
Thanks for posting the article link. Archive.md, which is a fantastic service, started throwing a 403 Forbidden error and 1001 error from Cloudflare a few days ago. Any idea what’s causing it? Cleared cookies and cache for it already. However I’m able to get to your archived article.
More specifically they don't support CloudFlare's DNS. The operator of Archive.(today/is/md) has decided to specifically provide bad IPs when the EDNS client subnet extension isn't provided, which CloudFlare's DNS doesn't provide due to privacy concerns.
In this thread: SF engineers realize how well paid they are. Did not complain about 2x salary bump when moving to SF. Will complain about 0.5x when moving out of SF. Signs of realization that pay is only weakly correlated with skill yet to be seen.
If you have a family with kids in daycare at 3000$+ each! and paying 6000$ a month for a crappy 2bd apartment, you'll happily move to the midwest for half the salary. You'd be better off, in terms of standard of living in a midwest town/city at half the SF salary.
Now if you're a single person in SF, that's a different story.
Colorado is the sweet spot if you don't require access to lakes or the ocean. I'm about ~$1850 for daycare and a nice house in Boulder is around $1mil. For a FAANG level engineer out here that's not much of a stretch at all.
> Signs of realization that pay is only weakly correlated with skill
This is of course the big problem. Facebook is admitting that developers elsewhere in the world are just as good as developers in Silicon Valley. Or if you want to put it another way: if Silicon Valley is special, it's NOT because the developers.
It is special not because of the quality of developers but because there are so many of them together in close proximity. It still remains to be seen whether the 100% remote experiment will work out or not as an industry standard, so let's not write the Silicon Valley obituaries just yet.
Personally, i think there was a time where we genuinely needed to solve hard engineering problems - around 2010-2015 when a ton of companies figured out concurrency, distributed systems, scaling, way better web tech, smartphones etc.. in those times companies needed a LOT of good devs, so the network effect Silicon Valley had was valuable. And the VCs saw huge empires to be built and so much money on the table, so high salaries were easy to justify.
Now the market is crowded, scaling is a simple economic problem, the network effect is turning on its head and there isn't any revolutionary software to build on the horizon. Times have changed but the narrative hasn't caught up yet.. its going to suck when it does honestly. Software is just so commoditized and cookie cutter at this point i can't see it being a great career for much longer.
There are still hard engineering problems to solve, they just aren't related to scaling out services as much (there's still optimizations and improvements to be made in that space, but not nearly as much). You can't seriously think all the hard engineering problems have been solved, right?
Give me some then! I see maybe some cool stuff in the move to ARM processors. I also don't have the resume or fame or background to get offered the chance to solve them if they're out there - in 2015 there were so many and the average level of competence was so low that people gave me a shot anyways.
I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now. But its not 2015 and I don't have 3 years of experience in embedded/systems/C++ so no ones gonna hire me for that stuff because my resume just says "generic backend dev lol".
> in 2015 there were so many and the average level of competence was so low
The average competence is still low, the technologies are just no longer new and shiny (they aren't mature either), they're just better understood throughout the industry. 2010-2015 saw huge cross-industry revolutions in terms of web adoption, and until the next "revolution" happens, we'll probably be in a lull in terms of innovation in the web app space. Of course JS/Node will continue to "innovate", but overall I think that portion of the industry has been successfully "commoditized."
Hardware engineering (drivers, embedded, IoT, etc.) will always have tough engineering problems, but as you said, it's kind of hard to break into that (though maybe not, I haven't tried). Quantum Computing and other experimental and uncharted spaces are good sources of problems looking for well engineered solution (source: I work in quantum computing, on the engineering side), but is a much smaller and niche industry.
> I see maybe some cool stuff in the move to ARM processors
I also agree on ARM, I think things will gradually shift towards ARM-based processor architecture in the server and desktop spaces. From the software side, most modern programming can be run on those processors without issue, though there's some work to be done on optimizing compilers (hard, not very rewarding).
> I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now
This is an area I'm also particularly interested in. If I wasn't getting close to burning out, I'd probably focus on it on the side a little more. AMD is behind, in particular, with regards to graphics driver optimization and toolkits for machine learning (nVidia is beating them out there, thanks CUDA). I'm not sure what their hiring is like, but there's been huge industry shakeups over the last few years from them in the processor space and they're swimming in money.
Machine learning is also a hot topic, and probably will be for awhile. Security engineering (especially in the context of Kubernetes) is an ongoing issue that needs more attention.
There's definitely others. I'd eventually like to find a problem that interests me and I see a market for so I could start my own company, but alas, I am not good at ideas.
There are still a lot of hard problems to solve, they're just cross-disciplinary.
Software is the infrastructure of the 21st century and if you step out of the tech bubble to things like material science, biotech, etc. you'll see that their infrastructure is garbage despite there being really big returns available.
Developers who can marry modern software to those domains should remain in high demand for decades.
Do you have any companies or spaces you would recommend where theres hard problems but low signalling/barriers to entry? I'm autistic AF (no joke) and learn new domains in a frenzy of 3 months of joy and digging but its not easy to prove/signal that.
Well beginning in 2008ish, we saw websites and applications that served the entire world, literally billions of users. That simply did not exist before then. The internet as a whole was a tiny part of peoples lives. All the stuff that went into solving that was genuinely new ideas in servers, databases, ops, data centre's etc. Eventual consistency went from being a joke to the only game in town. Distributed computing on large data sets went from a Google paper in 2005 on Hadoop to a widely used idea. Smartphones went from zero to iPhone to literally more than half the world has one. Devops became standard. Google went from just managing 1 or 2 datacenters to running AI to optimize the power efficiency of each one.
When you already have architecture that is capable of serving the entire world, when everyone has a smartphone all that's left in that space is efficiency/cost optimization. Whatever shiny new programming language or framework comes out, the bedrock of computing is solid (and the shiny new programming language is really mashing together decades old ideas which is cool if you're new to them but boring if you're not) . Every company is a mess on the inside of course, but they do their core functions well enough. AWS did not exist 10 years ago, now it's big internet drama when it goes down for a few hours twice a YEAR.A detailed postmortem comes out (not standard before), revealing the problem was a configuration change (because everything has long since been automated, so it's driven purely by configuration) .
I know not everyone is interested in those same problems, but I thought they were interesting and what's left now in the guts of software is an adoption phase, people rediscovering lessons that others long since figured out. Perhaps people who work on higher layers of the stack think differently, I'm only interested in the deep tech below, and it's pretty solid at this point.
There's still lots of relevant work to do deeper in the stack. It might just not be at large internet scale companies (I doubt this but lets assume it's true). Most every university has a systems research lab doing interesting things. I think I paged through 5 different professor's websites in CMU's systems department the other month and found 9-10 interesting projects.
You make it sound like this is some big secret. It's not like Facebook exclusively hires from people in the area only. Facebook and nearly every company regularly hire people from outside the area. Most developers in the bay area are from outside the area. Out of my team of 30 people there's maybe 1 person that's from the bay area. Everyone else was re-located.
I mean, if you extrapolate that, developers in US should really earn min wage as you can get someone in a developing country with a lower wage no matter what
Having done a recent stint at a Silicon Valley startup, I was honestly shocked to discover most of the engineers I was working with were at the bottom half of those I've worked with in my career. I think there are far more great engineers in SV than many places, but the truly great ones are still relatively rare and gobbled up by wealthier companies rather quickly. Even at 10x the normal amount of top notch engineers, that still only means a few thousand in the SV area.
I think a lot of people don't understand how pay works. The price of a good is determined not by how important it is to you, but by its marginal utility i.e. how difficult it would be to get more if you need it. Water, for example, is critical for life, but is basically free in most civilized areas in the first world because it is abundant.
The price a company is going to pay for your labor depends on how hard it is for them to replace you. If FB can replace a SWE in Atlanta with another for 90k$, that is what they will pay. It has nothing to do with the value of the work you're doing.
Value of work definitely is a major part of it depending on priorities, but also everything else you said. It’s not a black and white thing as some make out, all revolving around one element.
> Water, for example, is critical for life, but is basically free in most civilized areas in the first world because it is abundant.
