It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.
Working from home doesn't work.
People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration.
Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone.
Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers.
Most positive feedback you hear today are from existing lone wolfs who used to work remote before covid and never really worked in teams.
We all know how successful (not!) outsourcing can be. Working from home is even worse.
This is just provably false. Basecamp and GitHub are the famous counterexamples, but there are many, many more. (Although GitHub changed course when they got larger.)
Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it.
But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
Sounds like your personal experience. Which is fine but there are thousands of companies and teams that have found it to be just as good or better than butts at the same physical office
You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective.
I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.
This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.
> Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat.
I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration.
Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles.
In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.
While I haven't seen a formal plan announced, I think there are financial, logistical, social, and political headwinds to it.
- Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board.
- Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this?
- Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch?
- Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again.
Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.
Well it’s not one of the big four specifically. Neither is Twitter. While they carry weight, they’re simply not as dominant in terms of seeing cultural norms.
Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current policies when the pandemic fades away?
My two cents as a remote dev for past two decades I think we are not going back as the landscape changed a lot: the scene used to consist of code me a facebook clone for 200USD to getting rich iOS apps towards seeing more bootstrapped high margin businesses and VC backed startups. This last group starting to learn doing remote work effectively and they manage to mine this talent pool profitably
Yes, but not the utopia devs in big cities want. They're in for a rude awakening when they realize people with way more talent will do the job for less, not only in the US but worldwide. And I don't mean typical outsourcing bodyshops, but truly talented people in say, the midwest US or eastern Europe.
Spain and Italy are Western Europe by post-WW2 geo-politics, but a better definition would be to say they are Southern Europe which, by developer pay, is even worse than Eastern Europe that most devs there have long moved north to the point where I doubt they're many left there.
Hehe, I, for one, moved to Spain (Costa del Sol) from a high paying location. Working remotely for a US company through a Spanish outsourcing company and getting payed peanuts compared to what I earned back at home, not to speak of US salaries (though my pay here is still 2x average local salary). Heck, although I'm basically living paycheck to paycheck right now, I could not be happier with my decision, life is good here. I'm sure I will be able to find new sources of income over time to compensate for the initial losses. But I could never have found the great climate, nature and relaxed people in many other top paying spots. Can't have everything right away, have patience.
My point was that of young talented native Spaniards and Italians leaving for greener pastures abroad (Netherlands, Ireland, Scandinavia, UK, Germany are full of them)
I'm sure there is an endless supply of techies willing to move to Spain and Southern Europe just for the weather and the beaches, regardless of pay.
If you don't mind me asking how do you find daily life there and dealing with taxes, healthcare, the authorities an bureaucracy in general?
Sure. Icome tax is paid by the employer, it varies from around 25% to more than 30% depending on place and personal conditions. Public healthcare is fine, and I also pay for a private insurance. Bureacracy is so-so, and reportedly got worse with covid, though my employer helped me with the adaptation, so everything went smooth (spent 1 month in total to settle everything for everybody). Also, all family members are granted visas with the right to work, at least when you hold a "highly qualified professional" type of visa yourself.
I understand that this is not very informative, but I'm still new here, and most of this stuff is similar in most places in EU.
Realistically, the only things to worry about are money and the lack of jobs. The latter will hopefully be solved by remote becoming the norm in IT, and the former depends heavily on personal conditions. E.g. if my wife worked, it would be much easier for us. If I had a different attitude towards saving and investing in the past, it would be much easier for us. And so on and so forth.
There are quite a few rich people here, and their lifestyle is awesome. Weather is good throughout the year (20-22C and clear skies with bright sun now, and February is the coldest and harshest month here), sea and mountains provide lots of opportunities for leisure and sports, birds and flowers and scents everywhere... Weirdly, I feel like I'm back in my childhood, when everything was so bright and fascinating. Completely forgot how it feels after having been deprived of all of these things due to living in a big industrial city.
If you feel poor at 1.5x the local average, imagine how the pople making 1x that or below must feel.
BTW, why do you feel poor if you don't mind me asking?
PS: I'm also a dev in Austria now. You can reach out to me for a post-pandemic coffee if you want, would be cool to meet another dev. My email's in my profile. Cheers!
> There are some world class developers in Spain, Italy or France that are paid ~30K€ to 50K€ per year
I seriously question that. I hire a lot from EMEA and world class developers don't accept a pay of 30 to 50k, especially in France, Italy and Spain. Perhaps Czech Republic or the Ukraine yes.
Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift?
Even if WFH provably works well for a company it's likely that many will never admit that it's permanent. Companies will want their staff to believe WFH is a benefit, because that makes staff work harder and stay in their job longer.
I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve.
Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast.
I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB before COVID hit, and then accepted a new management role back on the team right as COVID was hitting. I've never seen my team all in the same room; but it's been fine/normal-ish. Now that full-remote just takes manager approval, we've had folks move away from Seattle/SF. I've got reports in the UK and NYC. It's pushed our culture to be a lot more communicative, intentional, and organized, which is good for everyone, Seattle based or remote.
What's great about all this is now there isn't even a question of "is remote ok"? We don't need to be looking for a specific skillset or a certain level of seniority. It really opens up the talent pool; recent hires have given us a lot more selection. (P.S. - I'm hiring Product Managers; permanent remote. Check out my pinned tweet on the twitter profile in my bio)
I know companies where management have refused work-from-home PRE-COVID have struggled to deal with their whole company forced to work from home because of lockdowns as they were unprepared. As soon as restrictions were lifted here, these same companies forced workers to come back into the office... and now only a few weeks later, we’re in a lockdown again.
In a digital world, and being the primary workers in this industry, I find companies that outright refuse work-from-home because “culture” are pissing in the wind.
I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?
Is it "fair" for many workers to work in hostile and dangerous environments like oil rigs or policing high-crime streets, while SWEs sit in comfortable climate-controlled offices?
Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?
This, so much. Can’t have us flatten the curve if we’re all jammed packed on public transport!
The Victorian government’s messaging here has been along the lines of “if you can work for home, please do it”, and fines can be issued if you force workers into the office when unnecessary... but from what I’m hearing, workers aren’t raising alarm bells
In general, less people using the infrastructure around cities means that traveling is more safer, is generally better for the environment, and also supports small business growth in local communities instead of in a few blocks in the big city.
Even people that don't get to work from home still benefit from work from home. At the very least there's one less person to get annoyed with on the commute.
This is Hacker News, so I was speaking to the crowds here. Sure, most companies can’t have work-from-home as a viable alternative, but I’m specifically talking about purely digital companies - even where devs don’t interact with customers :shrug.gif:
Yes, many employers would rather that we physically commute to their offices every morning. They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it.
However, as the talent crunch keeps getting worse, and CoL and local income taxes keep obliterating pay raises, employers will have to find ways to reward the talented senior employees they're all competing for - and it won't be simply paying them more to work on-site in ultra-high CoL locations.
