Personally, I can't wait to get back into an office. Working from home has helped me break some previous bad habits and improve my self-discipline - which both positively impacted my productivity while working from home.
However, even with commuting time, I'm happier (due to distinct separation of home-time and work-time) and more productive when I have an office I work from 3-4 days a week.
During my last "remote" engagement I joined a small community co-working space in Boston after two weeks of "true" work from home. I've found my idea balance is 3-4 days a week in-office and 1-2 days "remote".
I envy those of you who can work remote without issue, even as an introvert who dislikes lots of people and distractions I can't see "remote first" as something I enjoy going forward.
i've been pretty much 100% remote the last 5 years or so. I definitely rely on coworking spaces to get out of the house and around other humans. It's especially bad when kids are in school and wife is working ( she's a teacher ). Being without human contact all day every day really weighs on me over time.
There was a poll on linkedIn I came across with over 10k responses where the slight majority of people believe partial working from home was the best, beating out full working from home by a little, and no working from home being significantly in last.
What I find most interesting is how this might transform inner cities. If central space is cheaper more space will be available to artists and other cultural activities while also making room for early stage startups which could give rise to a renewal of a vibrant inner city atmosphere in places where this has been on the decline due to high rental prices.
Sure, the ability to work from anywhere in the world coupled with a severe epidemic, riots, looting, and boarding up of city centers will give rise to a "vibrant inner city atmosphere". Uh-huh.
Cities will still exist even if remote work rises significantly. There is a huge amount of buildings and infrastructure which won't just disappear. Rather, demand for them will fall, and since supply is flat, prices will drop. This will give opportunity to less lucrative ventures to work at the city center. Artists, for example, would have a harder time working remotely.
It's a common fallacy that rents fall when demand drops. In fact, they often don't, particularly for commercial space; the owners choose instead to let the spaces go unused. I've seen this happen up close with several buildings my city, in several neighborhoods. There was an article a while ago about how Greenwich Village suffered a similar fate.
Can the city councils do anything to counter that? I wonder...I heard about Frome (Southwest England) where the local council took proactive steps to prevent the high street being filled with betting shops. I think they lowered business rates significantly and possibly other measures.
A land value tax can help quite a bit. It can both prevent landlords from capturing all / most of the value when rents rise and also help act as a cushion when rents fall.
The current property tax system that most cities use make little sense. It penalizes people for improving and updating the structures on their land. Cities should be encouraging property improvements.
Got a source to back up that claim? Detroit for example has seen inflation adjusted commercial office space prices massively drop:
"Adjusted for inflation, the average office tenant paid a peak price of $34.34 per square foot during the fourth quarter of 2000, 65.5 percent more than the current average rate of $20.76, according to Newmark Knight Frank data. It's almost as deeply pronounced for Class A space — which has the best amenities and finishes. Today's Class A rental rate is $24.36 per square foot, but in the third quarter of 2001, tenants paid inflation-adjusted rent of $38.12 per square foot, 56.5 percent more than now" [0].
Basically rents are too high, so businesses won't rent because it won't be profitable. In 2018 when the NYT article was written, "about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016."
So maybe this is bimodal: you have "rich" areas like Manhattan and SF and Seattle, where rents stay high even with low occupancy (landlords sitting on empty properties and enjoying the free ride of increasing asset prices), and you have "poor" cities like Detroit, where no one wants it and you can't even give it away ("free" property still comes with liabilities like taxes and maintenance).
I follow along in /r/realestate and it seems that part of the motivation for this behavior is that the owners are usually leveraged - they don't own the property outright, or if they do, they have taken a loan against the property. If they lower rents, it impacts the valuation more than staying vacant and waiting for a new tenant, which in turn has implications on the loan & ability to obtain loans in the future.
If we don't get a working, _and safe_ vaccine in the foreseeable future (a real possibility), cities could all turn into Detroit - high density living or work just won't be epidemiologically viable.
It's not the 'everybody works there' that does it, it's the 'cheap enough that artists can live there' that does it. My mom split her time between art, her true love, and working as a secretary, or a maid, or an office manager. She had a way of living near where the art was happening, as artists tend to have very little money, as did she. She could afford to live just off the Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach in the mid-80's, as did hundreds of other artists. The South Beach that is now luxurious and pricey was once cheap, and shabby and a bit dangerous. That's really the seed of a vibrant inner city atmosphere. She repeated that (to smaller degrees) several times in her life.
I hear about artists being the ones who create vibrant neighborhoods a lot, and I'm honestly struggling to understand the causal effect that's being claimed. Do people really care about "living near where the art is happening" to the point where it would drive up property prices?
When I talk to people from demographics that are accused of being gentrifiers (young professionals), the overwhelming reasons they choose a neighborhood are to be near restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, shops, work and friends. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone pay a premium to be near an art gallery, or live near artists' private studios.
There are some gentrified neighborhoods that were known for their artists. New York's Soho is an example. These days the place is full of overpriced fashion stores, both independent ones as well as global chains. I can see why the shops were attracted - for branding purposes it might help to be associated with those artists. But I wouldn't say that artists turned it into a particularly vibrant neighborhood, at least not more than other neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan.
Is it that it's about correlation, not causation? It seems reasonable that artists would be attracted to an area for the same reason as, say, independent coffee roasteries (both require cheap space). I suspect it's only really the latter that are attracting new residents though.
I do suspect it's more the cheap part than it is the artist part, so it may well be correlation rather than causation. That said, given the same low rent in two locations, wouldn't the savvy coffee roaster pick the one with the artists? So, maybe there is a causal argument.
So the term "artists" covers a whole lot of ground here. It doesn't necessarily mean picture painters, but it's a shibboleth for a whole bunch of people with ideas and little to no money. These people try to minimise fixed costs, and move to "bad" areas.
The conglomeration of all of these people tends to lead to events, club nights and new and interesting businesses. This makes the area more attractive, causing others to move in and thus kickstarts the gentrification process.
There's no shortage of cities where central space has become cheaper after their industry has collapsed, and they do not have a great record of turning vibrant. The rust belt and the north of England are the first areas to mind.
That's true, but if now there is central space freeing up in major cultural hubs like NYC and SF, maybe it could be cool. These places might, although to a lesser extent, have the customer base of affluent people to support new cultural spaces.
IMO that's a big open question. Anecdotally, I've heard of a lot of people moving away from these cities, but most of them say they intend to move back. Since the appeal of both cities is largely in activities that are unavailable now, this is plausible to me. But it's also plausible people will find they miss the city less than they expected.
I have seen this happen in a medium sized coastal city on Australia's east coast. The major employer shut down in the early 1990's and the once vibrant inner city did indeed become a cesspool for a decade. But begining in the early 2000's it started to come back to life, and the people who moved in were the artsy types and the city became a wonderful and curious place while still having a bit of a air of danger and decay. These days it is somewhat gentrified, but it has become very beautiful and pleasant. In the end my city doesn't really have a central core which is a little problematic for public transit (terrible quality), but the old CBD is a lovely place.
The North of England has some good examples of the opposite. The Leeds/Bradford/Halifax/Huddersfield area is - was - gentrifying rapidly with an obvious shift away from the ruins of heavy industry to art/craft projects and enterprises of all sizes. The Calder Valley is almost notorious for it. There's also Salts Mill near Shipley, which is a carefully authenticised artisanal mall in an old converted mill.
And you'll find plenty of web/creative agencies plying their trade in the area, although that sector isn't quite as distinctive as in - say - Manchester.
It's all part of the standard gentrification cycle: - collapse -> bohemian -> artisanal -> gentrified -> investment grade -> collapse... but hurried along some.
To me this is kinda sad. Software Developers are not vibrant or cultured and shouldn't really be in inner cities with the interesting people and artists.
It's a bit more subtle than that, no? GP specifically mentioned early stage startups. The argument is that too high cost of living makes cities less vibrant, not that developers ruin them.
My company is just finishing building millions of square feet of additional office space on our campus. I wonder if someone up high is starting to regret that decision.
> Could anyone have honestly foreseen the pandemic and its ensuing upheavals?
Absolutely. Previous WHO classification has a "Phase 4: Sustained community-level outbreaks -> Medium to high probability of pandemic" designation, which has a roughly once-a-decade frequency historically. Compared to multi-quarter, multi-year scale of real estate planning, 10 years is not infinite long term. Of course it is so in comparison to quarterly earnings, share prices, average tenure of a fund manager, a CEO and so forth, so it doesn't get priced in or gets bundled with other catastrophes.
This pandemic might not be historically unprecedented, but the scale of the reaction to it (most office workers staying home for several months) certainly is.
I miss working in the office a lot. It's nice to have a physical separation between 'work' and 'home'. And I enjoy the company of my coworkers - it's fun to occasionally chat about something tangential to work, perhaps some interesting problem they dealt with in the past, or local politics or whatever.
I agree with this. I've known some of my coworkers 15 years. We talk now, but it's not the same as getting a bunch of people together to go to the terrible chinese place across the street for an hour and a half.
Hopefully in the future we'll have more options rather than offices becoming completely obsolete. Personally I still need a good office environment to do my best work and an all-remote future looks pretty bleak.
I wonder if this will result in the hollowing out of the American downtown similar to the 60s and suburban white flight. It just started to feel like the American inner urban core was coming back, density was increasing, more funding to transit.
One of the great tragedies of American society in the 20th century (in my opinion) was a focus on building everything around the car, the suburb, and the commute. Producing well paid office workers disconnected from any sort of community or the issues around them. Everything is a drive away, no one walks anywhere, feelings of isolation and segregation.
It will, because people will buy farther out. One of the major drivers of the urban core, density and transit was how bad traffic can be. You want to live closer to work, which is usually downtown. Now you want pretty much live on the outskirts or the sticks. Without the commute, nothing stopping cities from becoming extremely diffuse.
This is a huge question and I don't hear a lot of people asking it. What is the future for cities? How will this change suburbs? How can we create optimal communities?
I think it goes hand-in-hand with the coming loss of the car as a personal device and its transformation into "individual transit" as opposed to "mass transit". In the future, when you can use an app to get an autonomous vehicle to take you where you want to go, communities will restructure. Parking lots and garages will go away, opening up a huge amount of real estate.
I wouldn't mind starting a sort of "virtual salon" to talk about these larger questions. It's fascinating.
Eh, in-city autonomous driving is pretty much looking to be decades out at this point. And tons of people I know are fleeing cities during this and don't really expect to go back to regularly being in an office for the foreseeable future.
I don't have to work in an office, but I do. My consulting company owns commercial space in Sunnyvale and Tel Aviv. I like separating home and work. I work at work, and do non-work activities at home.
I worry that this trend is simply to squeeze employees harder. Now employees have to pay for their own workspaces, desks, chairs, etc.
If I may ask, how far do you live from your office? Is your home comfortable and does it meet your needs? Is your office a pleasant and productive space? I know many people who do grueling 2-hour, one-way commutes so they can afford a modest-size home and half-decent schools for their kids. Consider that many people might not be in your position.
The owners of traditional office buildings who will see the most success in this crisis will be those who realize that --while, yes, corporations may no longer need as large a footprint-- there's still valuable use of the capital infrastructure they hold. The first ones to pivot to alternate property uses will do best.
Another set of commercial property owners will sit on their above-market lease agreements and try and squeeze blood from a stone.
A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're also offloading other costs to the employees. Things like:
Some companies are taking this into account, but not all.
A personal anecdote: we had an all-hands meeting today and the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back. Whether or not that's temporary nostalgia for a previous life or an enduring need is an interesting discussion, but there are definitely people wanting to go back. I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
I think it depends where you live and your situation. I have coworkers in small NYC studios who just want to get outside. I have others who don't mind not taking the train for an hour a day.
Many coworkers have a nice big house to work from. The ones with kids most want to come back, because they appreciate the mental separation they get.
This. People with many young kids, especially, seem to be absolutely miserable.
More interesting than remote/in-office is that we don't seem to be acknowledging the inevitable permanence of social distancing measures. No more four-dudes-in-an-office. No more coming to work with mild cold symptoms.
Maybe, oh goodness please, the return of actual OFFICES. With DOORS. Thats the only way you're getting me to come back into a work office, barring a rediculous raise.
I went into the office this week as I had physical work to do in the equipment rooms. Very few people are there (normally 7k, now it’s more like 700 across 10 floors)
It’s been so long since I wore headphones I forgot how bad it was. Zooms were difficult as other people in earshot (only 4 people, all about 4m away) were talking at the same time.
But if I had an office with a door (like I have at home) and a fixed deal with monitors rather than hunching over a laptop (as I do at home) maybe things would be different.
I'm in a one bedroom Brooklyn apt. Any time I open up my laptop, my 2yr old daughter climbs onto my lap and repetitively hits the caps lock key (it lights up on my laptop). Luckily, I've found alternative places to work from, albeit with less than ideal setups.
> A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're
I hadn't considered this. I've always thought that many companies are tied to long leases they wouldn't be able to get out of that quickly. I can imagine some savings on the other associated office costs.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
My company was at the end of their lease for several office buildings. They’ve since closed all but our largest offices. We have some jobs that can’t be done remotely (security and certification requirements precludes outsourcing.) The remaining offices are running skeleton crews with the heaviest precautions we can do while remaining operational.
My open office already has a voluntary return; but you gotta wear a mask and get temperature checked. I’ve already been on multiple calls with people in the office.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
I don't understand this, why?
Regarding the rest of your comment, I totally agree. My mom and sister both work for a large, old-fashioned company, and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started. They both had to buy setups out of their own pocket, and these are not people making tech salaries.
Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though. It's really preferable to have a dedicated space for an office, and this is not free. It's one thing for someone who made a choice to go remote, but for people forced into it, it feels unfair to me.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the new world, offices are viewed as a perk rather than a requirement due to all this. I personally work remotely for the record, but talking to many people in my life, it's clear this is not for everyone.
>and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started
That is such a low life mentality. Not to give two screens worth $200 to someone who's probably making 10-20 times that a month.
What I envisage is super localised hubs,or small office spaces in residential areas. Small building nicely fitting into the area and offering local people some level of office like environment
Exactly - I'm lucky in that I made a deliberate decision to have a slightly longer commute because it meant a bigger house and closer to an amazing school my children attend. I'm fortunate to have a proper office that I can enter at the start of the work day, and leave at the end - separating my work and home life.
Having to work from your lounge, or kitchen, or worse bedroom makes it much harder to switch off.
Yep. The people who optimized for space at the cost of a longer commute are the winners here. Those of us who prioritized a short commute with the expectation of not being home every day for months on end are losing.
My sentiments are similar to OP's, and for me a large part of my job satisfaction was getting to hang out with really incredible people all day, getting lunch with those people, getting afterwork drinks with them, etc. Hanging out on video chat just isn't the same.
Of course, an argument can (and maybe should) be made that it's smarter to to keep your work focused on the work, and find your social outlets elsewhere. However, the unfortunate reality is that for those of us far removed from school and our home towns, work is where we tend to make our friends.
On top of that, I just enjoyed the change of scenery in leaving my apartment in the burbs to go into a nice office space in the city. Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.
Of course that later point would be somewhat mitigated in a world where I could work out of shared space or the local coffee shop, so I'm not sure if that's an indictment of remote work in general for my purposes.
> Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.
This is because of corona, not because of working from home.
People say this but I don't really see the alternative. I can't imagine going to a coffee shop to loiter every day. The reality is I'm gonna be at home in my office, and that is tiring.
I used to work remotely and really disliked it. Not talking to coworkers and being stuck at home all day were the two big reasons. I'm right back there now due to the pandemic, and it's much the same, the evenings and weekends are somewhat more boring than before but we still manage to get out and do stuff because the weather is nice this time of year.
I think this could be different with a complete overhaul of corporate culture but I haven't seen it yet in 20 years of employment with "teleworking" being an option at least part of the time. Perhaps remote-first teams really are different, but you're still stuck at home all day, or spending time and money going to a coffee shop and maybe finding a seat+wifi, etc.
I was working remotely for a few years and in my opinion coworking spaces are the best of both worlds. I like to leave my apartment for work, I need a environment where I can concentrate and I like to see and talk to people, making friends. But I also like not having a boss around and being able to come and go whenever I want. You have all this in a coworking space and if you move to the opposite part of town (or change the city) you just change your space so that your commute never gets more than 10 minutes. Best of both worlds!
