I am directly responsible for Jira and Confluence admin/infrastructure on an enterprise level and once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I haven't run into many issues except during a migration where we knew we were going to run into issues.
Atlassian's documentation isn't that good however.
That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.
I use Jira to track issues. It’s not as pretty and dumbed down as Github or as dandy as YouTrack but does the job fine over the last 8 years we used it.
You can set it up to be an issue tracker or you can set it up to be work & developer tracking. It's really dependent on how your PM sets your projects up.
Interesting how perspectives differ. Having used Jira for many years, I think it's straightforward for engineering work, but particularly hard for PMs and managers. Why? On the engineering side, it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a lifecycle. But for PMs and management it's a nightmare because they still haven't gotten their birds-eye-view roadmapping / bulk editing act together. The usual issue I have with Jira is that the engineering team gets it integrated into their workflows, things work ok, but it's a continual challenge getting global rollup views to the business at large. We keep ending up with Excel, Airtable, or what-have-you high level views that then point to particular Jira issues for details (yes, we've used Portfolio).
I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.
This is pretty much my experience as well - Jira is used almost entirely by developers (and we set up the statuses/transitions/etc in the ways we find useful), while product organizes their thoughts in Excel/Google Sheets and will create/watch/comment on Jira cases but mostly not otherwise use it.
> Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows
When you're working with Python, Jira will render __init__.py as an italicized version of _init_.py even when you put it in monospace with the {{braces}}. If you're talking more abstractly about algorithms, O(n) turns into the letter O followed by the thumbs down emoji.
It's a good thing no one uses Jira for software projects because that'd be really awkward!!!
Can someone explain what is hard about Jira to me? I push bugs and pull bugs and spend maybe 20 minutes a day in it. What is hard about it? Am I just at a place that uses it sanely? Once a week we spend maybe 1 or 2 hours in it review/updating the Agile sprint buckets with the group.
A non sane place would have 20 obscure mandatory fields per ticket, require the ticket to go through 10 different states that makes no sense, and last but not least, every click would take a full minute to load the page.
One of the other problems with Jira is that it's incredibly easy to create complex Byzantine workflows, dozens of required fields to file or update an issue, and reports based on those files. That makes it easy for a bad PM or manager to take their own hard questions to answer and turn them into endless bureaucracy for developers.
I'm not entirely sure why you'd comment this in the first place? If you're a developer you simply need to login and look at your project, not really know much else except how to click issue buttons. I'm talking from an administrator standpoint. Developers also aren't the center of the universe no matter how much we think we are.
Most of the tickets in our JIRA are made for the developers, not for the PMs or the customer support.
Also, looking at my project is a pain since my tickets are outside the sprint and I either need to go into the backlog and scroll a bunch, or use a custom search.
Unless you're a micromanager that's the way it should be. She see issues opening and closing and estimates on it. If those estimates blow up/linger on and on then the PM is needed to pull together resources and get it finished off. I don't see how it's a big deal. I've used it both as group lead and as a programmer and didn't have many issues with it either way. Sure it's a bit laggy but it's not that bad. It would be a lot nicer if they'd made a native client that has better queuing/caching of tasks to let you do many things at once.
Both JIRA and confluence are slow and the UI's are horrible and incredibly unresponsive by modern standards. It shouldn't take several seconds to load my JIRA board. Fuzzy searching for issues should just work.
Collaborating over JIRA on a video conference is PAINFUL AF. A lot of time is spent just waiting for the UI to respond. It is completely unacceptable.
Curious if you use self-hosted or cloud jira? My main problem with (cloud) jira is that it takes about 30 seconds from navigating to the site until I can start typing my issue comment or description or whatever. And that's without using search... It's just _so_ slow.
You know what’s worse than having to work with JIRA/Confluence/Bit Bucket, and such? Working with people who keep changing systems every 6-12 months. A crappy system used fully is better than system surfing to find the Holy Grail™.
Man, I’d agree with you if my experiences with these tools wasn’t _so bad_.
The current implementation of jira and confluence I’m using is worse than having _no_ ticket tracking and documentation system.
Because if it didn’t exist there would be the impetus to implement something. But we just kinda barely limp by with what we have.
It’s so barely functional that people actively avoid using it.
I’m fully aware that the company is to blame and not necessarily atlassian though, as we have a number of plugins and random custom fields.
One of the most dangerous things about jira is that it tries to be everything to everyone and people get carried away in the customisation believing they need it. It slows everything to a crawl and leaves you inundated with mandatory fields and a nightmare of matching stories with sprints and estimations in order to bring a bloody task in.
I think you're underestimating how bad the "something" people can come up with is. Think "weekly status reports to describe how you're doing on fixing a problem that was described through email, or an in-person meeting with someone, or a phone call, and never entered into a ticketing system at all".
Also the mandatory fields are definitely a per-organization thing. At my org we have I think 3 mandatory fields, which are the project the ticket goes under, the title, and the description. In many cases, "migrating" from JIRA to JIRA but 90% of the features are disabled would probably be an improvement.
I do in fact have such scripts :). Also to automatically tag my git commits with the ticket, transition the jira issues appropriately when the relevant things happen with those branches or pull requests, etc. I don't actually interact with JIRA-the-application all that much these days, but in the rare cases when I do it's because I'm doing something non-trivial, and in those cases the UI seems relatively straightforward.
... I suppose that might be the main difference between people who hate JIRA and people who find it a little bit clunky but generally acceptable: people who mostly have the baseline stuff happen automatically are fine with it, and people who spend a lot of time interacting with the web frontend in repetitive ways hate it.
Yes, exactly that. Basically wire up very simple commands with curl and jq that do the transitions you need, pulling data from other rest apis as necessary.
The two workhorses of my integration are two methods named jira_get and jira_post.
and then given the transition in question, you can look at the fields required for the transition, and figure out where you get the data that goes in those fields normally. Any time the data that goes in those fields is obtained through a rote process, you automate that process, and then prompt for any fields you can't get in an automated fashion (e.g. "signed off by" you can fetch the reviewer names from the github api for the associated pull request).
But yeah, a slack bot that issues requests to the JIRA api is a perfectly workable solution, and I think you'd be surprised at how much of a quality of life improvement you'll get by continuing to add capabilities to it that reflect your specific workflow.
> I’m fully aware that the company is to blame and not necessarily atlassian though
The problem is that this anecdote is not even remotely surprising. I've used JIRA and/or Confluence at three employers and all three had wildly different, and awful, configurations. I have never worked with any technical folks who loved either, although I think on the whole Confluence is slightly better than JIRA.
I thought the same thing for a long time - that Atlassian makes decent products that are often implemented poorly - but the problem is, at what point does it become Atlassian's fault for making products that seem so easy to implement so badly that developers will go out of their way to track work in Excel instead of JIRA?
For what it's worth, you get the pros and cons pretty well. A large part of our business is based on taking these types of messy systems and move them forward to support the user needs.
Feel free to email me if you think your company may be open to using outside help to clean things up.
I was saying a couple weeks ago that one just ok system is better than 5 good ones because with 5 you never know which one of them has the thing you're looking for.
Incidentally that conversation started with the suggestion to bring Jira into our already bloated set of services.
I’m never sure if it’s actually core JIRA that is bad or if the problem is how customizable the thing is. It seems like every organization has added a bunch of custom fields and required bits that make it so annoying to use.
yeah my feeling (this doesn't excuse atlassian of course) is that JIRA is fantastic if and only if you have a full time JIRA wrangling PM that is competent. Otherwise it's a dumpster fire.
Even a vanilla JIRA core on their cloud is slow as molasses, while there is slight improvement over the last year, they seem to be using more react on the frontend in each update.
On a typical day moving tickets around , reviewing everyone's items and confluence with its WYSIWHG editor only approach is 20% of my day gone.
Just making the UI non blocking for every single action would double my productivity. Their mobile apps are definitely better than web, so it is not like they cannot build decent interface and application, The web app just smells of legacy and debt to me.
Even if its because of customizability they provide, it is really on them, to approve all sorts of plugins and for all straitjacketing they and/or AGILE ( as typically implemented) does to your development in the name of structure, restricting some of this customizability would not have hurt product more.
Ultimately like any other SaaS business they serve the buyer and not the user. They are interested in what sells more, more often than not it does not intersect with what the users need. Customization sells, saying NO doesn't in enterprise.
I guess we should be thankful they are not IBM or Oracle and build your kitchen sink and neighbours too
I am tempted at least once every few months to just build a better interface and frontend which isnt' crap. Management is not going change from JIRA. Developers / users would happily pay out of pocket for a saner interface which helps simply manage their items without fuss, most people don't really care about the backend and the fancy reports, burndown charts for the most part, those who do can use the official app .
I've never worked for/with a company that used Jira that didn't change the way you were supposed to use Jira every six to eight months or with any leadership changes at the project management or TPM level. Also I've never worked with two Jira setups that were the same.
I'd rather use a tool that is flexible by default than use a rigid tool that you need to change every six months.
I actually liked Hipchat. It did what it was supposed to do - provide instant chat with colleagues - without the overhead and frills of Slack. It was simple and reliable. I'm not sure why it was so disliked.
What is hard about slack? We use channels for the "group" stuff and IM for quick and dirty chats, otherwise just pick up the phone and call. I personally just prefer using email, but the kids like their slack/discord/whatever
I had a friend complain it was eating their battery, and my phone battery started acting weird around the time I installed it. Seems better now, did they ever confess to a problem?
Hipchat memes were the main upside of the product, differenciating it from the market. They were 500x500 squares, not tiny emojimemes like in Discord or Slack. You could truely express an opinion. It was heartwarming.
Then they decided that they wanted to look serious, and reduced the meme size to 32px. That’s when the product fell out of fashion, because it was just like Slack with fewer features.
What do you mean by linguistic progress? AFAIK there isn’t any evidence that human language was much different during the cave painting era than it is now.
Thats why we switched from Hipchat to Slack. Slack's client for the Mac was so terrible at the time but we couldn't deal with the outages of Hipchat. I remember you could see the underlying browsers context menu if you right clicked in the original Slack app.
I have a tiny sliver of hope that they will see how it behaves on a slow network and fix some stuff.
One day I need to have a beer with these people who say Jira is fast. I've seen everything from "unremarkable" to "If we don't reboot the servers on Monday then nobody can work after 10 am on Friday". But never, ever, fast.
For anyone who is already used to Jira and considering switching, think again. Monday seems to be popular as the "much faster, responsive" competitor if the marketing is to believed.
I've used it for 6 months - it's garbage. At least, absolutely ZERO times better than Jira as an overall productivity tool.
I can't tell you how many times issues have never loaded (see: blank screen), painstakingly prioritised lists of HUNDREDS of issues that have had their ordering completely scrambled, to name two off the top of my head.
If you hate Jira, think about whether it's the thing you hate that you're used to. Because you're absolutely going to be trading for a NEW thing that you hate, and have to learn to use from scratch.
I think it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the office. An awful lot of people still like them. And aside from some big names, how many companies are really looking to give up their office work? I work for a mid-size (10000 employees) software company and we are working from home for the forseeable future, but management has been very clear that they think collaboration works best in an office environment, and they plan on going back to the office once it becomes safe to do so.
That's an issue in many truly rural locations. But you don't need gigabit connections to work from home perfectly adequately and 50 Mbit or so connectivity is available in large areas.
I don't think so, well maybe how tech used to work at the office with developers elbowing each other at a long table meant for 5 but 10 people working from it.
The article mentions that this will allow the company to recruit from areas where pay is much lower than the Bay Area, but I wonder if this will affect the pay of current workers.
Right away? No, not in most cases. For future hires, how could it not?
If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary. Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there before.
I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.
>I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.
There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.
You don't need to be paying $2,500 a month for a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco to get good Internet and reasonable delivery times. Sure, you'll get speedier delivery, and that's worth something, but it's a hell of a price to pay for it.
I'd make a distinction between medium to large cities and expensive cities. I don't think people want to move out to the country, but finding some balance between lifestyle and cost is a lot easier to do when you can pull a higher salary from remote work.
> There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.
Define “big city.” I live in a medium-sized city in a low cost of living area and my house has AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, and cable available to it. I dare say that’s better than most people in the Bay Area have access to. And yes, Amazon delivers here too.
A big thing for me is being able to walk to a ton of different things, no car or even bike needed. In the US, for practically any area with densities lower than those of cities you're going to need a car.
I'm sure that the reduction of CoL opens up plenty of financial room for a car, but it's a whole extra set of things to have to worry about that I personally would rather not.
Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area.
Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.
And if people can increasingly work anywhere in some number of different timezones--and the same is true of most of your competition--what justifies paying a premium because some people want to live in Manhattan or SF any more than because they want to live in an expensive beach or mountain community.
The common thinking is that it will reduce pay, but it may not be as much as most people think. A good example of this is Facebook's new compensation structure for remote work. For engineers remotely working from low cost of living areas base salaries are only 10-15% lower than in the Bay Area, and stock compensation is the same. So a senior engineer (E5) might go from making $400k to $370k in total compensation, while also substantially saving on California's income taxes.
The difference these days is that US-based developers are going to be facing most of the same hurdles as the international teams. It's a blow to their competitiveness.
no, not all parts of the country will be so hardcore about remote work into the future. For example, I see Utah (which leans heavy into enterprise SaaS and already booming in tech) to continue as normal except with masks or a little more space between desks.
If some businesses do better in person, then they will make it happen somehow.
reversing 1 won't stop 2 though. I don't understand your logic.
Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.
Some people from other countries are very good at what they do, and are hired because of that, not just because of 'cheap'. Cheap is an added bonus if you decide you need to open a dev center for the highly skilled people and can then also bring on some more mid-level talent.
> Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.
Why do so many companies hire at a higher salary in the Bay Area when they can hire the same person anywhere else in the US at much lower cost?
Because India is 9.5 time zones from New York. Americans who can remote work (not just developers) should be more worried about being outsourced to Canada, or to Central and South American countries.
I’m noticing that I am just becoming someone handed tickets who later hands them back for testing. Beyond that, I barely speak to anyone on the team anymore (in large part due to turnover). I speak to my boss maybe once a week, if that.
Government job, so they wouldn’t outsource me, but you could easily give someone else a login and that is all it would take to replace me.
Would be scrambling were I in the private sector in this type of job.