As more employers offer remote work options, the remaining employers will have to match - or risk losing many of the best candidates, especially senior engineers who aren't going to try to raise a family in SF or Manhattan.
Also, once the process kicks into high gear, it will be hard to reverse; engineers will move to suburbs in states like Colorado, and it will be very hard to get them to move back to extremely expensive areas like the Bay.
Arguably this is already happening during this pandemic. I know many engineers who moved to remote locations with no plans of coming back.
> Yes, many employers would rather that we physically commute to their offices every morning. They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it.
This is factitious comparison. Remote works great for a lot of people and it's undoubtable good that there are more options. But there are legit reasons for both businesses and employees to prefer working from an office. Office working isn't some ploy by evil employers to sweat every last drop of productivity from their employees at the employees expense.
Remote work is a coveted benefit, subject to the same economics as other coveted benefits: employers will have to offer it as it becomes normalized, and offered by their competitors in the war for talent.
Similar to how office food benefits used to be extremely rare niche, and now are extremely common.
Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.
> Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.
"They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it."
^ That's where I got it from. The framing that office work was something employers forced upon employees against their will. Many of us prefer an office and are keen to get back to one.
You might not know the history of employment. Employment is the latest iteration of a series of systems which require the bulk of the population to contribute labor to shared efforts which are designed by small elite groups. Your society explicitly asks you to trade labor for food, shelter, and other basic benefits of living in a civilization.
Specifically, we know that 12-hour shifts (without overtime or adequate breaks) were a thing that employers would want, because they used to exist. Similarly, we know that employers would want to pay below minimum wage, because they used to. In fact, both of these things still happen regularly today, despite the laws having changed.
Yes, when we look at history, we often feel that folks were doing evil/bad/harmful/etc. things, because we can't help but judge them based on our values which we hold today. The best that can be said is that people are complicated and that good/evil is not a good framing for weighing why people did what they did.
Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying"
Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?
It's incredibly easy to compete with "top paying" companies once you offer remote work, due to huge gaps in taxation and cost-of-living.
Let's do the math:
$400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net.
Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From an employer's perspective, that means I can offer 25% lower pay and be more than competitive with top paying companies in my field - if I offer a remote option.
A $400k wage in SFBay for Microsoft (which I've never heard of for a regular position) won't just translate to anywhere else in the world.
When starting salary in SF for Microsoft new college hire might be $120k+, in the UK it's £40k.
I realize you are specifcally talking about relocating to work remotely only within the US, but what I'm getting is that today Microsoft pays wildly differently based on location, and proposes to continue to pay wildly differently based on location with people relocating to work remotely.
I don't know if there will some special exception for United States, but the poster I replied to specifically brought up International.
Will Microsoft pay 1:1 for SF employee relocating to Texas while paying a UK employee 1/4 the wage?
If so, why... it doesn't make good business sense.
I am more than ready for my thoughts to be considered economically naïve, but I wonder if it's to do with the ability for labor to move?
In the US it is easy (from a legal POV) to move between California and Texas or vice versa so an American employee would probably move to California if a much larger salary depended upon it. If an employer doesn't really care if someone is in any particular location within the US, they may nonetheless feel happy paying what they valued the employee at if they did force them to move to California, say. Of course, they may also attempt to pay less, but that's a risky strategy since the employee could just as easily then request to move to the expensive location.
The UK worker earning 1/4 the wage does not have this freedom. Very few UK workers can move to the US (or any other economy than Ireland) and so the market rate for developers in the UK is very specific to the UK. Only a fraction of the best developers who both want to leave and be able to leave. There's a certain local demand and supply and the salary has found its natural resting point, protected by a moat of visas and regulations.
By the same process, you can also hire a 15 year of experience software engineer from europe or south america for 80k a year, and doing it as a contractor would also mean no payroll taxes.
In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe.
But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were fully remote, and it might just stay that way.
How many software engineers with 15 years of experience, perfect English, strong up-to-date skills, and ability to work seamlessly with an American team, do you think exist in South America or Europe (very different timezone)?
If it was so easy to reduce payroll cost (the biggest cost in the budget of all tech companies) then it would have been done years ago, COVID or no COVID.
B2B customers generally have it spelled into the contracts that engineers outside of the US may not access customer data. The value of an engineer who can remediate a customer problem end-to-end for a thousand $500K ARR contracts is far greater than saving $200K/year on salary.
How is the international remote scene? Does it exist in big (top paying?) companies in the US? To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies?
> To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies?
It's often called 'offshoring', I think. I know plenty of US companies large and small that hire remote workers. It also doesn't seem like it's a net win in most cases that I've seen, but people generally don't set themselves up to re-evaluate their decisions 3, 6 and 12 months later, nor have the willpower to reverse the decision if it's not working out as expected.
To clarify, I have seen remote workers outside the US, working for US companies, be a net positive/win, it just hasn't been the norm.
By 'net win', I'm meaning the original goals - more work getting done at a lower cost at the same or better quality in the same or reduced amount of time - panning out. Usually the timezone and cultural differences are bigger hurdles to overcome than anticipated. You often need more US-based resources dedicated to managing the remote team than originally planned. To counter some of those, you can hire more experienced overseas talent, but that's a higher cost, eating in to the anticipated cost savings.
Do note that the workforce in tech is already like 20% immigrants. They don't have a cultural mismatch. They can go back to their countries and work remotely at lower cost of living and possibly lower taxes.
Companies generally only allow this when they are forced. There are limits to remote work.
To add to this, there is work done in non-US offices which is not offshoring. A lot of companies have local products in the non-US countries that they operate. These features might have originated in US or one of the western countries, but eventually feature development of these local products moves to the countries it serves.
The opening of the talent pool flows both ways. The company options are also more open to high performance engineers.
High performers are not limited by geography anymore. Many more companies are open to remote option.
This means increased competition for high performers and increase in salary.
All high performing tech engineer should interview with multiple companies and negotiate for increase in salary from all of them.
Forget this silly notion of location based COL salary adjustments. That's industry propaganda to suppress salary levels.
This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they make a killing.
During COVID I transferred to a team based in the US west coast. My manager was happy with me working remotely from England, which has been great since I was able to move to the countryside where cost of living is much cheaper.
However I'm still getting paid about half the comparable salary of my colleagues over there just because of the location. Yes, I know, in the US health and education is more expensive, but the difference in income still impact my bottom line.
Also in a sense it's quite demotivating knowing that those new grads I'm mentoring make more money than me.
Salaries in the UK are less than the USA, or even China. I remember a friend moving from Beijing to Cambridge (for a well known big Corp) had to put up a decent struggle to keep his salary from being cut to local levels. I don’t get why UK salaries are less than most other major dev sites.
It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).
I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.
COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.