True, hence my follow-up sentence on this point being mitigated in a world where we felt more free to work in alternative work spaces.
It's not like I don't get out to run, go to the park, or even occasionally meet a friend for a drink on a spacious patio. So my comment was somewhat hyperbole. But sharing the same space for work and sleep is still driving me a bit batty.
We all have different needs of course. I recognize I don't share the same needs as many. Hence I'd never advocate for a workplace that didn't accommodate those that did prefer to work remote.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be an introvert/extrovert thing (for the most part). Extroverts miss being around people they can engage in conversations with, while introverts love not having extroverts around trying to engage in conversations with them. I think both camps have valid needs and right now the extrovert's needs aren't being met to their satisfaction.
I consider myself an extrovert and I love wfh. I don't consider conversations at work to be socialising. I guess it helps that I live with a few other people and play games with friends after work so I don't really feel alone or stripped of socialization.
This isn't always the case. If you are an introvert, work often is your main contact with other people. Work at home would be like working third shift for me, no "sunlight" of contact with other people. It'd be way too easy to be alone.
I can see the opposite as well. Extravert people can socialize more easily outside work. Introverts still need to socialize if they are not antisocial. For me(introvert) it much easier to socialize at my workplace: No need for smalltalk, we already have something in common. Outside of work you have to start a conversation with a stranger which can be really hard for an introvert.
Yes, this downside of remote work almost never gets brought up. I've worked remotely for about 10 years now and have no interest in going back, but I think people should be clear-eyed about what's in it for employers. Not so much coffee and snacks, but office space, desks/monitor/chair, etc. Ethical employers should be offering stipends for these.
> the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back.
Could also be the most vociferous or those worried about losing jobs to outsourcing? Also there's morale at play which could be people wanting to showcase they're all-in for facetime and not wanting to be the only ones without team spirit. imo people will vote with their feet re: remote work by not interviewing or accepting offers at companies that force back to the office.
Agree there's a nostalgia factor at play and need for ongoing discussions, I think overall things are going to move towards greater flexibility and maybe flex days/time etc.
The place is chosen not only for the cost. Some people like to live near the park, or downtown, because theaters museums movies bars dancehalls are all there.
Those of us who genuinely prefer city living and amenities seem to be relatively few among the crowd on HN.
I used to work full-time remote, and had the choice to go anywhere I wanted in the world. I still landed in NYC, and stayed because I loved a diverse, walkable community with amazing nightlife, culture, and parks all around.
I eventually took a job in an office in the city because I liked having an occasional social environment with coworkers, both in the office and outside of it. Working at home full-time as a person without a family and more social needs than I was willing to admit for a long time was extremely isolating, but I don't want a family yet.
I'm eager to go back to the office as soon as it is safe at scale for all the same reasons I was eager to leave my remote job and go into an office again most days originally. Moving somewhere cheap and more isolated to have more space to work at home is about the lowest thing on my priority list.
(But I recognize that I'm fortunate to work at a place which always had pretty good tolerance for remote work, even pre-pandemic, even if I didn't take advantage of it... and also lucky to have coworkers who I generally enjoy being around and working with.)
Long ago I made the decision to live in a smaller house close to work. My company's office is 15 minutes by bike from my house. Riding through the cool air every morning was a great start to my day. The office is perched above a canal. As I worked, I'd watch the boats go by and the bascule bridge go up and down. It was a great life.
Now I'm working in windowless cinderblock closet in my basement. I live near family and friends so just uprooting to a mini-mansion in the country isn't really a workable option. Companies clearly valued nice offices as a quality of life benefit to their employees, but now providing that nice office experience is squarely on my shoulders.
If my partner and I are going to be working remotely for the long term we'll probably need to move to a bigger house that can give us both better work spaces, which will probably cost $200K-$300K more than our current home. $250K financed at 3% interest over 30 years is $1200/mo plus things like heat, maintenance, furnishings, etc.
I don't expect my company to pony up a $15K/year remote work stipend, but also I see this a WFH future as a net downgrade from my old way of life.
I am more that willing to take on those costs to work from home forever because I get the freedom of no commute which not only incurs an obvious cost but puts me at risk each day.
I also find my costs reduced because now I am no longer eating out for lunch, let alone because I felt pressure to do so daily.
However there are companies that are overly proud of their head quarters and other real estate and are going to be loathe to give it up; this includes elite addresses and locations
Many people in big tech hubs don't pay for lunch. Work provides it. Now, they all have to pay for lunch that they weren't paying for before because the office is closed. Sometimes this isn't just lunch - but up to 3 meals a day. Same is true with transit. They took a company bus or work paid for public transit.
Now, people who were living in spaces where they didn't have a dedicated office space are dying for one. (like myself) And, unfortunately, the competition for homes with more bedrooms has skyrocketed. I'm looking at paying $2000 more a month just so I can get a couple more bedrooms for office work! Moving away for a year or more isn't a real option either.
Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).
>Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).
Yet places like Google would argue for them as part of their TC. The companies that tend to offer these benefits don't usually get rid of them until they're going out of business...
It’s your job as an employee to not drink the kool aid and to properly value benefits provided, regardless of how they’re marketed. Cash is king, everything else is window dressing.
No one is drinking any KoolAid. I care about the fact that I don't have to go through the cognitive load of figuring out every meal. This is a benefit I personally experience and so I factor it in my analysis. I don't care how my employer reports it in their taxes or balance sheet.
Also, cash is king but companies can offer benefits at scale that will be much harder to access for me as an individual.
Mostly healthcare in the US. And a few other things that are tax-advantaged by being benefits from an employer (like 401(k) matching). I'm not sure that I can think of much else, other than negotiated travel and other discounts--which I don't really consider "benefits"--that are harder for me to access as an individual.
Nobody in the management of a company like Google would ever breathe a word about meals and transportation being part of comp, because if they are part of comp then they need to pay taxes on them. The two companies where I worked that had expensive on-campus meals both had systematic approaches devised by corporate lawyers to make sure that meals did not appear to be compensation.
If my time's worth $50 an hour, it'd have to be a damn good free lunch or a damn short commute for the free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute trade to be a good deal.
I mean - I'm not really arguing that you should commute just for a free lunch. If anything - I was making a bigger argument in regards to the office space part. I'm fine with the lunches at home right now. (I can only blame myself for the poor lunch options on any given day) The $2,000/month that I'm looking at spending just to have office space is a bit of a bigger deal, imo...
Don't forget the huge benefit of lunch just being there.
I spend a lot more time dealing with food now (cooking, cleanup, groceries) than I spent on my commute. I could go to a restaurant, but if I don't want to eat the same thing every day, getting there and back and waiting for the food is going to take more time than my commute, especially if I do it for more than lunch.
Even purely from a time perspective, free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute is an EXCELLENT deal in my case. I can totally see that being different if your commute is longer than 30 minutes.
I kinda agree, except that I actually like cooking.
Even still, I've been working later (7pm approx) as I've started with a company based out of California (I'm in Ireland), which sucks for eating food.
Slow cookers/crockpots are kinda ace, you can dump all the ingredients into it in the morning, and have a meal when you finish work. As a bonus, the smell of the food is nice in the afternoons.
Of the Americans I know - quite a few. Of the foreigners - obviously quite a bit less.
Beyond that - friends can also be more important than family. I know plenty of people who won't move because all their friends are where they currently live - and they're fine with not being close to their family.
A dedicated personal office is very nice if you full-time work from home. It's much nicer than working out of a bedroom, especially if the bedroom isn't that big.
I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.
> I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.
Congrats, you don't live in silicon valley. Woohoo. Your life is not everyone's nor is it representative of what everyone can get.
My employer will only keep people who will show up at the office. If I found employers regularly paying $400k+ for remote - I'd consider it... But I don't see them often.
Well, most people aren’t making $400K at $BigTech either according to levels.fyi
I had two choices when I could see myself topping out locally as a bog standard enterprise dev - either I could go the r/cscareerquestions route and “grind leetCode” so I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard, and move to high cost of living area or I could focus on gaining experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant” somewhere where most of the jobs are remote with travel.
Right when I was about to pull the trigger and start applying for local companies, Covid hit, the local market dried up and I got an email from an Amazon recruiter.
I thought I might as well try. I can answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and I had the relevant experience.
Do I get the $400K salary? I’m not at the $400K salary level but neither are most people who work for $BigTech. The salary bands for the AWS consultants/solution architects/engagement managers are the same as the equivalent SDE roles. I would think the same holds true for GCP and Azure.
I can tell you according to levels.fyi that my salary is the same for my level as someone living in Seattle. I also know an SA living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is making the same for his level as someone in Seattle.
Would I move to the west coast for $225K compared to what I could makes locally? Heck no, $400K, maybe. At this point in life, even my local pre-Covid salary was “enough” for us to comfortably meet our short and long term goals.
The extra $70K-$80K basically just gave us enough to tell my wife don’t worry about going back to work surrounded by Covid when school starts back and the rest is going straight to long term goals - save more for retirement, pay off the house faster, etc.
Doubling our income wouldn’t make any lifestyle differences. What are we going to do travel in a post Covid world? Buy a larger house for three people and within a few years 2?
Thanks for the data :) For me, extra savings would just go towards automating more things in my life. All of the things that are broken or malperformant in my house could be resolved with a few phone calls. If I still have money left over after that, then it would probably be invested to generate more secure and reliable income. If I only have 500k in the bank, I feel weary about putting half in dividend stocks that might not pan out like I hoped. But if I have 2 milliom in the bank, then $200,000 in dividend stocks feels like child's play in terms of risk :)
That brings up another interesting and off topic aside.
I made plenty of $bad_life_decisions until 12 years ago. So early retirement is out of the question. But that’s okay, I’ve never hated my career, my previous jobs at times definitely.
But, with a paid off house, the amount of savings I should be able to amass in 20 years by the time I’m 65, and hopefully social security is still a thing. With today’s rules, your spouse can either collect their social security or half of yours while you are both still living. We could easily live off of an (inflation adjusted) $4500 SS + the hopeful retirement savings.
And it's really not the norm for companies to pay for meals or commuting.
But, yes, if you want to continue living in an expensive urban area, the cost of an extra room is significant. I do consider myself fortunate that I live in a semi-rural area and have a dedicated office. I know a number of people who are fleeing city apartments to more rural areas.
This is a very localized issue. Most people (I included) do not get even free lunch at work and there is no free transit to office either.
Both are cheaper than average (I think the buss is 1/2 the normal ticket price and the lunch is 2/3 of normal "take out" price) but certainly not free.
Everyone is also thinking this the wrong way around. People are thinking "how would this fit my current lifestyle" instead of "if this is the new normal, how would I change my lifestyle and would it be better over all".
I don't live in a big city even now, my commute is about 20minutes each way with a car. As it currently stands if I can stay working completely remotely I probably will and I will be selling my apartment and looking for a house in a more rural area. Something larger than my current apartment so I could have an actual office (in an ideal world there would be a separate building that would act as office / workshop). Currently I'm struggling with no dedicated office space, but that is because being 100% remote wasn't an option.
I get that many people have grown to expect free lunches and whatever from their work, but in over all work force thous people are in tiny margin group and while it sure would be sad if they lose the privilege, but needs of the many and so on.
I am shocked there are people who get 3 square meals a day all paid for by their job
I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
And why would you pay $2000 for a "couple more" bedrooms? You're telling me you can't put an L-desk in your living room? This thread just has ridiculous scenarios upon ridiculous scenarios, like the guy who would need to take a "40k pay cut" to get a home gym and a 3D printer.
I live in a small (400-sqft) 1-bedroom that has no internal doors. It was never rented as a WFH space. If you and your partner are both on calls a lot of the day - it's kinda hard to do them if you have to talk over one another. It used to be you had 8-hours of separation a day. Now, you don't have any. More bedrooms would provide some of that.
Some people like having living rooms without office furniture jammed into them - go figure. Most people I know would have to get rid of some furniture in order to fit a desk nicely into their living room.
> I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
The 3 meals a day thing just sounds like gatekeeping. "You must not be a real adult because you want food that's included in your benefits instead of having to labor over it like the rest of us who don't have such benefits!" (Or you have to pay for those meals to be delivered - which is very costly on an individual scale)
What if you can't go get your oil changed now? Should I say, "I'm appalled that there are adults getting oil changes at service centers and are upset that they now have to get those oil changes done themselves"
You work from home, there is no one forcing you to live in a 400 sq ft apartment, and there is no one forcing you to share it with someone else. The fact that you relinquish that responsibility to your job is what is ridiculous - you choose where to live, and now that you WFH you can work from wherever you want, the fact your home is only 400 sq ft, and that you want to actually stay in an area where you have to pay upwards of $2k just for adequate space is not your workplace's responsibility to fix.
And the argument is not that these people getting 3 free meals arent adults, it's that they are actually unprepared for a world in which they themselves have to pay for their own breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Availability for space for one. Moving your whole family in a different even state for the other -- which might not be an option, breaking lease etc during a pandemic. And not all employers have clarified when they expect employees to come back. Are you going to move across states for half a year, 3 months, less?
Also, those lunches are not free: employers offer them as part of the compensation and to keep you at the office working late. Compensation negotiations always bring up the benefits as an item of your compensation. If a company makes the argument that they are paying you in fact x,000 more in the form of benefits, they are now breaking this agreement (even if it is oral) and not paying you. (I have had a "if you end up working too late and there is no food in the office, we will pay for the food and keep working." style of clause).
Similarly, some people do negotiate working from home most of the time and doing a 3-4 hour commute once a week in exchange for reduced salary, to enjoy a larger and cheaper home. That is an obligation the employer placed on the employee and asks for money to lift it, and allow them to live somewhere further away.
Related to the workspace, I do personally like to change working environments (e.g. coffee shops at times, quiet room at others) etc. Most people though need to consistently separate work and rest of their lives.
And the workspace is the responsibility of the employee unless you have a remote work contract. (Certain countries have legislation on the matter in fact for both cases.) Imagine a car mechanic being asked now to service cars at their home instead. For engineers the work environment is not a power plug, some paper and a laptop, even for software engineers. That is romantic naivete perhaps, and dangerous thinking.
If employers send surveys around and ask point blank if people have screens, space, good desk and chair, keyboards, high speed stable connection -- home connections now have to take the slack from enterprise ones -- good access to all the servers, they disagree with the above thinking. They wouldn't be paying for all of the above in the first place, otherwise.
Definitely a trade-off, as the costs previously mostly foisted off on employees were related to commuting to the office (time, car, parking, public transport, etc.)
The leading companies would take account of those costs. One would hope they would also adapt to take acct of home office costs
I'm seeing/expecting people will want to go in some, but not back to 5-days in the office. 2-3 days, when necessary to really do things together.
If this reduced office loading prevails, it'll also help everyone from workers to cities with the misery & costs of commuting (tho I did read that NPR has lost huge audience due to loss of commute-time listeners).
I'm not experiencing this and I would assume anyone employed at a larger or established company would mirror this.
I've seen our company quickly react to the reduced office related costs and have reallocated that to cover employee's home office needs: internet service, phone, supplies. If you needed a desk at home, that also was accommodated.
Being able to take our work computer(s), including dual monitors, was also immediately available to everyone.
We run two office buildings on the same road: we went to the main one to collect all the IT equipment,pack it up and put it in the other,smaller office. We used to run fully in house. Yes,some people do want to go back to the office but the main reasons are: we were all stuck at home for months,so people do want to regain some sort of normality. Some have difficulties at home,so going to the office is better. Me personally? I run a 10 people team that will be half that size in a few days. I live in a 1 bed flat,so writing unit tests and dealing with dodgy suppliers,while Peppa Pig is blasting in the background can be challenging. However,I don't want to spend 3h on commuting daily.Screw that. The desk cost was about £3K a year,so I'm sure there will be some negotiation space to get something arranged for WFH.
We were very reliant on consumer credit, while selling services almost twice the going price,which has now gone,so the sales won't be anywhere near of what it used to be.
I love working from home but I’m about 30-45 minutes out of central London and friends and family often ask me why I don’t want to go into an office in town for the buzz, it must be difficult working at home with a baby running round, etc.