Uber also had fired a bunch of people from India. (I'm from India). But I was in complete shock when they started hiring again just a month after firing so many people. I think using the pandemic as a scapegoat they got to clean up some highly paid resources and recruit new ones bargaining (given pandemic those who looked for job didn't have much to ask for). I guess there must be some government regulatory body looking into such type of firing and hiring process.
Isn't new talent more expensive than existing talent? If you've had employees that for years have been getting inadequate COL adjustments, they're cheaper to keep than getting market-rate talent.
This assumes that the market rate is constantly increasing. Given the amount of job losses that have occurred recently, there may be talent available at a cheaper price.
Developing countries are developing at a two digit percentage a year, same in the few top cities.
If a company has had somebody stagnant for years (many years), they're not going to be replaced for cheaper. The crash might cancel the last couple years of inflation at most.
Also, the employee is much more experienced now (could go from junior to senior over 5 years). Will the replacement be equally experienced or starting from scratch again? A fresh experienced hire is certainly more expensive than what the employee was originally earning.
I’ve been around long enough to see the cycle play out a time or two:
1. Hey, let’s hire cheap Indian workers!
2. WTF, we didn’t expect all these time zone and quality control issues!
3. Let’s onshore again!
Believe me they’ve been trying to do the Indian outsourcing thing for a looooooong time. It doesn’t work as well as imagined. The Indian developers who are as good as their western counterparts don’t stay in India.
The really cool outcome for me would be if all my coworkers get to work from home and I could snatch a whole office just for me (there's a binding rent contract for the next X years still, we might as well use it :P)
Edit: this comment was a bit sarcastic, just in case somebody didn't get that.
Somehow I imagine that if I and four other co-workers decided to be the only five to come back into the office, they'd still make the five of us sit next to each other elbow to elbow and leave the rest of the building completely empty.
Ah yes, the perfect horror movie scenario. Honestly, if the office was pretty close to my home, I wouldn't mind going there every week on one or two days, just to break the routine of sitting at home. But happy to see the 5-day mandatory "go talk to your coworkers and sit in a cubicle" regime slowly being phased out.
I'd love to have my own cubicle. I fu--ing hate open spaces.
Btw, currently my job is a 25 minutes subway ride away, so... So and so. Not a lot, to be honest, I don't have to drive and the monthly public transport subscription is fairly cheap (~39€/month).
My office is 12 minutes "run-commuting", there are a couple of good restaurants there, if I make a mess on my desk in the office, my desk at home is still clean, I got four whiteboards, I am not bothered by the neighbor's Amazon package, nor coworkers as they are all working from home.
Now granted, if I had to come 2x1 hour by car, I wouldn't do it, but a 30 min walk in the morning is actually pretty nice
Same boat, founders seem level headed and the company seems heading in the right direction. For me a plus is the office locations in Australia. I wonder what the next companies to do this will be?
Make sure you visit Sydney specifically though, it's a bit different from the rest of Australia. It's not everyone's cup of tea, though you may well end up loving it.
Everything I read about the founders makes me think they are great guys, I think they value the same things I do. They are also obviously smart and great business people too because they have very successful business. They also have a habit of acquiring products I like using. I was a user of both source tree and trello when they were acquired.
Having said all that, I really hate Jira and Confluence and would not like being a developer working on them. The front end is such a mess, I hate to think what the back end looks like.
He was also here on HN comments telling everyone not to criticise the Australian Government’s COVIDSafe App while not disclosing Atlassian had a contract as part of the app’s development
“Turn the HN angry mob mode off - it’s not helpful. We’re all in this together.”
When asked by non technical people “Should I install this app? Is my data / privacy safe? Is it true it doesn’t track my location?” - say “Yes” and help them understand”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22986426
And here’s an article:
“Australian tech darling Atlassian is among the five private companies that helped the federal government build its COVID-19 contact tracing app.”
The fact that they didn’t wait for Apple and Google’s contract tracking API and instead went for an app that needs the phone turned on and in the foreground for it to work properly is the reason why nobody is using it :headdesk:
Lapses on that scale are not an engineering issue, they're likely a culture issue. Atlassian are a successful business that sell to engineering businesses, but that doesn't mean their leadership know or care about engineering. I'd stake a large bet on the reality he could not turn it around. Atlassian are basically the Oracle of ticket trackers
Atlassian undoubtedly has very smart people working there, but the absolute cluster mess of JIRA and their other flagships indicates deep management incompetence that favors shiny new feature over cleaning up the mountains of jQuery debt.
Atlassian has the Google problem: buying and half-ass integrating a competitor, shipping new features, that gives promotions to the people involved, but "menial maintenance" is not seen as necessary anywhere...
Maybe he thinks he can improve it or that things change. I've worked for MS in the past, it's not a dumpster fire like a lot of open source advocates would have you think. It was a fairly neutral experience, but they certainly have a lot of smart people working for them.
Did you click the link? There's a Group Product Manager explaining that it's a huge amount of work, they want to do it, and can't do it now. After the lead eng on the feature gave a detailed description of the work involved (20 teams were sucked into it).
Every engineering org has things like this – features that they know the customer rightfully wants and should have, and seem to the customer to be simple, but in reality bring your eng org to its knees.
I mean, maybe he can help fine tune GPT-4 to dynamically output the dynamic JS every time Jira page is loaded. Probably would have less bugs/more features. Also, depending on how they sample the code it could be a new experience every time you load a page! Exciting!
I know bashing on Jira is a popular pastime on HN, but I'm always surprised folks are not more introspective around why it's still so popular in the enterprise. It's because there are a million and one ways that teams like to work, and any one project has lots of different stakeholders with competing needs, and there really isn't any other tool that can scale out to this many use cases.
I've certainly pulled my hair out a million times with Jira, but TBH I'm extremely impressed with their redesign. They've really scaled back the complexity IMO while still giving my team the customizability we need (we started on Trello and quickly hit roadblocks).
I was responsible for bring Jira into my team at 'megabank' not long after it launched around 2003/4, because the alternatives were horrific to set up and use. That was pretty much it.
I was amazed at how rigid Jira is when I started using it (we used a heavily in-house customized version of Sabrina before, and Rally as well). Sure, if you have loads of time you can work with an admin to write custom code for it, but at the level of what one of many teams can do with it directly, it offers virtually no options.
You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably not Agile.
You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
Hope you like working India(Bengaluru) timezone and working for India wages. Like most that are higher percentage remote, the vast majority of development is done outside of higher wage countries and due to government currency policies are out of reach for those in country with a higher cost of living.
I’m shocked how naive people seem to be in these threads about remote work. There is tons of remote work. There already has been for decades. It’s called outsourcing. The reason you can’t find remote jobs in high wage countries is because no one would be crazy enough to pay those wages for remote workers when they can find the same level of talent for less than half the price.
There is a ton of demand for top talent and India is not going to fulfill that. India may have higher number of engineers but the ratio of decent talent at NON-FAANG companies is very low. The reason for this is in India Engineering education is forced by the parents and that's why there are too many engineers but good ones are very few.
But is it fairer when a person lives in a country that intentionally has monetary policy that causes them to not be able to work for those lower wages? A person in the US is not legally allowed to move to one of those lower wage countries and cannot afford to house or feed themselves if they worked for those wages. A person in one of those lower wage countries can afford many luxuries on that lower salary due to cost of living differences.
So that person, even if they are highly skilled, will instead have to work at a low skill job for low wages . Not because they have lower skills, but because their government is looking out for the wealthy asset class as opposed to the working class and those other countries(like India) do not legally allow US citizens to live and work in their lower cost of living country.
I know of many companies with outsourced talent, that have a local office in the US where clerical workers and the janitors of the building make higher wages than the overseas outsourced engineers. And those clerical workers and janitors do not make enough income in the US to have decent housing or health care. They are forced, by the laws of the lower cost of living countries, to stay in the US and live poorly.
I'm noticing we're about 40/60 with more wanting to go back to the office at my midsize company. I'm happily with the 40, but the company is just using this time to spruce up the office just waiting for our return.
I find communication and the work being better now then when we're in the office. All the cliques and hallway talk is more online, so I have a better clue what's going on. I wish it would stay that way.
I've worked remotely for 4 years now. We try extremely hard to avoid talking in private chats. Each person has their own channel which we try to use over DMs - this works really well although a few people seem to default to DM.
Our company has the policy of deleting all DMs after a couple weeks which helps push people towards using the channels as people generally like having a history of their communications for reference.
I've worked from home for ~6 years and 2 companies.
I really miss real whiteboards.
The only thing worse that being on a software team that has no whiteboards, is being the only remote person on a team that has whiteboards in the office.
Unless you’ve mastered one of those tools, it’s impossible to match the fluidity of thought to text or visualization that a standard whiteboard provides you.
I’m also not convinced that there is a tool that when mastered can provide the same fluidity, but I can claim that, and to the contrary I’d love a recommendation.
The ability to callously walk up to the whiteboard and erase what your coworker was doing and telling him to go back to his cube and repent for his sins is also sorely missed
I'm admittedly not a developer but I used to think that the lack of expansive whiteboards was one of the real failings of remote communication. And it still can be. But I've also find that shared Google Docs work better in a lot of situations than whiteboards and post-its all over the place in a big conference room.
(That said, if whiteboards are important to a team, I would imagine there's software for sharing tablet drawing. I've heard there is. I just haven't investigated.)
If you miss the physical act of writing on a whiteboard, then I would suggest looking into getting a drawing tablet (which you can use with any collaborative whiteboard app, or just screenshare a regular drawing program if you don't need to collaborate).
You can get an entry-level Wacom for < $100, and it scratches the whiteboarding itch for me in a lot of situations.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I'm not sure I really understand. Are you saying you create a public channel for each person (ie, their name)? If so, how come?
I'd be curious to know the split between newer / more tenured employees. As someone who has just started a new job, the process of building relationships across the company has been much harder than at previous jobs. Even with things like donut and social slack channels, it seems like theres no easy substitution for the types of casual interaction you get while working in the same location.
Agreed with this. I started 2 weeks before my company began the SIP, which itself was a few weeks earlier than the government mandate.
It's been _rough_. I knew going in that I hadn't joined a new company in 5 years, so it'd be difficult. But this has been a whole different level.
Nearly 6 months in now and I still don't feel like I've meshed with the majority of my team, only one or two people who are just extra friendly, and forget knowing anybody outside of my team at all.
I rarely get pings from anyone asking how things are going; I usually wind up needing to do that myself.
I've never been a very extroverted person, but I'd definitely prefer working from an office (in obviously better circumstances) during this period of on-boarding and readjustment. I feel so isolated right now, which is completely opposite of how I think I would have been if I were still at my last role but during this environment.
This is going to be the issue those in groups or made relationships with those often in person are at present fine with.
But those who haven't or as new teams and personnel come on board they will possibly not make that same real bond.
I think in 6, 12 or 24 months possibly longer for some. Many will regret when they look back they didn't realise what was really going on with the company. They just heard from their contacts and also heard what people wanted them to. They got stuck in a silio.
The new section of the office where a team was parachuted in which somehow has an impact.
How do people expect to form casual but often extremely useful contacts with the people who really know what's going on in other teams, department, divisions or other locations?
You won't hear the gossip from your workmate who works early or late, the postroom, the security guard or receptionist about that out of hours meeting the management team had or whatever.
How will you really know of you haven't been offered a poisoned promotion?
To a degree your rely on being told the full picture by those with the overview. Which is likely to be the management. Which no doubt may happen in many places the majority of times until the one time it really affected you or your team.
For example a group of us headed in to the Riverside sub office on the outskirts of London by the Thames yesterday. For aircon offices and a r oriverside pint at lunchtime as the UK had its hottest August day in 17 years.
Straight away those who caught on a group of us had met up in the office started to wonder why? With a number of messages and calls wondering what we were up to.
While we bonded and had a change of scenery. Some of those at home, for no reason got paranoid.
Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can go back to work from the office safely.
The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals).
This means that employees would see advantages to coming to work, and those that don’t would fare worse in promo and productivity on average, bringing the equilibrium state back to the office.
If you didn't do any work for a few days no one would notice? That does not compute. What do you do for a living? If I didn't show up for even a couple of days they would send out the police and possibly the state militia due to there being a lot of "village knowledge" at my company.
If I didn't have meetings scheduled or didn't have particular deliverables due? No. No one would notice if I didn't "do any work" for a few days. They would probably start to notice if I wasn't responding to chats or emails. But it probably wouldn't reach critical mass until after a few days.
> The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction.
There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." Lower trust or communication or higher friction are not inherent to working remotely, they are the product of poor and overconfident management (at least in tech, given our forum here) and can be seen in any number of environments. You can replace "working in person" with various other specious truisms like "having an organized workspace" or "having weekly status meetings" or "using agile methodologies" and the two sentences above will be likewise banal and true only in specific instances.
Most technology work can be done remotely, and I'd argue should be done both remotely and asynchronously (many companies recently forced to do the remote piece are still are holding dearly to 9-5 and constant meetings), unless there are specific use cases that require more in person synchronous efforts (and to be sure this is the case in some cases, especially when specific hardware must be used for instance). The perception that there is something "better" about 9-5 in-office work is more a product of tradition and resistant over-management than inherent advantages to either setup.
People are different and they have different needs and skills. Working in meatspace is different from working remotely so those needs and skills may better match one model or the other. That is, SWEs aren't bug tracking robots that only need to communicate online using emotionless text.
To be sure different models fit different situations, and there are other needs people have aside from getting shit done, namely social interaction (which is at its root the biggest cause of resistance). If you don't get those needs meet elsewhere, the workplace is historically a good place to do so. But of course there are all sorts of ways outside a traditional office to optimize for this.
Game theory doesn't know everything. History tells us that when people are exposed to new ideas they will often adapt. After managers see that working from home isn't necessarily the devil they will allow more of it. However, it's not going to be wholesale shift to home, unless there is a big monetary advantage (say rent was insane to be in the middle of the city) companies will meet with the idea somewhere in the middle, especially in tech jobs.
I wish there was a way I could make a bet that 100% remote will NOT become the norm. Given how contrarian this opinion seems to be, surely there must be some way to profit if I am right?
I think it's pretty obvious that 100% will not become the norm. But maybe 50% for some types of jobs? And some number of smaller companies will go 100%? Those seem plausible.