Netflix and FAANGs in general can get away with employee unfriendly practices due to the obscene compensation they offer which provides them with an endless stream of talented candidates knocking on their door.
The problem is, I see these practices slowly creeping in European tech companies, but without the glorious compensation to make up for them: i.e. companies wanting to put you through 3-6 rounds of interviews, full-day on-site interviews, leet-coding, long un-paid take home tests, and all this for 40k/year?! How about no thanks and GTFO!
I wouldn't consider FAANG comp to be "obscene", in fact many of the lower-paying FAANGs - Amazon, and recently also Google - are not paying much above market pay.
Facebook has already committed to supporting more remote work, as has Microsoft.
Ok, but you missed my point, my point wasn't that FAANG pays best in SV, my point was that employee-unfriendly practices from SV, which pays best in the world, make their way outside but without the compensation.
Yeah, easy to say but unless you're in the top percentile of highly sought-after specialists in a hot area, you're not making a dent.
The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no problem as they have 99 more candidates waiting in the pipeline and some will.
When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.
> When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.
I heard before that the European tech scene sucks, and my only advice is: relocate.
Pay in Switzerland for example is more competitive.
Incidentally, one reason I heard for low pay in Germany, specifically, is that it's very hard to fire people.
You heard wrong, it's just an internet myth. Difficulty of firing people or high taxes are not the main cause of low pay in Europe.
The main causes are: lack of VC funding, lack of innovative disruption and entrenchment of traditional businesses with old-fashioned boomer MBA mentality that consider tech as an expensive cost center and devs as replaceable factory floor cogs that should be offshored whenever possible, risk adverse investor mindsets, complex bureaucracy, fragmented market with various languages, laws and cultures that make scaling a product/service nearly impossible, a broken EU-grant funding system where the focus is producing documentation instead of successful products/services and an overabundance of low- to mid- level talent due to hype, free education and easy immigration.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the pay in Europe, I'm complaining about the shitty SV practices that some entitled employers here adopt but without the compensation because "If Google does it then it must be good so we should do it too, who cares if we pay only 40k/year vs 200k+, we deserve only the best hoop-jumpers and nothing less."
I know people who worked in Europe, and Germany specifically, and they all said it's much harder to fire employees in Germany (and Western Europe generally) compared to the US.
Even in a remote world, it's still pretty painful to deal with large timezone differences. I don't want to work with people in india if I'm in the america timezone set, and if they could choose, people working for american companies in india would probably feel the same. Similar with european offices. NYC, Brazil and SF can all interact with each other well enough.
So even if the software world was remote, I still think you'd probably have to move to an american timezone somewhere.
I agree. When I worked in London for Nokia I tried to keep to Finland time where possible, as it made things a lot easier. Then they added teams in India and China and it became a nightmare.
From my experience working with global teams, as soon as you have Asia & EMEA, you need to go to two meetings if you actually want to retain said staff.
This is annoying, but it's much better than people taking meetings at midnight, which is what happens otherwise.
2 meetings work fine for large company / departmental scope presentations, because only %1-5 of the people in the meeting have to do the midnight thing, but break at the 5-10 person level unfortunately. Someone is forced into a midnight meeting somewhere as part of syncing up planning between teams at the very least.
It just requires the manager/lead to run two meetings.
I did this with small teams for many years, and it's annoying but it can be done.
I generally aimed to have everyone together 1/quarter in person to do the higher level planning stuff, which would be much more difficult in the times of Covid.
it’s great but from what i’ve also heard, the permanent remote teams at fb for instance are pretty shitty projects that no one else wanted to own, not the shiny stuff most people want to work on
I don't think we'll really know what the future holds until people start coming back to work.
When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.
If WFH becomes fully accepted, I don't think many employees will choose to commute 30-60 minutes to spend their days at the office instead of staying home with their spouse, kids, and pets.
The solution that everyone goes on Zoom, regardless of whether or not they are sitting next to each other. Pretend the team is fully remote, but still take advantage of organic, local interaction to skill up new developers. We were coincidentally doing this in my workplace 6 months before COVID took off.
A lot of teams seem to also struggle with no "face to face" communication. Yeah you can't turn and talk to your colleague but you can press "Call", which arguably is the same amount of effort.
I think they might. And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote.
Overwhelmingly the developers in my organisation are happy to work remote forever. Deliver people, product people, design people all seem to want to be back in the office. Upper management as well.
> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote.
You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers?
Do you really think the average person prefers that to living in a quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home, and spending all day every day in the comfort of their home with their family and pets?
The vast majority of even the developed world is nothing like SF. In particular, for most people outside major capitals buying a house and raising a family is very doable.
> spending all day every day in the comfort of their home
This may sound good to you, it definitely doesn’t sound good to an extrovert. If that was my prospects for the rest of my life, I’d likely shoot myself.
Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office, and I know a lot of people who get a productivity boost due to the dynamics of from-office work. Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits.
There are also lots of people working from 1br apartments who can't wait to work from a space that isn't also their bedroom.
> Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office
Find a co-working space.
> Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits.
Remote work gives you the freedom to work from anywhere. That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.
Alternatively, they can work for an employer who has an office and then they don't need to pay for access to a co-working space. Their choice to do so doesn't harm you, they simply value certain aspects of the job differently, much as people value vacation vs raw salary differently.
> That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.
Yes, but for the same reason as above, there are enough people who explicitly value the "conventional" office interaction that companies will continue to cater to it. It's often cheaper and more efficient for employees to do so.
I'll also as an aside mention that
> Engineers tend to be introverted.
Is in my experience false. The hn bubble is far more introverted, on average, than my coworkers at a major tech company are. If you are introverted, you may not spend a great amount of time with those people, but i don't think it's controversial to say that the majority of currently employed software engineers don't want to stay in their homes forever.
I believe you express an opinion that is shared by many people who are simply comforted and reassured by the status-quo. Additionally, you work for Google, which has been quite stringent about keeping all work on-site. You'd like to keep your job, so cognitive dissonance induces you to conclude - without much evidence - that this status quo is The Best of All Worlds.
Working full-time from the office is a condition that was created due to certain historical preconditions. In particular, it was a good fit for industrial work, and indeed the modern urban office environment is rooted in the industrial revolution.
It is not at all necessary in our modern world. If you want to live in a big city and commute to a shared workspace every day, you can do so. However, there are so many other options available, and I dare suggest you shouldn't declare them all inferior before trying them.
Overall, onsite office work binds you to exactly one option, remote work allows you a huge freedom of choice - and that is categorically a positive thing.
> You'd like to keep your job, so cognitive dissonance induces you to conclude - without much evidence - that this status quo is The Best of All Worlds.
No, I'm just unhappy working from home, and greatly miss the office. You don't need to invent a conspiracy theory.
> It is not at all necessary in our modern world
I never said it was. I said that many employees find it preferable. I agree some do not. But you're solution seems to be to ban offices.