I honestly wouldn’t give up working from home for triple my salary. The flexibility to come and go as I please, not losing time to a commute, watching the kid grow up. All priceless to me.
However, I have enough bedrooms to use one as an office, a garden I can work in during summer. I can understand if I had to work at the kitchen table with the family making noise around me I would be yearning to go in to the office.
I stayed in a hotel at Blackfriars at the start of the week. A supplier took me out for drinks, we went to the Cheshire Cheese, it was empty. And closed early.
Riding around was an interesting experience, London isn’t too bad at the moment with very few people there, certainly different to pre covid though
Your coworker is totally on the money with this analysis.
More so, I think folks like me that had a 5 minute walking commute are losing out a ton of benefits by not being near the office anymore.
I'm lucky the weather's been cooperating but if I had to have the A/C on for days I would easily be spending $60-100/mo just for HVAC, forget the extra water, electricity and other utility costs for the extra usage at home.
We got a $500 WFH stipend but it definitely won't cover 12-16 months of this.
Overall though, I realize I'm in the minority and most people are winning back their time and money.
I can take public transportation which is $2.50 a day. If I don't then parking downtown is $150 per month in our current building, but no one is allowed to go into the office. We're getting a new building next year when we do return to the office and parking will be $250+ across the street or $300+ for garage attached to the same building. That's what it costs me to run my ancient, inefficient 220 volt window unit and keep an uninsulated wooden garage apartment cool in the summer. I will gladly go back to the office when it's allowed.
At least with my own company, the approach has been pretty reasonable.
They know they're saving money in the long term on space, and they're splitting that with employees pretty fairly. $1500 up front for all existing employees and all new hires to provision a space to work remote, and a $125 a month in reimbursement for internet/phone/electricity, no questions asked.
Frankly, it's made the transition pretty positive for all parties. The company saves a ton in the long term on rental space, and employees get a nice perk.
There are still folks that would prefer not being remote, but most folks are pretty happy without a commute.
I'm on board with you on not wanting 100% remote anymore. I used to want to work 100% remote but this pandemic has shown me that working in any sort of team remotely is hard to get right (most companies don't). I've come to the conclusion that 3-4 days/wk max is viable and can be healthy.
The problem is there's so much information and communication that happens implicitly through our day-to-day actions that when you're remote, you have to make that information explicit. It's tiring as hell.
For example, meetings. In person, you can look at a room and understand some basic relationships-who is talking to whom, who is laughing, who is avoiding, etc. This gives you valuable information on the shape of the team and how to navigate and work best with each other. Turn that into a zoom meeting, however, and that information either has to be explicitly pointed out or it is lost. This kind of thing eats up valuable cycles for information that could have been communicated in a literal glance.
Remote meetings work best when they're frequent, short and small groups.
Good remote teams have better communication in my experience because very often "implicit" communication in an office means you think you communicated something but did not.
Making all communication explicit is a useful habit to into, and overall improves everything.
@notjim @chosenbreed37 - I chose not to expand because it's specific to my own situation, but: I found remote work isn't for me. A selection of reasons (from pre-and-post covid experience): I find my communication stilted, I really miss hanging out with my colleagues, online whiteboards aren't the same, we have beer and board games, aisle conversations are useful, it's easy to see if it's OK to interrupt someone with a question in-person, and frankly it's motivating to have people bustling around working on stuff directly related to your own work. Half-and-half remote and in-person is probably a good balance for me. Yes a lot of the above reasons are a) privileges and b) can be mitigated with good remote work discipline, but again, it's just my preference.
> Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though.
100% agree. Many people are literally working in closets or worse, if they even can.
@taurath - "Quarantine Work Is Not Remote Work" good point. People are learning to support their remote colleagues right now, whether they intended to or not :) So "normal remote work" might be even better after this chapter concludes.
I had the best of both worlds, I went in once a week - but I loved going in. I met with my team, talked with our people outside my division. Grabbed some good "city miami" food, no "suburb miami" food. It was like a mini-vacation, every week and it energized me for the following week.
Hard problem to solve. Other people in the company had to go in every day, and I'm sure they LOVE not having to commute, and for good reason.
Companies can't really "rent an office space" for one day a week can they? It's not realistic. I wonder what will work look like in the next 2 years. I'm glad I had a chance to experience the office setting for a year at least.
I’ve been saying this for months on HN and it hasn’t been very well-received. Maybe such a large percentage were already remote that it seems obviously better to them?
I worked at a job I loved pre-Covid - great coworkers, freedom to tinker, a large amount of autonomy, admin access to our AWS account so I didn’t have to worry about the infrastructure gatekeepers (I was hired as the de facto “cloud architect”), etc.
But, I couldn’t stand the loud open office. One of the reasons I changed jobs was because there was talk about us coming back into the office by the end of June.
My job (for a FAANG) now was always designed to be fully remote and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve job hopped for the last decade, but there isn’t a dollar amount that would make me go back into the office.
I think saying they're offloading those costs is somewhat unfair since almost all of those things you would be buying anyway even if you went into the office. When I started working from home the only cost that changed for me was buying more coffee, and that's maybe 10 bucks a week.
Agree with most of these, but man do I ever miss the free and very well provisioned salad bar at the office :( I've eaten more grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches during WFH than any self-respecting adult ever should.
My brother is also in the "I wanna go back to the office" camp. He misses his co-workers, and it's hard for him to get stuff done with a few young kids at home. I can understand it. Hopefully we just get to the point where people can pick. Seems like the easiest solution.
Today I realized what I want most out of going back to the office is just going to lunch with my coworkers. What a nice experience to break up the day.
I was already paying for all those things, and they were sitting idle during the day while I was at the office using another set of them that my employer was paying for. Except the snacks, I miss the free snacks, but my waistline doesn't.
I'm curious what the IRS will have to say about it. If self-employed people can deduct a certain amount of their square footage as an "office expense", can I do that too? All those things you just listed are now part of my employment.
You can (Please check with a CPA before listening to this rando on the internet, I did my homework but it's a big deal and you want to do it correctly and legally) deduct any single purpose office space that you use at home from your taxes.
The company already offloaded the cost of travelling to and from work. My choice to live with a (reasonable) commute, but savings in petrol since March have more than offset other costs.
I find that the costs of all the things outlined in your list are either:
a) Things I would be paying for anyways as part of maintaining my residence
or
b) Vastly outweighed by the savings in time and vehicle wear/tear by not commuting to and from an office 5 days a week. If we use a figure lower than the official IRS vehicle cost reimbursement, $0.50 per mile, and my commute is 20 miles one way. That's 200 miles a week, same as $100.00/week vehicle expenses, or $5200/year.
Those costs really doesn't add up to much for me. Most of the stuff I would have anyways (internet, electricity, HVAC). There's some small marginal increases I suppose. And I would bet that the costs are less than the savings from not commuting (especially if you include the value of your time), not needing new work clothes and not eating out.
Companies think that remote work works but they fail to realize that most of what happened over the past few months was based on prior momentum built inside the office they are carelessly ditching.
I like this point, we've had a lot of success going remote but also haven't been through multiple rounds of planning out the next quarters yet, everything was in place.
Couldn't you bring people together once a quarter or bi-yearly? Book a nice villa someplace exotic for a couple of weeks, get all the planning and coordination out of the way, give everyone the last few days off with families invited.
Would that really be any cheaper for the business than just renting an office?? Flying people to nice destinations and putting them in expensive hotels along with their families is $$$.
Same way they take vacations. The parent working remote has more flexibility to take on childcare responsibilities the rest of the year, so they can probably work something out together.
Going "someplace exotic" may be great for some people, but if you have responsibilities such as being the caregiver for an aging parent, being forced to be away from home for a couple of days or weeks can be a big problem.
True. OTOH, and not to invalidate anyone's experiences, but people shouldering such responsibilities typically have help already (either paid or other family). Otherwise they couldn't do their current job. They also, presumably, have plans/protocols for when they need to take a vacation or break. Unless they were otherwise spending all their free time on caregiving, which isn't sustainable or healthy. They could potentially use those same measures when it's offsite time and even be given some makeup time off later.
They could also get an exception and attend the working sessions remotely. But there's a chance that could lead to fewer opportunities for advancement for them, because they weren't there. Which sucks. It's not an ideal situation.
BTW, lots of enterprise sales companies already do annual "sales kickoff" events where they fly all their salespeople globally to a single place. It's not unprecedented.
> Unless they were otherwise spending all their free time on caregiving
You're not far off the description of parents of young and early school-age children. Kids are in school/daycare for part of the day, then at home, needing dinner, care, etc.
That's different from caring for elderly family members. Parents with young families (maybe not those with newborns) can and do take vacations and travel. They also often have paid help even in their non-work hours e.g. babysitters or nannies.
This is resolved by going somewhere within an hour of the office location. It’s a good idea, but not everyone wants to be forced into traveling for work.
If everyone's 100% remote, there's no "office location". The best compromise is to find a location that minimizes travel for everyone. That might mean the city nearest the centroid.
> lots of enterprise sales companies already do annual "sales kickoff" events
Salespeople know, when they take their job, that they'll be expected to travel for work. Developers may not expect that to be a requirement of their job.
I worked at a company that did this: big in person retreats, once or twice a quarter. I've now been working remotely due to covid about as long as I worked at that company before I was laid off. I still feel much closer and more in sync with my current coworkers than I did to my coworkers at the remote company.
I feel like everyone in my remote company is a total stranger and it's the strangest feeling waking up every day and working with total strangers. Feels like every project I have to prove myself and it's been making my impostor syndrome pretty acute. Cultures a big, big thing there..
also most people on your team has met in person, so there's that momentum too. It's a complete different vibe when teleconferencing with people you've met several times than with those you have not.
I'd say that totally depends on the area you're working in. If IT is at the core of your business, you'd probably be fine working from home. For companies in manufacturing/retail/etc. where the IT is not the core, I doubt permanent work from home would be equally good.
Looking at my company, the IT departments seem to be doing just fine. However, basically all people I know from engineering and other departments are really looking forward to come back to the office. Having everybody onsite is just so much easier if you have that many dependencies with other departments.
Also, I think the size of the company plays an important role as well. We're about 2000 employees in the IT departments alone, I somehow cannot imagine all of those people permanently working from home while also being able to properly cooperate with the other 100k employees.
Much of this momentum was negative though, meetings and rituals were built around everyone being in the office and being face to face. Remote work relies on much more async text based communication and many companies are still building momentum to work well remotely.
The team I work in has done more in a month while wfh than we have ever achieved before. I guess we will be able to prove this for sure soon since it doesn't look like things are changing this year.
I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.
If it were that good, software engineering in the US would suffer the same fate as manufacturing: it would disappear to cheaper foreign workers and only specialties would survive.
> I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.
Would it be? Seems like, at a minimum, various employer liabilities that exist when an employee is working independently of whether or not it is at the employer’s location become less controlled in remote work, which potentially works strongly against that.
Also, the argument you make, even in the best case, fails to grasp the difference between “is” and “has always been” and the magnitude of impact of cultural inertia in favor of what has worked well in the past.
Not true in my case, I joined a company during corona and started out remotely. I've been working there for 2 months and had the opportunity to go to the office for the last 2 weeks. What I've noticed between the first 6 weeks and the last 2 weeks is that there wasn't a difference in productivity.
There was a difference in amount of time wasted though. Going to the office is in my case much more wasteful, mostly due to travel time (90 minutes per day).
Will this trend revive the fortune of WeWork? We can have a future where teams within a company decide on “core days” where everyone is in the office but WFH the rest of the week and the company can pay for a variable number of office spaces depending on the week day. WeWork can become the cloud but for office spaces.
I think there was always a viable business in WeWork. Just not with all the excesses and crazy valuations. But prior to the current pandemic it certainly meet a need. Granted they were not the only ones offering the same service. But even that in itself would suggest that with the proper management it would be successful operation.
It's interesting to me that companies are threatening to reduce pay if a remote employee moves to a lower cost of living area. It's hard to understand the logic when geography is the only change driving the decrease in pay. Same person, same job, same skills, same productivity, the only thing that has changed is the person's cost of living.
I wonder if a remote employee working in a low cost of living area moved to a high cost of living area would their pay be increased or would the company put up a fight? "You voluntarily moved to a high cost of living area, why should i pay you more?". However, "you voluntarily moved to a low cost of living area, i'm paying you less" is reality.
My wife’s employer makes fairly drastic COL changes based on office location (bank with large corporate offices in 3-4 US cities and branches worldwide). From the lowest COL office to the highest, it can be 10s of thousands USD.
Edit - they don’t officially do WFH (outside COVID) so cant comment on that.
Companies are typically very impersonal about money, to a much greater extent than people. I'm sure some highly compensated employees are about to be sad, but this is just business. It's a free market, and it just got a lot bigger.
Why not? It's a business relationship; both parties are in it to come out as ahead as possible. Why would a company pay a remote worker $400k/yr in Oklahoma when they can just pick from a country-wide candidate pool who will do the same job for a fraction of that?
Your salary is the balance between the leverage you have over the company and the leverage the company has over you. If they can get rid of you and hire someone remotely for half the price they will. If you want to stay in an expensive city while working remotely and the company can't do without you, they won't.
It's hard to hire remote employees in different COL areas without opening yourself up to legal liability, if people are able to bounce around and hold onto COL salaries disproportionate to the local area.
Ex, if a bunch of white and asian bay area employees relocate to Florida, taking their salaries, and then Facebook hires some local hispanic employees at 1/2 the rate... well, you can try to explain exactly what happened after you get sued, but that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And even if you legally get away with it, you are going to have a lot of REALLY unhappy employees.
Not to mention you're opening yourself up to a real game, where employees move to the Bay Area for a year to get hired at a high salary, and then immediately leave for 2x the salary. All you've done is turned salaries into a game that benefit highly-mobile employees.
So I definitely understand why this feels shitty, but I honestly can't see it working any other way for large corporations. You have to have some kind of local salary adjustment you can stand behind, when you're remote-first hiring.
I've thought about playing this game, one of the largest retailers in the country just pays you based on the cost of living in your zip code. I could move in with my in laws in Honolulu for a few months and use that zip code, get hired, and then move back to my low cost of living area.
Your employer probably has to pay state taxes/state unemployment insurance, may have to ensure that they are filing certain state forms as an employer of a resident of a given state, may have to adjust health care policies to address state-specific requirements (or residency requirements of the plan they have, etc).
Unfortunately, given the run-amuckness of registration and compliance requirements, it probably is needed for your employer to know where you live (or at least in which state and local taxation/regulation entity).
Yes this is accurate. At my company they've said in the past that they have to count business trips to certain states because once you have employees that have "worked" in those states for more than X days a year, it can be shown that you have a "presence" there and would need to pay state taxes.
Someone needs to run the experiment. Move to some place in Russia outside the Moscow metropolitan area. Apply to Gitlab. If you get the job, relocate to San Fran. See if your pay quadruples.
I feel like GitLab is one of the few places where this would happen. They have a salary calculator that's basically just band * CoL * performance in band[0].
GitLab was rumoured to be suspending hiring in Russia and China, but I can't see a reference to it on their page. They ban seemingly random countries [0] like Sweden, while allowing hires in Australia, wonder what their rationale is.
You can't think of your pay as a transaction based on value you bring. It's based on 1) retaining you 2) how much would it cost to replace you
For 1, what are your alternatives in your local market or remote positions (next best alternative). For 2, if they just fired you instead and then opened up the position to anyone anywhere, what would they have to pay?
Also, yes, I have moved from a low cost of living area to a high cost of living area and got a pay adjustment. It is standard to increase pay for those moves (they they are not always approved though)
I don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding that the value of something changes depending on the context (aka "the market").
Soda at the grocery store? $1.50
Soda at the gas station? $1.99
Soda at Disney World? $30
Your skills are not worth a fixed rate. Your skills are worth more in certain areas because the demand is higher in those areas. As soon as you go remote, you are competing with every other remote worker in the US. More competition, lower price.
This cuts both ways; your ability to demand higher pay is contingent on that you can get that pay elsewhere. If other companies at your new LocalRate are paying substantially less, then your remote employer only has to beat those offers to remain competitive (from your point of view).