Anecdotal, but I've worked remotely for over a decade and been able to advance and grow at 2 companies. It may be luck or happenstance. It isn't always easy, I think that remote can allow one to be more productive. Sometimes you do need to do more than if you weren't in the office and you need to communicate, a lot.
I actually thought it was a forgone conclusion that remote work is _more_ productive (for IC work) but the problem is ideation and serendipitous interactions leading to novel IP is more likely to happen when people are physically near each other. Hence the aversion at a corp. level to remote work.
Is there any evidence for lower rate of IP generation? The same argument was made for open offices as well and has proven false.
Similar to the studies with brainstorming where people doing it in a group come up with fewer and less diverse ideas than people brainstorming individually and collating the results.
There's a plausible story that is told here about spontaneous interactions producing new and interesting ideas, but what I don't know is if there is any actual evidence to believe this is the case. As contrasted to having regular planning meetings over zoom and then mulling over ideas in private (which I find to be a very fruitful way of coming up with solutions to problems, much more than "brainstorming" or whatever in a group)
>The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person.
it depends what their goals are. having worked in-office and remote for the same company, it's way easier to get shit done in the office. at least if you're reasonably extroverted/persuasive/bold. there are so many times I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth. but if you're remote you're easier to ignore, and a lot of office workers are very good at ignoring people who want to create more work for them
but the flip side is it's way easier for remote workers to fade into the background and hardly do anything. a skilled developer can emulate a mediocre developer while working a fraction of the hours. a skilled manipulator can "work" a fraction of the hours managing expectations and barely produce much of anything. plenty of people will figure out how to automate their jobs and just never tell anyone
there's this idea that remote will benefit introvert/aspie types because it's so word-focused. you have few face-to-face conversations but you write tons and tons. but really, apsie types will produce reams of literal-minded descriptive and often very helpful documentation and discussion, while people-people types will manipulate their image to appear very legibly valuable and come out ahead more often than not
my honest opinion for awhile is that remote is going to a massive efficieny drain on big tech companies and startups doing stuff that's easy to phone in like webdev/saas/whatever, such that if you founded a small committed colo team you could probably outcompete them in whatever domain you want even without any special edge
> I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth
Let's ignore how you interrupting someone cost them potentially hours of productivity.
I agree face-to-face is higher bandwidth for easy/simple topics. "Bob, what's the mainframe password" is easier shouted than written, and the reply likewise (assuming Bob knows it by heart).
It gets tricky when the topic is complicated or when Bob is distracted and confused. You might get a half-assed dismissive and incomplete answer (which you may or may not notice), or it might take Bob much longer to figure the answer out than if you had messaged it to him.
The quality of your communication depends on many factors, and your perception may not necessarily match reality.
I don't mean asking technical questions, which I agree is often easier to do over text, not least because you can cite line numbers and include code snippets etc. I mean getting favors, demanding concessions, strategizing, comparing notes, etc. especially if you're running a project (as I was) and need buy-in and deliverables from people in different reporting lines (I was eng with an asterisk, depending heavily on people in qa and ops), the ability to walk up to their desk and convince them is priceless
there were more than a few times when the schedule slipped by months because someone outside the project delayed something by weeks. those kinds of issues I never had when I was in the office because I could get what we needed through force of personality. but outside, you have to go through process, and process is inefficient
seasoned remote workers might counter the org was dysfunctional (a charge I will not deny, hence why I left) but they don't have solutions other than more process. because remote depersonalizes work interactions, they have to layer on policies and documents. it's fundamentally a bureaucratizing force
It sounds like what you are saying is that it is easier to be either a bullying management type or a charismatic persusasive type. Both of which I have seen lead to some of the stupidest corporate decisions in my career. So while both of those types might have a much easier time in an office setting, I'm not convinced that is a competitive advantage for the company as a whole.
Normally yes, but we have one major difference with Atlassian - our teams are split between SF and Sydney (for the most part, we have other offices but those are the major ones). Even before COVID we had a pretty strong remote culture. We were doing video chat based meetings where everyone dials in separately even before COVID hit. We also acquired Trello, which was a remote-first company. There's a LOT of push internally to make sure remote people are first party citizens in the company.
I'm curious as to what you base this statement on. Game theory is modeling of strategic interaction between two or more players in a situation containing set rules and outcomes. Did you create the actual model? Is there an insight you mind sharing?
If this trend continues, it should affect bay area housing prices. I dont see any reason to pay such high rent, if I could work anywhere in the pacific north west.
I don’t know about the US, but there’s more to urban areas than just the commute time.
If anything wfh means spending more time in your home neighbourhood, so you’re going to need more amenities closer by - which are generally found in cities.
This will be fiercely debated but Bay Area (notably San Francisco) has previously been a mix of {things to do, high paying jobs}. Once you remove high paying jobs (or rather, expand them to other cities by way of remoteness), there are many other equally good or better contenders for things to do with significantly cheaper housing.
There’s an opposite effect too, because one of the biggest urban amenities is the density of activities which are likely to be closed for some time: night life, concerts, lots of hobbies, etc.
My Bay Area job is letting me WFH permanently, and I'm looking to move to an adjacent area but the rental market is empty, and housing sales seem... targeted to SF expats.
South bay anecdote: Rent was ~3.8k, I tried to negotiate on renewal (4- at same rate) saying market conditions dont justify it. The management refused to go below ~3.3k, now they are offering same apartment at 2.8k after I vacated.
That's deep decrease (~33%), I fully expect the effects to show up starting Q4.
Exactly, the rental market is very illiquid, it could easily take a year for price to settle at a new low.
Landlords are stubborn beings always thinking they can rent easily and for more. Gotta take a beating with the property being empty for weeks/months before they adjust to reality. (Lettings agents don't care about waiting and pushing tenants out, they make fees either way).
Expect multiple hits downward over the coming year(s) as layoff benefits come to an end, personal savings dry up, evictions are reinstated, properties are foreclosed, etc...
How would they handle remote employees who want to work from countries where Atlassian doesn't have a physical /legal entity? How would thing like taxes work in that situation?
Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work - remote people will be left out, and disadvantaged in terms of their career progression. So if they are serious about remote, they should commit to being remote only. Yes, some people won't like it, at least initially. But most of them will get used to it over time, same as they got used to the ridiculous proposition of spending a good chunk of their lives in traffic every day without getting paid, or not seeing their spouse and children for more than a few hours a day, or not being able to take a nap when they are tired, or sitting in a distracting noisy environment and being unable to focus, etc, etc.
>Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work
Piecemeal is more difficult but it's basically what my company was pre-COVID and presumably will be again (with probably a lot more remote) posy-COVID. It does mean the people who are co-located need to have the discipline to treat decision-making, etc. as if everyone is remote.
It probably helps that we're a somewhat larger company so most things are piecemeal anyway--people working together are in multiple offices even if they're not working at home.
Discipline requires upkeep and it will eventually deteriorate. You want to set things up such that discipline is not required: either the "right" outcome is the lowest energy state, or the "wrong" thing is logistically impossible. Fundamentally, this is the secret to successful people management in general. Anything else doesn't really work in the long term.
That's the reason they move there but may not be the reason they stay there. Once you change something in your life that allows you to take advantage of new opportunities, the latter may become the reason to support the change more than whatever initial reason you had.
Depends on the city. Portland is a good example of a city with an anemic economy that people seem to be drawn to.
I mean, even Philly (where I live) has seen somewhat of a resurgence (especially relative to the MSA at large), despite a lot of jobs being outside the city.
I think we'll see the hypergrowth of the tech hubs drop off. I think cities more broadly might slow growth as millennials age into parenthood and that might be accelerated by recent events making cities more broadly seem less welcoming.
But I'm not sure that jobs will be the main driver here.
I've seen people in the Seattle area and SF area who want to live in cities so badly that they reverse commute out of the city to their offices (Seattle to Redmond for MS, SF to Menlo Park or Mountain View for FB and Goog). These companies have a large group of private buses that handle this commute so it's common enough in those groups that there is evidence people move to the cities for things besides work.
I live in Toronto and we are already in stage 3 of reopening. Restaurants have allowed indoor dining and gyms have started to reopen. Movie theatres are also open.
Streets are bustling and patios are pretty full again.
I think this whole thing is overblown and we will return to normal sooner than people think.
cost of living in cities has been rising at an insane rate over the last decade, a large part of it is tech salaries. I know a ton of software engineers who only live in cities b/c that's where the jobs are. Places outside of cities also offer a lot of (different) enjoyable things to do.
Presumably big companies moving jobs away from cities will have some impact.
Both "cities will thin out because of covid" and "cities will remain the same despite covid" are pretty reductionist of much larger and more complicated trends I'm sure.
I'm aware I reduced the two sides in summarizing them above haha.
This. Basic supply/demand problem. For those in control of that scare resource (Bay Area housing close to employers/amenities), that constraint is pure profit.
Basically yes and insane NIMBY regulations have kept the city from reducing the cost of living via more open housing regulations and support for multiunit housing and ridiculous amounts of permitting.
Wouldn't that mean living in cities will get cheaper? People that didn't want to live in the city but had to for work will move out, and people that wanted to live in the city but couldn't because it was too expensive will move in. Hopefully a cheaper equilibrium in cities will happen because of all this.
This is why I'm in a suburb working from home. I do not want to ever not be near a city with things to do. I grew up in a very rural area and I hated it. There is a nostalgia uptick every now for the simple life now and then and I remember how terrible it was to be around uneducated rednecks and push it from my mind.
There is only one meaning of the term, at least nowadays. I think parent was sarcastic because part of definition of "redneck" is "uneducated", at least per OED.
Personally happy non city dweller and for real estate purposes hoping what your saying is true.
For me not fan of city dwelling and even more now with cities having the highest cases of Covid, at times there are not so peaceful protests and it's more expensive to live in close proximity to others.
I work live in Bangalore (India) where most IT companies are. I could go back to my village and save money and work remote. it's just good and easy on paper but very hard. A city like Bangalore offers a heck lot of things starting from the Tech community / vibe, weekend meetups (after Corona hopefully), Uber, Next day Amazon delivery, Online food deliveries, Work/Job Market, Side gigs opportunities.
I might be interested to moving to a nicer city probably stay slightly away from the expensive side but moving completely away from City is difficult for a lot of families who have enjoyed that life and its perks.
Massive? No. For one thing I don't think enough companies will buy into the work from home forever.
Although, those that want to work from home will most likely move from the cities, as it almost requires extra space.
Plus there are other advantages to cities... Nightlife, variety of eateries, multitude of entertainment options. People. Shopping.
People can rent co-working spaces in cities which is probably cheaper than getting an extra bedroom. That's an expense that some companies have reimbursed in the past. Although with everyone working from home, I'm not sure how equitable offering that as benefit would be viewed as.
If self driving cars ever actually work, coupled with ubiquitous remote work, it seems to me that the major disincentives for living far away from the urban center are mostly gone.
If you can sleep or working during your two hour automated commute, it would be a game changer.
Buses and trains are able to privately transport on arbitrary point to point journeys now? Also an enclosed space alone seems more attractive in a psot-COVID world.
When covid is done, or effectively done, we'll be the same fundamental society we were before it started.
This bubble of tech workers aside, most people don't want to sit at home all day. I like going somewhere to work where I can socialize a little or a lot on a given day, depending on my mood. Communicate with people in person when I don't want to deal with the online trade-offs. Go to lunch with people. Leave my work at work rather than have it invade my personal space.
I don't think covid has turned me into a minority on that. I'm dealing with this subsistence level of contact because I have to, but when this is over the companies that can offer me a comfortable work space will have a recruiting advantage over the ones that can't. I'll still favor being in my city.
I wouldn't extrapolate what tech companies are doing across the entire economy. A slowing or stopping of growth in cities? Sure. Massive deflation? Tech workers make up a single digit percent of the population.
There will be movement, but my sense is it won't be massive. People move to cities for the network effect -- there's an energy you get from being close to other people who are doing interesting things. It affects its inhabitants even outside of work. It's addictive.
People who move to cities just for work and who are on the edge may elect to move out.
But I was born in a city, grew up in the suburbs, lived in small university towns and now I'm in a big city again. I think I'll always want to live in a city -- or at the very least in any outlying cosmopolitan areas with easy access to the city core. COL be damned -- I'll make it happen, even if I have to live in a smaller space.
I have a feeling this is going to end up similar to the "open office" fad. Lots of companies are going to go 100% on "forever work from home". Then in a year it's going to be not so much. That being said, I do believe "work from home" will become more of an option and far less frowned upon by employers. Then again, this is a white-collar problem. Blue collar and a few other industries still have to go to work. But who cares about them, right? It's only the white collar jobs that matter and should have a form of change and evolution to how they work. Those lowly blue collars and service industry peasants need to get back to work. It's far more vital for the important industries to hide away from the outside world, from its horrors and look down at the rest.
The open office “fad” is pretty much the only office arrangement for more than a decade now, so what you’re saying is this will be the de facto going forward?
De-facto, but actually counter to productivity, just like open-office. Companies that choose to not do this, will have a per employee efficiency advantage. Big companies may not care just like in open office because the per employee advantage is outweighed by the ability to reduce costs for the space
We don't need to endlessly increase productivity. The US been increasing productivity faster than wages for decades and it hasn't been good for most people.
I'm not arguing either way for whether "we" need to as a whole, but if you want to get the most out of your team and company (and you should if you're running a startup) I think you should look at in person options again once things are somewhat normal if you want an advantage. Some sort of hybrid office(with dedicated per employee offices)+WFH flexibility is probably your best option.
No. There's not a lot of research into it yet because the ability to work from home is relatively new, but this is literally my wife's area of academic expertise and the research that does exist generally shows that given the proper conditions and environment, working from home can be vastly more productive.
In software, remote work is way more productive in my experience working remotely for the last almost seven years. It's a win win. More productivity and way better working conditions (home office, nice desk etc.). Less hours needed to finish. Easier to concentrate. Easier to deal with bad bosses or co-workers or take time out and breaks during the day. More flexible schedule. Much less stress. The pros go on and on. The only negative for work is promotions and visibility, but when everyone's remote, even that works itself out.