I largely agree with your comment, but I disagree with this sentence. Water is almost free in most civilized areas because it's not subject to free market economics (for good reason). Basic water supply is usually provided by the local government (and this applies to places where it is scarce). If water were treated the same way health is in the US, its price wouldn't be anywhere close to free.
Everything is subject to “free market economics”, no matter how much you try and force it not to be. It just happens that it’s very easy to “control” the price of water, because the supply far outstrips the demand anyway.
Beer costs about $0.50 a liter here in Shanghai. At 50L a day, $25 that’d be $750 a month. Doable in most of the first world.
If you want to know the realistic upper bound for local price of water see how much Coke costs. That’s not something the government much concerns itself with anywhere. Or look at the price of water in someplace like Gurgaon our Dubai, cities so hideously planned that drinking water and sewerage are transported by tanker.
Water can be provided for very low cost even with less than competent governments.
I don't know why rumors like this persist when they're so easy to fact check. When I go on Walmart's website, a 2-liter (~half gallon) bottle of store-brand cola is $0.87 and a gallon of drinking water is $1.00.
Following this argument, the replacement cost for a SWE in SF is also 90k$ since they can hire an engineer to replace them in Atlanta. Thus resulting in most of the SF office being let go.
But if employees work remotely anyways, why does it matter where the employee is (as long as they can work the same hours, so within a few hours of the same timezone)?
The point is just that if a company wants to participate in a labor market, it has to pay at the going rate in that market. For various reasons, a company might choose to stay in a pricy market. For example, it might be easier to hire for some skillset, or it might be easier to grow your team because your employees have lots of friends with similar skills that they can refer.
Companies that don't think this is an advantage should do what you're recommending, but the ones that do will continue to hire here, while also hiring in other markets. I don't know which group is more correct (it's pretty hard to make any authoritative claims about these things), but that does explain why there isn't a mass exodus from SF to ATL.
A point to note here is that labor markets vary not just by location, but also by what the job is. Many companies in the Bay Area do outsource some parts of their internal IT or Business Intel functions to Accenture and co, for example. What they're doing is exactly that - they're leaving this expensive market because they don't believe the benefits are worth the markup for those specific roles
This mostly doesn't change much. Most people who come to high pay areas come for the pay and opportunity and will continue to do so. Sounds more like PR. It's yet to be seen if productivity is better or worse.
> It's yet to be seen if productivity is better or worse
The rest of the source announcement covered that. It was noted that individual productivity was the same or better, but there were concerns about collaboration.
As an aside: the announcement started at 10:00 Pacific and Mark continued to speak for an hour.
This story (and many others!) were created and posted well before any of the details were mentioned.
I'm not saying that's bad, but it was strange getting e-mails from people with links to fully formed news articles even while I was watching the announcement live.
This would increase the talent pool for tech companies that goes remote. e.g. U.S. companies could hire more international developers without sponsoring work visa for them.
I don't live in US and don't want to immigrate at the moment for a variety of personal reasons. But I am competent and professional, and would be happy to deliver just as much as a SF-based engineer for half the pay.
(When I said cool, I meant, it's really cool for me. It might not be as cool for a US-based HN reader).
Exactly! Most HN readers don't realize the real amount of talent outside of US waiting for this opportunity. There are thousands of people who would easily work at any top-notch companies but were just not willing to leave their home towns, their families, friends, local lifestyle etc. And now they can easily work to such companies with /2 or /3 of the standard SF wage.
As a Brit; I'm a capitalist with a sprinkle of socialism.
I'm disappointing none of these tech companies are acknowledging the happiness that comes from camaraderie and togetherness. (Note: I don't have a family though)
I love the company of others; and the unpredictability of what my day has in store when I venture out my front door.
Everybody working from home for me sounds like one step closer towards a blander, lonelier, disengaged, dispassionate, oppressed workforce.
You can still find places to work with other peoples, or spontaneously meet your colleagues in a much nicer (and possibly nearer) place. When the COVID crisis will go, you'll find tons of options to meet people thorough the day and enjoy a great social life. Working from home is a pandemic thing, afterwards you could work from anywhere you want.
> I'm disappointing none of these tech companies are acknowledging the happiness that comes from camaraderie and togetherness
Exactly, which is why I work so I can experience camaraderie and togetherness with the people I actually want to: my family and my friends. Working from home allows me to do that more, much more than working in an office.
Hmm...I wonder if I'll be hearing from them again. I've been recruited a few times by FB, but the relationship ended when I told them that I won't be commuting into the city to work in that massive bullpen.
Unlike a lot of folks, I don't have much against them. The people I've interacted with have been a decent, diverse, crew, and I use the platform fairly lightly.
The chances are better than even that I wouldn't be considered a "cultural fit" with the company (I'm a bit "long in the tooth," and I've found that's a "showstopper," these days).
Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
Still not sure if I would take any jobs there, but it hasn't gotten past the initial phase anyway, so it has not been a decision that I've had to struggle with.
> The chances are better than even that I wouldn't be considered a "cultural fit" with the company (I'm a bit "long in the tooth," and I've found that's a "showstopper," these days).
Anecdata: I'm 40+ and as far as I can tell, I fit in just fine.
> Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
A recent earnings release said that 90+% of FB ad revenue is from mobile. Between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsAp, IOS is definitely a company priority (although I don't think we've publicly released stats on Android vs. IOS).
I don't actually know if/how-much Swift we're doing vs. ObjC (I'm on the server side of things, not the client)
The people I talked to described a massive ObjC monorepo (Instagram). Not sure about the FB app, but you guys did invent React, so I suspect that platform-dedicated solutions are not high on the guest list.
609 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread> In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year.
> “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. “We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range — I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”
I would prefer either one without mixing. One shoe in one shoe out is a great way to make it extra hard to manage.
Anyway details aside, it can be done, it's just it has to be a deliberate effort from everyone in the office.
The benefits are also there for people who go to the office since there ends up being less tribal knowledge and more written down or documented somewhere.
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
Also, all of those companies say "less expensive areas" while they really mean "lower wage areas" - which doesn't necessary align with the former preposition.
As for low-wage/high-cost place - e.g. Italy is a great example.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/2-_beds/2.0...
Exactly. Also, if you live in the “middle of nowhere” or even outside a major metro area on the east and west coasts of the US, the quality of healthcare substantially declines. Considering that the third leading cause of death in the US is preventable medical errors, living outside of these areas can literally be a death sentence. It is only a matter of time before it is likely to become the case for an individual, healthy or not.
As somebody with 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, plus type 1 diabetes, remote work helps tremendously. But, living in the boonies would literally, in no exaggeration, kill me. So, I need a salary that allows me to live in a major decent metro area, plus allows me to pay for my healthcare. That is non-negotiable. Every day, working in the US is looking less appealing. I can legally work in select places in other parts of the world, and plan on leaving the US. There are other places in the world that have universal healthcare, that do not have huge disparities in quality across similar geographical areas.
You can find out more about healthcare quality worldwide and the US by examining the data on http://HealthData.org
But, where I live absolutely matters. I also require a lot of healthcare contact, where living 2-3 hours outside of a city just does not work.
Secondly, it's not likely the case that Facebook needs the "absolute best talent" across the board -- it's more likely that they do for some positions (and will pay appropriately) and not so much for others. And for where it stands there, I'm pretty sure Facebook knows what that Pareto frontier looks like -- at least in recent history, they have generally outbid their weight class competitors [1] in terms of total compensation.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
Obviously, you're free to work wherever you want but I simply fail to understand the sentiment here.
The "same" house that costs $1M in the Bay Area costs $300k in Atlanta. A pound of chicken or gallon of milk is also half the price. Day care for children? Twice as expensive in CA. Why should FB pay Bay Area living wages to someone in Atlanta, when they can pay them top dollar for their own market?
Does this suggest a company should have to pay the entire workforce, whatever they pay the individual in the highest-cost-of-living area? These are businesses, not charities.
As a side note, Bay Area inflated prices will probably drop as a result of this.
Facebook pays the same payscale for Seattle as the Bay Area. Combined with no state income tax, lower property prices, and lower cost of living, you come out far ahead (financially) by being a Facebooker in Seattle instead of SF.