> Overall, onsite office work binds you to exactly one option, remote work allows you a huge freedom of choice - and that is categorically a positive thing.
But you're proposing not the option of remote work, but remote only. That does remove choice, the choice to work from my company's office in proximity to my coworkers. I value that.
> However, there are so many other options available, and I dare suggest you shouldn't declare them all inferior before trying them.
I don't think I have. Please stop putting words in my mouth and getting defensive about other people's preferences.
Your entire counter-argument against me rests on the strawman that I proposed "banning offices", and is therefore invalid.
I never suggested "banning offices" (how would that be achieved, exactly?). In fact I specifically presented a model in which voluntary offices / co-working spaces exist for those who want them.
> In fact I specifically presented a model in which voluntary offices / co-working spaces exist for those who want them.
No, you presented "co-working spaces" as a particular form of alternative to offices. Those two things aren't the same, and from your prior comments, it does seem that you find offices to be bad, and want to replace them with co-working spaces. (co-working spaces, at least to my mind, resemble something where I might rent a space and work in proximity to other people, but we all have various employers)
Further, when I stated that I'd likely choose an employer who provided an office, you resorted to calling me naive and implying I have ulterior motives like trying to keep my job, seemingly suggesting that me commenting negatively about offices would cause Google to fire me.
I maintain that up until this post, everything you said supported a remote-only approach, instead of remote-optional, and that's flawed. If that's a misrepresentation of your actual opinion, than you're more than welcome to clarify it, but I'll reiterate that to many, a co-working space is less useful than a dedicated company office, and both are superior to work from home. Hacker News is not broadly representative of opinions on WFH. I realize that as someone who likes work from home you may not enjoy hearing those things, but they're true.
I mentioned that I expect most employers would still have physical offices in other comments in this thread, though perhaps not directly to you.
Co-working spaces are already used as "mini offices" by employers who hire remotely. One of my recent offers featured one. It's basically a light-weight, low-cost way for some employers to offer physical offices in many diverse locations. Of course, some co-working places are more about mixing different employers.
> you resorted to calling me naive and implying I have ulterior motives like trying to keep my job, seemingly suggesting that me commenting negatively about offices would cause Google to fire me.
No, what I meant by "cognitive dissonance" is that since you are happy working for an employer who doesn't and won't offer remote work, you would like to believe that this is the best fit for you as well. This is the meaning of cognitive dissonance.
> I maintain that up until this post, everything you said supported a remote-only approach, instead of remote-optional, and that's flawed.
I don't believe a "remote only approach" exists, because if an employer chooses to have a physical office, it's completely outlandish that anyone would try to prevent them from doing that. There's simply no basis, rhyme, or reason to try. Like what you gonna do, make offices illegal? :)
> Hacker News is not broadly representative of opinions on WFH. I realize that as someone who likes work from home you may not enjoy hearing those things, but they're true.
We'll see. I'm not very frequent participant on Hacker News, and I have many real-world friends in the tech industry. I can tell you that many of them preferred working remotely long before the pandemic. In fact it's been a common feature of senior engineers working for startups and small-medium sized companies for years now: they often can and do choose to work remotely, which is generally (though perhaps not universally) considered a major perk that they can afford to demand for sacrificing higher comp at the bigger companies.
Speaking of these bigger companies: they have formed the most major resistance to this trend so far, but we are now seeing some of them - Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter - joining in. We will see how it all plays out, but I'm sure you'll agree that 2020 wasn't a bad year for those who prefer to work remotely.
Finally, let me emphasize again that I'm not trying to force anyone to work remotely. Quite the opposite: I am just hoping for more options for all those who want them.
The meaning of my comments to you earlier was:
1. Even if your company goes remote, you will have options like co-working spaces at the very least.
2. You may be happier with some of these options. For example, working from a co-working space (i.e. a small satellite office) in the town where your family lives, which isn't available to you right now.
That is, I believe more distributed work model can bring more satisfaction to both those who want to work 100% from home, and those who prefer a more traditional office environment. It will certainly be better than the only option available with many big employers right now: move to one of very few tech hubs and work in a huge office.
Do you think if everyone works remotely and companies can hire from all over the country (or the globe for that matter) you will still get a salary that you'd get in SF? I'm pretty sure this will push down the salaries, so you probably won't end up in a "quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home", but a quiet, medium-crime suburb, in a decent home maybe.
Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job?
As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.
Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much. Maybe you won't make the $300k you used to make in SF, but $200k gives you a damn big home and high quality-of-life in most of suburban Texas - especially since you won't have to pay crazy California income taxes.
You also won't have to deal with crime if you can go literally anywhere in the country. There are thousands of small towns and suburbs that have effectively zero crime while not being very expensive. In general, most serious QoL problems disappear once you can choose to live anywhere.
> Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job?
Yes, but employees had to relocate to the Bay Area so companies had to pay that level of salaries. But if people can work from whatever cheap location then why would any company keep paying that much?
> As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.
Sure, and they get paid on Indian levels. I am also not from the US, I work and live in Europe but both my current and previous employers are big American tech companies with HQs in the Bay Area, and guess what they pay here? Standard European salaries that any other local company does. Maybe a couple of percent more, but nothing outstanding, definitely not close to Bay Area level salaries. And that is exactly the point I'm trying to make here: companies adjust the salaries considering the cost of living of the area their employees live in. If you move to a cheaper place, that will definitely have an impact on your salary.
> Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much.
Well, time will tell. I hope you'll be right there.
You're comparing a terrible commuting scenario to a great remote scenario. You're also looking at this from the perspective of someone with an established family. Of course remote looks better!
There are more commuting scenarios that living in the SF (or London or NYC or insert major city here) with a long commute and crazy house prices. I live and work(ed) in a medium size city where a mid-level engineer can afford a decent flat 10-25min walk into the city centre with lots of walkable local community areas and green space. Moving out to a suburbs gives me a bit more space but not much else. It also comes at the expense of being further away from everything and having to drive everywhere. There's a lot of room between everyone in the same dense massive urban areas and everyone going full remote from the suburbs.
Additionally not everyone is settled down with a family. Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc. For those of us at this stage the idea of moving to the suburbs is hellish. Sure an extra room would be nice but otherwise it's boring as hell.
What I've not heard discussed enough is the middle ground. If remote and distributed teams start to work better why not distribute teams across more offices in medium sized cities where we can get a trade off between both worlds. Or change the office concept to something where lots of folk work from shared offices. I'd love to go work for a FANG but I'd hate to move to London. If there was an option to work for FANG from my local WeWork office and there was a critical mass of other tech professionals doing the same that might be a good trade off.
> Moving out to a suburbs gives me a bit more space but not much else. It also comes at the expense of being further away from everything and having to drive everywhere. There's a lot of room between everyone in the same dense massive urban areas and everyone going full remote from the suburbs.