How big are the teams you've worked with? I agree it's productive for deep work and when design is already worked out for large changes or additions, but I've had many people on my team complain that they can't work through a hard problem on a whiteboard with peers or quickly sync up on a design and require more time in meetings to get things done across components/team members/teams. Also not everyone has a dedicated office space at home, those people are hurting and having a hard time focusing in many cases.
Not too long after this discussion, a similar thought from PG: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1295788954353111040.
"Possible scenario: It's 2025. The epidemic is over, but most big tech cos are still significantly remote, because powerful employees moved to Jackson Hole and don't want to move back. A startup emerges that's intensely not-remote, and beats one of the incumbents by moving faster."
Where has the "open office" fad ended? It seems like companies say it's a great idea even when presented with evidence to the contrary and they never back down or reverse course
hoping wfh/remote kills the cargo culted agile/scrum stuff.
a cute one liner, Regularly scheduled video chat meetings are anti pattern for remote work.
That's my feeling at the moment. trying to schedule people around the world to do video chats is a lost cause. Its also trying to cram the office experience into remote work. Video chats are a waste, no one is engaged, probably because most meetings are useless. Like stand ups, who's listening? We were only engaged becasue its socially awkward to not be in person. Now, I can turn my camera and mic off and stretch until I hear my name or just do my work. There's my stream of thought and slight rant.
If all of the white collar workers who are able to work from home and limit exposure to and spread of covid-19, doesn't that help everyone else who can't work from home?
There are a number of blue-collar jobs that don't require close indoor proximity. That's almost the differentiating factor. A landscaper, welder, framer, forester aren't sitting in conference rooms breathing each other's exhalations for 8 hours a day.
And since most of those jobs aren't usually salaried, I think they'd all welcome being able to go to work and continue to earn.
What are you actually saying? That white colar workers cannot have certain benefits that come with the job because blue collar workers cannot have them?
Let's hope everyone can choose the job they want and have the benefits that come with it.
I know plenty of blue collar workers that would never want to work behind a desk, and also know plenty who started earning a lot of money at 18.
I find your "blue collar victims" mentality very strange.
> What are you actually saying? That white colar workers cannot have certain benefits that come with the job because blue collar workers cannot have them?
I'm pretty sure this is what is regarded as "progress" these days... :)
How are those related? I don't understand why you think that some people working from home means that others will be less able to, or that those who can WFH don't care about those who can't WFH.
Given that some people are not working from home, surely it's strictly better for them if the spread of the virus is reduced?
> You don't see the "It's good for you that I hide from the danger and you go out in it" and how incredibly messed up that is?
That would be messed up, but what is actually being said is “Given that you need to go out into the danger, its good for you that I don't go out and needlessly increase that danger.”
In fact, I've heard the exact argument made from the side of workers that have to go out into the danger—whether to deal with it directly because thet are in healthcare, or because they work in retail in essential sectors, or whatever—that out of respect for their safety, people who don't need to be out magnifying the danger shouldn't be.
Because only Sith think in absolutes. It's objectively positive because there are a lot fewer people out there to get infected and lowers the overall case load for health and other essential workers. Unfortunately it hurts other. There will always be winners and losers.
I think there is a massive business opportunity for somebody to develop a system that will help big businesses turn cube farms into bubble farms, where every employee has an airtight box to sit in with their own air supply, filters, and exhaust.
Perhaps even some kind of comfortable spacesuit you can just live in all day will help the blue collar workers.
I'm only half joking. I would like to think there will be a strong push for a much more hygienic society in the future. A corona vaccine will never completely solve the problem, and who wants to even get a traditional flu. I suspect these social distancing measures are just how we live now.
I think the perspective of "who cares about blue collar worker" is assuming that wfh is always a choice, a preference and ideal for non-blue-collar workers.
I'm sure right now, lots of people who dreamed of wfh and couldn't have tried it and learned that it might not be the right arrangement for them.
Also, I find it hard to accept that people who pick certain jobs out of preference (not made to chose out of circumstances) like "blue collar jobs" would expect working from home. What does it mean for a steel worker to be working from home? A warehouse worker? A painter? A housekeeper? A cook?
I do agree with the rest of the sentiment you shared though... The sense that some people who are enjoying the current state of affairs want others to return to normalcy while they are living the exception.
Why would companies keep their offices if no one comes in to work there? Why wouldn't they sell all the furniture? Get rid of the infrastructure? Etc, etc.
This isn't a decision that could be rolled back easily or without significant capex. Companies that are doing this must be thinking it's a long term thing.
>Companies that are doing this must be thinking it's a long term thing.
Or they were thinking along these lines anyway and this was the push to get them over the line. Or they're putting real estate expansion plans on indefinite hold in the case of "you don't need to come back in the office but you can."
Similarly, I suspect that the people moving out of NYC aren't those with a mindset of "I could never live anyplace else on account of the opera." In many cases, they're probably people who were toying with idea already and this accelerated the process.
I don't get how WFH is related to not caring(or caring) about blue collar employees. If anything the demand for housing reduces and the rent goes down.
I feel like it’s the right thing to do at this moment but.. it’s one of those things where the long term consequences are unforeseeable, and it makes me nervous. Like: how can you organize a union if everyone is remote? Does this make outsourcing a lot easier? What about personal connection? Is this a step in the Uber-ification of the office worker? Will we all become independent contractors? It’s impossible to say at this point.
One thing that is not often mentioned is these threads is how this is particularly beneficial for European workers. They live in cities that are already small and dense, generally don't depend on the office for their socialization, internet speeds are good (due to density probably) and family life is balanced. Plus a lot of them are already accustomed to working remotely. They 'll probably be able to compete for a lot more jobs now.
Timezones are challenging between US West Coast and Europe. But, at my company, we do a lot of collaboration between US East Coast and Central Europe--which seems manageable synchronously but is probably approaching the limit where it's fairly straightforward (on a frequent basis).
I'm US east coast working for a US west coast client, and that's complicated enough. I've got a few hours before and after work to myself, which is nice, but the workday is smack in the middle. On the upside, I can sleep in and stay up late if I want. On the downside, I often miss family dinners (less of a concern with covid) and there's no long block of time for more than errands during the week. Overall, I like it. A bigger shift would be hard. I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.
I actually know someone who is a one-woman PR agency in Hawaii with mostly (all?) West Coast clients. Yes, she gets up at like 5AM.
I have a lot of calls that are mostly people in eastern time and central European time. It mostly works pretty well. We schedule calls typically between about 8:30 and 11 ET. Sometimes those of us in ET have a bit earlier calls than we prefer and the Europeans have calls a bit later than they'd prefer but it works pretty well. And we just don't expect Europeans to get back to us on the same day if we send them an email in the afternoon and they don't expect us to respond to emails in their morning.
Of course, if you're contracting the client may well want a more synchronized schedule.
> I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.
I know someone who did this. If you're a morning person already, the 5am wake-up isn't terrible, and finishing work at 2pm means you get prime surfing time every day. Not a bad way to go.
Literally did this all the way through the bay areas SIP order. Was going to head back but things are worse in Hawaii now, they just shut down the beaches...
> I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough
I do this, but from New Zealand: 5am (in winter) is 10am in SF, so I wake up at 4:50am. I'm usually online by about 5:15am. I manage a software team, who are distributed across North and South America.
It works fine. There's more than enough overlap between all our timezones (some of my South America team have adjusted towards SF time, too, though I haven't asked them to). Many of my colleagues don't even know what time it is for me, which is kind of the idea - it makes it easier if I just stick to west coast office hours, then no-one else has to think about it.
The early starts do drag as winter goes on, but I have the first daylight savings coming up in about 6 weeks - that'll mean 6am starts - then another DST shift will make it 7am (but I'll probably do 6:30am).
I am a morning person, and though I wouldn't usually wake up at 5am by choice, I wake up and become fully alert quickly enough that it's fine.
Having a big contiguous block of time in the afternoon / evening is amazing. Even in the middle of winter I finish work at 1pm and I have ~4 hours of daylight left to do whatever. In summer I'll finish around 2pm and have 7 hours of daylight. It's like having a full day to do stuff, every day - provided I have the energy.
What makes it truly hard (speaking from US location) is having a team in both directions. If you’re an Eastward team, or Westward team, but not attempting both, there is enough overlap that with some flexibility you can have meetings when everyone is awake.
By and large, Europe does not have Silicon Valley's culture of crazy overtime, living at the office, and spending your remaining free time with your colleagues.
This is a total tangent, but I'm an American with a partner from Stockholm, and we're interested in maybe moving over there when that is possible again. Do you have any suggestions or resources for getting to understand the tech scene around Stockholm, especially AI/computer vision stuff? Thanks!
I'm not really sure that I would be the best person to answer but if you would like to ask anything please do. I've work with over 250 clients and agencies over the years mostly in stockholm. Why not make it an Ask HN?
Good point! I can try but it's hit or miss whether it'll get any traction. I guess a couple questions you could help with are (1) are there any good resources for scoping the job market beyond putting "[whatever] jobs stockholm" into search engines, and (2) do you have any do's or don'ts for applying as an American not currently living in Sweden?
Visited the Bloomberg office in London. If you rent a Bloomberg terminal they gave free training on multiple features. Encouraged to visit the cafeteria, all free for staff and clients with visitor pass. Good stuff. Salads, fruit, cakes, sandwiches.
Looked around.
No chairs. This was in vast contrast to my employer at the time where lunch was a practical siesta.
Ok.. "so you take this back to desk?" I asked someone.
Possibly, but the ‘young driven worker’ dynamic in Europe is just completely different, where you do not need to compete all that hard to have a comfortable life.
European salaries are lower, for sure. But nice offices and free snacks are everywhere in the IT-field.
The place I just left had a wonderful rooftop terrace, overlooking central Helsinki, complete with an amazing sauna, a foam-pit, and gaming spaces too. That's a bit of an outlier, but there are a lot of amazing spaces across the whole of Europe.
Of course, a company that currently depends on crazy overtime, etc, isn't suddenly going to be looking to hire people who aren't going to do that just because they are hiring remote.
Let's not imagine that widening a hiring pool is going to change top-down company cultures.
I can’t think of a single great developer that you could hire in the US for $100K. The few jobs in non metropolitan areas for software developers are going to be WordPress Developers. Everyone else is going to at least leave for the closest metropolitan area.
As someone in the Midwest, this seems pretty biased to me.
I make right about $100k, which is pretty competitive for the area from what I can tell. It's possible I'm just getting completely fleeced, but I think that's unlikely.
But then again, I guess you can just play the "No true Scotsman" game and argue that I don't count as a truly great developer.
I’m not in Silicon Valley - I’m on the opposite coast. I’m not talking about the difference between small town and SV. I’m more referring to moving from SmallTown, Nebraska to Omaha Nebraska where experienced developers wouldn’t usually accept $100K.
I moved from SmallTown southern United States four hours away to Metro City southern US for increased opportunities almost 25 years ago.
I find it's better to just ignore it. But sometimes it does get hard. My friends make similar amounts of money as me, which is generally what I try to think about.
Gotta be happy where you are. Otherwise I guess you could go join the rat race and make the big bucks.
Beginning of 2020, I was 45 years old making A little more than the average senior SaaS CRUD developer made locally because of $bad_career_decisions. It was about $50K -$80K less than a CS grad would make a couple of years out of school working for a FAANG or even a second tier software company on the west coast.
Then Covid hit and the company I worked for had an across the board 10% pay cut.
Just dumb luck and being at the right place at the right time - I happened to have a combination of skills that let me slide into a remote position as a cloud consultant for BigTech.
Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win??
Well, even inflation adjusted I was making more than my parents did combined when they were 45.
But, my mom retired from teaching after 30 years at 55 and my Dad retired from his factory job at 57. When they were 62, they were both getting pensions and social security checks. They’ve been married for 50+ years and retired for 20+ years.
My mom retired a couple years ago from the hospital in town and gets a pension from that. I agree that people with pensions have a completely different outlook on money than those without.
My dad was a member of the steelworker's union for 25 years and then they closed down the plant he worked at and moved the production line to Mexico. He got to train his replacements. Then he delivered propane for a couple years, and ended up getting a job at Cargill on a line that made eggs for McDonald's breakfast burritos and Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches.
He worked there for 5 or 6 years, finally scored a nice job as the custodian at the rec center in town and planned to ride that out until retirement.
Shortly after his 57th birthday he started acting funny and was diagnosed with Glioblastoma [1], probably better known as "that cancer John McCain had". Died a year and a half later.
I don't think either or us is really adding much to the original conversation, but I am enjoying swapping stories nonetheless. Hopefully some of the bystanders are as well...
I worked at a company that was officially based in Nebraska because they received some type of grant for hiring locally. They expanded to my larger metropolitan area in the south east to find reasonably priced developers but a larger pool.
That being said, I was speaking to my CTO about hiring and I asked him, why doesn’t he hire in the Nebraska office, it would be a lot cheaper. His reply was “not really”. I know in my metro area, salaries for your standard experienced software as a service CRUD developers (no insult intended - as a developer that’s what I am), were making between $125K-$155K pre-Covid. I can only assume they were making about the same in Kearney and Omaha Nebraska.
Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it?
Personally, I consider myself to be a pretty good enterprise developer/architect but I wouldn’t get past the first round of an algorithm heavy technical interview without lots of practice.
> Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it?
Considering I tutored people in college that went on to work at the FAANGS of the world, I would guess so.
But also I guess it doesn't terribly matter. I got off that treadmill a long time ago.
Not my experience. 4 years ago I offered 3 people in the US a job. All declined it. They were looking north of $175k. All were in very low cost of living places. They would live like a king or queen on that salary there. I was offering $125k. It was a very quick conversation, too. Once they knew that, they bailed.
Not sure exactly how to ask this, but since $125k is well above US market rate in low cost of living areas: have you considered the possibility that they asked for more because other aspects of the work seemed extremely unattractive?
2 of the 3 were ready to accept the job. Salary was the only issue. The 3rd, I'm not sure of. The job was writing Lisp code, so you can gauge the unattractiveness of that yourself. (It's what they were looking for, they said.)
You should compensate employees based on the value their work provides you, not based on the particulars of their personal life. An engineer's frugality is not an excuse to lowball him or her.
$100k USD is $133k CAD and will get one some pretty decent talent in Canada -- especially outside of Toronto where rates are higher -- with the advantage of being in the same time zones, same linguistic-cultural nexus, and you won't have expensive American medical insurance benefits etc. Even better if you can offer annual bonuses and stock options.