But overall, I am in full agreement with you. You will be able to save noticeably more as a FB engineer in Seattle as opposed to SF, while living around the same lifestyle level.
And $150k in Boise likely results in a higher quality of life than $250k around SF.
If you move to a place with a 50% COL as NYC or SF, you retain 70% or so of your salary. You still come out ahead. I think you've set up a strawman fallacy here. People come out ahead financially when relocating to lower COL, even with the downward salary adjustments.
Because they are now competing globally as an employer as well.
Sure, if you can grow that subset to 100% then you can keep all the pizza for yourself, but the reason tech salaries are so high is the companies are that profitable.
If Zuckerberg is paying Alabama rates to everyone, it will be trivially easy to poach talent from him, and he knows this, so while he might have in mind a pool of "superfungibles" making $ALABAMA in $WHEREVER, you will not see Big Tech start slashing the compensation of the people they want to keep.
I already live in a low COL location and successfully demand Bay Area salary. So obviously I don't see a problem with this. Most people all across the country will see no appreciable change here. The only people who need to be concerned are people who are unable to demand a high salary based on their attributes other than geography.
The mistake is many people in the latter group think they are in the former.
Like many, I think I'm in the former group and will allow myself a little Schadenfreude if the latter group gets an "adjustment." Unless it turns out I'm wrong. :-O
There are many skills and levels of talent for which there is always a global shortage.
Who knows what will happen over some time if this really becomes big. Lots of people will leave the Bay Area and the cost of living will drop, in some places dramatically. Those 2m starter homes will get cut in half or more if this becomes wide scale.
Regardless, companies will still want to attract and recruit the best people they can and if that means having to hire from an expensive zone then they will. Or their competitors will and they'll be out competed. If anything though, over enough time if this becomes the norm than I'd expect places like the Bay Area to see the cost of living decline.
And then people will start moving in because CoL is suddenly cheaper and they get to enjoy all the nice stuff Bay Area offers without suffering through the daily commute...then CoL will rise again.
Then the top companies' headquarters will still be here, and there will still be a heavy premium placed on top of physical presence, especially for management/senior level employees, in fact I wouldn't be surprised to see the average income going up in areas like the Bay Area after the lower level rank and file employees move out.
Why should I hire someone and pay them a bay area salary if there are equally talented folks in that geography that are perfectly happy making what's market for _their_ location?
This is only a perspective that highly paid engineers living in the bay area share. The rest of the world doesn't work this way.
When someone good is on the line, it’s not hard to justify the Bay Area salary when you were willing to pay it if they were in the bay.
Source: kept Bay Area salary when moved remote and was able to easily negotiate Bay Area salary at future companies.
I might still say if someone is doing a 6-mo/1-yr temporary change of scenery, it makes sense to not dock their salary. But an actual move and keep my $300K FAANG salary while working in Thailand? I don't see it happening. If the difference is < 20%, may be sure. But a > 50% difference? I doubt we'll see that world. But who knows...stranger things have happened.
Every profession gets paid this way. Tech is no different, or some special snowflake.
> Some companies will do it simply to keep you because they're already familiar with you, know how you work, and have trust built. But it won't be the norm.
I’ve negotiated into a new company a bay salary and I had never worked with any of them before. The interview was a little extended to talk about remote work background but that was about it.
The problem is most remote employees fold on salary negotiation when the company lowballs them because they don’t know any better. If they company is actively hiring bay area salaries, they enough to offer you the same as remote.
Remember, good tech companies can’t even find enough good employees in the bay. They are realistically just as happy to have a remote employee that’s as good as a local even if it’s for the same price.
You’ll see this standard change pretty quickly once companies realize how many other techs are now remote friendly.
If Facebook or Apple or whoever are still willing to give you 400k+ TC outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, or Los Angeles, it's because you're truly exceptional. Most people who get around that much in compensation working for those companies in the Bay Area will have to take a reduction in pay if they go to another office in a major city, and an even bigger cut if they go full remote.
I am expecting Bay Area SWE incomes to fall in the next few years, as housing & rent prices fall. But I could be wrong, and they'll continue going up despite cost of living going down. We'll see!
This describes 90+% of HN posters these days, to be fair. You’re absolutely completely right in your argument.
Right now, you wouldn't. However, if going full remote turns into a trend, then you're not competing with other talented folks in that geography making what's market for their location because they don't have a location, but rather with every other company which offers remote work. They're remote. Won't this drive up market standard prices for engineers in places where markets are less populated by tech right now, while lowering the market price in places like the bay area? After all, if I'm a company, why would I pay $BAY_AREA_ENGINEER more money for the same job I can get done by $KANSAS_ENGINEER for less? Remote work, if taken to the furthest conclusion, will obviate any discussion of "location" based payment because every engineer would be in the same location: the Internet.
How do you think it will play out?
In the long term with enough companies doing remote work though, this starts to blur the boundaries between job markets and we might expect salaries to start to be affected by other cities, in the same way that different suburbs within a city share the same comp rates.
How do you decide what a software engineer salary (since we're talking about pure skill and not location) should be? Is it $30K, $80K, $150K, $400K?
Do you see the problem and why I don't think this will happen?
If Facebook will now hire permanent remote employees anywhere with excellent internet they are now hiring in the area. They pay new grads in SF $200K a year. If they pay $100K for people with seven years of good experience, Seniors, in Vietnam they will have them all in under six months. Even at $50K the market price of devs will get bid up quickly.
No, but FAANG and other extremely profitable companies might try it. If you offer Bay Area salaries to everyone who’s currently in a top 20 CS PhD programme and tell them they can live wherever they want you’ll get a pretty good yield. Even better if you make a standing offer to everyone who completes X hard classes on GA Tech’s OMSCS. This wouldn’t be worthwhile if the productivity differential between remote and office was high enough but in the long run wages approach the marginal product of labour absent employer collusion. Might take 20 years but eventually the top end of the market will be getting comparable numbers whether in NYC or Bangor, Maine.
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
Because people living in those other markets will be more than happy to take a "reduced pay" for SF standards, since that's way higher than any other local wage.
For example, for engineers in many big tech companies, pay vs COL in London is not very attractive.
I dictate my value, not my zipcode or employer.
That could be totally fine and rational since there are other utility-maximizing considerations for you like how much you want to work, the kind of work you do, the kind of clients you're willing to take on, etc., but that doesn't change the fact that you can't arbitrarily set your price and not expect a change in the amount of business you can conduct.
You may not be profit-maximizing, but companies certainly are, and as a result, they'll pay whatever rates the market allows them to.
It's obvious we're not comparing humans to rice here since we're not buying and selling humans. It's so obvious that I can only conclude you're acting in bad faith intentionally.
If you want to get paid the big salary, move to the big city. Don't complain about higher rent and cost of food. Or live frugally.
I find them usually often inaccurate, though.
For companies that don't pay at the top of the scale, the people in the high-cost areas are comparatively screwed (software engineers having to resort to living with roommates!?), whereas for the companies paying more, sometimes it tips the other way (like failing to account for how most costs don't scale with area the way housing does, so you could end up with a $500+ disadvantage in disposable income in one of the cheaper areas).
For instance, the only person who can classify income as disposable or not is me. No one else is allowed to make that decision, or is even deserving of knowing the information at all.
If your hiring manager is giving you the song and dance about calculations on your cost of housing and milk, you need to turn around and go elsewhere.
If you think you’re a cog in a machine, yes, you can determine your value this way.
If you feel you have inherent value in and of yourself, your attitude will change about work and employment.
The value I provide to a company has absolutely nothing to do with where I live. If I’m a good hire, I’m a good hire.
It's a view on negotiation, not on employment.
But I think feelings like yours get in the way, regardless.
"Determining your value" is internalizing things way too much. Failing to convince the opposite side in a negotiation is very different from "your value".[0]
Being a cog in a machine - or, more directly in this situation, being seen as replaceable by the next candidate who would accept the offer you don't like - isn't about how you feel or think of yourself, it's about what you can do and what you demonstrate. That holds true for far more than just the initial interview and offer negotiation, too.
[0] I'm tempted to suggest the person who's happy to be a "cog" - show up, do some work, get paid, and define their life and their value in non-work terms - may value themselves more than us maximizers!