Each individual hiring case is wildly different, with different supply/demand and price dynamics, and it's nothing like the commodity sold at a gas station example. Yes some companies will penny pinch, but some companies just wont. Not worth their time.
I would argue most people in a organization actually are fungible, especially the more junior they are. At least in software.
It's not a coincidence that conversations around the number of engineers/designers required for a project commonly end up referring to them as 'resources' in most companies.
Since algorithm interviews are the current norm for filtering, there are a huge swathes of people who are just as good at beating such interviews but never got the chance due to their location.
Someone decided to drink the kool-aid the PM is selling. While business is business and we are not family. We are deeply human, don't ever refer to people as a resource if you want a more healthy working environment.. that goes for any industry or company.
I guess as it becomes more obvious to people that the logical next step for a fully remote company would basically be to lay off staff in higher cost of living locations (I'm sure we are starting to see this), more people will internalize this reality.
Sure, but this is closer to having soda delivered to your home. The costs on the production side don't matter to you. You only care about price, quality, and delivery time.
I personally suspect the employment market is just not very efficient due to a lack of information. If companies had perfectly accurate information about how good every software person is, available for free, we'd probably all be paid based on that information, with our cost of living ignored.
This is about the time that people start to imply (or even say straight out) that their skills are really special, and that there aren't good developers outside the valley. So they totally deserve the rate they're being paid.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are actually quite a lot of smart people who just don't care to live in the valley for various reasons, and they are all just as available as you are when the whole team is 100% remote. Companies are going to love it, but a subset of employees are going to be sad as the market rate adjusts to the new reality.
You don't understand probably because your paycheck depends on not understanding, e.g. you think you are benefiting from the current status quo. Others call it unfair because their paycheck also depend on it.
What if the market says you can get away paying less for group X? What if X is some historically marginalized group? Does it make it OK? What if X = remote workers?
> How about the number we agreed on is the number we agreed on.
This is exactly what the company is doing.
They’re paying you the number you agreed upon until they don’t want to anymore (or until they’ve fulfilled whatever contractual agreements they’ve made). You’re not guaranteed to keep getting the number you agreed upon if your work sucks or the company goes out of business.
By the same token, you’re not obligated to hold up your end of the bargain any longer than you have to based on whatever agreement was made. Want to move to a cheap city and find a new high-paying job? Go nuts.
Yeah, ironic how there is nothing on https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ about cheaper packages based on the customers location. But they want to pay you less as an employee based on your location.
The most amusing aspect of Gitlab's location based compensation is that they spin it as employees in higher CoL locations should be paid more (while carefully choosing to ignore the corollary implication that employees in lower CoL locations are paid less for the same work).
Cost of living in terms of rent or expenses is not everything. If I work from India, I also pay in terms of reduced life expectancy due to higher pollution, greater chance of dying in a road accident and what not. If a perverse sense of 'fairness' (or a facade of it) is so important to companies, I would love to see these factors being considered too.
I don't think that it's the right thing to do, but just to share what's being done elsewhere, for 1 it's absolutely the case in Japan.
As an anecdote from first hand experience, if your parents live close enough to your work (less than 2 hours commute) it's considered that you could live with them, regardless of what you actually do. Then, you cannot claim the $7k/year indemnity for accommodation. This is significant for a salary of $36k in this company (not in tech).
The company agreed to pay you X amount because that's the market in the area you and the employer are competing in. Once you expand beyond that area the market changes. You're now competing against all of the other engineers from SF to Arkansas (and beyond). Let's put this way. If you're working from Arkansas, why should your employer pay you 400k/yr when they can just hire someone else in a cheap COL area within a reasonable timezone for a fraction of that?
I see it as an opportunity to show you're a team player by moving to a lower-CoL area and taking a pay cut. Believe me - the bosses WILL notice who takes this offer.
A former employer of mine wanted me to relocate to their HQ in NorCal and they were going to give me a raise to cover the cost of living increase. (I decided not too.)
At my company, it’s about equality. Everyone gets paid within the same range for the same work after adjusting for cost of living. Move to higher COL, raise, lower, cut. It’s that simple.
Except that this idea is always a farce. People talk about cost of living as though it doesn't vary wildly within a city from neighborhood to neighborhood.
You in effect pay people more to live in nicer areas. If I move to a place tons of other people move to it likely has some positives (better schools, more to do, closer to nice vacation opportunities), and higher costs.
Also if the high COL employee owns a property, much of that difference goes into equity in their home. Which they can they cash out and move to a low COL area.
So if I have 7 kids and a physical disability should I get paid more because my COL is higher? Shouldn't someone get paid for the work they provide? COL is frankly none of the f*cking company's business.
In my opinion, the argument companies really should be hiding behind is the cost of labor for a given geo. It's got cost of living baked into it, is sufficiently handwavy, yet still makes it a little more clear that you're compensated based on market supply/demand and little else.
The simplest solution to me as a director is to determine the value difference between on-site vs remote employees, then factor in the costs needed to run the office per person, and pay differently based on that delta. However in my experience my team is all getting more done remote, so if anything I should be paying them more to move out into middle America.
The only reason for me to not go back to the office is: fixed working hours. Sure, my contract says I have to work 40h/week, but I just can't. If I'm at the office, I would probably work (focused) around 4 or 5 hours. The rest is "wasted" with: chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff), breaks... but I have to be there for 8 hours no matter what. At home, I can work those 4 or 5 hours (focused) and call it a day. I don't have to pretend I'm working, I just close the laptop.
Same outcome (for the company), less (wasted) hours for me. This is impossible to achieve if one has to go to the office. (can you imagine entering at 9am and leaving at 2pm while telling everybody: "hey, I cannot work anymore, I'm only able to work focused 5 hours per day. See you tomorrow!".)
Yes, i'm the same. And if you're like me, i suppose sometime, in high pressure situation, you can easily work 10 hours straight. Doing this at the office is impossible, doing this home is easy (if it stay exceptional). I'm more productive home than i was at the office, and this is really surprising for me ( i assumed i was just a slacker).
I'm genuinely curious - would you be so kind to share what kind of coding do you do, and for how long have you been doing it, when you can code for 12 hours not needing to look up how to do something online (syntax, example for a best way to approach something etc)? I'm asking because this is one of my worst fears - how genuine of a senior, experienced developer am I, if I probably wouldn't be able to do 2 good hours of progress without the internet...
I do a lot more writing than coding. But, while I used to be able to do stuff surrounded by books, absent an Internet connection, I'd have to work through something with lots of [need to check], [flesh this out when can look up], etc. if I tried to do anything in the absence of an Internet connection.
I've been forced to work without the internet for large swaths of time. In the beginning its a pain, but once you get all the resources you need local, you can speed up past what you can do with the internet.
The key, for me, is to work without the internet, keeping a list of things you need and when you hit a hard snag, go online, grab all the things you need, repeat. This allows you to slowly accumuate almost everything you need local.
Now you have the ability to full-text index the entire shebang and when you get to the point of real-time responsive full-text search on all your manuals and all the source code (libraries included), you'll be kicking yourself for not getting to that point much sooner.
It was truly a game-changer for me. Googling for answers and filtering through the crap is a huge time sink.
It depends on what it is. If I'm doing something in C, it's much less likely that I use the internet for anything. C and Unix grew up before the internet. Man pages are installed on local system for quick and easy reference.
If I'm doing something in a less familiar language, library, or framework (or even new techniques), then I fully expect that I'll rely heavily on internet to find code samples, reference, and documentation.
I can't get any work done with my kid around either. But the difference is not that I'm home instead of at the office. The difference is that she's at home instead of at school.
When kids go back to school some of the work from home conflicts will end, but kids still get home from school early afternoon, and schools typically only open 180 days a year - whereas most officeworking adults have to continue working into the late afternoon, and show up for about 240 days of the year. If you continue working from home after schools reopen, you're still going to have days like these lockdown times...
Well I'm fortunate to have a six-figure income and a job that affords a reasonable amount of flexibility. So throughout the school year I work 9-15:30 and then make up the last hour or two after my kid's bedtime. In the summer she can go to camp for hundreds of dollars per week and I keep a similar schedule.
This summer, we're foregoing camp due to safety concerns.
Same here - I don't have a separate room for work (never needed it) and have 2 pre-school kids at home. Average period without interruption: 10 minutes. I do so little "real" work during the day, that I need 4-5 hours at night to catch up...My wife doesn't work for a longer time now, so there's not a lot of understanding from her side - if I complain, I'm considered a drama queen and I only care about work...If this keeps up, I'll have to rent another small apartment or find another solution.
I don’t tell my coworkers when I do this but at Apple we are adults and can go to the bathroom without permission. You can come and go as you wish, that notwithstanding the waste of colocating with and/or commuting to an office. I want virtual reality so I can be in shared spaces for impromptu conversation and coworking.
(Edit: I really don’t miss my boomer/genx coworkers jamming out to hair metal)
The most productive workers barely scrape 50% productivity; however, idle, chat, socialization and other “wasteful” time isn’t wasted. You learn things about the needs of other groups, colleagues, the politics and all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.
I agree that the socialization part is not actually "wasted" time and I would love to do it as much (or as little) as I want per week (ideally one or two days, instead of five days per week on a forced basis).
The time spent on distractions and procrastination was around 1 hour per day:
> On average, the research shows that knowledge workers waste one hour and four minutes each day due to distractions and procrastination
So to be clear, people were working for more like 80% of their day, but not 100% of that time was considered core work or productive meetings.
People don't simply socialize and mess around on the internet for 50% of their work days at most companies. I've been at companies where people get away with that level of messing around, but I wouldn't say it's the norm.
> all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.
When people say these things I seriously question if they've ever worked remote before. Yes if being remote makes you atypical for your workplace, then you'll probably be left out. But if you're working for a remote-first team the it's completely different. Nearly all of my closest coworkers I've met have been at remote companies.
I have had tons of interesting conversations, brainstorming session and just generally fun discussion while remote.
Honestly, I have personally found the amount of more toxic conversations also drops when remote. The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like (working with people you don't like is fine, but having to have conversations with them, go out for team drinks with them etc is another thing). This leads to generally more toxic behavior, since you have to put more energy into those social interactions.
I have actually spoken more to my coworkers while remote than at the office where its one big open plan room where having a conversation will bother 20 other people.
> The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like
This is actually a problem with remote companies.
It's really easy for teams to silo themselves away in private chat channels and form exclusionary cliques. It's fun for those in the inner circle, but it's miserable for newcomers and anyone else trying to get work done without being part of the in-group for a particular project.
Obviously the same dynamics can play out in a real office, too, but it happens much more frequently when it only takes a few clicks to make it happen. People are much more likely to be mean to each other when it's just a screen name on your computer rather than the real person you have to see every day.
How is this any different than office based companies? My team has multiple cliques; the coffee bros and the vape bros. The Windows admins and the *nix admins. The sports fans and the sportsball haters. The desk lunch people and the restaurant eaters. Some of these overlap, but not always.
Now that we're remote, it's much easier. None of the high school bullshit. If you're on a project, you're assigned work and have project team mates if you get blocked. With daily standups (even for non-programming roles), it's pretty easy to see who's struggling with a story, who might need some help, and who's rocking just fine.
Interesting, because my pre-COVID experience managing remote teams was just the opposite.
The toxic people were much more likely to play politics or manipulate people when they were just a screen name in Slack than when it was Jim from down the hall with a wife and two kids. The office politicians were always hiding away in private Slack channels or even separate invite-only Discords that they created for the in-group to talk separately from the rest of the company.
In fact, one of the quickest ways to defuse politics and toxicities was to fly everyone to a location for a few days of meetings. The context didn't matter so much as just getting people in the same room.
It's the same phenomenon that drives people to be friendly and civil in person, but then tear each other apart on Facebook or Next Door. In person communication is more human.
Hmm strange ... I guess I was lucky or that it varies widely? Or maybe the effect I am noticing is eg. that is easier to ignore "office politics" when you literally can mute a meeting.
Stereotyping, I know that HN is a bunch of introverts, but we were built for actual, face to face, human contact. That can't really be replaced with anything modern technology can offer us. Maybe in 10-20 years...
Also some teams practice "watercooler-based development". Requirements and coding standards are passed by word-of-mouth. Being remote in an environment like that effectively means you're cut off from key knowledge required to do your job.
building relationships is really underrated (especially among the Aspergers-inclined tech crowd) is and much harder to do remotely. Most of moving up in life and finding new opportunities is about who you know, and someone you only know through email and slack isn't the same as someone you know who you've spoken to face-to-face every day for several years.
Also going by parents idea that completing a task is the end of your workday, any socialization is eating into your free time. The entire thing has added stress as you race towards completion each day
Guess I must be wired differently, but I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”, rather than “I’m convinced this is the output required of me, thus I will do no more with my new found time.” shrug
Everything you produce once you are punchy, you will have to re-do tomorrow morning during your productive hours, at which point you have to keep working later to get done what you had planned for today, and now you're in a never-ending loop of reworking your code.
I feel the same. For the last 3 hours of the day I just state at my screen in zombie mode. With wfh when I start to feel braindead I just lay in bed for 15 minutes and when I come back I feel refreshed for the rest of the day. With no pressure to look like you are constantly working you can do what works best since no one can see more than your output at the end of the week.
I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5.
What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)
One of the biggest QoL improvements for me has been not traveling. I enjoy visiting a new city every once and a while and meeting new people for work, but now in retrospect, my overall work life balance has significantly improved with no business travel.
Traveling a lot is what I really miss--for all that I complain about it. I was hoping that I could at least do personal travel relatively freely in the fall but that seems a non-starter. I definitely need to figure out a Plan B if, at some point, I can reasonably travel for myself but events are all still shut down.
If they did a better job of making sure you got a chance to see the city instead of the inside of a hotel, a taxi, a convention center, and office, then I think it would be different. Young people get suckered into it because they don't know yet that they're in for something worse than not going at all; being moment's away and not being able to take advantage of it.
My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after.
He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.
If you have the control and are in a position to spend the time (which may well depend on family situation), it's partly a function of making the time. Which I've usually done when practical. The timing is not always practical but, in normal times, I've made a point of tacking on personal time to work trips. At the moment, I'm sorry I didn't extend one or two of my early 2020 trips more, but who knew?
I started on a remote-only team about 6 years ago. For half of that time our only chat system was a 1-to-1 and you could do group chats but had to explicitly invite people and they had to accept. When we switch to Slack (although Teams or Riot or open source would have worked too) and had always-on chat rooms, things changed dramatically.
Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.
100% agree. Working remote for about a decade. When we added slack before the company had teams for our group it completely changed the dynamic for the good. The company added teams right before COVID hit and it’s been a blessing. It has forced the entire company to adapt and adopt it quickly. It worked. I connect more frequently to nearly anybody I need to. I have more water cooler talks then ever.
Oddly, our shared social chatroom was most active when we were all in the office. Over the past few months it's tapered off to the point where now there's a week gap between conversations.
Ours has also tapered off over the last few months, not because people are remote, but because they're afraid of being called out for not being sufficiently woke. Easier to remain silent than try to appease the cancel mobs.
Yeah it’s easier to not say hateful things than it is to try to “appease the mobs”. So I guess that means if you’re not talking to your coworkers anymore, the only thing you could contribute to the conversation before was hateful things?
My team has very nice conversations about the weather, our pets, even video games we’ve played or movies we’ve watched. Nothing “woke” about it. If you’re worried about being canceled, maybe try saying something that has nothing to do with politics?
I strongly recommend ‘random’ rooms in your shared chat messenger, or a way to make random rooms in whatever communication infrastructure you have. They’re vital for maintaining social interactions
I like these channels a lot. I have to ask, though, doesn't #hot-takes end up getting people in trouble? Like HR trouble? Or at least stuff like starting political flame wars between colleagues?
I think the original argument was a meat because a meat is a single, semi-solid, blob of a single item. Salads are non-mixed collections of goods and soups are homogenized(?) liquids.
Or did they collapse the state of matter for soups and meats?
Well, everyone probably does need to agree on what is off-limits for work conversation. Putting something like "Joe Biden is a communist" or "Black lives matter is just a front for foreign agitators" into #hot-takes is probably not something you want people getting into at work in most cases, right? (Note that I am not making either of those statements, they were purposely chosen to be extremely provocative.)