The US is the recipient of all of the world's top talent. Why would any extremely experienced developer willingly choose to earn 1/6th of the money in the Europe or less unless forced to?
Of course, top talent does exist in Europe but there's way less than the US.
My comment never suggested there are none who don't live there by choice. Of course, by choosing Europe, you surrender literally millions of dollars (in compounding retirement investments over decades).
I specifically mean EU countries by the way, Switzerland and London are the only exceptions -- and even then the US is better.
You don't. You spend those "millions" of dollars on ridiculously expensive medical care, on ridiculously expensive education, on car ownership, on... And in return you get worse infrastructure, worse medical care, worse ecology etc.
> I'll remind you that new grads in the US are often paid substantially more than senior level developers in the EU.
Yeah, ain't that right. I've been programming for 20 years, worked as a lead developer/architect and have usually been among the most highly compensated technical people in companies I've worked for. And yet I have never seen anything close to the kind of money fresh grads get at FAANG.
On the other hand, if I landed a job paying 300k-400k USD a year, I'd probably just retire after 4-5 years.
I moved back to Europe from SV for a lesser paying job (not 1/6th though) because I thoroughly hated the bay area / US. I got a way better quality of life here (Belgium).
Because people like other things than just money? Once you have the safety network of a european state, have upper middle class income, there is very little to gain in quality of life by increase in pay.
I’m a big remote work advocate and have worked with some amazing European engineers. That said, having worked as an engineer in the US office of a early stage startup with a European office, the 5-9 hour time difference is a not-insignificant impediment when you’re resource constrained and moving fast.
Even with great communication and good management, having little overlap during the day for realtime conversations made it hard for me to feel like we were a well-oiled machine, especially with so much of the product changing on a daily basis. It’s very much a complex decision to make, in my opinion.
It’s worked better for me in teams that work on open source. Such projects tend to be intrinsically asynchronous and conducted via email, chat etc which is what you need to make a distributed team work well.
Yeah, there's actually some Linux kernel research that looked at what mattered for collaboration and time zones wasn't one of the factors. My counter would be that the Linux kernel community is a very mature one that's very accustomed to working asynchronously so I'd be cautious about generalizing.
Yes, asynchronous communication is the key. The synchronous communication is conducted sparingly in opensource projects. Say, once per month (video conference).
It depends on how you manage the workload I think. I am based in California (and so is my client) and we have a team in Hanoi, Vietnam. We get a lot done as many tasks are done asynchronously. Plus we can deploy when the users in US are sleeping :)
Why do people who are remote need to stick with 9-5 hours? Plenty of people hate those times, and would rather work later/earlier, which could well lead to more congruent schedules.
Working different hours from all your friends and family gets old fast. It gets old fast even if your family is on another continent and all your friends are on the same schedule. Most English teachers who come to China start in training centres where they work three evenings and two full weekend days a week. Everyone either leaves China or gets a job with more normal hours eventually.
I’m sure there are people who’d work 13-22 but I’d bet a substantial sum employee churn would be consistently higher.
I have fried st hat have worked shift patterns (some 24/7, some more like 4x10 hours “unsociable”) for decades and are fine with it. I have one colleague who works 4-12 5 days a week for the last 6 years and wouldn’t change it for the world. Another does 11-23 or 11-19 3 or 4 days a week. Personally I get more done between 18 and 21 than most of the day, hence I work 10-15 then 18-21.
Wife used to work for a company with an office in Yorkshire where working hours finished at 2pm (7-2 no lunch). Horses for courses.
HN does seem to bias towards morning based extrovert urbanites in its group think. It’s nowhere near as universal as you might think.
Yeah, especially given the fact that literally nothing is open out of hours in the UK (with exceptions - but you wouldn’t be able to base your life on that).
In Singapore we are working from home due to the Wuhan Virus. I shifted my hours to start around 1pm to better align with our London office. I think it’s much better as I’m not a morning person so I feel far more productive.
The biggest time gap team I've worked on was east coast US and China.
Great. 12 hour gap.
US team changed to being in the office, or at least online, at 6am. China team started at 11am in China. Roughly a 3 hour handover time.
It worked.
But for some was a toil. When interviewing and taking pains to point this out, the usual response being "Ok, no problem" but then a few months later seeing someone looking visibility drained wasn't good. Helped them find an alternative role. And some loved it, especially the reduced traffic and sense of community.
During this handover period everyone had a webcam on their OC, a fair amount of travel between sites which all participants were excited for on and three US-China marriages happened over the years.
At my last company (US on the east coast) I was the only remote member of the team, and the 5 hour time difference, although relatively small, and with significant work-day overlap, was still very difficult. Having to wait until the afternoon for a code review, staying online to support my team later.
It did mean that my mornings were totally free and I could get a lot done - so it swings both ways, but outsource everything to Europe isn't the panacea some people assume it to be.
Yeah they don’t pay $300K for a good undergrad who just graduated. More like $200K I would say (base + equity). It varies of course. But $300k would be a hell of a good offer.
(Not sure if your question is rhetorical, apologies if so)
It’s a flywheel. Investors give preferential to local teams, which leads to teams having to hire local, which reinforces the prices. The big tech that can’t really move or adapt to a more remote workforce pushes the salaries up, local cost of living rises, and the cycle continues. The cost to move from that culture is extremely high, so the salary differences end up being “justifiable”
So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company:
- 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays)
- 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses)
- Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work.
- Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded.
- Protection from the employer wanting to constantly monitor me, do drug, medical, lie detector test and such nonsense.
- Co-Paid pension, health. disability, unemployment etc. insurances
- Minimum contract termination notice periods and unjust termination protection
- Paid sick and paternal leave
- That other employees, who might not happen to have a as sought after job and thus negotiation power as me get largely the same basic benefits as me nonetheless.
I'd never work for an US company for a 100k given all the stuff I'd have to compensate.
Benefits and regulations vary from country to country. I don't know details about eastern Europe, but all those are fairly common to different degrees in large parts of the continent.
It's mostly the same in Eastern Europe (Romania at least), with the exception of paid overtime (though technically legally required, it is often not enforced), and the 13th monthly salary only being common in some industries.
I'm not European, but to a degree it seems so, yes. For example, minimum paid vacation by law is 21 days in almost all of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... And judging by common statements and anecdotes here on HN, I think the number of paid vacation days tend to exceed the legal minimum, especially in Western Europe, just as they do in the U.S.--typically 2 weeks for salaried employees even though Federal law mandates 0.
Likewise, mandatory pension contributions (employee and employer) in most of Western Europe exceed 20% of income (upwards of 30% in some cases), as contrasted to 12% in the U.S.: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/pension_glance-2017-... Who in the U.S. contributes 10-20% to their IRA or 401(k) on top of FICA payments? It's not even legal to make such large contributions pre-tax. (Some of us are privileged enough to make up the difference with higher salaries; a smaller fraction of a higher salary let's us contribute more to retirement.) Note that employer contributions aren't generally reflected in salary figures, and in some European countries employer contributions exceed 20%.
I worked in Switzerland, the 13th month wasn't a bonus, they simply took your salary, divided that by 13, that was your monthly payment and you got 2 of them in December.
Also many bills are due on the first of January for the whole next year e.g. insurance. So it was kinda like a holiday and large bill windfall, but it wasn't additional to salary.
That was just one company, maybe other countries or employers are different.
Not in the Netherlands. I always negotiated monthly gross. Then your 13th month and summer bonus suddenly actually feel like bonuses, even if the company includes it in the full yearly amount.
Even the '13th month' is standard, too, in Denmark, it is called 'vacation pay' and is accrued as a 12% added pay on top of your salary, but paid into a separate account, to be paid out when you go on vacation.
Sure, maybe. My point is that US companies have to pay more because more things need to be taken care of by the individual instead of it being socialized to different degrees. Also there is very little in terms or labor rights in the US. So it is a bit more complicated, than just taking some amount you think any European would just line up for work, without considering the conditions they are used to.
It is not like the possibility to work remotely for US companies that in absolute numbers pay more than the local ones is completely novel. But at least in my circles pretty much no one is interested in doing so.
You have to update your knowledge about working for the software companies in US. You get $150-$300K plus almost all the benefits you mentioned on top of that.
You might have missed my point in the original post, that I care about everyone getting these or similar benefits, not just me in a higher salaried positions or after years of staying in a company. It indirectly improves my own quality of life and affects cost of things.
Me making 150, 200 or 300k actually has fairly limited impact on my life. Everyone else getting the same benefits or not has, in a way not easily compensated by salary.
I answered this line:
>>> My point is that US companies have to pay more because more things need to be taken care of by the individual instead of it being socialized to different degrees.
the point is you get all these benefits and on top of this you get several times higher salary (I'm from Europe myself originally for what it worth).
Because that is what pretty every US American independently from political affiliation i talked with about this told me. They need to spent their own money on things that is covered via taxation in many parts of Europe. Whether this is good or bad, is a bit a matter of opinion.
I have absolutely no doubt that if you want to maximize personal compensation and benefits, the US is the place to be. Nothing else comes close
But originally this threat was about "Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it."
I doubt that a statistically significant amount of new grads get 300k in compensation plus those kind of benefits. I haven't spent a whole time researching but I couldn't find anything backing this up. E.g. it seems that you need to stay at Google 5 years to get 25 days vacation and entery level total compensation at FAANG being more in the 150k - 200k range.
On the other hand as an experienced developer making more than a 100k in just salary plus at least these benefits is not that hard in Europe if you are willing to move or find a remote job.
From all I heard or read, outside FAANG, the financial industry, and certain hotspot, the compensation and benefits within the US go down quite considerably and the difference to Europe is still big, but less exorbitant.
So sure, if you come in with full FAANG (many / all? of which have had engineering teams in Europe for a long time) style compensation packages plus benefits you will be able to attract many Europeans, especially if they don't have to move. But then we are quickly back to square one: Why compete with FAANG?
And again, I'd argue a big part of the reason why US companies can offer these much higher compensation package to positions like software engineers is because they save it on lower end jobs and there are fewer regulations for the common good in place that would cost them money. For some, this makes US companies a non-starter independent from the individual offer.
Wouldn't any company hiring workers in Europe need to provide the same benefits as any European company, roughly the ones listed above? Or can an American company just hire remotely and offer American benefits directly to employees (not talking about independent contractors of course)? It would seem like the former no? Or is there a possibility of the latter? Say I'm remote and would like to work in Europe. I think this is the big problem with trying to keep a remote American job there without becoming a consultant and getting paid Corp to Corp. Is remote work for an American company even possible if that company doesn't have a European presence in the country the work would be conducted in or would they need to get such presence first before it was legal? If it's the latter (seems like it would be) it could really limit the companies willing to hire in Europe.
I suspect that since the act of working happens physically in an European country, both the employee and the employer need to obey the labor law of that country.
Practically, the American companies usually employ Europeans through their European subsidiaries/branches (which to local government look exactly like local companies).
At a minimum a company hiring in Europe (or anywhere else) needs to offer at least the legal minimum of benefits. And they may offer additional benefits to be locally competitive. Of course, salaries may be lower than in many US locations as well. And, yes, companies usually have to establish some sort of legal presence in a country. This is an obstacle for smaller firms, less so for larger ones.
>>Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.
Because $300K vs $100K makes very little difference to them when they're printing money. One idea from a top dev can make the whole thing pay itself and then some, for years.
From what I have seen, its hard to make a fluid team without an extraordinary amount of effort in communication. This is quite tiring for a lot of people and they need specific training.
> internet speeds are good (due to density probably)
ISPs and wireless carriers are the most profitable companies in the USA all with 60% gross profit margin if you look and any of the financials.
When my friend was younger he worked for a cable company, where he did installs. He said the capital costs were usually covered in the first month of service, and everything was gravy after that.
So. What if in another country instead of extracting the profit, they put 5% of it back into the infrastructure. I suspect you would have what a lot of europeans have - fast internet. And what if you didn't take as much profit? You would have the other thing europeans have, cheap internet.
I mean, I like capitalism. It works! But I think there are some things that are out of whack.
Because much of the US doesn't have capitalism for ISPs. It's largely monopolies and oligopolies all around. And not the nonprofit, regulated utility type.
That's exactly the end result of capitalism, at least in America, due to lack of proper regulations. There's nothing more capitalistic than a monopoly or duopoly. Oligopoly at worst. This is the goal every single capitalistic organization in the world strives for. From Google to Apple to drug dealers and slavers they all want monopoly or close to it. To claim that monopoly is not capitalistic is delusional. It's the most capitalistic situation possible and the most desired and sought after universally. It earns the winner the most capital. America has really perfected this system in its legal markets, although on the black market many other countries have too.
Technically you may be correct. I meant capitalism, small 'c', as understood in the post-Standard-Oil era. If there is no competition then it's not truly a free market. So perhaps I should have written free-market capitalism.
Hiring and operating out of a whole new country (or several) is a bigger leap for a company to make than just "anywhere in the same country" - the places I've talked to are considering making the latter change permanent, but aren't looking at starting to hire internationally.
Its worth noting Atlassian's roots in Australia mean they have had a long history of working across borders. Both the founders just bought the two most expensive houses in Sydney adjacent to each other so presumably they don't want to be bound by geography in running their business either.
My company forced me back into a windowless massive open office back in June, I handed in my notice yesterday to take a better paid 100% remote position with a company that has been 100% remote for years before this crisis.
That it also comes with a substantial pay rise, zero travel and the opportunity to work on stuff I actually find interesting is just a gigantic cherry on the cake.
It was by far the largest factor in getting me to go look elsewhere though not the only one.
I was frank (though polite) with my boss (since I'm a lead and I have zero intention of ever returning) about it - they are going to haemorrhage their senior developers and I know stuff he doesn't yet about others leaving.
I once worked in an office with fake windows---just some blinds hung over a small recess in the wall.
When our team first arrived in the office, a colleague walked over to them and said something along the lines of `let's get some sunlight in here' before opening them to reveal the deception.
Previous employer I was given the choice of been in the main open office or taking over an old out of the way (huge) meeting room that had no windows to myself.
Boss simply couldn't understand that someone would choose to sit in a quiet, miles away from anyone else on site, air conditioned office even without windows.