EDIT: And odds are, the employer won't notice enough to fire me.
But if you reduce my pay, you're gonna make me take stock of what I'm giving you and shift the balance in my favor if I can easily get away with it.
1) You're upfront about it and tell your manager, they update workday, HR schedules a meeting with you to explain the multiplier effect and how your salary is being reduced.
2) You're kind of sneaky, you update your state tax withholding, it updates workday and put you into the appropriate COL bucket for next year's performance review, your salary slowly falls in line with people in your COL area.
3) You keep it secret, allow the company to keep paying taxes to your original state, maybe pay estimated taxes or something to your new state? Don't develop any relationships with coworkers that'll eventually leak your true situation, get away with it?
I don't think companies that want to attract upper-tier engineering talent will be able to get away with it either.
Good engineers:
A) Are outnumbered by job openings non-trivially
B) Return many multiples in value of their total compensation cost
C) Are well aware of A and B from a negotiating standpoint
If I'm operating in the same market orbitals as Facebook, I see this as an instant hiring advantage. Simply tell candidates:
"Not only have we shifted towards remote-focused teams, we won't arbitrarily grade your salary based on where you or your family choose to live"
The increased costs will be a pittance compared to the potential 8-9 figure market advantage gained in 18-36 months by having consistently won hiring battles.
I get why management wants to do this, but I doubt it will stick with remote workers.
Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world. They will just be a lot lower than you are used to.
Are they paying "Bay Area" salaries, or "Skills With The Most Obvious Correlating Signal Of Living In The Bay Area" salaries?
> Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world.
Does a Mercedes and a Honda Civic cost the same?
No?
Well why not? They're both cars.
They're paying for the skillsets, and for salaries to be the "same everywhere in the world", the skillsets would have to be the same, and we're not at the point where they've been commoditized to that level(which is a different discussion versus geography anyways).
Facebook pays Bay Area salary only because they have to, to get the talents they want.
I could go on, but you get the point I'm trying to make here right?
However, if the choice is between working for a local company and working for a high end bay area firm, then absolutely the best financial move is to move to SF/Seattle/NYC. Local companies here top out at $150,000 for a senior engineer, so if I can make $400,000 in a big city, then even with the higher cost of living, I still would come out way ahead living in SF.
Where this development fascinates me is that it vastly increases the pipeline into the FAANG BigCos. I'm sure that, not to be outdone by FB, other members of FAANG will be having serious conversations that are along the same lines as this. Even if your career at a certain company plateaus because of satellite syndrome, you at least have the door open to moving to where the action is if that's what you prioritize.
But for me, so long as the real world reflects the asymmetry of capital allocation at central nodes, so too will salaries reflect that. I don't see any point in protesting that. I feel like it's more valuable to try and figure out a way to speed up the diffusion from central nodes outwards which already appears to be happening, and which this story is part and parcel of.
The variation won’t be as dramatic within a region but it’ll be there.
In fact, developers everywhere benefit from the high salaries of the Bay Area, as it sets the general expectation for the profession.
Competition -> high pay
high pay + zoning rules -> high COL
This is THE reason driving all these companies to announce the shift to remote: it’ll be a massive cost saving. Access to talent that can’t live in a center where they have offices is nice, but hardly justifies the overhead of remote work
Tech companies have always paid less to staff in cheaper cities like Pittsburgh, but the ratio usually still favors the employee (i.e. they make 90% of the Bay Area base salary and their cost of living is 20% as high). Workers can also hack the system by getting irrevocable, long-term RSU grants and then getting transferred to cheaper markets.
If a company suddenly allows working remotely full time, they've suddenly increased their supply of talent, as moving to another city will no longer be a roadblock when they consider Facebook.
At the same time, if more and more companies go with a remote friendly approach, the supply of job openings that applicants have access to will also increase.
Theoretically, this will lead to some sort of equilibrium where compensation is actually based more on the value/output of your work than other factors.
To make an analogy, an apartment building in SF serves the same purpose as an apartment building in Ohio, yet they charge vastly different rents. You're paying less in Ohio for something that provides the same utility (shelter), because of factors outside of the direct utility of the apartment.
That is ridiculous. A job is a job. Also what prevents anyone from keeping a California phone number and a PO Box in Menlo Park or wherever? At what point have you 'moved'?
Note: I don't advocate doing this. I neither work in CA nor at Facebook. I just wonder if this doesn't open things up for being to game the system.
For example: https://www.palmspringstaxandtrustlawyers.com/nonresidents-w...
(Not something I would prefer, but many would.)
Listen I am not advocating doing this. I don't even live there nor do I work at Facebook. I just feel like this is easily gameable.
The incentive is clearly to stay and cost FB more money per head.
And a market is a market. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, your salary/wage is, to some degree, determined by where you are, among many other variables.
On the other hand, you are almost definitely reading this comment on a device that was manufactured in a "low cost of living area" (namely: China) by people who get paid far below Western wages. Likewise, most of the clothes you wear were manufactured in a "cheap" country by people who get paid next to nothing. If you had bought these goods from a US- or Europe-based manufacturer, you would have paid far more, and the people who produced the value would have received higher wages.
So if Facebook shouldn't be allowed to reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas, why don't we apply this logic across the board? Why is it okay for you (or me) to reduce the pay of our own workers (by which I mean the people who work who work for us indirectly, by creating the goods we consume) just because they live in less expensive areas?
It seems to me that you can't have it both ways.
If you've ever tried scheduling a call between India, East Coast US, Europe, and West Coast US...you've dealt with the fact that there's only a few hours a day such a call can occur, greatly limiting the ability to schedule last minute meetings.
For the same team, it is at most 3 hour difference, I would say.
You'll never get everyone together (unless someone takes a midnight meeting, but that's just cruel) except on special occasions, which sucks but it can be done.
They are about double the price of Asian and Eastern European developers. Which is about the price of a junior US developer. (Independent freelance devs try to charge about the same price that development firms charge you).
This solves the time zone problem. The distribution of English proficiency amongst developers is about the same as the other places, where only occasionally you will encounter a real language barrier with one or two devs.
Now that all big tech workers are digital nomads against their will, there are two entire continents that can chill on without stretching the time zone issue.
Highly unlikely, there's still a lot of value in face-to-face meetings.
And--wouldn't it be great if our cities were designed so that people don't need to drive long distances to work? Density + mass transit in cities would go a long way towards reducing emissions.
(and no, we should not use the threat of a once-per-century pandemic to double down on isolated, suburban lifestyles--instead, we should work to make sure cities are clean and support a safe, sustainable density of people)
That is no reason to require not-remote work , and also not entirely true
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac9d2
More to the point, VRChat really makes you appreciate the minutiae of physically proximate human communication, like the lengths of pauses between various speakers. The "mute" avatars in VR also make you appreciate how much we communicate with high dimensional facial and body gestures that can't be duplicated with existing video conferencing. I highly recommend interacting with a mute player in VR if you have the chance. Watching a video isn't the same experience, but here's a short clip of two mutes communicating if you have 30 seconds: https://clips.twitch.tv/CrackyMushyAntelopeBloodTrail
- eye tracking
- facial muscle sensors (that sit between your skin and the rest of the headset)
- deepfake ML
- high resolution scanning
Combine all four, and wala, you can inhabit a high resolution deepfake model of yourself in real time. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a thing, maybe one or two generations of headsets. It will be mind-blowing.
Sure they can, but the Silicon Valley has an immense human capital in skills, talent and knowledge that you can't find easily in the rest of the world. The type of complexity, the scale of the systems and the engineering culture that you can find in SF is not common around the world. My experience as a developer in an European country is that it is really difficult to encounter engineers with a real experience in developing truly complex systems and companies with true engineering cultures. This is simply due to the fact that the majority of the companies that need that high quality of engineering and are willing/capable to pay for it are based in the Bay area, therefore creating an ecosystem that is unique in the world. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, but I don't think the "they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world" is as easy at it may look.
The effects of such decisions are going to be immense; people in the developed countries still live in a bubble thinking they are not going to be affected, but things will probably change dramatically the next couple of years.