"The imperial system is awful compared to metric, but Farenheight is a better temperature scale for humans than Celsius."
"soft-close hinges/slides are a worthless and annoying novelty in modern cabinetry. they feel worse to open and closing a drawer without slamming it isn’t that hard"
"Cartoon Network was way better than Nickelodeon in the 90s-00s. Both of them win over Disney Channel any day"
"email should be banished, just like faxes and cheques. it’s an extremely inferior and unsuitable medium for how we communicate online these days"
"cucumber is an overrated and is only good in gin and tonics"
Basically, nothing is actually of consequence there, but people get fired up and have strong opinions. It's a fun interaction.
Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.
As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.
After 5 years or so working remote I noticed a few of the same things:
* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.
* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.
* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.
* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.
All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.
To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.
To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.
> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.
Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.
FWIW, for a long time I've worked roughly 11 to 4 and have not caught any flack for it, as I get my work done. It entirely depends on the company you work for. (I'm not saying my situation is common, just that it does exist.)
Figured I'd chime in and say that I'm basically in the same situation.
I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle.
My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day"
Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit.
The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.
I think the need for an office depends a lot on the type of work that needs to be done. If you're working in R&D or science, for example, it's really (really) hard to make much progress alone, without people bouncing ideas around, showing you how things work, whiteboards, etc.
Sure, you could do some of that on zoom, but the psychology of it is very different, and the spontaneous component of it is gone completely. It's awkward to slack someone with "hey do you want to talk about some ideas i have, using the awkward zoom annotation tool?". They'll probably say yes, but then other people who might have something interesting to contribute (or learn) will not be present. Also the feeling of interacting with people via videochat is weird, especially if you're new to the workplace.
Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; b) human beings around you who work on similar things; and c) a sense of community. I realize that many workplaces are toxic and don't offer any good versions of b) or c), and working remotely could be better then (though a better idea would be to find a new employer if you can). But, though many people are thriving in this new work-from-home environment, equally many or more are suffering.
Also, regarding the 4-5 hours of productivity a day: yeah! There's been a lot of studies on this, and some countries/companies have been experimenting with 4 day work-weeks or shorter workdays. There's definitely progress to be made there.
> Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home;
This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation.
Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode.
Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.
I find that dressing the part also helps. Something about trying to be a professional engineer in my shorts and britney spears t-shirt doesn't seem to motivate.
You're right that the spontaneity is missing. Everything has to become formalized in some capacity to ensure everyone knows what's up as well.
Just recently I noticed that my coworkers were all jumping into a slack thread. It was a thread that was active hours earlier but that I missed out on, so I couldn't put in my input. If this was in the office, the fact that everyone was having a big conversation would be a signal to turn around and engage in it, but in the virtual world, someone has to specifically @ you to have you join, or else create a formal meeting to discuss it.
The small connections that grease the wheels of communication are gone or are more challenging when you have to do them over Slack or video call.
I really don't understand this. In a cubicle farm environment, you'd walk over their desk, interrupt whatever they are doing, and ask them to follow you to a separate meeting room to use the whiteboard? And how are other people supposed to contribute if you close the door in order not to disturb anyone in the radius of this meeting room?
I found that it's much less awkward to hit them up on collaborative tools. Meetings are also much easier to spin since you don't have to herd people into a single room and convince them as hard to use their limited time on this meeting since they can just do something else in the background if they're not in another one.
Well, in my workplace for example, there'd be spontaneous questions that would move to the whiteboard, and ideas could be fleshed out and developed there. Also, research meetings and journal clubs would be lively and full of debate. Since WFH started, none of this has been the case.
Again, i think it really depends on the people and the workplace. Some people are really content working from home, others are losing their minds.
Text chat is amazing. Maybe growing up in the heyday of chat services has made it feel natural to me, but I don't understand these complaints about how people don't feel like they can connect emotionally etc etc.
Do you need to do these interactions over Zoom? Or is it habit?
It's like, if you can connect with a book, you can connect over chat. It's just words.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home. I've always tracked my time even when working from home to make sure I'm doing the amount of hours I'm getting paid for.
If this person was contracted to achieve a certain amount of work done I'd totally understand, but they're contracted based on time. Kinda surprised how positive the Hacker News crowd is towards skipping work for up to 50% of contracted time. I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.
It is simply impossible to accurately measure knowledge worker productivity on an individual basis. Any attempt to do so causes serious unintended consequences where employees attempt to game the metrics instead of doing the right thing for the business.
I think it's possible, but usually non-cost-effective because it has to be done on a 1:1 basis and therefore doesn't scale well. For example: I can intensively audit a developer's code for a couple weeks (in real time) and usually get a good feel for the blend of skill/time/effort being invested. But it's so time intensive for me to do that, that it's reserved for extreme situations.
Writing code is only a small part of a developer's job. If you focus on that then you'll miss a lot of other key productivity factors, such as contributions to team design discussions, code reviews, defect root cause analysis, etc.
So in short no, it's not possible to accurately measure developer productivity even if cost isn't a factor. Employee evaluations are necessarily subjective and we simply have to accept inaccuracy.
The person does the same amount of work at home that they do in the office, because when being in an office there is a normal background level of distraction, socializing, breaks etc that interfere with the person’s work, causing them to only be productive for 5 of the 8 hours. But those “unproductive” hours were paid as part of the expected 40. They are still in essence paid as part of the 40. This person’s output for the company is the same (if not better). Lost time from friction caused by office life is restored. BUT spending that restored time on work can be suboptimal. Eg if I push too fast, I sometimes make subtle mistakes that are time consuming to undo. Or I get out of step with coworkers and have to find a way to cool my heels anyway. People are positive about this because the worker is happier and more effective at the job, whilst reclaiming some hours, and contributing at the same level as always, which deep down is what the company is buying with their forty hours - a certain contribution of work per week.
People are paid to be available to do 40 hours a week of work, not to actually do 40 hours of work a week. Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start etc still counts as work because you’re on the companies time not your own.
That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.
The trouble is that this assumes pre-determined quantity of work. The reality I've seen most in places is that there's no end of stuff to do. The work is never "done."
What there is instead is an expectation of how much work you're supposed to get done per unit time (albeit calendar time in shops that have things more together). But this is in turn informed by how much time you are expected to devote to work vs other parts of your life.
Companies typically don't pay for hours worked but fo the value that is delivered. It's common to see people work a lot more than 40 hrs a week as well without overtime, and this is legal as per most employment contracts.
If you are a freelancer billing hours, then yes, I agree it would not be ethical. But still it's somewhat of a gray area. In theory, you should be able to raise your hourly rate to compensate for the fact that you can get more done in less time. But in practice, you might not get any clients if you advertise a higher than usual hourly rate, at least until you build a reputation.
> I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home.
In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment.
> I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world.
Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week.
In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly.
>but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time.
This isn't true. It depends on whether the work is cerebral or not. Certain workloads are limited to as little as 2 hours per day, for 2-4 hours of real knowledge work per day. The rest of it is either extremely suboptimal or of a different class.
Something semi-mechanical like translation or categorization that isn't obviously mechanical could probably occur for a full workday.
I have and had plenty of full days of coding smart solutions where, when i was in the flow, would even forget that i hit 8h work.
If i really hit my head against a wall because i literaly have an issue i can't figure out right now, i will still try to find different angles or take a walk but i will not just close my laptop after 2-4h of work oO?!
If you're working 8hr straight I'd guess you're following up on work you previously invested a lot of time into.
I don't really see "coding" as productive work. The entire point is the write as little as possible. Most of my day is full of reading and thinking about the problem. The actual coding part is quite small.
It's definitely a mindset and is self-fulfilling, once I started working in a restricted area (no internet, cell phones, other electronics allowed) I stopped feeling like I was having trouble working 8 hours a day.
It's possible to focus 8 hours every day, you just have to sacrifice some more of your time to rest afterwards.
It's just not worth to throw your life away for someone else. Especially if your peers don't do it, and you won't get rewarded proportionally for doing it.
If my company could lower the cost of its product by half and still make the same yearly revenue, it would. And all the executives would get huge bonuses.
That's not how salaried positions work in the US. If you work 60 hour weeks you don't get paid overtime (but if that helps you perform beyond your peers, you might get promoted faster).
Not universally true, I am salary and get paid overtime. In fact, of all the software jobs I've had I did unpaid overtime only a couple times a year at most, never most years. I absolutely wouldn't do unpaid overtime regularly - paid overtime is fine, if I were expected to do unpaid overtime regularly I'd leave. Overtime has always been at base pay, not time-and-a-half like hourly employees.
Every salary job I've ever had (I've had 4) required everyone to do their own timekeeping ever day, no working six hours a day and calling it "full time" unless you charged the time off or I guess lied.
Most HN readers probably regard the concept for being contracted to work for a certain number of hours (rather than achieving certain outputs) with inherent contempt anyway so they're not going to be upset about turning one into the other.
I think I've expressed myself wrongly. I'm not a contractor, just a normal fulltime employee. This normally means (at least in Europe) 8h/day 5 times per week, hence 40h/week. I'm not being payed by the hour.
I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine.
Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge.
Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office.
I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.
Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.
I wasn't clear, I meant when I'm socializing with co-workers while I'm on the clock, such as gathering around the cubicle. Not at home or a bar.
Edited: for clarity.
The OP mentioned they work 4-5 hours a day and are distracted the other 3-4 when at work (in the office).
I was saying during those 3-4 hours you have multiple side conversations (on company time) that it makes sense to the company to encourage. Not just cuz co-workers who get along have a better work environment, but that it makes a more interconnected environment.
> Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.
I have been struggling with this a bit. It is kinda like the “unlimited PTO!” phenomenon where it is honor system based but can trick more work out of people. It is difficult to prove 8 hours of engineering work so the stress of my week can vary wildly based accuracy of estimates and how desperate I am to prove my skills haha.
Glad to see I'm not the only one..I wrote a script that records (manually) how much time I am able to focus each day, and it averages around 5 hours. On the days when I have to work overtime, it'd be around 6.5 hours.
I can easily imagine being judged based on my output, not my etiquette.
It'd reveal most people to be largely about etiquette, largely useless if not outright harmful in terms of output if contemplated a little.
Most software jobs are re-implementing the same shit another company has already done. It's worse than useless - sipping tequila on the beach would actually be a net benefit for humanity - it'd alleviate stress, tension, traffic, hubris, carbon footprint among other things.
If contemplated a little more - most jobs are enabling this insane rat race and the immense infrastructure around it, which nobody individually is really that interested in continuing.
It's like religion or circumcision - we do and believe things and we don't even know why - most would be better off not knowing and not believing - just give them tequila and a beach :)
I feel exactly like this. I can work , focused at most 4 hours every day. After that, I want to stand up and go running because my legs are killing me. So home office is heaven. When I'm done I'm done.
I'm a developer and pre-covid typically only stayed in the office until 2pm most days (lunch with the team, work for an hour then leave). I would tell everybody that I was going to work from home the rest of the day. Nobody ever cared. this is the future I dream of for all of us.
This is basically the same for me, plus the commute. The office manager doesn't get in until 8-9am and he was the only person who could unlock the office, and would leave around 5:30pm, meaning if you want lunch away from the office, you aren't going to hit 40 hours per week.
Where as now, I start my day around 6-7am (I wake up "early" every morning), I try and quit around 4pm, and take a 1-2 hour lunch sometime between the two. This schedule is only possible working from home. I now hit 40 hours per week week every single week that I work all 5 days, where as before I would hit 30 hours. And even weeks where I only work 4 days, I still hit ~35 hours after shrinking my lunch.
There was a fansinating take on the potential impact of a WFH revolution on white collar works in The Telegraph the other day.
As companies embrace working from home and downsize their offices presence, a lot of the barriers to entry to offshoring start to disappear - if everyone is remote then a remote individuals in cheaper Eastern Europe will likely integrate a lot easier than when most the employees were sitting together in expensive London.
White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.
Personally, if my team stays remote, then our next hire will most likely not be London based. There’s a much larger pool of European talent available to us and we’re now better setup to and culturally open to hiring remote first. This isn’t something our company would have considered before COVID.
The flip side to that is with the UK leaving the EU will there be legal and taxation hurdles. Also, sometimes having local context, and the ability to meet locally at short notice is an important requirement. I don't think it's as clear cut in all cases.
Will there? Plenty of workers fly in from non EU countries to work in the UK and rest of EU.
We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa.
Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip.
Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa.
Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply.
If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already.
I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work.
Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing.
People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed.
When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.
Even within the EU every country has its own income tax rules and employment regulation. I'm not a fan of Brexit but I don't see any significant changes around this.
London is notorious for low SWEng salaries; you might not have any other choice than to contract somebody in Ukraine who didn't escape somewhere else if your own employees get higher paid remote gigs in the US...
I'm from Liverpool originally (live abroad now) and I have friends in Manchester earning £50-60k... in the North of England. That's a big wage in that area.
Yeah, even both Google and FB pay engineers pretty terribly in London. I was once asked to move there, and I refused unless they accounted for cost of living changes. They didn't, so I stayed working at my original office.
The stat you link appears to be for "IT" jobs across all of the UK. Restricting the search to "Software Engineer" and "London"[0] bumps the number up quite a bit to £72,500 as of when I checked.
>White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Lots of white collar people seemingly have a very "meh" attitude towards manufacturing getting outsourced. What will the attitude be once these white collar jobs start leaving?
Wage decrease in one place means wage increase elsewhere. If someone who could do my job for half of my income, maybe they should get the job.
I place my future in the fact that it will be hard for employers to hire someone that can do my job (all facet of it) for half of my income. Sure there will be people slipping through the crack at that level, but hiring is a numbers game where you don't count on luck.
Having worked with overseas teams in the past, I'm not particularly concerned.
There are plenty of companies specially in tech sector that build and support products that are focused and used in multiple countries, and are quite successful. They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience. Why would it not be possible to do it the other way around?
That’s interesting and something I hadn’t considered.
That said it probably depends on the job.
I’m currently working remote, but same timezone. I may go remote at a very different timezone, but the expectation is clear that I’m overlapping most of the West Coast work day (calls with vendors, team calls, etc).
For me that would mean working from 8pm to 2am, approximately. Not sure I have the stamina for that.
I reached that conclusion at the start of the coronavirus lockdown; that the managers who resisted letting us work remotely were consoling themselves at the outsourcing experiment they were conducting.
But I’m not too sure outsourcing white collar jobs will work.
Trumpism has 40% of the electorate in any western country. Add in the masses of disillusioned white collar workers, and populism will be the natural political position of every Western country (therefore joining the rest of the world)
Now imagine a “respectable” Trumpism, i.e. populism without the icky Le Penns, Salvinis, or Trumps.
The cost of hiring good talent (whether remote or on-site) will always be the same. Companies (tech and non-tech) and government facilities have tried to hire cheap labor to replace more experienced workers for many decades. The result is usually the same with a few exceptions: poor work which has to be refactored, re-worked, or completely thrown out. Usually underpaid employees have no incentive to do anything more than what's assigned to them. The old adage comes true: "you get what you pay for."
In the end the employer has to deal with a shitty product and in the end hire the right talent to get the job done (which they should have done in the first place).
Agreed. It's actually amazing how often I've seen a company truly believe that the lower wages they pay to offshore workers has no impact on the quality of the product, only for the truly diminished nature to become apparent after some time.
That's not to say all offshore workers are bad, of course. Just that, just because you can hire an Eastern European for half the price doesn't mean they will produce the same quality work as the other people who were more expensive.
In remote work, communication matters more. Language barriers kill it. Working with non native language speakers over less than ideal communication channels is hell on Earth.
Corporate managers need to run the following exercise:
1) Quantify the loss in productivity from employees working from home. Call this "x."
2) Calculate the savings in rent you don't have to pay for putting the company's employees in an office. Call this "y."
3) If x < y, pass on savings to shareholders, take your bonus, and have a nice day.
4) Explore hiring candidates outside of major metros and see if you can pay them less.
Will not happen, of course. The modern corporate middle manager thrives as a sycophant, constantly praising their bosses / and boss's bosses - yes sir / ma'am, how high would you like me to jump for my bonus? Thus, they are desperate to get back into the office and play that sweet, sweet game of "office politics." Also, they probably leased additional space for more tech and digital marketing workers, so they are trying to not regret that decision.