Remote works lets you choose where you want to live and work. You can stay in the city if that's your thing, or move to the suburbs.
I don't understand comments that pretend as if remote work is going to force everyone to "work from the suburbs". Remote work is about more choice.
Incidentally, remote work will also make cities more affordable, so folks like you who enjoy them will benefit tremendously.
Remote work doesn't limit your choices, that's what office work does.
Remote work greatly expands your range of options.
> Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc.
Areas that are very dense in tech aren't ideal for dating. Tech is male-dominated, so if your preferred partner is female, you will find dating in Silicon Valley quite challenging.
With remote work, you could choose a city that offers better dating prospects.
Yet another win for remote work.
Literally any particular thing you'd like to optimize for: dating, meeting new people, staying near existing family and friends, raising a family of your own - remote work gives you far better and more numerous options.
> I don't understand comments that pretend as if remote work is going to force everyone to "work from the suburbs".
I mentioned the suburbs because the comparison you setup was suburbs vs expensive city life. I was critiquing the flawed comparison.
> Areas that are very dense in tech aren't ideal for dating. Tech is male-dominated, so if your preferred partner is female, you will find dating in Silicon Valley quite challenging.
I was making the point about expensive cities more generally. Other similar areas such as London and NYC don't have that issue.
There's also the advantages of actually being in an office. Having structure enforced by a physical separation, the social aspect of being in an office etc. Those aren't valuable to everyone but to many they're incredibly valuable.
> You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is dying to go back to their offices in SF
In the real world, once a company becomes self-sustaining no one with real decision-making power cares about productivity, they care about amassing more power, even at the detriment of the organisation. Those games are infinitely better played in person. I don’t like it any more than you do but that won’t change these facts.
As someone who spends all day at home in the suburbs with family and pets, I do think a lot of people will want to go back.
The suburbs only make sense if you're commuting. Who would want to live there otherwise? Not remote enough to be cheap or have real land, not city enough to be a fun place to live. Who would willingly spend all there time in the suburbs?
I do live in the suburbs because it used to offer a convenient commute and have me close enough to still go into town for bars, museums, concerts, etc. But with all that stuff out of the picture, what is the point of this place?
Most of my team wants to come to the office and is always super happy when they find a reason to do so. "Oh, I have to test this mobile device which only works in the office, can I come in today @ $manager?"
And currently I am at the office together with one other person. Beats being alone at home. At least a few days per week.
It's always so fun to be at the office with my coworkers and I am looking forward to them all coming back.
That's because they live alone at home, probably because they moved recently / immigrated / forced to live in bad cities. Post-pandemic, they will be able to move to a place where they are not alone. I think they'll take that option rather than alone at home/only social in the office.
The only people who would still want to go back to an office are people who live in a city without friends and family, who would move and live with them, but would not move within the same city and live with new people?
Sounds rather rare. I don't deny it but from just talking to work mates it seems more want to come back.
I think it is age based: younger workers crave the social interaction they get at the office, older workers see a huge advantage in getting more family time (and handling things like taking the kid to school) by working remote. Not universal of course, but I bet there is at least a correlation.
My kid’s daycare was interrupted for just a month. But being WFH has made it super simple to get him to and from daycare, whereas with a 40 minute commute, I wouldn’t be able to do it without getting the kid up fairly early.
what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart (https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?
Bonuses, seasonal differentials, benefits, vacation time, excellent managers who don't micromanage might all be reasons people stay there. I don't work there, but I've worked for less than I'm "worth" before because of reasons like those.
10% pay cut, but 5wks vacation instead of 2? Sign me up. I really landed an offer like that once, I felt so lucky.
It all just depends. It could just be bad statistics or something like that too, it's all quite hard to actually quantify when there's so many non-numerical factors (insurance, commute, social, etc)
How much international employees do they have? The US, especially the SF area is probably the highest paid location, most of the world has much more reasonable wages.
I've been working with and running remote teams for a few years. It takes some getting used to but basically it can work. And when it doesn't work, it's usually for the same reasons that local teams can fail. Which is of course a combination of communication issues, management issues, and sometimes simply not having the right people on your team.
Communication issues get amplified in a remote situation because you are dealing with cultural issues, timezone issues, and often poor tooling. And even when it works well, a video call just isn't a substitute to being in the same room. A key lesson here is to simply rely less on this and push your processes in a more asynchronous direction. E.g. having scrum related meetings over a video meeting is even more painful than having them in real life. They are inherently synchronous in nature. Going asynchronous reduces meeting pressure. We have a lot of tools to support that these days. Most of which came out of the OSS community which out of necessity tends to favor asynchronous processes because remote is a defacto reality in pretty much most of them.
Another lesson is that once you get used to this actually being a workable situation, hiring locally at greater expense becomes harder to defend. Basically it levels the playing field and your premium rate is going to be more related to what you can do then it is to where you are doing it.
When there are lots of qualified people willing to work at a quarter your rate, maybe that is going to be a challenge long term. In reality it's not so bad; you get what you pay for also remotely. Worse, you actually need a certain level of maturity and skills to compensate for people being remote. So, that biases rates to the premium end of the spectrum. But still, expecting San Francisco rates just because you are based there or used to be based there on a remote project that also has people from India, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, would probably not be long term sustainable. You can literally get an entire team for those rates and it wouldn't be that bad of a team.
But for some on-site hardware jobs, demand seems to have increased (anecdotally?).
Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand.
Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp.
I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadWorking from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it.
But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective.
I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.
Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output.
It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine.
Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.
I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration.
Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles.
In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.
- Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board.
- Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this?
- Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch?
- Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again.
Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.
Even when factoring in the tax levels and COL, there is still a huge potential for social dumping from the EU
I'm sure there is an endless supply of techies willing to move to Spain and Southern Europe just for the weather and the beaches, regardless of pay.
If you don't mind me asking how do you find daily life there and dealing with taxes, healthcare, the authorities an bureaucracy in general?
I understand that this is not very informative, but I'm still new here, and most of this stuff is similar in most places in EU.
Realistically, the only things to worry about are money and the lack of jobs. The latter will hopefully be solved by remote becoming the norm in IT, and the former depends heavily on personal conditions. E.g. if my wife worked, it would be much easier for us. If I had a different attitude towards saving and investing in the past, it would be much easier for us. And so on and so forth.
There are quite a few rich people here, and their lifestyle is awesome. Weather is good throughout the year (20-22C and clear skies with bright sun now, and February is the coldest and harshest month here), sea and mountains provide lots of opportunities for leisure and sports, birds and flowers and scents everywhere... Weirdly, I feel like I'm back in my childhood, when everything was so bright and fascinating. Completely forgot how it feels after having been deprived of all of these things due to living in a big industrial city.
I feel you and I'm planning a similar move myself. Thanks for the detailed info.