But what if they wouldn't? For people from some countries, getting to live in the West is a major benefit on its own. (I have to say I'm a bit afraid that the WFH shift will make immigration way more difficult than it is now.)
I see very likely Bay Area salary is now peaked. It is not like companies prior to the pandemic aren't looking for alternative. Now this is just in full acceleration mode.
But at the end of the day, while I doubt they'd admit it, the main reason either of them do it is because they can't afford anything else, even though they have full-time jobs and work just as hard as the next guy.
Isn't this a sign of a broken housing market? What kind of world are we creating where significant numbers of people are forced out of economic necessity to live in vehicles?
What about work visas? Will this encourage more visas, or will citizens become unsettled after more cost effective labor is remotely hired while they’re left competing against far cheaper world economies. I can see arguments for both expanding H1B program, and making it more difficult/selective.
Something about this doesn’t feel right, the pandemic isn’t nearly as bad as was predicted. It’s been devastating, but nothing like 1918. That is to say, perhaps these drastic actions of mass WFH will have implications we can’t predict yet, especially at scale.
Will cities become less congested? How about home life, if WFH becomes standard in 5 years time, and some positions that are easily remote are hard to find physically, will home life become disrupted? (Currently domestic violence, child abuse has soared, though this is most likely due to the stress of the pandemic, and not the WFH itself. Through school, work, etc tends to allow those at risk to form social networks, and reach out for help from their abusers.)
There is something to say about spending time away from immediate family. Some people need the break, others are synergetic and can spend all their time together. Depends on the persons involved. But let’s not celebrate just yet, there’s obvious economic incentives, and it isn’t clear this can be reliably reversed. We’re rarely given the full list of motives, which may not be in our best interest.
It's not over.
I doubt we'll get anywhere near the numbers most models claimed with mitigation. Even the 90k/US currently will have to be re-evaluated at the end and pruned (or possibly added to) for any inaccuracies.
Predicting the future is often foolish, and I hope this is a cautionary tale. We'll have to wait until March 2021 to look at the average deaths per year and compare it to 2020 to get a real sense of the picture, but from what I've been reading currently, my hypothesis is that it will be no where near what was predicted a few months ago. (I could be wrong though, but we won't know until 2021).
It's all guessing at this point though. This whole thing we're in, was a guess, and the costs are high.
Over half of US counties have had zero coronavirus deaths.
Unfortunately, I'm almost certain things will get dramatically worse in the next 2 weeks. Come laugh at me in 14 days if I'm wrong :)
I don’t know where we go from here, though.
That said I personally hate working from home. Never ever thought I'd say it but I long for my office cubicle as my work has totally monopolized what's usually my own personal space for side projects and zoning out.
I'm watching mountain houses that have sat vacant for months get rented and I'm quite tempted myself. It's not like I can walk to anywhere that's open and I'm paying all this money to live in a hip area with bars and stuff.
I would like to see an increase in flexibility. Many people will choose to work from their own homes, and some may choose to use a flex working space near their homes, and some may commute to the office. Maybe you'll do all 3 depending on what's going on in your life or at work.
The increased flexibility is the key.
Perhaps its less malicious than you make it sound. Isn't it pretty unprecedented in human history for families to be restricted in such close quarters, cut off from community, for such an extended period of time? People need personal space
Hunter gatherer and agricultural societies often have labor segregated by gender roles, with men, women and children spending more time apart from each other than a family in lockdown.
https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/sleep/bed-sharing-co...
There are no eggs to collect or cows to milk in tech work.
Well we won't really know until we finish the third wave too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...
Edit: Wrong word used
However, it's also the case that the free market seems to now be only in play when it comes to reducing wages, off shoring, and other cost cutting.
The free market isn't at play when it's time for bailouts, subsidies, and government contracts.
Rugged individualism for all, except the wealthy elite.
I'm not sure the person who you replied to has a frustrated / discouraged tone, but that's what I read it as. I share the sentiment and the above is why.
This is a direct consequence of considering money to be free speech: those who have more of it have louder voices, and this matters a lot when it comes to elections, and when it's time for politicians to pay back their debts to the donors.
If I leave Silicon Valley to settle down in rural Vietnam, I'm not going to work for $50k a year. If I couldn't find something paying at least $150k+, I'd start my own company and live off my savings until I get it up and running.
There's a real market-based reason engineers get paid as much as they do. It's easy to lose sight of that here on HackerNews, but just look at what your white collar, non-tech friends do at work all day. Their productivity can often be easily doubled or tripled by better tech. That is to say, someone generating $30k in value per year for your business could suddenly generate an extra $30-$60k a year with better software to help them.
2) Some 5-star engineers in the bay area are willing to take a pay cut to work from low-cost areas
3) I agree there are market-based reasons, but there are also geographic considerations as well as WFO momentum - why fix what ain't broken? Companies were not interested in experimenting/implementing remote work because it costs money and had unclear benefit. Their hand has been forced and they had to tackle remote work
Also, a genuine question
Are Amazon, Twitter, Google, Facebook really doing any very technically amazing things?
mostly they are building platforms to collect more and more data and spy more and more
that's hardly cutting edge stuff that needs the world's best engineers
perhaps Facebook is beginning to realize this
10 years later, I was burned out from working at my crappy FAANG job building platforms to spy on people, so I went into consulting on my own. Sure enough, it was a really similar situation.. I don't want to break any NDAs or sound like a jerk, but I was rolling in and doing things in hours that teams of my clients' best engineers had been failing at for months at a time.
You could grab just about any mediocre nobody from a FAANG company and drop them into any tech company somewhere else that normally pays sub-six figures, and they'd be the top performer there. I think it's something that can be taught, and maybe we'll have a tech renaissance now where everyone goes back to their comfortable hometowns, but there's a very real skill differential between the big tech hub cities and the rest of the planet. (And yes, I'm including other countries where even super hard-working geniuses make $35k a year or less.. because a lot of those geniuses eventually tend to either make their way to the USA, or start their own successful companies. If I found out I could eventually make $3.5 million/year by learning Chinese and working my way over there, you'd better believe I'd get it done)
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork...
I've worked remote before and it was fun, I got more done, and I could go into the office once or twice a week if I really wanted. I worked with a guy in Colorado I never met in person for over a year, but I did eventually meet him while driving through on a trip.
If you've never worked remote before 2020, this is not what remote work even remotely feels like. Everything is very different when it's not a choice. I think we need to keep that in mind.
That's true. But I'm damn happy this is the direction we're moving in, the commute is never fun, open offices are usually draining if you're not with a headset stuck in your focus bubble (which defeats the purpose of the open-office in the first place). Of course, we'll need to find a medium for this, but even an option for remote work is great.
That's a great reminder. Thanks.
Something that I haven't yet seen discussed much on this or similar threads are the support and amenities staff. Most of the developers will be alright, maybe even better off, but the Bay Area is full of chefs, shuttle drivers, janitors, and who knows how many other roles that probably won't exist anymore. That's a big permanent shift in employment opportunity for those people.
> Among the advantages of a dispersed workforce, Mr. Zuckerberg said, is that it will enable more demographic and ideological diversity if recruits aren’t required to work in tech strongholds like the San Francisco Bay Area.
This is of critical importance in tech, especially with companies that control the digital public square such as Facebook or Twitter. Allowing employees to live in different political climates, near family, in different lifestyles (more rural), etc. is badly needed. Otherwise, the world's digital public squares fall victim to the ideological monocultures of San Francisco and Seattle.
(I think it's a weak argument)
https://www.redfin.com/MO/St-Louis/1219-Washington-Ave-63103...
"We ran these surveys and asked people what they want to do. Twenty percent of our existing employees said that they were extremely or very interested in working remotely full time. And another 20 percent on top of that said that they were somewhat interested"
Another way to read this, is that 80% employees are not interested in remote. Companies doing this at large will probably realize that remote work is not popular as it made out to be.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/21/21265780/facebook-remote-...
But will they care once the cost savings are realized? Similar things happened with open office floorplans.
I imagine most people have moved past the "throw a desk in an unused area of the house and work mainly off a laptop" phase of WFH and in to the "have additional monitors, a quality chair, and access to basic office supplies" phase... there's definitely more phases that need to happen and to use the current/limited/reaction based setups as an example of what full-time WFH is is shortsighted, IMHO.