Honestly, never bothered me, lots of plants and replacing the strip lights with 5000K bright LED's for the overheads and some LED lamps dotted around it was only the same as working at night at home.
Hands down the best physical work environment I've had outside of work from home.
I joked at the time I'd program in a cave if it had good internet and was quiet.
I like the trend but one big hurdle will come when we have a partial return to the office. Everyone at work, or everyone remote works well. Mixing office and WFH communication will have further growing pains.
I feel like permanent WFH is outsourcing real estate costs to the worker. This isn’t a big deal for some, since one may live alone or already have a home office, but it gets burdensome if there is more than one home worker in a household.
Then your pay will be cut too. Lots of people think that is unfair because you are doing the same work, but those people just don't understand that salaries are market based.
Also you might think "my company doesn't cut salaries", or "I just won't say I've moved". That might work if you stay at the same company for the rest of your life, but if you move jobs there's no way you'd get the same deal.
I believe that depends on the company. Facebook? Sure, I think I saw an article about that for Facebook. Other places? Maybe not.
Often times, there's plenty of places that are _totally_ within commuting distance, but really aren't. Do you think Facebook would lower someone's wages for living in Davis rather than Palo Alto or San Jose?
> Do you think Facebook would lower someone's wages for living in Davis rather than Palo Alto or San Jose?
Yes of course. You only think that would be surprising because until now companies can tailor salaries to the office location, based on the reasonable assumption that most people will live nearby, and the annoyance of commuting long distances will roughly cancel out the lower cost of living.
As soon as the annoyance of commuting is removed they will definitely take into account your cost of living.
I suspect this is one of those cases where there are temporary winners and losers. In places where housing was less expensive, such as much of the Midwest, a lot of people over-bought, so we have space that we didn't really need anyway, and that was idle during the entire work / school day.
I work in hardware development, and moved an entire lab to my house. I could think about what it's costing me to maintain this space and pay taxes on it, or think about the fact that I still have a job. And it would be hard to imagine this work being done in a lower cost region.
We had 4 people working from home until the school year ended. But the kids are old enough to be reasonably self sufficient during the day. It's actually been pretty easy.
Younger colleagues who are living in starter homes, or apartments, and have small kids, are having to figure out more compromises. Places with extremely expensive real estate also have higher salaries, at least for tech workers, so those folks may still be ahead of us Midwesterners.
Even before the COVID, there was a trend towards people buying a bit of extra space to set aside just in case their careers turned towards consulting or other similar work.
I was almost entirely WFH before but, yes, if I were still commuting, this would be a big savings of both time and cost. And I don't even have a bad commute--about 30 mins each way. On the other side, I have a house with a dedicated office that would be well equipped whether I used it for a work office or not. I did have to replace my good home office chair after this started, but I would have wanted to do that anyway.
On the other hand, if you're in a studio city apartment, don't want to leave the city, and can normally walk to work, renting a co-working space or a larger apartment obviously isn't a great financial deal relative to going into an office. That said, I doubt many companies will eliminate their offices for people who want to go in. But it may be a while. And I know people moving out of the city--at least some permanently.
FWIW Atlassian has been giving us a bunch of perks to account for this since the COVID-wfh started. We've had extra days off to account for the stress of a different lifestyle and home office budgets to purchase things we need.
It's not going so far as to pay us enough to offset the rent of a dedicated home office room, but they're still quite nice perks. The Australian government is helping out quite a bit too - there are many additional benefits this tax season for those who are working from home.
If we count putting the gear on/taking it off my motorcycle commute costs me 10hrs a week on top of my 40hrs (currently).
That's time I can't get back or do anything with - compared to the remote position I just accepted (on higher pay ironically) I'll take the nominal increase in costs of working from home over that, intention was to buy a house next year and convert the garage into one half motorcycle workshop, one half office so I'll just accelerate those plans potentially.
If my employer told me, that I could do the same, work from home, but have to buy my IT stuff and other things myself, I'd gladly do that, up to the point of approximately 1/6 of my wage, perhaps more. The point is, that it would save me so much time, that the cost is easily justified.
In Covid-19 times I don't need to wear a mask at home and I don't need to be worried about not wearing one. I can have lunch in peace, without worrying about aerosols hitting my food.
Side rant, I'm convinced that companies who say the office helps communication are just really bad at communication.
If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are good at communicatimg.
No, I'm really being serious. If someone doesn't answer an email, the reason usually isn't "I'm busy", it's "I don't want to help you".
If the answer is "I'm busy right now and I am not responsible enough to remember all of the people I need to follow up with to at least give them a pointer of who could actually help", then your company is dysfunctional.
As much as people like to complain about JIRA and Confluence, the very essence of corporateness, Atlassian is a great company for both customers and employees. Also, I have 'known' Mike Cannon-Brooks since twenty years ago when he was active in developer forums, good dude then, too. So nice to see engineer driven companies succeed and not forget the little guys.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 486 ms ] threadElse they'll be forced to use something like Jira, Confluence, Bit Bucket, and such, which suck...
Atlassian's documentation isn't that good however.
That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.
I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.
When you're working with Python, Jira will render __init__.py as an italicized version of _init_.py even when you put it in monospace with the {{braces}}. If you're talking more abstractly about algorithms, O(n) turns into the letter O followed by the thumbs down emoji.
It's a good thing no one uses Jira for software projects because that'd be really awkward!!!
A non sane place would have 20 obscure mandatory fields per ticket, require the ticket to go through 10 different states that makes no sense, and last but not least, every click would take a full minute to load the page.
I'm not a PM and I don't really want to get to know the ins and outs of an issue tracker.
Also, looking at my project is a pain since my tickets are outside the sprint and I either need to go into the backlog and scroll a bunch, or use a custom search.
Collaborating over JIRA on a video conference is PAINFUL AF. A lot of time is spent just waiting for the UI to respond. It is completely unacceptable.
The current implementation of jira and confluence I’m using is worse than having _no_ ticket tracking and documentation system.
Because if it didn’t exist there would be the impetus to implement something. But we just kinda barely limp by with what we have.
It’s so barely functional that people actively avoid using it.
I’m fully aware that the company is to blame and not necessarily atlassian though, as we have a number of plugins and random custom fields.
One of the most dangerous things about jira is that it tries to be everything to everyone and people get carried away in the customisation believing they need it. It slows everything to a crawl and leaves you inundated with mandatory fields and a nightmare of matching stories with sprints and estimations in order to bring a bloody task in.
Life was better with rt and mediawiki.
Also the mandatory fields are definitely a per-organization thing. At my org we have I think 3 mandatory fields, which are the project the ticket goes under, the title, and the description. In many cases, "migrating" from JIRA to JIRA but 90% of the features are disabled would probably be an improvement.
... I suppose that might be the main difference between people who hate JIRA and people who find it a little bit clunky but generally acceptable: people who mostly have the baseline stuff happen automatically are fine with it, and people who spend a lot of time interacting with the web frontend in repetitive ways hate it.
I ended up forcing my slack bot to issue POSTs to Jiras API out of frustration.
The two workhorses of my integration are two methods named jira_get and jira_post.
Then if you want to get the available transitions, and required fields for those transitions, you can do and then given the transition in question, you can look at the fields required for the transition, and figure out where you get the data that goes in those fields normally. Any time the data that goes in those fields is obtained through a rote process, you automate that process, and then prompt for any fields you can't get in an automated fashion (e.g. "signed off by" you can fetch the reviewer names from the github api for the associated pull request).But yeah, a slack bot that issues requests to the JIRA api is a perfectly workable solution, and I think you'd be surprised at how much of a quality of life improvement you'll get by continuing to add capabilities to it that reflect your specific workflow.
The problem is that this anecdote is not even remotely surprising. I've used JIRA and/or Confluence at three employers and all three had wildly different, and awful, configurations. I have never worked with any technical folks who loved either, although I think on the whole Confluence is slightly better than JIRA.
I thought the same thing for a long time - that Atlassian makes decent products that are often implemented poorly - but the problem is, at what point does it become Atlassian's fault for making products that seem so easy to implement so badly that developers will go out of their way to track work in Excel instead of JIRA?
A couple of mandatory fields (department, team, application), that were manageable and that's about it.
They even the JIRA during my tenure there. Made user sessions last for a while instead of being disconnected every 15 minutes.
Feel free to email me if you think your company may be open to using outside help to clean things up.
Incidentally that conversation started with the suggestion to bring Jira into our already bloated set of services.
I'd rather learn a completely new system every 90 days than use JIRA.
On a typical day moving tickets around , reviewing everyone's items and confluence with its WYSIWHG editor only approach is 20% of my day gone.
Just making the UI non blocking for every single action would double my productivity. Their mobile apps are definitely better than web, so it is not like they cannot build decent interface and application, The web app just smells of legacy and debt to me.
Even if its because of customizability they provide, it is really on them, to approve all sorts of plugins and for all straitjacketing they and/or AGILE ( as typically implemented) does to your development in the name of structure, restricting some of this customizability would not have hurt product more.
Ultimately like any other SaaS business they serve the buyer and not the user. They are interested in what sells more, more often than not it does not intersect with what the users need. Customization sells, saying NO doesn't in enterprise.
I guess we should be thankful they are not IBM or Oracle and build your kitchen sink and neighbours too
I am tempted at least once every few months to just build a better interface and frontend which isnt' crap. Management is not going change from JIRA. Developers / users would happily pay out of pocket for a saner interface which helps simply manage their items without fuss, most people don't really care about the backend and the fancy reports, burndown charts for the most part, those who do can use the official app .
I'd rather use a tool that is flexible by default than use a rigid tool that you need to change every six months.
Then they decided that they wanted to look serious, and reduced the meme size to 32px. That’s when the product fell out of fashion, because it was just like Slack with fewer features.
Thousands of years of linguistic progress out the window...
One day I need to have a beer with these people who say Jira is fast. I've seen everything from "unremarkable" to "If we don't reboot the servers on Monday then nobody can work after 10 am on Friday". But never, ever, fast.
I've used it for 6 months - it's garbage. At least, absolutely ZERO times better than Jira as an overall productivity tool.
I can't tell you how many times issues have never loaded (see: blank screen), painstakingly prioritised lists of HUNDREDS of issues that have had their ordering completely scrambled, to name two off the top of my head.
If you hate Jira, think about whether it's the thing you hate that you're used to. Because you're absolutely going to be trading for a NEW thing that you hate, and have to learn to use from scratch.
Edit: People seem to be agreeing but I'm getting downvoted. WTF.
I agree, but mostly because high speed internet connections aren't that widespread yet.
Now, the plan is :bring everyone back to the office, despite clear better kpi and more output etc.
Old managers just cant let go.
If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary. Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there before.
I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.
There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.
Define “big city.” I live in a medium-sized city in a low cost of living area and my house has AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, and cable available to it. I dare say that’s better than most people in the Bay Area have access to. And yes, Amazon delivers here too.
I'm sure that the reduction of CoL opens up plenty of financial room for a car, but it's a whole extra set of things to have to worry about that I personally would rather not.
Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area.
Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.
If you do ordinary CRUD coding at work in USA, I would seriously start looking at how to pivot out of that job.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipen...
no, not all parts of the country will be so hardcore about remote work into the future. For example, I see Utah (which leans heavy into enterprise SaaS and already booming in tech) to continue as normal except with masks or a little more space between desks.
If some businesses do better in person, then they will make it happen somehow.
2. extremely portable work goes abroad
Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.
Why do so many companies hire at a higher salary in the Bay Area when they can hire the same person anywhere else in the US at much lower cost?
1. Reduce foreign workers in the US
2. Allow WFH from anywhere* thereby reducing total cost of workforce domestically
*remember things are never done to be awesome for the employee, just the companies bottom line, if both happen then that is fine too.
Government job, so they wouldn’t outsource me, but you could easily give someone else a login and that is all it would take to replace me.
Would be scrambling were I in the private sector in this type of job.
If a company has had somebody stagnant for years (many years), they're not going to be replaced for cheaper. The crash might cancel the last couple years of inflation at most.
Also, the employee is much more experienced now (could go from junior to senior over 5 years). Will the replacement be equally experienced or starting from scratch again? A fresh experienced hire is certainly more expensive than what the employee was originally earning.
What I'm asking is: Do you think another type of developer (e.g. Systems programming) will not need to pivot?
1. Hey, let’s hire cheap Indian workers!
2. WTF, we didn’t expect all these time zone and quality control issues!
3. Let’s onshore again!
Believe me they’ve been trying to do the Indian outsourcing thing for a looooooong time. It doesn’t work as well as imagined. The Indian developers who are as good as their western counterparts don’t stay in India.
Edit: this comment was a bit sarcastic, just in case somebody didn't get that.
Btw, currently my job is a 25 minutes subway ride away, so... So and so. Not a lot, to be honest, I don't have to drive and the monthly public transport subscription is fairly cheap (~39€/month).
My office is 12 minutes "run-commuting", there are a couple of good restaurants there, if I make a mess on my desk in the office, my desk at home is still clean, I got four whiteboards, I am not bothered by the neighbor's Amazon package, nor coworkers as they are all working from home.
Now granted, if I had to come 2x1 hour by car, I wouldn't do it, but a 30 min walk in the morning is actually pretty nice
Having said all that, I really hate Jira and Confluence and would not like being a developer working on them. The front end is such a mess, I hate to think what the back end looks like.
“Turn the HN angry mob mode off - it’s not helpful. We’re all in this together.”
When asked by non technical people “Should I install this app? Is my data / privacy safe? Is it true it doesn’t track my location?” - say “Yes” and help them understand” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22986426
And here’s an article:
“Australian tech darling Atlassian is among the five private companies that helped the federal government build its COVID-19 contact tracing app.”
https://www.innovationaus.com/atlassian-and-the-covidsafe-te...
The fact that they didn’t wait for Apple and Google’s contract tracking API and instead went for an app that needs the phone turned on and in the foreground for it to work properly is the reason why nobody is using it :headdesk:
I'd sooner work the curb while living in a coal bunker
That's the best way of putting that I've ever heard. Stealing it.
Every engineering org has things like this – features that they know the customer rightfully wants and should have, and seem to the customer to be simple, but in reality bring your eng org to its knees.