Weird experience.
BTW, why do you feel poor if you don't mind me asking?
PS: I'm also a dev in Austria now. You can reach out to me for a post-pandemic coffee if you want, would be cool to meet another dev. My email's in my profile. Cheers!
I seriously question that. I hire a lot from EMEA and world class developers don't accept a pay of 30 to 50k, especially in France, Italy and Spain. Perhaps Czech Republic or the Ukraine yes.
Even if WFH provably works well for a company it's likely that many will never admit that it's permanent. Companies will want their staff to believe WFH is a benefit, because that makes staff work harder and stay in their job longer.
Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast.
I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB before COVID hit, and then accepted a new management role back on the team right as COVID was hitting. I've never seen my team all in the same room; but it's been fine/normal-ish. Now that full-remote just takes manager approval, we've had folks move away from Seattle/SF. I've got reports in the UK and NYC. It's pushed our culture to be a lot more communicative, intentional, and organized, which is good for everyone, Seattle based or remote.
What's great about all this is now there isn't even a question of "is remote ok"? We don't need to be looking for a specific skillset or a certain level of seniority. It really opens up the talent pool; recent hires have given us a lot more selection. (P.S. - I'm hiring Product Managers; permanent remote. Check out my pinned tweet on the twitter profile in my bio)
I know companies where management have refused work-from-home PRE-COVID have struggled to deal with their whole company forced to work from home because of lockdowns as they were unprepared. As soon as restrictions were lifted here, these same companies forced workers to come back into the office... and now only a few weeks later, we’re in a lockdown again.
In a digital world, and being the primary workers in this industry, I find companies that outright refuse work-from-home because “culture” are pissing in the wind.
Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?
Lets not put people at risk just to increase "fairness".
The Victorian government’s messaging here has been along the lines of “if you can work for home, please do it”, and fines can be issued if you force workers into the office when unnecessary... but from what I’m hearing, workers aren’t raising alarm bells
Also: Not every country is the US... some can safely go back to work. Or others, like Taiwan, never stopped.
Even people that don't get to work from home still benefit from work from home. At the very least there's one less person to get annoyed with on the commute.
Remote work at scale is relatively new, and it will be evolving - you don't know the direction: good, or bad.
However, as the talent crunch keeps getting worse, and CoL and local income taxes keep obliterating pay raises, employers will have to find ways to reward the talented senior employees they're all competing for - and it won't be simply paying them more to work on-site in ultra-high CoL locations.
As more employers offer remote work options, the remaining employers will have to match - or risk losing many of the best candidates, especially senior engineers who aren't going to try to raise a family in SF or Manhattan.
Also, once the process kicks into high gear, it will be hard to reverse; engineers will move to suburbs in states like Colorado, and it will be very hard to get them to move back to extremely expensive areas like the Bay.
Arguably this is already happening during this pandemic. I know many engineers who moved to remote locations with no plans of coming back.
This is factitious comparison. Remote works great for a lot of people and it's undoubtable good that there are more options. But there are legit reasons for both businesses and employees to prefer working from an office. Office working isn't some ploy by evil employers to sweat every last drop of productivity from their employees at the employees expense.
Similar to how office food benefits used to be extremely rare niche, and now are extremely common.
Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.
"They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it."
^ That's where I got it from. The framing that office work was something employers forced upon employees against their will. Many of us prefer an office and are keen to get back to one.
Specifically, we know that 12-hour shifts (without overtime or adequate breaks) were a thing that employers would want, because they used to exist. Similarly, we know that employers would want to pay below minimum wage, because they used to. In fact, both of these things still happen regularly today, despite the laws having changed.
Yes, when we look at history, we often feel that folks were doing evil/bad/harmful/etc. things, because we can't help but judge them based on our values which we hold today. The best that can be said is that people are complicated and that good/evil is not a good framing for weighing why people did what they did.
Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying"
Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?
Let's do the math:
$400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net.
Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From an employer's perspective, that means I can offer 25% lower pay and be more than competitive with top paying companies in my field - if I offer a remote option.
This gap will only increase, as states are constantly planning ways to squeeze more taxes out of their major tech hubs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2021/12/31/calif...
I therefore believe these economics will drive remote work adoption.
A $400k wage in SFBay for Microsoft (which I've never heard of for a regular position) won't just translate to anywhere else in the world. When starting salary in SF for Microsoft new college hire might be $120k+, in the UK it's £40k.
I realize you are specifcally talking about relocating to work remotely only within the US, but what I'm getting is that today Microsoft pays wildly differently based on location, and proposes to continue to pay wildly differently based on location with people relocating to work remotely.
I don't know if there will some special exception for United States, but the poster I replied to specifically brought up International.
Will Microsoft pay 1:1 for SF employee relocating to Texas while paying a UK employee 1/4 the wage? If so, why... it doesn't make good business sense.
In the US it is easy (from a legal POV) to move between California and Texas or vice versa so an American employee would probably move to California if a much larger salary depended upon it. If an employer doesn't really care if someone is in any particular location within the US, they may nonetheless feel happy paying what they valued the employee at if they did force them to move to California, say. Of course, they may also attempt to pay less, but that's a risky strategy since the employee could just as easily then request to move to the expensive location.
The UK worker earning 1/4 the wage does not have this freedom. Very few UK workers can move to the US (or any other economy than Ireland) and so the market rate for developers in the UK is very specific to the UK. Only a fraction of the best developers who both want to leave and be able to leave. There's a certain local demand and supply and the salary has found its natural resting point, protected by a moat of visas and regulations.
In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe.
But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were fully remote, and it might just stay that way.
If it was so easy to reduce payroll cost (the biggest cost in the budget of all tech companies) then it would have been done years ago, COVID or no COVID.
It's often called 'offshoring', I think. I know plenty of US companies large and small that hire remote workers. It also doesn't seem like it's a net win in most cases that I've seen, but people generally don't set themselves up to re-evaluate their decisions 3, 6 and 12 months later, nor have the willpower to reverse the decision if it's not working out as expected.
To clarify, I have seen remote workers outside the US, working for US companies, be a net positive/win, it just hasn't been the norm.
By 'net win', I'm meaning the original goals - more work getting done at a lower cost at the same or better quality in the same or reduced amount of time - panning out. Usually the timezone and cultural differences are bigger hurdles to overcome than anticipated. You often need more US-based resources dedicated to managing the remote team than originally planned. To counter some of those, you can hire more experienced overseas talent, but that's a higher cost, eating in to the anticipated cost savings.
Companies generally only allow this when they are forced. There are limits to remote work.
This means increased competition for high performers and increase in salary.
All high performing tech engineer should interview with multiple companies and negotiate for increase in salary from all of them.
Forget this silly notion of location based COL salary adjustments. That's industry propaganda to suppress salary levels.