Even the folks in non-tech jobs who hate WFH, griping about missing look-em-in-the-eyes managerialism, or how they can’t do management-by-walking-around, acknowledge the past few months have been more productive and curiously more collaborative (right people across national offices invited to “meetings” and able to attend).
So actual productivity up, other factors important to Taylorist managers (but not to individual contributors) sharply down.
If there is one business I would not want to be in right now it is commercial real estate. I'll be letting go of 2/3rds of our office space at the end of this year and I may even get rid of all of it depending on how things develop.
With some luck this will have a nice downward effect on house prices in and around Amsterdam, where plenty of companies have converted houses to offices.
My wife used to be in commercial real estate. She said that that from what she heard from colleagues, the industry is actually doing pretty well at the moment, since so many offices have to be completely refitted for covid-19 precautions, and that's something that's also handled by those companies.
But right now a lot of places are still under contract for their leases. Might be a different story in a year or so when more leases expire and they just don't bother keeping their offices.
You want to know an industry that's really screwed? The industry she left commercial real estate for: events/conventions. Her current company has had basically no revenue since the first lockdowns, and that's not changing anytime soon.
She's been eyeing jobs in commercial real estate again as an escape from events, as they're in better shape for the moment, at least.
I always keep our leases short because you never know what the future brings. I'd hate to be locked to a five or 10 year contract. Sure, I don't get the best rates. But that flexibility has paid off more than once.
You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.
I work in CRE. There’s still a lot of demand. I think we tend to get a bit of a myopic perspective around HN due to most being in tech, which is well suited to remote work and also tends to have a lot of introverted personalities.
I really hope this trend sticks so that we can decentralize away from big urban centers. It would really allow us to free ourselves from crowded spaces/amenities, painful commutes, and high prices, as well as letting us seek out the community/culture that fits us best.
Agreed. Getting managers to agree to WFH (and keep allowing WFH) has always been a struggle. Management hates it, because they can't see with their own eyeballs that everyone is "working" (with "sitting at their desk" as a somewhat-useful heuristic proxy for "working"). Lots of companies have tried full-remote, and very few stick with it long-term. I think that once the risk is low enough, we'll all be back to the exact same long packed commutes and open-plan offices.
I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound when it turned out that close communication between teams requires more than phone, email, and video. There are places where it works (I am an example of that), but it normally doesn't work all that well, because the advantages of being in one physical space are normally hard to quantify and thus hard to reproduce.
I'm still amazed the fight seems to be "everyone works from home" or "everyone works from the office".
I've been fairly productive since we all started full-time from home in March. However I prefer working at the office. As time has gone on I've found myself losing routine. Either working sporadically through the day or longer hours in general.
Being somewhere does a better job for me of time-boxing work.
That being said, I also have my work and personal machine in the same room. So now I'm spending most of my time in one room! I'm working to rectify that situation.
I agree with you and find myself in a similar situation and mindspace re: time boxing. I found having a KVM switch to have to actually "go to work" and "go to personal" was a good mental switch. And make sure you have a good chair. I was having minor back issues before I upgraded my chair with how long I was spending at the desk.
How will this affect commercial real estate? I've already noticed an uptick in "for lease" signs on commercial buildings throughout the major city I live in...
This is going to be another short decision making drive, decided by the CFOs because they have the 'cost' numbers in front of them, whereas issues like productivity are a little more intangible.
We work in 'open spaces' because the CFO can definitively say "$/employee!" - whereas the impact on staff is difficult to measure. The 'up front cost' is the driver.
This same 'cost logic' will apply to remote working, once Ops can see 'how cheap it is' they will love it but it may have nothing to do with true ROI.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadHowever, even with commuting time, I'm happier (due to distinct separation of home-time and work-time) and more productive when I have an office I work from 3-4 days a week.
During my last "remote" engagement I joined a small community co-working space in Boston after two weeks of "true" work from home. I've found my idea balance is 3-4 days a week in-office and 1-2 days "remote".
I envy those of you who can work remote without issue, even as an introvert who dislikes lots of people and distractions I can't see "remote first" as something I enjoy going forward.
There was a poll on linkedIn I came across with over 10k responses where the slight majority of people believe partial working from home was the best, beating out full working from home by a little, and no working from home being significantly in last.
The current property tax system that most cities use make little sense. It penalizes people for improving and updating the structures on their land. Cities should be encouraging property improvements.
"Adjusted for inflation, the average office tenant paid a peak price of $34.34 per square foot during the fourth quarter of 2000, 65.5 percent more than the current average rate of $20.76, according to Newmark Knight Frank data. It's almost as deeply pronounced for Class A space — which has the best amenities and finishes. Today's Class A rental rate is $24.36 per square foot, but in the third quarter of 2001, tenants paid inflation-adjusted rent of $38.12 per square foot, 56.5 percent more than now" [0].
[0]: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20170730/news/635141/d...
And a NYTimes article similarly, "The Empty Storefronts of New York" https://archive.is/JnhDS
Basically rents are too high, so businesses won't rent because it won't be profitable. In 2018 when the NYT article was written, "about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016."
So maybe this is bimodal: you have "rich" areas like Manhattan and SF and Seattle, where rents stay high even with low occupancy (landlords sitting on empty properties and enjoying the free ride of increasing asset prices), and you have "poor" cities like Detroit, where no one wants it and you can't even give it away ("free" property still comes with liabilities like taxes and maintenance).
When I talk to people from demographics that are accused of being gentrifiers (young professionals), the overwhelming reasons they choose a neighborhood are to be near restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, shops, work and friends. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone pay a premium to be near an art gallery, or live near artists' private studios.
There are some gentrified neighborhoods that were known for their artists. New York's Soho is an example. These days the place is full of overpriced fashion stores, both independent ones as well as global chains. I can see why the shops were attracted - for branding purposes it might help to be associated with those artists. But I wouldn't say that artists turned it into a particularly vibrant neighborhood, at least not more than other neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan.
Is it that it's about correlation, not causation? It seems reasonable that artists would be attracted to an area for the same reason as, say, independent coffee roasteries (both require cheap space). I suspect it's only really the latter that are attracting new residents though.
The conglomeration of all of these people tends to lead to events, club nights and new and interesting businesses. This makes the area more attractive, causing others to move in and thus kickstarts the gentrification process.
One of them lost their economic engine. The other is undergoing a real estate adjustment.
And you'll find plenty of web/creative agencies plying their trade in the area, although that sector isn't quite as distinctive as in - say - Manchester.
It's all part of the standard gentrification cycle: - collapse -> bohemian -> artisanal -> gentrified -> investment grade -> collapse... but hurried along some.
Of course, one is free to regret.
Now, it would seem that the best we can do is make the most of the information available to us in the present moment.
Absolutely. Previous WHO classification has a "Phase 4: Sustained community-level outbreaks -> Medium to high probability of pandemic" designation, which has a roughly once-a-decade frequency historically. Compared to multi-quarter, multi-year scale of real estate planning, 10 years is not infinite long term. Of course it is so in comparison to quarterly earnings, share prices, average tenure of a fund manager, a CEO and so forth, so it doesn't get priced in or gets bundled with other catastrophes.
One of the great tragedies of American society in the 20th century (in my opinion) was a focus on building everything around the car, the suburb, and the commute. Producing well paid office workers disconnected from any sort of community or the issues around them. Everything is a drive away, no one walks anywhere, feelings of isolation and segregation.
Would it? With commutes dead, a good chunk of weekday traffic is gone.
I think it goes hand-in-hand with the coming loss of the car as a personal device and its transformation into "individual transit" as opposed to "mass transit". In the future, when you can use an app to get an autonomous vehicle to take you where you want to go, communities will restructure. Parking lots and garages will go away, opening up a huge amount of real estate.
I wouldn't mind starting a sort of "virtual salon" to talk about these larger questions. It's fascinating.
I worry that this trend is simply to squeeze employees harder. Now employees have to pay for their own workspaces, desks, chairs, etc.
Another set of commercial property owners will sit on their above-market lease agreements and try and squeeze blood from a stone.
- Water, electricity, HVAC, sanitation
- Desks, chairs, ergonomic equipment, safety equipment
- Telecom, networking support
- Physical security
- Office supplies
- Misc. amenities like coffee and snacks
Some companies are taking this into account, but not all.
A personal anecdote: we had an all-hands meeting today and the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back. Whether or not that's temporary nostalgia for a previous life or an enduring need is an interesting discussion, but there are definitely people wanting to go back. I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
edit: formatting, I'll learn eventually
Many coworkers have a nice big house to work from. The ones with kids most want to come back, because they appreciate the mental separation they get.
Remember, Quarentine Work Is Not Remote Work - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork...
More interesting than remote/in-office is that we don't seem to be acknowledging the inevitable permanence of social distancing measures. No more four-dudes-in-an-office. No more coming to work with mild cold symptoms.
It’s been so long since I wore headphones I forgot how bad it was. Zooms were difficult as other people in earshot (only 4 people, all about 4m away) were talking at the same time.
But if I had an office with a door (like I have at home) and a fixed deal with monitors rather than hunching over a laptop (as I do at home) maybe things would be different.
I hadn't considered this. I've always thought that many companies are tied to long leases they wouldn't be able to get out of that quickly. I can imagine some savings on the other associated office costs.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
Interesting...could you please elaborate on this?
I don't understand this, why?
Regarding the rest of your comment, I totally agree. My mom and sister both work for a large, old-fashioned company, and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started. They both had to buy setups out of their own pocket, and these are not people making tech salaries.
Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though. It's really preferable to have a dedicated space for an office, and this is not free. It's one thing for someone who made a choice to go remote, but for people forced into it, it feels unfair to me.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the new world, offices are viewed as a perk rather than a requirement due to all this. I personally work remotely for the record, but talking to many people in my life, it's clear this is not for everyone.
That is such a low life mentality. Not to give two screens worth $200 to someone who's probably making 10-20 times that a month.
What I envisage is super localised hubs,or small office spaces in residential areas. Small building nicely fitting into the area and offering local people some level of office like environment
Penny wise pound foolish
Having to work from your lounge, or kitchen, or worse bedroom makes it much harder to switch off.
My sentiments are similar to OP's, and for me a large part of my job satisfaction was getting to hang out with really incredible people all day, getting lunch with those people, getting afterwork drinks with them, etc. Hanging out on video chat just isn't the same.
Of course, an argument can (and maybe should) be made that it's smarter to to keep your work focused on the work, and find your social outlets elsewhere. However, the unfortunate reality is that for those of us far removed from school and our home towns, work is where we tend to make our friends.
On top of that, I just enjoyed the change of scenery in leaving my apartment in the burbs to go into a nice office space in the city. Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.
Of course that later point would be somewhat mitigated in a world where I could work out of shared space or the local coffee shop, so I'm not sure if that's an indictment of remote work in general for my purposes.
This is because of corona, not because of working from home.
I think this could be different with a complete overhaul of corporate culture but I haven't seen it yet in 20 years of employment with "teleworking" being an option at least part of the time. Perhaps remote-first teams really are different, but you're still stuck at home all day, or spending time and money going to a coffee shop and maybe finding a seat+wifi, etc.
It's not like I don't get out to run, go to the park, or even occasionally meet a friend for a drink on a spacious patio. So my comment was somewhat hyperbole. But sharing the same space for work and sleep is still driving me a bit batty.
We all have different needs of course. I recognize I don't share the same needs as many. Hence I'd never advocate for a workplace that didn't accommodate those that did prefer to work remote.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be an introvert/extrovert thing (for the most part). Extroverts miss being around people they can engage in conversations with, while introverts love not having extroverts around trying to engage in conversations with them. I think both camps have valid needs and right now the extrovert's needs aren't being met to their satisfaction.
Could also be the most vociferous or those worried about losing jobs to outsourcing? Also there's morale at play which could be people wanting to showcase they're all-in for facetime and not wanting to be the only ones without team spirit. imo people will vote with their feet re: remote work by not interviewing or accepting offers at companies that force back to the office.
Agree there's a nostalgia factor at play and need for ongoing discussions, I think overall things are going to move towards greater flexibility and maybe flex days/time etc.
- Physical space. If you've got a small home without a spare room to turn into an office, have fun working on the kitchen table!
I used to work full-time remote, and had the choice to go anywhere I wanted in the world. I still landed in NYC, and stayed because I loved a diverse, walkable community with amazing nightlife, culture, and parks all around.
I eventually took a job in an office in the city because I liked having an occasional social environment with coworkers, both in the office and outside of it. Working at home full-time as a person without a family and more social needs than I was willing to admit for a long time was extremely isolating, but I don't want a family yet.
I'm eager to go back to the office as soon as it is safe at scale for all the same reasons I was eager to leave my remote job and go into an office again most days originally. Moving somewhere cheap and more isolated to have more space to work at home is about the lowest thing on my priority list.
(But I recognize that I'm fortunate to work at a place which always had pretty good tolerance for remote work, even pre-pandemic, even if I didn't take advantage of it... and also lucky to have coworkers who I generally enjoy being around and working with.)
Now I'm working in windowless cinderblock closet in my basement. I live near family and friends so just uprooting to a mini-mansion in the country isn't really a workable option. Companies clearly valued nice offices as a quality of life benefit to their employees, but now providing that nice office experience is squarely on my shoulders.
If my partner and I are going to be working remotely for the long term we'll probably need to move to a bigger house that can give us both better work spaces, which will probably cost $200K-$300K more than our current home. $250K financed at 3% interest over 30 years is $1200/mo plus things like heat, maintenance, furnishings, etc.
I don't expect my company to pony up a $15K/year remote work stipend, but also I see this a WFH future as a net downgrade from my old way of life.
I also find my costs reduced because now I am no longer eating out for lunch, let alone because I felt pressure to do so daily.
However there are companies that are overly proud of their head quarters and other real estate and are going to be loathe to give it up; this includes elite addresses and locations
Now, people who were living in spaces where they didn't have a dedicated office space are dying for one. (like myself) And, unfortunately, the competition for homes with more bedrooms has skyrocketed. I'm looking at paying $2000 more a month just so I can get a couple more bedrooms for office work! Moving away for a year or more isn't a real option either.
Yet places like Google would argue for them as part of their TC. The companies that tend to offer these benefits don't usually get rid of them until they're going out of business...
Also, cash is king but companies can offer benefits at scale that will be much harder to access for me as an individual.
I spend a lot more time dealing with food now (cooking, cleanup, groceries) than I spent on my commute. I could go to a restaurant, but if I don't want to eat the same thing every day, getting there and back and waiting for the food is going to take more time than my commute, especially if I do it for more than lunch.
Even purely from a time perspective, free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute is an EXCELLENT deal in my case. I can totally see that being different if your commute is longer than 30 minutes.
Even still, I've been working later (7pm approx) as I've started with a company based out of California (I'm in Ireland), which sucks for eating food.
Slow cookers/crockpots are kinda ace, you can dump all the ingredients into it in the morning, and have a meal when you finish work. As a bonus, the smell of the food is nice in the afternoons.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-cafeterias-whet-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-and-free-food-at-tech-co...
Beyond that - friends can also be more important than family. I know plenty of people who won't move because all their friends are where they currently live - and they're fine with not being close to their family.
Why do you need a couple more bedrooms?
Can split a bedroom as an office with the other person in your house.
If you have kids you can pair them up in the same bedroom with bunk beds.
You could spend the money on a Murphy bed that folds up and turns into a desk.
I have co-workers who even work from their dining room table for the time being.
Moving is always an option every excuse you have just follow up with, "and...?".
Congrats, you don't live in silicon valley. Woohoo. Your life is not everyone's nor is it representative of what everyone can get.
My employer will only keep people who will show up at the office. If I found employers regularly paying $400k+ for remote - I'd consider it... But I don't see them often.
I had two choices when I could see myself topping out locally as a bog standard enterprise dev - either I could go the r/cscareerquestions route and “grind leetCode” so I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard, and move to high cost of living area or I could focus on gaining experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant” somewhere where most of the jobs are remote with travel.
Right when I was about to pull the trigger and start applying for local companies, Covid hit, the local market dried up and I got an email from an Amazon recruiter.