I've certainly pulled my hair out a million times with Jira, but TBH I'm extremely impressed with their redesign. They've really scaled back the complexity IMO while still giving my team the customizability we need (we started on Trello and quickly hit roadblocks).
I was responsible for bring Jira into my team at 'megabank' not long after it launched around 2003/4, because the alternatives were horrific to set up and use. That was pretty much it.
You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably not Agile.
You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.
And on and on, with very basic needs...
I’m shocked how naive people seem to be in these threads about remote work. There is tons of remote work. There already has been for decades. It’s called outsourcing. The reason you can’t find remote jobs in high wage countries is because no one would be crazy enough to pay those wages for remote workers when they can find the same level of talent for less than half the price.
So that person, even if they are highly skilled, will instead have to work at a low skill job for low wages . Not because they have lower skills, but because their government is looking out for the wealthy asset class as opposed to the working class and those other countries(like India) do not legally allow US citizens to live and work in their lower cost of living country.
I know of many companies with outsourced talent, that have a local office in the US where clerical workers and the janitors of the building make higher wages than the overseas outsourced engineers. And those clerical workers and janitors do not make enough income in the US to have decent housing or health care. They are forced, by the laws of the lower cost of living countries, to stay in the US and live poorly.
I really miss real whiteboards.
The only thing worse that being on a software team that has no whiteboards, is being the only remote person on a team that has whiteboards in the office.
I’m also not convinced that there is a tool that when mastered can provide the same fluidity, but I can claim that, and to the contrary I’d love a recommendation.
It’s definitely not the same as drawing on a whiteboard, but I’ve found it useful for explaining abstractions.
(That said, if whiteboards are important to a team, I would imagine there's software for sharing tablet drawing. I've heard there is. I just haven't investigated.)
You can get an entry-level Wacom for < $100, and it scratches the whiteboarding itch for me in a lot of situations.
It's been _rough_. I knew going in that I hadn't joined a new company in 5 years, so it'd be difficult. But this has been a whole different level.
Nearly 6 months in now and I still don't feel like I've meshed with the majority of my team, only one or two people who are just extra friendly, and forget knowing anybody outside of my team at all.
I rarely get pings from anyone asking how things are going; I usually wind up needing to do that myself.
I've never been a very extroverted person, but I'd definitely prefer working from an office (in obviously better circumstances) during this period of on-boarding and readjustment. I feel so isolated right now, which is completely opposite of how I think I would have been if I were still at my last role but during this environment.
I think in 6, 12 or 24 months possibly longer for some. Many will regret when they look back they didn't realise what was really going on with the company. They just heard from their contacts and also heard what people wanted them to. They got stuck in a silio.
The new section of the office where a team was parachuted in which somehow has an impact.
How do people expect to form casual but often extremely useful contacts with the people who really know what's going on in other teams, department, divisions or other locations?
You won't hear the gossip from your workmate who works early or late, the postroom, the security guard or receptionist about that out of hours meeting the management team had or whatever.
How will you really know of you haven't been offered a poisoned promotion?
To a degree your rely on being told the full picture by those with the overview. Which is likely to be the management. Which no doubt may happen in many places the majority of times until the one time it really affected you or your team.
For example a group of us headed in to the Riverside sub office on the outskirts of London by the Thames yesterday. For aircon offices and a r oriverside pint at lunchtime as the UK had its hottest August day in 17 years.
Straight away those who caught on a group of us had met up in the office started to wonder why? With a number of messages and calls wondering what we were up to.
While we bonded and had a change of scenery. Some of those at home, for no reason got paranoid.
The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals).
This means that employees would see advantages to coming to work, and those that don’t would fare worse in promo and productivity on average, bringing the equilibrium state back to the office.
And that presents a long term problem.
There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." Lower trust or communication or higher friction are not inherent to working remotely, they are the product of poor and overconfident management (at least in tech, given our forum here) and can be seen in any number of environments. You can replace "working in person" with various other specious truisms like "having an organized workspace" or "having weekly status meetings" or "using agile methodologies" and the two sentences above will be likewise banal and true only in specific instances.
Most technology work can be done remotely, and I'd argue should be done both remotely and asynchronously (many companies recently forced to do the remote piece are still are holding dearly to 9-5 and constant meetings), unless there are specific use cases that require more in person synchronous efforts (and to be sure this is the case in some cases, especially when specific hardware must be used for instance). The perception that there is something "better" about 9-5 in-office work is more a product of tradition and resistant over-management than inherent advantages to either setup.
I really miss whiteboard sessions and and being able to chat without lag.
I wish there was a way I could make a bet that 100% remote will NOT become the norm. Given how contrarian this opinion seems to be, surely there must be some way to profit if I am right?
I think it's pretty obvious that 100% will not become the norm. But maybe 50% for some types of jobs? And some number of smaller companies will go 100%? Those seem plausible.
Similar to the studies with brainstorming where people doing it in a group come up with fewer and less diverse ideas than people brainstorming individually and collating the results.
it depends what their goals are. having worked in-office and remote for the same company, it's way easier to get shit done in the office. at least if you're reasonably extroverted/persuasive/bold. there are so many times I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth. but if you're remote you're easier to ignore, and a lot of office workers are very good at ignoring people who want to create more work for them
but the flip side is it's way easier for remote workers to fade into the background and hardly do anything. a skilled developer can emulate a mediocre developer while working a fraction of the hours. a skilled manipulator can "work" a fraction of the hours managing expectations and barely produce much of anything. plenty of people will figure out how to automate their jobs and just never tell anyone
there's this idea that remote will benefit introvert/aspie types because it's so word-focused. you have few face-to-face conversations but you write tons and tons. but really, apsie types will produce reams of literal-minded descriptive and often very helpful documentation and discussion, while people-people types will manipulate their image to appear very legibly valuable and come out ahead more often than not
my honest opinion for awhile is that remote is going to a massive efficieny drain on big tech companies and startups doing stuff that's easy to phone in like webdev/saas/whatever, such that if you founded a small committed colo team you could probably outcompete them in whatever domain you want even without any special edge
Let's ignore how you interrupting someone cost them potentially hours of productivity.
I agree face-to-face is higher bandwidth for easy/simple topics. "Bob, what's the mainframe password" is easier shouted than written, and the reply likewise (assuming Bob knows it by heart).
It gets tricky when the topic is complicated or when Bob is distracted and confused. You might get a half-assed dismissive and incomplete answer (which you may or may not notice), or it might take Bob much longer to figure the answer out than if you had messaged it to him.
The quality of your communication depends on many factors, and your perception may not necessarily match reality.
there were more than a few times when the schedule slipped by months because someone outside the project delayed something by weeks. those kinds of issues I never had when I was in the office because I could get what we needed through force of personality. but outside, you have to go through process, and process is inefficient
seasoned remote workers might counter the org was dysfunctional (a charge I will not deny, hence why I left) but they don't have solutions other than more process. because remote depersonalizes work interactions, they have to layer on policies and documents. it's fundamentally a bureaucratizing force
I'm curious as to what you base this statement on. Game theory is modeling of strategic interaction between two or more players in a situation containing set rules and outcomes. Did you create the actual model? Is there an insight you mind sharing?
If anything wfh means spending more time in your home neighbourhood, so you’re going to need more amenities closer by - which are generally found in cities.
That's deep decrease (~33%), I fully expect the effects to show up starting Q4.
Landlords are stubborn beings always thinking they can rent easily and for more. Gotta take a beating with the property being empty for weeks/months before they adjust to reality. (Lettings agents don't care about waiting and pushing tenants out, they make fees either way).
Expect multiple hits downward over the coming year(s) as layoff benefits come to an end, personal savings dry up, evictions are reinstated, properties are foreclosed, etc...
Piecemeal is more difficult but it's basically what my company was pre-COVID and presumably will be again (with probably a lot more remote) posy-COVID. It does mean the people who are co-located need to have the discipline to treat decision-making, etc. as if everyone is remote.
It probably helps that we're a somewhat larger company so most things are piecemeal anyway--people working together are in multiple offices even if they're not working at home.
I mean, even Philly (where I live) has seen somewhat of a resurgence (especially relative to the MSA at large), despite a lot of jobs being outside the city.
I think we'll see the hypergrowth of the tech hubs drop off. I think cities more broadly might slow growth as millennials age into parenthood and that might be accelerated by recent events making cities more broadly seem less welcoming.
But I'm not sure that jobs will be the main driver here.
That's the thing though. For the next $few years, they offer nothing but a higher chance of infection. All enjoyable things are closed
Streets are bustling and patios are pretty full again.
I think this whole thing is overblown and we will return to normal sooner than people think.
Presumably big companies moving jobs away from cities will have some impact.
I'm aware I reduced the two sides in summarizing them above haha.
That's the problem, no?
Further, Merriam-Webster’s first definition is: sometimes disparaging : a white member of the Southern rural laboring class
For me not fan of city dwelling and even more now with cities having the highest cases of Covid, at times there are not so peaceful protests and it's more expensive to live in close proximity to others.
Will probably see a substantial rebalancing between metros though, with people fleeing super expensive ones to cheaper ones.
I might be interested to moving to a nicer city probably stay slightly away from the expensive side but moving completely away from City is difficult for a lot of families who have enjoyed that life and its perks.
If you can sleep or working during your two hour automated commute, it would be a game changer.
No matter how much easier doing unnecessary work is, it still doesn't make sense.
Sitting in an enclosed space for 3 hours is still sitting in an enclosed space for 3 hours.
This bubble of tech workers aside, most people don't want to sit at home all day. I like going somewhere to work where I can socialize a little or a lot on a given day, depending on my mood. Communicate with people in person when I don't want to deal with the online trade-offs. Go to lunch with people. Leave my work at work rather than have it invade my personal space.
I don't think covid has turned me into a minority on that. I'm dealing with this subsistence level of contact because I have to, but when this is over the companies that can offer me a comfortable work space will have a recruiting advantage over the ones that can't. I'll still favor being in my city.
People who move to cities just for work and who are on the edge may elect to move out.
But I was born in a city, grew up in the suburbs, lived in small university towns and now I'm in a big city again. I think I'll always want to live in a city -- or at the very least in any outlying cosmopolitan areas with easy access to the city core. COL be damned -- I'll make it happen, even if I have to live in a smaller space.
Hot desking is your CEO standing up and saying "I got nothing" when asked how to increase profitability.
a cute one liner, Regularly scheduled video chat meetings are anti pattern for remote work.
That's my feeling at the moment. trying to schedule people around the world to do video chats is a lost cause. Its also trying to cram the office experience into remote work. Video chats are a waste, no one is engaged, probably because most meetings are useless. Like stand ups, who's listening? We were only engaged becasue its socially awkward to not be in person. Now, I can turn my camera and mic off and stretch until I hear my name or just do my work. There's my stream of thought and slight rant.
The fewer people out and about, the less opportunities for the virus to spread.
Yes, it's messed up, but it's better than the alternative: Everyone going about their lives like normal and spreading it even more.
I honestly don't see any better alternative.
And since most of those jobs aren't usually salaried, I think they'd all welcome being able to go to work and continue to earn.
Let's hope everyone can choose the job they want and have the benefits that come with it.
I know plenty of blue collar workers that would never want to work behind a desk, and also know plenty who started earning a lot of money at 18.
I find your "blue collar victims" mentality very strange.
I'm pretty sure this is what is regarded as "progress" these days... :)
Given that some people are not working from home, surely it's strictly better for them if the spread of the virus is reduced?
That would be messed up, but what is actually being said is “Given that you need to go out into the danger, its good for you that I don't go out and needlessly increase that danger.”
In fact, I've heard the exact argument made from the side of workers that have to go out into the danger—whether to deal with it directly because thet are in healthcare, or because they work in retail in essential sectors, or whatever—that out of respect for their safety, people who don't need to be out magnifying the danger shouldn't be.
Perhaps even some kind of comfortable spacesuit you can just live in all day will help the blue collar workers.
I'm only half joking. I would like to think there will be a strong push for a much more hygienic society in the future. A corona vaccine will never completely solve the problem, and who wants to even get a traditional flu. I suspect these social distancing measures are just how we live now.
I'm sure right now, lots of people who dreamed of wfh and couldn't have tried it and learned that it might not be the right arrangement for them.
Also, I find it hard to accept that people who pick certain jobs out of preference (not made to chose out of circumstances) like "blue collar jobs" would expect working from home. What does it mean for a steel worker to be working from home? A warehouse worker? A painter? A housekeeper? A cook?
I do agree with the rest of the sentiment you shared though... The sense that some people who are enjoying the current state of affairs want others to return to normalcy while they are living the exception.
This isn't a decision that could be rolled back easily or without significant capex. Companies that are doing this must be thinking it's a long term thing.
Or they were thinking along these lines anyway and this was the push to get them over the line. Or they're putting real estate expansion plans on indefinite hold in the case of "you don't need to come back in the office but you can."
Similarly, I suspect that the people moving out of NYC aren't those with a mindset of "I could never live anyplace else on account of the opera." In many cases, they're probably people who were toying with idea already and this accelerated the process.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
I have a lot of calls that are mostly people in eastern time and central European time. It mostly works pretty well. We schedule calls typically between about 8:30 and 11 ET. Sometimes those of us in ET have a bit earlier calls than we prefer and the Europeans have calls a bit later than they'd prefer but it works pretty well. And we just don't expect Europeans to get back to us on the same day if we send them an email in the afternoon and they don't expect us to respond to emails in their morning.
Of course, if you're contracting the client may well want a more synchronized schedule.
I know someone who did this. If you're a morning person already, the 5am wake-up isn't terrible, and finishing work at 2pm means you get prime surfing time every day. Not a bad way to go.
I do this, but from New Zealand: 5am (in winter) is 10am in SF, so I wake up at 4:50am. I'm usually online by about 5:15am. I manage a software team, who are distributed across North and South America.
It works fine. There's more than enough overlap between all our timezones (some of my South America team have adjusted towards SF time, too, though I haven't asked them to). Many of my colleagues don't even know what time it is for me, which is kind of the idea - it makes it easier if I just stick to west coast office hours, then no-one else has to think about it.
The early starts do drag as winter goes on, but I have the first daylight savings coming up in about 6 weeks - that'll mean 6am starts - then another DST shift will make it 7am (but I'll probably do 6:30am).