During COVID I transferred to a team based in the US west coast. My manager was happy with me working remotely from England, which has been great since I was able to move to the countryside where cost of living is much cheaper.
However I'm still getting paid about half the comparable salary of my colleagues over there just because of the location. Yes, I know, in the US health and education is more expensive, but the difference in income still impact my bottom line.
Also in a sense it's quite demotivating knowing that those new grads I'm mentoring make more money than me.
Seriously, it's super weird and I don't understand it either.
I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.
COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.
This is very much in line with their traditional approach.
The problem is, I see these practices slowly creeping in European tech companies, but without the glorious compensation to make up for them: i.e. companies wanting to put you through 3-6 rounds of interviews, full-day on-site interviews, leet-coding, long un-paid take home tests, and all this for 40k/year?! How about no thanks and GTFO!
Facebook has already committed to supporting more remote work, as has Microsoft.
The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no problem as they have 99 more candidates waiting in the pipeline and some will.
When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.
I heard before that the European tech scene sucks, and my only advice is: relocate.
Pay in Switzerland for example is more competitive.
Incidentally, one reason I heard for low pay in Germany, specifically, is that it's very hard to fire people.
The main causes are: lack of VC funding, lack of innovative disruption and entrenchment of traditional businesses with old-fashioned boomer MBA mentality that consider tech as an expensive cost center and devs as replaceable factory floor cogs that should be offshored whenever possible, risk adverse investor mindsets, complex bureaucracy, fragmented market with various languages, laws and cultures that make scaling a product/service nearly impossible, a broken EU-grant funding system where the focus is producing documentation instead of successful products/services and an overabundance of low- to mid- level talent due to hype, free education and easy immigration.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the pay in Europe, I'm complaining about the shitty SV practices that some entitled employers here adopt but without the compensation because "If Google does it then it must be good so we should do it too, who cares if we pay only 40k/year vs 200k+, we deserve only the best hoop-jumpers and nothing less."
The way I look at it is that it's far too easy to fire people in the US, and this also leads to pathologies.
I'm not sure I'd make that argument, but Netflix doesn't really count as big tech to me as I'm not convinced they'll survive for much longer.
So even if the software world was remote, I still think you'd probably have to move to an american timezone somewhere.
India is the absolute worst for the USA because they are almost 12 hours off.
This is annoying, but it's much better than people taking meetings at midnight, which is what happens otherwise.
It just requires the manager/lead to run two meetings.
I did this with small teams for many years, and it's annoying but it can be done.
I generally aimed to have everyone together 1/quarter in person to do the higher level planning stuff, which would be much more difficult in the times of Covid.
When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.
A lot of teams seem to also struggle with no "face to face" communication. Yeah you can't turn and talk to your colleague but you can press "Call", which arguably is the same amount of effort.
Hint: they won't. When the office is half-empty, it's useless, people might as well go back home. Remote is a self-reinforcing loop, office isn't
Overwhelmingly the developers in my organisation are happy to work remote forever. Deliver people, product people, design people all seem to want to be back in the office. Upper management as well.
You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers?
Do you really think the average person prefers that to living in a quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home, and spending all day every day in the comfort of their home with their family and pets?
> spending all day every day in the comfort of their home
This may sound good to you, it definitely doesn’t sound good to an extrovert. If that was my prospects for the rest of my life, I’d likely shoot myself.
For American workers, most tech hubs are SF or very similar to it, in terms of CoL. SF, LA, Seattle, Manhattan, etc.
> it definitely doesn’t sound good to an extrovert
Engineers tend to be introverted.
There are also lots of people working from 1br apartments who can't wait to work from a space that isn't also their bedroom.
Find a co-working space.
> Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits.
Remote work gives you the freedom to work from anywhere. That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.
Alternatively, they can work for an employer who has an office and then they don't need to pay for access to a co-working space. Their choice to do so doesn't harm you, they simply value certain aspects of the job differently, much as people value vacation vs raw salary differently.
> That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.
Yes, but for the same reason as above, there are enough people who explicitly value the "conventional" office interaction that companies will continue to cater to it. It's often cheaper and more efficient for employees to do so.
I'll also as an aside mention that
> Engineers tend to be introverted.
Is in my experience false. The hn bubble is far more introverted, on average, than my coworkers at a major tech company are. If you are introverted, you may not spend a great amount of time with those people, but i don't think it's controversial to say that the majority of currently employed software engineers don't want to stay in their homes forever.
Working full-time from the office is a condition that was created due to certain historical preconditions. In particular, it was a good fit for industrial work, and indeed the modern urban office environment is rooted in the industrial revolution.
It is not at all necessary in our modern world. If you want to live in a big city and commute to a shared workspace every day, you can do so. However, there are so many other options available, and I dare suggest you shouldn't declare them all inferior before trying them.
Overall, onsite office work binds you to exactly one option, remote work allows you a huge freedom of choice - and that is categorically a positive thing.
No, I'm just unhappy working from home, and greatly miss the office. You don't need to invent a conspiracy theory.
> It is not at all necessary in our modern world
I never said it was. I said that many employees find it preferable. I agree some do not. But you're solution seems to be to ban offices.
> Overall, onsite office work binds you to exactly one option, remote work allows you a huge freedom of choice - and that is categorically a positive thing.
But you're proposing not the option of remote work, but remote only. That does remove choice, the choice to work from my company's office in proximity to my coworkers. I value that.
> However, there are so many other options available, and I dare suggest you shouldn't declare them all inferior before trying them.
I don't think I have. Please stop putting words in my mouth and getting defensive about other people's preferences.
I never suggested "banning offices" (how would that be achieved, exactly?). In fact I specifically presented a model in which voluntary offices / co-working spaces exist for those who want them.
No, you presented "co-working spaces" as a particular form of alternative to offices. Those two things aren't the same, and from your prior comments, it does seem that you find offices to be bad, and want to replace them with co-working spaces. (co-working spaces, at least to my mind, resemble something where I might rent a space and work in proximity to other people, but we all have various employers)
Further, when I stated that I'd likely choose an employer who provided an office, you resorted to calling me naive and implying I have ulterior motives like trying to keep my job, seemingly suggesting that me commenting negatively about offices would cause Google to fire me.
I maintain that up until this post, everything you said supported a remote-only approach, instead of remote-optional, and that's flawed. If that's a misrepresentation of your actual opinion, than you're more than welcome to clarify it, but I'll reiterate that to many, a co-working space is less useful than a dedicated company office, and both are superior to work from home. Hacker News is not broadly representative of opinions on WFH. I realize that as someone who likes work from home you may not enjoy hearing those things, but they're true.
Co-working spaces are already used as "mini offices" by employers who hire remotely. One of my recent offers featured one. It's basically a light-weight, low-cost way for some employers to offer physical offices in many diverse locations. Of course, some co-working places are more about mixing different employers.