Also, there's a company/team culture shift that needs to happen too, which to the parent's point, is hard to just magically do while also balancing all these additional "challenges".
It sounds like you are not at all interested in working remotely full time
What other option is this person supposed to pick then? Saying "not at all interested" skews the results of the survey to mean that this person is not interested in remote work whatsoever.
Imo in the absence of "strongly interested in working remote part-time" answer, picking "somewhat interested in working remote full-time" is the most rational choice.
No, amongst 5 choices (strong negative, negative, neutral, positive, strong positive) you can't select multiple choices from those.
It definitely involves learning new habits and skills as part of the adjustment, which does involve some effort and possibly pain on the part of employees.
So I'm sure most people aren't interested up front. That doesn't say much about what their preference would be after some time to adjust.
Three months of a situation assumed to be temporary is not a sufficient adjustment period.
That coupled with Facebook not reducing its office footprint and this transition supposedly taking a decade makes me wonder if people are making this a bigger deal than it actually is.
Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar (that you partially define along with your employer). Caring about maximizing productivity is the goal of your employer. But you have some leverage in this job market so it's not like they can squeeze you dry. Remote only helps the employee side of that adversarial relationship.
My personal take on things is that if you don’t recognize the adversarial part of the employer/employee relationship, then you will suffer for it. It’s more healthy to recognize where parties have competing interests, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them.
I’d also say that the people who can ignore the adversarial aspects of employment can only do so because of a fair bit of privilege. For example, people will throw around the saying here that “HR is an advocate for the company, not the employee,” but many of us will never really have to deal with HR in a way where it really matters.
Your employer needs employees, not specific employees.
Just because you're working together in a circumstance that benefits the two parties doesn't mean each party is not also working against each other to some degree to better optimize their self-interests.
An employer may need an employee to create something and by creating and selling that thing, an employer and employee may both get a cut and benefit. None of that prevents the employer or employee from attempting to get a larger cut or do less work (invest less time) to receive their cut. Extremes to either side cause the relationship to collapse but there's definitely wiggle room in the margins beyond a 50/50 split.
I've yet to meet a single employer that doesn't try to optimize on labor costs in that relationship through some component or another, directly or indirectly.
Which is also true. At the same time, risk is highly relative which is why this situation is feasible at all. What's risky for you to do as an individual is not of the same order of magnitude of relative risk when you consider scaling of available resources.
Example, Alphabet, Amazon, or Company Y decide to invest $1 million in a new SaaS 'X' effort with some monthly fee in an attempt to build a successful product/service. These companies have arrays of pre-existing successful products/services they've built (typically diversified) that generate stable profits. Relative to that sort of expected profit, SaaS 'X' is a drop in the bucket. If 'X' fails, it's the same absolute monetary loss ($1 million) but the relative risk of losing $1 million isn't significant to any of these businesses, it's small relative to their total resource pool of disposable assets. Loss recovery will also take significantly less time.
On the other hand, if I as an individual go through the effort to form an LLC, develop SaaS 'X' myself and fail, $1 million is nothing to scoff at. Even if you're in the higher income scales of our industry and making $300-500k+/yr for labor, you're looking at ~3-4 years or so of potential losses and values that are probably near or a bit more than your total personal assets, at the very least I'd say 10%. If you start an LLC and get a loan or have some investor drop money on you, $1 million is still likely going to be a lot relative to your loan. It's highly likely that if 'X' fails your business will fail. There's high relative risk here (there are some mitigations strategies from your personal assets but it's still significant). You're probably going to face noticeable financial hardship or have to revert back to the labor market due to business small failure rates.
Risk is mitigated through scale, snowballed growth, and diversification (amongst other strategies) in our economic system through initial successes that often occur either through true innovation/market creation/penetration and/or sheer luck.
I'm not sure I'd agree. When a company loses an employee it's an inconvenience but when an employee loses their job it's often devastating.
The market rewards them for this. Is the market wrong, or your thesis?
So just as always, you have a choice, what's worth more to you? Money, or free time? And pick your job accordingly.
They paid poorly precisely because of the relative lack of opportunity for software in the region at the time. That meant anyone who’s livelihood was in software had little recourse other than to move. That was the option I took, but others can’t for a number of reasons.
And this change isn't going to improve employee leverage, it's going to decrease it substantially when all companies develop processes to have a significantly higher pool of candidates to hire from. Long-term employees will look at having a company-provided office with a good work environment as a luxury.
This is the path to mediocrity and leaving tons of money on the table in much of the tech industry.
I've been able to be well above mediocre in west coast tech for years now with this strategy /shrug For FAANG, startups, and other BigCos.
FYI, the bar can be the bar needed to get a promotion & bump your pay grade. It can also be to keep your current job & stay the course. And it can change over time strategically.
Unless your side hustle brings in $300k+ a year, you’re better off becoming critical at the main job because it becomes very lucrative.
I don't think this is guaranteed to happen. Another possible outcome is that tech salaries will pin to the lowest common denominator, such that employers will "outsource" much of their engineering work to engineers that live in low cost-of-living markets.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w21154
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.
I like showing up at work to work together with my co-workers. If you don't then maybe you should get a new job where you like the people you work with.
Am I really not looking forward to the new remote work future. Maybe someone will come up with a way to restore the socializing I got from work. I don't just want to hang out with friends. I want to work together with people on a common goal, and by "work together" I mean I want to do this in the same space. Just like eating lunch on zoom or going to a virtual bar via facetime is not as good as actually siting at the same table with friends neither is remote work as fulfilling "for me" as actually being in the same space as my co-workers. But then again I like my co-workers and I like the things we are building together.
Now that I work from home, I've more time at my hand so I am working on my hobbies which make me more productive at my work.
I’m on my 10th year of wfh with just a handful of days per year in the office and I notice how each time I’m in the office I realize I actually like that guy who is professionaly the most annoying one. This is extremely important for an organization to work. I do it too little and while I wouldn’t want to go 100% to the office I realize I’m not doing it enough.
We are 90% remote. Most remote employees are in the same area though, so sometimes they commute to the office for weekly meetings or just to hang out and work together.
I don’t live in the same country so I’m 100% remote. However, I still travel to the office ( when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic going on ) a few times a year.
I think giving people the option to work in the office when they want to is the best solution. Keep meetings on skype/jitsi, whatever, but give people the option to attend in person. More people will come than you might think.
Now, WFH I'm free to set my own schedule. Sometimes I do my best work later in the evening, something that I never had time or energy to do while following the "9-5" schedule.
I don't miss the socialization much, probably because of the roll my family fulfills. The most important difference now is that I have a lot more patience with my family, because I don't feel the constant stress of my old commute and schedule.
1. Companies have to invest in work from home practices and they have just started to do that. Using zoom and creating more meetings to replace in person experiences is not sufficient.
2. People have in effect just brought work into their home, into a house with no child care and generally no prepared work spaces
So please don't use this period as a reference for what WFH looks like when an organization is dedicated to doing it.
So in some ways, the current situation is actually an improvement over a more typical split environment.
Also, ideally, you should be able to meet your colleagues once in a while to discuss important matters and keep a human connection. But surprisingly lots of trust and friendship can be maintained at distance.
Take time to refresh, slow down during the day and try to maintain social contact despite the lockdown (whatever your local conditions are, you might have to use remote methods of course).
I've been able to work well those last two months but can't wait to hug all my colleagues - miss them as well.
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc
These are the exact reasons WFH is more productive IMO. Less people coming up to your desk talking nonsense distracting you.
I manage four small development teams and the one metric I track is velocity or velocity per developer (VPD). If you're familiar with scrum, you probably have a sense of what this means. (Note: this data is tracked in an open spreadsheet and not used to reward or punish but rather to adjust and adapt.)
Anyway, we went full-time remote from in-office 9-10 weeks ago. We did have some experience being partially remote (team members in different offices) before this. A comparison of avg VPD for last 3 sprints in-office (WFO) vs last 3 sprints (WFH):
This the first time I've actually compared them and I'm mildly surprised WFH is lower. Of course this ignores all sorts of caveats and qualifiers (like adjusting to a major change of environment and a pandemic!)My impression is that productivity has held more or less steady and VPD will eventually not be too different from where it was.