I thought I might as well try. I can answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and I had the relevant experience.
I can tell you according to levels.fyi that my salary is the same for my level as someone living in Seattle. I also know an SA living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is making the same for his level as someone in Seattle.
Edit:
Would I move to the west coast for $225K compared to what I could makes locally? Heck no, $400K, maybe. At this point in life, even my local pre-Covid salary was “enough” for us to comfortably meet our short and long term goals.
The extra $70K-$80K basically just gave us enough to tell my wife don’t worry about going back to work surrounded by Covid when school starts back and the rest is going straight to long term goals - save more for retirement, pay off the house faster, etc.
Doubling our income wouldn’t make any lifestyle differences. What are we going to do travel in a post Covid world? Buy a larger house for three people and within a few years 2?
I made plenty of $bad_life_decisions until 12 years ago. So early retirement is out of the question. But that’s okay, I’ve never hated my career, my previous jobs at times definitely.
But, with a paid off house, the amount of savings I should be able to amass in 20 years by the time I’m 65, and hopefully social security is still a thing. With today’s rules, your spouse can either collect their social security or half of yours while you are both still living. We could easily live off of an (inflation adjusted) $4500 SS + the hopeful retirement savings.
And it's really not the norm for companies to pay for meals or commuting.
But, yes, if you want to continue living in an expensive urban area, the cost of an extra room is significant. I do consider myself fortunate that I live in a semi-rural area and have a dedicated office. I know a number of people who are fleeing city apartments to more rural areas.
Both are cheaper than average (I think the buss is 1/2 the normal ticket price and the lunch is 2/3 of normal "take out" price) but certainly not free.
Everyone is also thinking this the wrong way around. People are thinking "how would this fit my current lifestyle" instead of "if this is the new normal, how would I change my lifestyle and would it be better over all".
I don't live in a big city even now, my commute is about 20minutes each way with a car. As it currently stands if I can stay working completely remotely I probably will and I will be selling my apartment and looking for a house in a more rural area. Something larger than my current apartment so I could have an actual office (in an ideal world there would be a separate building that would act as office / workshop). Currently I'm struggling with no dedicated office space, but that is because being 100% remote wasn't an option.
I get that many people have grown to expect free lunches and whatever from their work, but in over all work force thous people are in tiny margin group and while it sure would be sad if they lose the privilege, but needs of the many and so on.
I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
And why would you pay $2000 for a "couple more" bedrooms? You're telling me you can't put an L-desk in your living room? This thread just has ridiculous scenarios upon ridiculous scenarios, like the guy who would need to take a "40k pay cut" to get a home gym and a 3D printer.
Some people like having living rooms without office furniture jammed into them - go figure. Most people I know would have to get rid of some furniture in order to fit a desk nicely into their living room.
> I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
The 3 meals a day thing just sounds like gatekeeping. "You must not be a real adult because you want food that's included in your benefits instead of having to labor over it like the rest of us who don't have such benefits!" (Or you have to pay for those meals to be delivered - which is very costly on an individual scale)
What if you can't go get your oil changed now? Should I say, "I'm appalled that there are adults getting oil changes at service centers and are upset that they now have to get those oil changes done themselves"
And the argument is not that these people getting 3 free meals arent adults, it's that they are actually unprepared for a world in which they themselves have to pay for their own breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Also, those lunches are not free: employers offer them as part of the compensation and to keep you at the office working late. Compensation negotiations always bring up the benefits as an item of your compensation. If a company makes the argument that they are paying you in fact x,000 more in the form of benefits, they are now breaking this agreement (even if it is oral) and not paying you. (I have had a "if you end up working too late and there is no food in the office, we will pay for the food and keep working." style of clause).
Similarly, some people do negotiate working from home most of the time and doing a 3-4 hour commute once a week in exchange for reduced salary, to enjoy a larger and cheaper home. That is an obligation the employer placed on the employee and asks for money to lift it, and allow them to live somewhere further away.
Related to the workspace, I do personally like to change working environments (e.g. coffee shops at times, quiet room at others) etc. Most people though need to consistently separate work and rest of their lives.
And the workspace is the responsibility of the employee unless you have a remote work contract. (Certain countries have legislation on the matter in fact for both cases.) Imagine a car mechanic being asked now to service cars at their home instead. For engineers the work environment is not a power plug, some paper and a laptop, even for software engineers. That is romantic naivete perhaps, and dangerous thinking.
If employers send surveys around and ask point blank if people have screens, space, good desk and chair, keyboards, high speed stable connection -- home connections now have to take the slack from enterprise ones -- good access to all the servers, they disagree with the above thinking. They wouldn't be paying for all of the above in the first place, otherwise.
The leading companies would take account of those costs. One would hope they would also adapt to take acct of home office costs
I'm seeing/expecting people will want to go in some, but not back to 5-days in the office. 2-3 days, when necessary to really do things together.
If this reduced office loading prevails, it'll also help everyone from workers to cities with the misery & costs of commuting (tho I did read that NPR has lost huge audience due to loss of commute-time listeners).
I've seen our company quickly react to the reduced office related costs and have reallocated that to cover employee's home office needs: internet service, phone, supplies. If you needed a desk at home, that also was accommodated.
Being able to take our work computer(s), including dual monitors, was also immediately available to everyone.
Is this something that is coming about as a result of the pandemic?
I honestly wouldn’t give up working from home for triple my salary. The flexibility to come and go as I please, not losing time to a commute, watching the kid grow up. All priceless to me.
However, I have enough bedrooms to use one as an office, a garden I can work in during summer. I can understand if I had to work at the kitchen table with the family making noise around me I would be yearning to go in to the office.
Riding around was an interesting experience, London isn’t too bad at the moment with very few people there, certainly different to pre covid though
More so, I think folks like me that had a 5 minute walking commute are losing out a ton of benefits by not being near the office anymore.
I'm lucky the weather's been cooperating but if I had to have the A/C on for days I would easily be spending $60-100/mo just for HVAC, forget the extra water, electricity and other utility costs for the extra usage at home.
We got a $500 WFH stipend but it definitely won't cover 12-16 months of this.
Overall though, I realize I'm in the minority and most people are winning back their time and money.
They know they're saving money in the long term on space, and they're splitting that with employees pretty fairly. $1500 up front for all existing employees and all new hires to provision a space to work remote, and a $125 a month in reimbursement for internet/phone/electricity, no questions asked.
Frankly, it's made the transition pretty positive for all parties. The company saves a ton in the long term on rental space, and employees get a nice perk.
There are still folks that would prefer not being remote, but most folks are pretty happy without a commute.
The problem is there's so much information and communication that happens implicitly through our day-to-day actions that when you're remote, you have to make that information explicit. It's tiring as hell.
For example, meetings. In person, you can look at a room and understand some basic relationships-who is talking to whom, who is laughing, who is avoiding, etc. This gives you valuable information on the shape of the team and how to navigate and work best with each other. Turn that into a zoom meeting, however, and that information either has to be explicitly pointed out or it is lost. This kind of thing eats up valuable cycles for information that could have been communicated in a literal glance.
Good remote teams have better communication in my experience because very often "implicit" communication in an office means you think you communicated something but did not.
Making all communication explicit is a useful habit to into, and overall improves everything.
> Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though.
100% agree. Many people are literally working in closets or worse, if they even can.
@taurath - "Quarantine Work Is Not Remote Work" good point. People are learning to support their remote colleagues right now, whether they intended to or not :) So "normal remote work" might be even better after this chapter concludes.
Hard problem to solve. Other people in the company had to go in every day, and I'm sure they LOVE not having to commute, and for good reason.
Companies can't really "rent an office space" for one day a week can they? It's not realistic. I wonder what will work look like in the next 2 years. I'm glad I had a chance to experience the office setting for a year at least.
Not exactly but they could get 1/5 the space and rotate people onsite one day per week.
But, I couldn’t stand the loud open office. One of the reasons I changed jobs was because there was talk about us coming back into the office by the end of June.
My job (for a FAANG) now was always designed to be fully remote and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve job hopped for the last decade, but there isn’t a dollar amount that would make me go back into the office.
Agree with most of these, but man do I ever miss the free and very well provisioned salad bar at the office :( I've eaten more grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches during WFH than any self-respecting adult ever should.
I'm curious what the IRS will have to say about it. If self-employed people can deduct a certain amount of their square footage as an "office expense", can I do that too? All those things you just listed are now part of my employment.
You can (Please check with a CPA before listening to this rando on the internet, I did my homework but it's a big deal and you want to do it correctly and legally) deduct any single purpose office space that you use at home from your taxes.
a) Things I would be paying for anyways as part of maintaining my residence
or
b) Vastly outweighed by the savings in time and vehicle wear/tear by not commuting to and from an office 5 days a week. If we use a figure lower than the official IRS vehicle cost reimbursement, $0.50 per mile, and my commute is 20 miles one way. That's 200 miles a week, same as $100.00/week vehicle expenses, or $5200/year.
They could also get an exception and attend the working sessions remotely. But there's a chance that could lead to fewer opportunities for advancement for them, because they weren't there. Which sucks. It's not an ideal situation.
BTW, lots of enterprise sales companies already do annual "sales kickoff" events where they fly all their salespeople globally to a single place. It's not unprecedented.
You're not far off the description of parents of young and early school-age children. Kids are in school/daycare for part of the day, then at home, needing dinner, care, etc.
Salespeople know, when they take their job, that they'll be expected to travel for work. Developers may not expect that to be a requirement of their job.
And I don't think a quarterly on-site is enough.
Also, I think the size of the company plays an important role as well. We're about 2000 employees in the IT departments alone, I somehow cannot imagine all of those people permanently working from home while also being able to properly cooperate with the other 100k employees.
If it were that good, software engineering in the US would suffer the same fate as manufacturing: it would disappear to cheaper foreign workers and only specialties would survive.
Would it be? Seems like, at a minimum, various employer liabilities that exist when an employee is working independently of whether or not it is at the employer’s location become less controlled in remote work, which potentially works strongly against that.
Also, the argument you make, even in the best case, fails to grasp the difference between “is” and “has always been” and the magnitude of impact of cultural inertia in favor of what has worked well in the past.
There was a difference in amount of time wasted though. Going to the office is in my case much more wasteful, mostly due to travel time (90 minutes per day).
I wonder if a remote employee working in a low cost of living area moved to a high cost of living area would their pay be increased or would the company put up a fight? "You voluntarily moved to a high cost of living area, why should i pay you more?". However, "you voluntarily moved to a low cost of living area, i'm paying you less" is reality.
This does happen now when companies have multiple offices. I've seen people move from LCOL to HCOL and see a cost of living adjustment.
Edit - they don’t officially do WFH (outside COVID) so cant comment on that.
Edit: it’s truly a test of elasticity
Your salary is the balance between the leverage you have over the company and the leverage the company has over you. If they can get rid of you and hire someone remotely for half the price they will. If you want to stay in an expensive city while working remotely and the company can't do without you, they won't.
Ex, if a bunch of white and asian bay area employees relocate to Florida, taking their salaries, and then Facebook hires some local hispanic employees at 1/2 the rate... well, you can try to explain exactly what happened after you get sued, but that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And even if you legally get away with it, you are going to have a lot of REALLY unhappy employees.
Not to mention you're opening yourself up to a real game, where employees move to the Bay Area for a year to get hired at a high salary, and then immediately leave for 2x the salary. All you've done is turned salaries into a game that benefit highly-mobile employees.
So I definitely understand why this feels shitty, but I honestly can't see it working any other way for large corporations. You have to have some kind of local salary adjustment you can stand behind, when you're remote-first hiring.
Company Type 1, where they don't care where you live
Company Type 2, where they explicitly care, and have some stupid table they look at.
I suspect it will lead to a lot of employees at T2 companies getting shafted. Not everyone is as Online as the HN crowd.
My personal residence address is need-to-know, and if I were to have an employer, they would have no need whatsoever to know my residential address.
If you're remote, it's simply not their business. You might have an extra step when filing state income tax, but that's your liability, not theirs.
Unfortunately, given the run-amuckness of registration and compliance requirements, it probably is needed for your employer to know where you live (or at least in which state and local taxation/regulation entity).
0: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
For 1, what are your alternatives in your local market or remote positions (next best alternative). For 2, if they just fired you instead and then opened up the position to anyone anywhere, what would they have to pay?
Also, yes, I have moved from a low cost of living area to a high cost of living area and got a pay adjustment. It is standard to increase pay for those moves (they they are not always approved though)
Soda at the grocery store? $1.50 Soda at the gas station? $1.99 Soda at Disney World? $30
Your skills are not worth a fixed rate. Your skills are worth more in certain areas because the demand is higher in those areas. As soon as you go remote, you are competing with every other remote worker in the US. More competition, lower price.
It's not a coincidence that conversations around the number of engineers/designers required for a project commonly end up referring to them as 'resources' in most companies.
Since algorithm interviews are the current norm for filtering, there are a huge swathes of people who are just as good at beating such interviews but never got the chance due to their location.
A) will be irreparably harmed and have to cease operations.
B) will hire a replacement and be fine.
(Hint: It's B)
I personally suspect the employment market is just not very efficient due to a lack of information. If companies had perfectly accurate information about how good every software person is, available for free, we'd probably all be paid based on that information, with our cost of living ignored.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are actually quite a lot of smart people who just don't care to live in the valley for various reasons, and they are all just as available as you are when the whole team is 100% remote. Companies are going to love it, but a subset of employees are going to be sad as the market rate adjusts to the new reality.
What if the market says you can get away paying less for group X? What if X is some historically marginalized group? Does it make it OK? What if X = remote workers?
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
i.e. 1. Employee moved back in with parents, not paying rent. Should company start paying them less because they need less?
2. Employee works remote from Arkansas, has 2 kids in college and is sending checks home to support mom. Company pays them less because... Arkansas?
How about the number we agreed on is the number we agreed on.
This is exactly what the company is doing.
They’re paying you the number you agreed upon until they don’t want to anymore (or until they’ve fulfilled whatever contractual agreements they’ve made). You’re not guaranteed to keep getting the number you agreed upon if your work sucks or the company goes out of business.
By the same token, you’re not obligated to hold up your end of the bargain any longer than you have to based on whatever agreement was made. Want to move to a cheap city and find a new high-paying job? Go nuts.
Cost of living in terms of rent or expenses is not everything. If I work from India, I also pay in terms of reduced life expectancy due to higher pollution, greater chance of dying in a road accident and what not. If a perverse sense of 'fairness' (or a facade of it) is so important to companies, I would love to see these factors being considered too.
As an anecdote from first hand experience, if your parents live close enough to your work (less than 2 hours commute) it's considered that you could live with them, regardless of what you actually do. Then, you cannot claim the $7k/year indemnity for accommodation. This is significant for a salary of $36k in this company (not in tech).
The company agreed to pay you X amount because that's the market in the area you and the employer are competing in. Once you expand beyond that area the market changes. You're now competing against all of the other engineers from SF to Arkansas (and beyond). Let's put this way. If you're working from Arkansas, why should your employer pay you 400k/yr when they can just hire someone else in a cheap COL area within a reasonable timezone for a fraction of that?
Also if the high COL employee owns a property, much of that difference goes into equity in their home. Which they can they cash out and move to a low COL area.
Eg: moving to 10% lower CoL? then it will only be a 5% pay cut, or something along those lines.
Your point of "same output, why not same return?" makes sense, but this way employees are incentivized
Same outcome (for the company), less (wasted) hours for me. This is impossible to achieve if one has to go to the office. (can you imagine entering at 9am and leaving at 2pm while telling everybody: "hey, I cannot work anymore, I'm only able to work focused 5 hours per day. See you tomorrow!".)
Went on a berserk coding spree from 1PM to 1AM with some small breaks in between. Completely cut off from any distraction, I was able to concentrate.
Willpower and discipline are nice, but real restrictions that are impossible to circumvent are better, at least for me.
I've been forced to work without the internet for large swaths of time. In the beginning its a pain, but once you get all the resources you need local, you can speed up past what you can do with the internet.
The key, for me, is to work without the internet, keeping a list of things you need and when you hit a hard snag, go online, grab all the things you need, repeat. This allows you to slowly accumuate almost everything you need local.