I am a morning person, and though I wouldn't usually wake up at 5am by choice, I wake up and become fully alert quickly enough that it's fine.
Having a big contiguous block of time in the afternoon / evening is amazing. Even in the middle of winter I finish work at 1pm and I have ~4 hours of daylight left to do whatever. In summer I'll finish around 2pm and have 7 hours of daylight. It's like having a full day to do stuff, every day - provided I have the energy.
Could you explain what you mean by this argument?
Companies that hire young driven workers and have a good environment can get a similar amount of overtime and the work all the time attitude.
Thanks a lot for your perspective!
Looked around.
No chairs. This was in vast contrast to my employer at the time where lunch was a practical siesta.
Ok.. "so you take this back to desk?" I asked someone.
Yes.
QED that.
For context this was early 2000s.
Join a company in London. They have no seats. I'm not talking about free food or a company restaurant. Just having a place to sit with a table.
The place I just left had a wonderful rooftop terrace, overlooking central Helsinki, complete with an amazing sauna, a foam-pit, and gaming spaces too. That's a bit of an outlier, but there are a lot of amazing spaces across the whole of Europe.
Let's not imagine that widening a hiring pool is going to change top-down company cultures.
Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.
I make right about $100k, which is pretty competitive for the area from what I can tell. It's possible I'm just getting completely fleeced, but I think that's unlikely.
But then again, I guess you can just play the "No true Scotsman" game and argue that I don't count as a truly great developer.
I moved from SmallTown southern United States four hours away to Metro City southern US for increased opportunities almost 25 years ago.
Gotta be happy where you are. Otherwise I guess you could go join the rat race and make the big bucks.
Beginning of 2020, I was 45 years old making A little more than the average senior SaaS CRUD developer made locally because of $bad_career_decisions. It was about $50K -$80K less than a CS grad would make a couple of years out of school working for a FAANG or even a second tier software company on the west coast.
Then Covid hit and the company I worked for had an across the board 10% pay cut.
Just dumb luck and being at the right place at the right time - I happened to have a combination of skills that let me slide into a remote position as a cloud consultant for BigTech.
Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win??
I'm 31 making 3-4x what my father ever did.
And I get to sit in an office instead of busting my ass doing repetitive labor on an assembly line day in day out.
It's all about perspective I guess.
But, my mom retired from teaching after 30 years at 55 and my Dad retired from his factory job at 57. When they were 62, they were both getting pensions and social security checks. They’ve been married for 50+ years and retired for 20+ years.
I won’t be retiring before 67...
Again perspective...
My dad was a member of the steelworker's union for 25 years and then they closed down the plant he worked at and moved the production line to Mexico. He got to train his replacements. Then he delivered propane for a couple years, and ended up getting a job at Cargill on a line that made eggs for McDonald's breakfast burritos and Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches.
He worked there for 5 or 6 years, finally scored a nice job as the custodian at the rec center in town and planned to ride that out until retirement.
Shortly after his 57th birthday he started acting funny and was diagnosed with Glioblastoma [1], probably better known as "that cancer John McCain had". Died a year and a half later.
I don't think either or us is really adding much to the original conversation, but I am enjoying swapping stories nonetheless. Hopefully some of the bystanders are as well...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glioblastoma
That being said, I was speaking to my CTO about hiring and I asked him, why doesn’t he hire in the Nebraska office, it would be a lot cheaper. His reply was “not really”. I know in my metro area, salaries for your standard experienced software as a service CRUD developers (no insult intended - as a developer that’s what I am), were making between $125K-$155K pre-Covid. I can only assume they were making about the same in Kearney and Omaha Nebraska.
Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it?
Personally, I consider myself to be a pretty good enterprise developer/architect but I wouldn’t get past the first round of an algorithm heavy technical interview without lots of practice.
Considering I tutored people in college that went on to work at the FAANGS of the world, I would guess so.
But also I guess it doesn't terribly matter. I got off that treadmill a long time ago.
Of course, top talent does exist in Europe but there's way less than the US.
I specifically mean EU countries by the way, Switzerland and London are the only exceptions -- and even then the US is better.
You don't. You spend those "millions" of dollars on ridiculously expensive medical care, on ridiculously expensive education, on car ownership, on... And in return you get worse infrastructure, worse medical care, worse ecology etc.
As for medical care, all half decent tech employers provide comprehensive healthcare coverage.
I don't know what you've been reading, but unless healthcare costs $200,000 a year (it doesn't cost 1/10th of that), you're better off in the US.
As for "worse infrastructure", you'll have to be specific. There's crumbling infrastructure all over the US and Europe.
Worse medical care is also a stretch. In fact, in some areas (heart attacks and strokes, for example) the US is a world leader. [1]
I'll remind you that new grads in the US are often paid substantially more than senior level developers in the EU.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/22/the-real-reason-medical-care...
Yeah, ain't that right. I've been programming for 20 years, worked as a lead developer/architect and have usually been among the most highly compensated technical people in companies I've worked for. And yet I have never seen anything close to the kind of money fresh grads get at FAANG.
On the other hand, if I landed a job paying 300k-400k USD a year, I'd probably just retire after 4-5 years.
Most are basically forced to. We're not US citizens, we don't have a right to work in the US.
Even with great communication and good management, having little overlap during the day for realtime conversations made it hard for me to feel like we were a well-oiled machine, especially with so much of the product changing on a daily basis. It’s very much a complex decision to make, in my opinion.
I’m sure there are people who’d work 13-22 but I’d bet a substantial sum employee churn would be consistently higher.
Wife used to work for a company with an office in Yorkshire where working hours finished at 2pm (7-2 no lunch). Horses for courses.
HN does seem to bias towards morning based extrovert urbanites in its group think. It’s nowhere near as universal as you might think.
The biggest time gap team I've worked on was east coast US and China.
Great. 12 hour gap.
US team changed to being in the office, or at least online, at 6am. China team started at 11am in China. Roughly a 3 hour handover time.
It worked.
But for some was a toil. When interviewing and taking pains to point this out, the usual response being "Ok, no problem" but then a few months later seeing someone looking visibility drained wasn't good. Helped them find an alternative role. And some loved it, especially the reduced traffic and sense of community.
During this handover period everyone had a webcam on their OC, a fair amount of travel between sites which all participants were excited for on and three US-China marriages happened over the years.
Great for some. Terrible for others.
It did mean that my mornings were totally free and I could get a lot done - so it swings both ways, but outsource everything to Europe isn't the panacea some people assume it to be.
I am pretty sure even FAANG dont pay $300K for fresh grad.
Also $200K is on a higher end and depends on other offers, etc. Average is around $180K.
It’s a flywheel. Investors give preferential to local teams, which leads to teams having to hire local, which reinforces the prices. The big tech that can’t really move or adapt to a more remote workforce pushes the salaries up, local cost of living rises, and the cycle continues. The cost to move from that culture is extremely high, so the salary differences end up being “justifiable”
- 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays)
- 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses)
- Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work.
- Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded.
- Protection from the employer wanting to constantly monitor me, do drug, medical, lie detector test and such nonsense.
- Co-Paid pension, health. disability, unemployment etc. insurances
- Minimum contract termination notice periods and unjust termination protection
- Paid sick and paternal leave
- That other employees, who might not happen to have a as sought after job and thus negotiation power as me get largely the same basic benefits as me nonetheless.
I'd never work for an US company for a 100k given all the stuff I'd have to compensate.
You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.
Likewise, mandatory pension contributions (employee and employer) in most of Western Europe exceed 20% of income (upwards of 30% in some cases), as contrasted to 12% in the U.S.: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/pension_glance-2017-... Who in the U.S. contributes 10-20% to their IRA or 401(k) on top of FICA payments? It's not even legal to make such large contributions pre-tax. (Some of us are privileged enough to make up the difference with higher salaries; a smaller fraction of a higher salary let's us contribute more to retirement.) Note that employer contributions aren't generally reflected in salary figures, and in some European countries employer contributions exceed 20%.
Five weeks vacation is a legal minimum. Most companies I worked for here in Denmark will give you six. It’s technically not five weeks, but 25 days.
Also many bills are due on the first of January for the whole next year e.g. insurance. So it was kinda like a holiday and large bill windfall, but it wasn't additional to salary.
That was just one company, maybe other countries or employers are different.
- 14 payments (extras in June and December)
- 12+1 in December
- 12 + 2 x 0.5 (one extra in June and the other In December)
I believe dates were pick to match Xmas and Summer Holidays, two big spending anomalies
Anyhow you always negotiate yearly gross.
No, it's not. It might be in some European countries, though.
Also, not all of those apply to Norway at least and some are provided by the government.
It is not like the possibility to work remotely for US companies that in absolute numbers pay more than the local ones is completely novel. But at least in my circles pretty much no one is interested in doing so.
Me making 150, 200 or 300k actually has fairly limited impact on my life. Everyone else getting the same benefits or not has, in a way not easily compensated by salary.
the point is you get all these benefits and on top of this you get several times higher salary (I'm from Europe myself originally for what it worth).
I have absolutely no doubt that if you want to maximize personal compensation and benefits, the US is the place to be. Nothing else comes close
But originally this threat was about "Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it."
I doubt that a statistically significant amount of new grads get 300k in compensation plus those kind of benefits. I haven't spent a whole time researching but I couldn't find anything backing this up. E.g. it seems that you need to stay at Google 5 years to get 25 days vacation and entery level total compensation at FAANG being more in the 150k - 200k range.
On the other hand as an experienced developer making more than a 100k in just salary plus at least these benefits is not that hard in Europe if you are willing to move or find a remote job.
From all I heard or read, outside FAANG, the financial industry, and certain hotspot, the compensation and benefits within the US go down quite considerably and the difference to Europe is still big, but less exorbitant.
So sure, if you come in with full FAANG (many / all? of which have had engineering teams in Europe for a long time) style compensation packages plus benefits you will be able to attract many Europeans, especially if they don't have to move. But then we are quickly back to square one: Why compete with FAANG?
And again, I'd argue a big part of the reason why US companies can offer these much higher compensation package to positions like software engineers is because they save it on lower end jobs and there are fewer regulations for the common good in place that would cost them money. For some, this makes US companies a non-starter independent from the individual offer.
Practically, the American companies usually employ Europeans through their European subsidiaries/branches (which to local government look exactly like local companies).
That would put a stopper to working from a beach somewhere after this pandemic has been put to rest.
Because $300K vs $100K makes very little difference to them when they're printing money. One idea from a top dev can make the whole thing pay itself and then some, for years.
ISPs and wireless carriers are the most profitable companies in the USA all with 60% gross profit margin if you look and any of the financials.
When my friend was younger he worked for a cable company, where he did installs. He said the capital costs were usually covered in the first month of service, and everything was gravy after that.
So. What if in another country instead of extracting the profit, they put 5% of it back into the infrastructure. I suspect you would have what a lot of europeans have - fast internet. And what if you didn't take as much profit? You would have the other thing europeans have, cheap internet.
I mean, I like capitalism. It works! But I think there are some things that are out of whack.
That it also comes with a substantial pay rise, zero travel and the opportunity to work on stuff I actually find interesting is just a gigantic cherry on the cake.
It was by far the largest factor in getting me to go look elsewhere though not the only one.
I was frank (though polite) with my boss (since I'm a lead and I have zero intention of ever returning) about it - they are going to haemorrhage their senior developers and I know stuff he doesn't yet about others leaving.
In this context it means slowly bleed out developers from the teams until all the vital parts have left and you have a husk left.
It's also commonly used when referring to money when an unexpected event has led to losing a lot of money unexpectedly.
When our team first arrived in the office, a colleague walked over to them and said something along the lines of `let's get some sunlight in here' before opening them to reveal the deception.
Boss simply couldn't understand that someone would choose to sit in a quiet, miles away from anyone else on site, air conditioned office even without windows.
Honestly, never bothered me, lots of plants and replacing the strip lights with 5000K bright LED's for the overheads and some LED lamps dotted around it was only the same as working at night at home.
Hands down the best physical work environment I've had outside of work from home.
I joked at the time I'd program in a cave if it had good internet and was quiet.
Also you might think "my company doesn't cut salaries", or "I just won't say I've moved". That might work if you stay at the same company for the rest of your life, but if you move jobs there's no way you'd get the same deal.
Often times, there's plenty of places that are _totally_ within commuting distance, but really aren't. Do you think Facebook would lower someone's wages for living in Davis rather than Palo Alto or San Jose?
Yes of course. You only think that would be surprising because until now companies can tailor salaries to the office location, based on the reasonable assumption that most people will live nearby, and the annoyance of commuting long distances will roughly cancel out the lower cost of living.
As soon as the annoyance of commuting is removed they will definitely take into account your cost of living.
I work in hardware development, and moved an entire lab to my house. I could think about what it's costing me to maintain this space and pay taxes on it, or think about the fact that I still have a job. And it would be hard to imagine this work being done in a lower cost region.
We had 4 people working from home until the school year ended. But the kids are old enough to be reasonably self sufficient during the day. It's actually been pretty easy.
Younger colleagues who are living in starter homes, or apartments, and have small kids, are having to figure out more compromises. Places with extremely expensive real estate also have higher salaries, at least for tech workers, so those folks may still be ahead of us Midwesterners.
Even before the COVID, there was a trend towards people buying a bit of extra space to set aside just in case their careers turned towards consulting or other similar work.
It's anybody's guess what the future holds.
On the other hand, if you're in a studio city apartment, don't want to leave the city, and can normally walk to work, renting a co-working space or a larger apartment obviously isn't a great financial deal relative to going into an office. That said, I doubt many companies will eliminate their offices for people who want to go in. But it may be a while. And I know people moving out of the city--at least some permanently.
It's not going so far as to pay us enough to offset the rent of a dedicated home office room, but they're still quite nice perks. The Australian government is helping out quite a bit too - there are many additional benefits this tax season for those who are working from home.
That's time I can't get back or do anything with - compared to the remote position I just accepted (on higher pay ironically) I'll take the nominal increase in costs of working from home over that, intention was to buy a house next year and convert the garage into one half motorcycle workshop, one half office so I'll just accelerate those plans potentially.
If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are good at communicatimg.
If the answer is "I'm busy right now and I am not responsible enough to remember all of the people I need to follow up with to at least give them a pointer of who could actually help", then your company is dysfunctional.