I've also talked about this individually with members of my team. The consensus seems to be leaning toward a flexible mixture of WFH and WFO. That's the future I'd like to see.
Schools are closed.
A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of effort for completing requirements.
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-poi...
It is generally recommend you not include time as a component of that unit. For our teams, we kinda do. (Basically, for us, story point = time + uncertainty + complexity.) So there is a common standard. But with scrum you're supposed to size stories relative to other (previous) stories and I feel it's ok for the standard measure of a story point to drift apart between teams as long as its internally consistent to the team.
So maybe there's some kind of leveling force at work. But probably not.
Suffocating Agile, as is the standard these days, is about pushing away risky, but really valuable tasks, in favor of fine grained, easily estimated and understandable tasks that are only of minor importance but "feel" like progress. They are more amenable to Bad Agile, and so are the tasks that get selected increasingly in the long run.
WFH is far, far better at deep work, which is much more important to the long term value of a company.
"Velocity is the sum of the estimates of the stories that were completed in an iteration. If the programmers estimate perfectly, it's simply a measure of the number of hours that the programmers worked, minus interruptions. The number is often confused by estimates that aren't 100% accurate. Velocity measures a strange combination of estimate accuracy and hours worked. It's a great planning tool, but as a metric, it has serious flaws."
https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Productivity-Metric.html
do you have any other recommendation?
The article you've provided continues to keep saying story points are good things.
I don't know how we've found something contrary to what I've asked, yet.
* multipliers, like infrastructure work or pipeline improvements?
* fixing of technical debt that may have no immediate benefit?
* projects of uncertain monetary value?
* projects with great short term value but so much technical debt that they crumble the company a few years later?
* moonshots that may revolutionize the company?
How would organizations like the entirety of Microsoft Research where some guy got to play with coloring problems for a long time and that just so happened to end up requiring him to solve a subset of the halting problem, which just so happened to have benefit in driver validation? (It’s going to take me a looong time to find that source somewhere on the internet.)
> Velocity isn't a productivity metric, so your findings probably aren't meaningful.
They were responding to someone that was using their average story point completion rate to track their productivity.
This person seems to be talking about what sorts of work to work on - the kind that makes the company money.
If it's already been predicted or measured that a certain project is going to earn the company money, then you need to know how long it's going to take to complete that project, which means either estimating it as a whole, or breaking the project into parts and estimating each part.
Assuming two projects of similar mathematical proportionality of size and value, you can then estimate velocity based on how much projected time it's going to take to complete each step of each project, as estimated by story points or similar.
In this way, story points can still be a meaningful metric that you can estimate velocity on.
In short, the discussion is on two separate things and their initial premise of velocity being meaningless is not correct.
Velocity is a great prediction tool. Given a total estimate, it can tell you approximately how many weeks it will take to be done. It's a unit conversion factor: velocity = 25 points / week, therefore 100 points = 4 weeks.
Productivity is defined as output / input. Effort and time are both "input." Velocity is a way of converting from points (effort) to weeks (time). To measure productivity, you still need to define "output."
OP said, "On the productivity question, if you're interested in some soft (very squishy) numbers, I can provide them."
But OP didn't define "output," so they weren't measuring productivity. They just showed that their effort --> time unit conversion factor had changed. Given that there's any number of possible reasons for this—changes in hours worked, changes in overhead, changes in estimating technique, changes in estimate accuracy—the numbers probably aren't meaningful.
They're measuring how much work they're getting done based around approximate predicted complexity / work amount using story points and then using that to map overall work output and charting it from between non-WFH and WFH. If the projects they're working on have tended to remain of similar complexity with people that tend to be consistent, then this seems like a perfectly fine metric for exactly what they're trying to discuss: the relative output from WFH and non-WFH.
I was super productive in the first month of WFH, but that spike is going away, and I think a large part of it is meeting fatigue. The projects we are working on require coordinating with lots of devs within our team and then devs and PMs on other teams. That means lots of meetings here and there to make sure we're all on the same page.
There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).
My team does have lunches together remotely, but having to be tied to the computer the whole day, I often want to drop out of those and just be outside in the sun.
But to your point about burnout, I find that that's the other extreme as well. In those afternoons or days that I don't have meetings, there's a sense that, okay, I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard. While at the office, you'd have occasionally breaks and conversations in the hall when you were getting up for coffee and you could see people's rhythms. At home, I don't see that, so my natural, irrational belief is everyone must be working hard, so I should too.
But FB people ops (or beyond) aren't stupid and hopefully they can come up with ways to intentionally replace this. Won't be the same but something is needed and will be better than nothing or ad-hoc.
This sounds like a normal day in the office for me pre-lockdown :/
The feeling of "I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard" can also be pretty hard to shake. Especially if most people are heads-down and there's no chatter on Slack or email or anything going on.
Ask me to WFH in a shared room in a tiny SiValley apartment with construction, gardeners and the neighbors music blasting randomly and I will show you how to waste $250k per year.
We are moving to a house next month with a separate office space on the other side of a 2 car garage from the main house. I am beyond excited.
kicks the dirt a bit
We call it iPad time.
When I am repairing my car/bike, he comes with his bike (small plastic one) and gets under it and starts repairing act.
And he does it for long as I am repairing mine.
It's interesting that I don't live with him but he is copying my action but when I asked his mom if he helps with housework as he probably sees her doing a lot of housework, she said no.
I've no idea why getting under a bike is more appealing to him than doing stuff like cleaning with a mop and bucket.
Zoom/Phone don't quite replicate that experience - they require focused attention. In person, your attention can "wander" while you are still focused on the conversation. Look how many people maintain eye contact in a cafe while having a conversation. Not many right? But do the same thing on Zoom/Skype/$VideoChat. "Hey, are you paying attention?" When really, wandering eyes are indicative (usually) of deep thought.
I have a heuristic when synchronous communication (phone, video chat) is necessary: When something is:
a) complex, or b) has a significant likelihood of misunderstanding (which is just a more specific version of (a).
Actual face to face... that's got to be for things that are socially critical. Breakups. Hard messages to people who are close. First meetings with the biggest client of your life. Important deals, if they take more than "Happy? Yep." Etc. Stuff where the physical impression makes or breaks the experience.
One executive I spoke to put it like this (paraphrased): "the introverts are loving it and the extroverts hate it. Productivity-wise its neutral to positive, but emotionally a lot of our folks are struggling without work so we're still committed to reopening offices when it's safe to do so."
I run a completely distributed company and no one in their right mind would argue that a completely distributed company or even a partially work from home company
can be as good as the same people working TOGETHER in one office
The bonds are much stronger
The interaction is much better
Two superstars together are 10 times better than separately
However, when you do remote, it's only 5 times better
At minimum, it is 50% worse to have a distributed company than have a real same office, same location company
What really makes people say 'working from home is just as good' is a combination of
1) liking it for other reasons (more time with family, less pressure) and rationalizing
2) being able to cut out time wasting things (which they could anyways cut out if they were better at saying no to time wasting stuff
3) not ever having done it for a long time and seeing the long term implications
There is a very good reason that very few companies have become very big and very successful while being distributed companies
The former are generally pro working from home while the latter feel more swamped and are always talking about how busy they are now.
My guess is that for the first group it's pretty much business as usual, while the second (not generally producing visible output) feels that meetings are the only signal to indicate work being done. And as a result # of meetings in their area has gone up dramatically.
Would love to hear a counter from managers, perhaps I'm way off the mark.
More that as we transition to remote, there is a higher internal desire to signal worth to offset not being in the office. Which on the surface is easily accomplished by adding meetings to your calendar.
Producing the results managers achieve over videoconference meetings takes more meetings (nothing as hoc now) and is physically tiring. Maybe that is what managers in your circle have been talking about.
Why has this happened? My estimation is that it isn't "because I'm a manager" or "because I'm trying to create artificial face time to indicate my value", but because the broader organization hasn't matured enough culturally to know how to handle itself when everybody is WFH. Examples of things that haven't happened yet:
1) Top down declaration of any core hours, to reduce need for early morning and evening meetings 2) Adjustment of business objectives 3) Formal recognition that there is inequity across sub-populations when it comes to WFH effectiveness/capability (type of work, family situation, living situation, infrastructure access, maturity, mental state, ...).