Now you have the ability to full-text index the entire shebang and when you get to the point of real-time responsive full-text search on all your manuals and all the source code (libraries included), you'll be kicking yourself for not getting to that point much sooner.
It was truly a game-changer for me. Googling for answers and filtering through the crap is a huge time sink.
If I'm doing something in a less familiar language, library, or framework (or even new techniques), then I fully expect that I'll rely heavily on internet to find code samples, reference, and documentation.
It will force you to really learn whatever you are doing.
I mainly did refactoring on that day, so I had to make decisions by myself, anyway.
Kids don't understand time or space boundaries very well, and will interrupt your focus, your meetings, your work in general.
I have a colleague with kids and he was the first to volunteer back to the office.. I am without kids and I never want to go back.
This works out decently well, because he's alone: thus, safer than if we all came back.
But the issue is if there was more people in the office, then they would make decisions which the rest of us are not privy to.
I’ve worked from home their entire lives though.
This summer, we're foregoing camp due to safety concerns.
Being a doormat is not helping anyone, including yourself.
(Edit: I really don’t miss my boomer/genx coworkers jamming out to hair metal)
https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/new-research-says-workers-...
The study claimed that people spend a lot of time doing "work about work", dealing with apps, and so on: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191017005053/en/Asa...
The time spent on distractions and procrastination was around 1 hour per day:
> On average, the research shows that knowledge workers waste one hour and four minutes each day due to distractions and procrastination
So to be clear, people were working for more like 80% of their day, but not 100% of that time was considered core work or productive meetings.
People don't simply socialize and mess around on the internet for 50% of their work days at most companies. I've been at companies where people get away with that level of messing around, but I wouldn't say it's the norm.
Just minutes? No seconds? Garbage study.
When people say these things I seriously question if they've ever worked remote before. Yes if being remote makes you atypical for your workplace, then you'll probably be left out. But if you're working for a remote-first team the it's completely different. Nearly all of my closest coworkers I've met have been at remote companies.
I have had tons of interesting conversations, brainstorming session and just generally fun discussion while remote.
Honestly, I have personally found the amount of more toxic conversations also drops when remote. The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like (working with people you don't like is fine, but having to have conversations with them, go out for team drinks with them etc is another thing). This leads to generally more toxic behavior, since you have to put more energy into those social interactions.
This is actually a problem with remote companies.
It's really easy for teams to silo themselves away in private chat channels and form exclusionary cliques. It's fun for those in the inner circle, but it's miserable for newcomers and anyone else trying to get work done without being part of the in-group for a particular project.
Obviously the same dynamics can play out in a real office, too, but it happens much more frequently when it only takes a few clicks to make it happen. People are much more likely to be mean to each other when it's just a screen name on your computer rather than the real person you have to see every day.
Now that we're remote, it's much easier. None of the high school bullshit. If you're on a project, you're assigned work and have project team mates if you get blocked. With daily standups (even for non-programming roles), it's pretty easy to see who's struggling with a story, who might need some help, and who's rocking just fine.
The toxic people were much more likely to play politics or manipulate people when they were just a screen name in Slack than when it was Jim from down the hall with a wife and two kids. The office politicians were always hiding away in private Slack channels or even separate invite-only Discords that they created for the in-group to talk separately from the rest of the company.
In fact, one of the quickest ways to defuse politics and toxicities was to fly everyone to a location for a few days of meetings. The context didn't matter so much as just getting people in the same room.
It's the same phenomenon that drives people to be friendly and civil in person, but then tear each other apart on Facebook or Next Door. In person communication is more human.
Heck, even crossing the street is safer if you look the drivers in the eyes: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/motr/safe-crossing...
Stereotyping, I know that HN is a bunch of introverts, but we were built for actual, face to face, human contact. That can't really be replaced with anything modern technology can offer us. Maybe in 10-20 years...
Everything you produce once you are punchy, you will have to re-do tomorrow morning during your productive hours, at which point you have to keep working later to get done what you had planned for today, and now you're in a never-ending loop of reworking your code.
It's a milder version of the Red Queen Problem.
If I don't have equity in the company, my interest in that is exactly 0.
“I don’t want to spend 2 hours driving a day to do 4 hours of work.”
> ...
> Same outcome (for the company),
What if the company cares for those non-work stuff - for example, some of those chats being a mentoring conversation?
I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5.
What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after.
He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.
Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.
I've worked in plenty of jobs and this has never remotely been a concern for me, including for higher ed where Title IX is strictly enforced.
Just to be clear, you are claiming that not just you yourself, but also your coworkers are silent out of fear of reprisal?
My team has very nice conversations about the weather, our pets, even video games we’ve played or movies we’ve watched. Nothing “woke” about it. If you’re worried about being canceled, maybe try saying something that has nothing to do with politics?
A regular on my service is hotdogs are sandwiches or emacs is the superior text editor
Or did they collapse the state of matter for soups and meats?
That wouldn't match salad, though.
"The imperial system is awful compared to metric, but Farenheight is a better temperature scale for humans than Celsius."
"soft-close hinges/slides are a worthless and annoying novelty in modern cabinetry. they feel worse to open and closing a drawer without slamming it isn’t that hard"
"Cartoon Network was way better than Nickelodeon in the 90s-00s. Both of them win over Disney Channel any day"
"email should be banished, just like faxes and cheques. it’s an extremely inferior and unsuitable medium for how we communicate online these days"
"cucumber is an overrated and is only good in gin and tonics"
Basically, nothing is actually of consequence there, but people get fired up and have strong opinions. It's a fun interaction.
My team was becoming more and more remote even before the Covid-19 lockdown and a constant, real-time connection is something that we were exploring.
Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.
As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.
And you create artificial solutions. I don't understand.
* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.
* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.
* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.
* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.
All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.
To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.
To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.
> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.
I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle.
My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day"
Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit.
The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.
Sure, you could do some of that on zoom, but the psychology of it is very different, and the spontaneous component of it is gone completely. It's awkward to slack someone with "hey do you want to talk about some ideas i have, using the awkward zoom annotation tool?". They'll probably say yes, but then other people who might have something interesting to contribute (or learn) will not be present. Also the feeling of interacting with people via videochat is weird, especially if you're new to the workplace.
Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; b) human beings around you who work on similar things; and c) a sense of community. I realize that many workplaces are toxic and don't offer any good versions of b) or c), and working remotely could be better then (though a better idea would be to find a new employer if you can). But, though many people are thriving in this new work-from-home environment, equally many or more are suffering.
Also, regarding the 4-5 hours of productivity a day: yeah! There's been a lot of studies on this, and some countries/companies have been experimenting with 4 day work-weeks or shorter workdays. There's definitely progress to be made there.
This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation.
Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode.
Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.
I find that dressing the part also helps. Something about trying to be a professional engineer in my shorts and britney spears t-shirt doesn't seem to motivate.
Hey, my balls aren't sweating and I waste a third of the time I used to on showering! Go me!
Just recently I noticed that my coworkers were all jumping into a slack thread. It was a thread that was active hours earlier but that I missed out on, so I couldn't put in my input. If this was in the office, the fact that everyone was having a big conversation would be a signal to turn around and engage in it, but in the virtual world, someone has to specifically @ you to have you join, or else create a formal meeting to discuss it.
The small connections that grease the wheels of communication are gone or are more challenging when you have to do them over Slack or video call.
I found that it's much less awkward to hit them up on collaborative tools. Meetings are also much easier to spin since you don't have to herd people into a single room and convince them as hard to use their limited time on this meeting since they can just do something else in the background if they're not in another one.
Again, i think it really depends on the people and the workplace. Some people are really content working from home, others are losing their minds.
Do you need to do these interactions over Zoom? Or is it habit?
It's like, if you can connect with a book, you can connect over chat. It's just words.
If this person was contracted to achieve a certain amount of work done I'd totally understand, but they're contracted based on time. Kinda surprised how positive the Hacker News crowd is towards skipping work for up to 50% of contracted time. I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
So in short no, it's not possible to accurately measure developer productivity even if cost isn't a factor. Employee evaluations are necessarily subjective and we simply have to accept inaccuracy.
Unless you're Jack Dorsey!
That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.
Get your work done. That's what Salary used to, and should mean. Takes you 20? Good. Takes you 60? Too bad; get it done.
What there is instead is an expectation of how much work you're supposed to get done per unit time (albeit calendar time in shops that have things more together). But this is in turn informed by how much time you are expected to devote to work vs other parts of your life.
If you are a freelancer billing hours, then yes, I agree it would not be ethical. But still it's somewhat of a gray area. In theory, you should be able to raise your hourly rate to compensate for the fact that you can get more done in less time. But in practice, you might not get any clients if you advertise a higher than usual hourly rate, at least until you build a reputation.
In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment.
> I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world.
Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week.
In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly.
This isn't true. It depends on whether the work is cerebral or not. Certain workloads are limited to as little as 2 hours per day, for 2-4 hours of real knowledge work per day. The rest of it is either extremely suboptimal or of a different class.
Something semi-mechanical like translation or categorization that isn't obviously mechanical could probably occur for a full workday.
I have and had plenty of full days of coding smart solutions where, when i was in the flow, would even forget that i hit 8h work.
If i really hit my head against a wall because i literaly have an issue i can't figure out right now, i will still try to find different angles or take a walk but i will not just close my laptop after 2-4h of work oO?!
I don't really see "coding" as productive work. The entire point is the write as little as possible. Most of my day is full of reading and thinking about the problem. The actual coding part is quite small.
Well, you posted it around 8pm my time, so...
Yes, I write software.
It's just not worth to throw your life away for someone else. Especially if your peers don't do it, and you won't get rewarded proportionally for doing it.
That's not how salaried positions work in the US. If you work 60 hour weeks you don't get paid overtime (but if that helps you perform beyond your peers, you might get promoted faster).
What matters is performance, not hours.
Every salary job I've ever had (I've had 4) required everyone to do their own timekeeping ever day, no working six hours a day and calling it "full time" unless you charged the time off or I guess lied.
I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine.
Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge.
Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office.
I've been trying to replicate that at home more.
Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.
The OP mentioned they work 4-5 hours a day and are distracted the other 3-4 when at work (in the office).
I was saying during those 3-4 hours you have multiple side conversations (on company time) that it makes sense to the company to encourage. Not just cuz co-workers who get along have a better work environment, but that it makes a more interconnected environment.
> Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.
This is a good point.
It'd reveal most people to be largely about etiquette, largely useless if not outright harmful in terms of output if contemplated a little.
Most software jobs are re-implementing the same shit another company has already done. It's worse than useless - sipping tequila on the beach would actually be a net benefit for humanity - it'd alleviate stress, tension, traffic, hubris, carbon footprint among other things.
If contemplated a little more - most jobs are enabling this insane rat race and the immense infrastructure around it, which nobody individually is really that interested in continuing.
It's like religion or circumcision - we do and believe things and we don't even know why - most would be better off not knowing and not believing - just give them tequila and a beach :)
30-32 hours per week is perfect. More is just useless.
I have heard that this seems to be true for most intellectual work that requires concentration (5 hours daily max). No sources on that, though.
Where as now, I start my day around 6-7am (I wake up "early" every morning), I try and quit around 4pm, and take a 1-2 hour lunch sometime between the two. This schedule is only possible working from home. I now hit 40 hours per week week every single week that I work all 5 days, where as before I would hit 30 hours. And even weeks where I only work 4 days, I still hit ~35 hours after shrinking my lunch.
As companies embrace working from home and downsize their offices presence, a lot of the barriers to entry to offshoring start to disappear - if everyone is remote then a remote individuals in cheaper Eastern Europe will likely integrate a lot easier than when most the employees were sitting together in expensive London.
White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.
Personally, if my team stays remote, then our next hire will most likely not be London based. There’s a much larger pool of European talent available to us and we’re now better setup to and culturally open to hiring remote first. This isn’t something our company would have considered before COVID.
That is true. Although I've noticed that some outsourcing companies are comfortable working to the office hours of the headquarters.
We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa.
Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip.
Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa.
Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply.
If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already.
I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work.
Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing.
People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed.
When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.
I was actually going to challenge this before I did a bit of research and discovered you're right - the average wage for a software engineer is £47,500 (https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-it-salary). That's ugly.
I'm from Liverpool originally (live abroad now) and I have friends in Manchester earning £50-60k... in the North of England. That's a big wage in that area.
[0]: https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-software-eng...
72k in London isn't a lot :)
With the banks and big tech, I'm pretty sure it has the highest paying SWE salaries in Europe.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Lots of white collar people seemingly have a very "meh" attitude towards manufacturing getting outsourced. What will the attitude be once these white collar jobs start leaving?
I place my future in the fact that it will be hard for employers to hire someone that can do my job (all facet of it) for half of my income. Sure there will be people slipping through the crack at that level, but hiring is a numbers game where you don't count on luck.
Having worked with overseas teams in the past, I'm not particularly concerned.
Isn't that making the same point I made: local knowledge matters.
That said it probably depends on the job.
I’m currently working remote, but same timezone. I may go remote at a very different timezone, but the expectation is clear that I’m overlapping most of the West Coast work day (calls with vendors, team calls, etc).
For me that would mean working from 8pm to 2am, approximately. Not sure I have the stamina for that.
But I’m not too sure outsourcing white collar jobs will work.
Trumpism has 40% of the electorate in any western country. Add in the masses of disillusioned white collar workers, and populism will be the natural political position of every Western country (therefore joining the rest of the world)
Now imagine a “respectable” Trumpism, i.e. populism without the icky Le Penns, Salvinis, or Trumps.
Imagine Brexit with half as many remainers.
He was highlighting Tech jobs, when we already tried that shit 20 years ago.
Spoiler: It didn't work out well.
In the end the employer has to deal with a shitty product and in the end hire the right talent to get the job done (which they should have done in the first place).
That's not to say all offshore workers are bad, of course. Just that, just because you can hire an Eastern European for half the price doesn't mean they will produce the same quality work as the other people who were more expensive.
In remote work, communication matters more. Language barriers kill it. Working with non native language speakers over less than ideal communication channels is hell on Earth.
1) Quantify the loss in productivity from employees working from home. Call this "x."
2) Calculate the savings in rent you don't have to pay for putting the company's employees in an office. Call this "y."
3) If x < y, pass on savings to shareholders, take your bonus, and have a nice day.
4) Explore hiring candidates outside of major metros and see if you can pay them less.
Will not happen, of course. The modern corporate middle manager thrives as a sycophant, constantly praising their bosses / and boss's bosses - yes sir / ma'am, how high would you like me to jump for my bonus? Thus, they are desperate to get back into the office and play that sweet, sweet game of "office politics." Also, they probably leased additional space for more tech and digital marketing workers, so they are trying to not regret that decision.
Even the folks in non-tech jobs who hate WFH, griping about missing look-em-in-the-eyes managerialism, or how they can’t do management-by-walking-around, acknowledge the past few months have been more productive and curiously more collaborative (right people across national offices invited to “meetings” and able to attend).
So actual productivity up, other factors important to Taylorist managers (but not to individual contributors) sharply down.
With some luck this will have a nice downward effect on house prices in and around Amsterdam, where plenty of companies have converted houses to offices.
But right now a lot of places are still under contract for their leases. Might be a different story in a year or so when more leases expire and they just don't bother keeping their offices.
You want to know an industry that's really screwed? The industry she left commercial real estate for: events/conventions. Her current company has had basically no revenue since the first lockdowns, and that's not changing anytime soon.
She's been eyeing jobs in commercial real estate again as an escape from events, as they're in better shape for the moment, at least.
You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.
Getting together still has value but spaces will be transformed more for collaboration... and also small individual offices as work pods
(saying this as someone who's been WFH for a few years now)
I've been fairly productive since we all started full-time from home in March. However I prefer working at the office. As time has gone on I've found myself losing routine. Either working sporadically through the day or longer hours in general.
Being somewhere does a better job for me of time-boxing work.
That being said, I also have my work and personal machine in the same room. So now I'm spending most of my time in one room! I'm working to rectify that situation.
We work in 'open spaces' because the CFO can definitively say "$/employee!" - whereas the impact on staff is difficult to measure. The 'up front cost' is the driver.
This same 'cost logic' will apply to remote working, once Ops can see 'how cheap it is' they will love it but it may have nothing to do with true ROI.