The perception most within the org seem to have is that, while we pressed pause on some activities (proactive sales outreach, for example), we are accelerating others, and this is coming without much regard for human experience.
Imho, there's also a difference between normal WFH -- as a previous commenter noted -- and this cv-forced WFH. I think there's real fear, that well-founded, from workers who know they can't be 100% productive right now, but don't know if that fact will be adequately recognized by their employer or have clarity around how it will impact future performance ratings, compensation and promotion decisions. As a result, many folks are struggling with balance because they feel obligate to structure their lives in an unbalanced way.
https://www.theverge.com/facebook/2020/5/21/21265699/faceboo...
A lot more discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
you will access <personally>.<identifiable>.<stuff>.pixel.archive.md
(also mail.ru)
Now if you're a single person in SF, that's a different story.
This is of course the big problem. Facebook is admitting that developers elsewhere in the world are just as good as developers in Silicon Valley. Or if you want to put it another way: if Silicon Valley is special, it's NOT because the developers.
Now the market is crowded, scaling is a simple economic problem, the network effect is turning on its head and there isn't any revolutionary software to build on the horizon. Times have changed but the narrative hasn't caught up yet.. its going to suck when it does honestly. Software is just so commoditized and cookie cutter at this point i can't see it being a great career for much longer.
I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now. But its not 2015 and I don't have 3 years of experience in embedded/systems/C++ so no ones gonna hire me for that stuff because my resume just says "generic backend dev lol".
The average competence is still low, the technologies are just no longer new and shiny (they aren't mature either), they're just better understood throughout the industry. 2010-2015 saw huge cross-industry revolutions in terms of web adoption, and until the next "revolution" happens, we'll probably be in a lull in terms of innovation in the web app space. Of course JS/Node will continue to "innovate", but overall I think that portion of the industry has been successfully "commoditized."
Hardware engineering (drivers, embedded, IoT, etc.) will always have tough engineering problems, but as you said, it's kind of hard to break into that (though maybe not, I haven't tried). Quantum Computing and other experimental and uncharted spaces are good sources of problems looking for well engineered solution (source: I work in quantum computing, on the engineering side), but is a much smaller and niche industry.
> I see maybe some cool stuff in the move to ARM processors
I also agree on ARM, I think things will gradually shift towards ARM-based processor architecture in the server and desktop spaces. From the software side, most modern programming can be run on those processors without issue, though there's some work to be done on optimizing compilers (hard, not very rewarding).
> I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now
This is an area I'm also particularly interested in. If I wasn't getting close to burning out, I'd probably focus on it on the side a little more. AMD is behind, in particular, with regards to graphics driver optimization and toolkits for machine learning (nVidia is beating them out there, thanks CUDA). I'm not sure what their hiring is like, but there's been huge industry shakeups over the last few years from them in the processor space and they're swimming in money.
Machine learning is also a hot topic, and probably will be for awhile. Security engineering (especially in the context of Kubernetes) is an ongoing issue that needs more attention.
There's definitely others. I'd eventually like to find a problem that interests me and I see a market for so I could start my own company, but alas, I am not good at ideas.
Software is the infrastructure of the 21st century and if you step out of the tech bubble to things like material science, biotech, etc. you'll see that their infrastructure is garbage despite there being really big returns available.
Developers who can marry modern software to those domains should remain in high demand for decades.
Anything related to public safety (including transportation) probably needs the most tech talent.
Spend a month with a tech stack of any passing complexity, even ones at $FAANGco...
We're nowhere close to solving all the hard problems.
When you already have architecture that is capable of serving the entire world, when everyone has a smartphone all that's left in that space is efficiency/cost optimization. Whatever shiny new programming language or framework comes out, the bedrock of computing is solid (and the shiny new programming language is really mashing together decades old ideas which is cool if you're new to them but boring if you're not) . Every company is a mess on the inside of course, but they do their core functions well enough. AWS did not exist 10 years ago, now it's big internet drama when it goes down for a few hours twice a YEAR.A detailed postmortem comes out (not standard before), revealing the problem was a configuration change (because everything has long since been automated, so it's driven purely by configuration) .
I know not everyone is interested in those same problems, but I thought they were interesting and what's left now in the guts of software is an adoption phase, people rediscovering lessons that others long since figured out. Perhaps people who work on higher layers of the stack think differently, I'm only interested in the deep tech below, and it's pretty solid at this point.
The price a company is going to pay for your labor depends on how hard it is for them to replace you. If FB can replace a SWE in Atlanta with another for 90k$, that is what they will pay. It has nothing to do with the value of the work you're doing.
I largely agree with your comment, but I disagree with this sentence. Water is almost free in most civilized areas because it's not subject to free market economics (for good reason). Basic water supply is usually provided by the local government (and this applies to places where it is scarce). If water were treated the same way health is in the US, its price wouldn't be anywhere close to free.
If you want to know the realistic upper bound for local price of water see how much Coke costs. That’s not something the government much concerns itself with anywhere. Or look at the price of water in someplace like Gurgaon our Dubai, cities so hideously planned that drinking water and sewerage are transported by tanker.
Water can be provided for very low cost even with less than competent governments.
Companies that don't think this is an advantage should do what you're recommending, but the ones that do will continue to hire here, while also hiring in other markets. I don't know which group is more correct (it's pretty hard to make any authoritative claims about these things), but that does explain why there isn't a mass exodus from SF to ATL.
A point to note here is that labor markets vary not just by location, but also by what the job is. Many companies in the Bay Area do outsource some parts of their internal IT or Business Intel functions to Accenture and co, for example. What they're doing is exactly that - they're leaving this expensive market because they don't believe the benefits are worth the markup for those specific roles
Those companies are only paying this much because the cost of living there is so high.
It's so obvious that I now feel silly for not realizing this fully before experiencing it myself.
Then again if companies can still turn a profit offering these salaries, then perhaps the work is actually that valuable?
On the other hand there might be an upside to being paid half: you're unlikely to deliver less value than your cost.
Any corona-related layoffs start with the most expensive (comparing to value brought) employees.
The rest of the source announcement covered that. It was noted that individual productivity was the same or better, but there were concerns about collaboration.
This story (and many others!) were created and posted well before any of the details were mentioned.
I'm not saying that's bad, but it was strange getting e-mails from people with links to fully formed news articles even while I was watching the announcement live.
#notspeakingforfacebook
I don't live in US and don't want to immigrate at the moment for a variety of personal reasons. But I am competent and professional, and would be happy to deliver just as much as a SF-based engineer for half the pay.
(When I said cool, I meant, it's really cool for me. It might not be as cool for a US-based HN reader).
1. Level IC5 or higher (this is what most would call "senior").
2. Can't have performance less than meets expectations in last two reviews.
3. Permission from team and manager.
I'm disappointing none of these tech companies are acknowledging the happiness that comes from camaraderie and togetherness. (Note: I don't have a family though)
I love the company of others; and the unpredictability of what my day has in store when I venture out my front door.
Everybody working from home for me sounds like one step closer towards a blander, lonelier, disengaged, dispassionate, oppressed workforce.
Exactly, which is why I work so I can experience camaraderie and togetherness with the people I actually want to: my family and my friends. Working from home allows me to do that more, much more than working in an office.
Unlike a lot of folks, I don't have much against them. The people I've interacted with have been a decent, diverse, crew, and I use the platform fairly lightly.
The chances are better than even that I wouldn't be considered a "cultural fit" with the company (I'm a bit "long in the tooth," and I've found that's a "showstopper," these days).
Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
Still not sure if I would take any jobs there, but it hasn't gotten past the initial phase anyway, so it has not been a decision that I've had to struggle with.
Anecdata: I'm 40+ and as far as I can tell, I fit in just fine.
> Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
A recent earnings release said that 90+% of FB ad revenue is from mobile. Between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsAp, IOS is definitely a company priority (although I don't think we've publicly released stats on Android vs. IOS).
I don't actually know if/how-much Swift we're doing vs. ObjC (I'm on the server side of things, not the client)