> you resorted to calling me naive and implying I have ulterior motives like trying to keep my job, seemingly suggesting that me commenting negatively about offices would cause Google to fire me.
No, what I meant by "cognitive dissonance" is that since you are happy working for an employer who doesn't and won't offer remote work, you would like to believe that this is the best fit for you as well. This is the meaning of cognitive dissonance.
> I maintain that up until this post, everything you said supported a remote-only approach, instead of remote-optional, and that's flawed.
I don't believe a "remote only approach" exists, because if an employer chooses to have a physical office, it's completely outlandish that anyone would try to prevent them from doing that. There's simply no basis, rhyme, or reason to try. Like what you gonna do, make offices illegal? :)
> Hacker News is not broadly representative of opinions on WFH. I realize that as someone who likes work from home you may not enjoy hearing those things, but they're true.
We'll see. I'm not very frequent participant on Hacker News, and I have many real-world friends in the tech industry. I can tell you that many of them preferred working remotely long before the pandemic. In fact it's been a common feature of senior engineers working for startups and small-medium sized companies for years now: they often can and do choose to work remotely, which is generally (though perhaps not universally) considered a major perk that they can afford to demand for sacrificing higher comp at the bigger companies.
Speaking of these bigger companies: they have formed the most major resistance to this trend so far, but we are now seeing some of them - Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter - joining in. We will see how it all plays out, but I'm sure you'll agree that 2020 wasn't a bad year for those who prefer to work remotely.
Finally, let me emphasize again that I'm not trying to force anyone to work remotely. Quite the opposite: I am just hoping for more options for all those who want them.
The meaning of my comments to you earlier was:
1. Even if your company goes remote, you will have options like co-working spaces at the very least.
2. You may be happier with some of these options. For example, working from a co-working space (i.e. a small satellite office) in the town where your family lives, which isn't available to you right now.
That is, I believe more distributed work model can bring more satisfaction to both those who want to work 100% from home, and those who prefer a more traditional office environment. It will certainly be better than the only option available with many big employers right now: move to one of very few tech hubs and work in a huge office.
As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.
Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much. Maybe you won't make the $300k you used to make in SF, but $200k gives you a damn big home and high quality-of-life in most of suburban Texas - especially since you won't have to pay crazy California income taxes.
You also won't have to deal with crime if you can go literally anywhere in the country. There are thousands of small towns and suburbs that have effectively zero crime while not being very expensive. In general, most serious QoL problems disappear once you can choose to live anywhere.
Yes, but employees had to relocate to the Bay Area so companies had to pay that level of salaries. But if people can work from whatever cheap location then why would any company keep paying that much?
> As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.
Sure, and they get paid on Indian levels. I am also not from the US, I work and live in Europe but both my current and previous employers are big American tech companies with HQs in the Bay Area, and guess what they pay here? Standard European salaries that any other local company does. Maybe a couple of percent more, but nothing outstanding, definitely not close to Bay Area level salaries. And that is exactly the point I'm trying to make here: companies adjust the salaries considering the cost of living of the area their employees live in. If you move to a cheaper place, that will definitely have an impact on your salary.
> Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much.
Well, time will tell. I hope you'll be right there.
There are more commuting scenarios that living in the SF (or London or NYC or insert major city here) with a long commute and crazy house prices. I live and work(ed) in a medium size city where a mid-level engineer can afford a decent flat 10-25min walk into the city centre with lots of walkable local community areas and green space. Moving out to a suburbs gives me a bit more space but not much else. It also comes at the expense of being further away from everything and having to drive everywhere. There's a lot of room between everyone in the same dense massive urban areas and everyone going full remote from the suburbs.
Additionally not everyone is settled down with a family. Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc. For those of us at this stage the idea of moving to the suburbs is hellish. Sure an extra room would be nice but otherwise it's boring as hell.
What I've not heard discussed enough is the middle ground. If remote and distributed teams start to work better why not distribute teams across more offices in medium sized cities where we can get a trade off between both worlds. Or change the office concept to something where lots of folk work from shared offices. I'd love to go work for a FANG but I'd hate to move to London. If there was an option to work for FANG from my local WeWork office and there was a critical mass of other tech professionals doing the same that might be a good trade off.
Remote works lets you choose where you want to live and work. You can stay in the city if that's your thing, or move to the suburbs.
I don't understand comments that pretend as if remote work is going to force everyone to "work from the suburbs". Remote work is about more choice.
Incidentally, remote work will also make cities more affordable, so folks like you who enjoy them will benefit tremendously.
Remote work doesn't limit your choices, that's what office work does.
Remote work greatly expands your range of options.
> Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc.
Areas that are very dense in tech aren't ideal for dating. Tech is male-dominated, so if your preferred partner is female, you will find dating in Silicon Valley quite challenging.
With remote work, you could choose a city that offers better dating prospects.
Yet another win for remote work.
Literally any particular thing you'd like to optimize for: dating, meeting new people, staying near existing family and friends, raising a family of your own - remote work gives you far better and more numerous options.
I mentioned the suburbs because the comparison you setup was suburbs vs expensive city life. I was critiquing the flawed comparison.
> Areas that are very dense in tech aren't ideal for dating. Tech is male-dominated, so if your preferred partner is female, you will find dating in Silicon Valley quite challenging.
I was making the point about expensive cities more generally. Other similar areas such as London and NYC don't have that issue.
There's also the advantages of actually being in an office. Having structure enforced by a physical separation, the social aspect of being in an office etc. Those aren't valuable to everyone but to many they're incredibly valuable.
In the real world, once a company becomes self-sustaining no one with real decision-making power cares about productivity, they care about amassing more power, even at the detriment of the organisation. Those games are infinitely better played in person. I don’t like it any more than you do but that won’t change these facts.
The suburbs only make sense if you're commuting. Who would want to live there otherwise? Not remote enough to be cheap or have real land, not city enough to be a fun place to live. Who would willingly spend all there time in the suburbs?
I do live in the suburbs because it used to offer a convenient commute and have me close enough to still go into town for bars, museums, concerts, etc. But with all that stuff out of the picture, what is the point of this place?
And currently I am at the office together with one other person. Beats being alone at home. At least a few days per week. It's always so fun to be at the office with my coworkers and I am looking forward to them all coming back.
That's because they live alone at home, probably because they moved recently / immigrated / forced to live in bad cities. Post-pandemic, they will be able to move to a place where they are not alone. I think they'll take that option rather than alone at home/only social in the office.
Sounds rather rare. I don't deny it but from just talking to work mates it seems more want to come back.
10% pay cut, but 5wks vacation instead of 2? Sign me up. I really landed an offer like that once, I felt so lucky.
It all just depends. It could just be bad statistics or something like that too, it's all quite hard to actually quantify when there's so many non-numerical factors (insurance, commute, social, etc)
Communication issues get amplified in a remote situation because you are dealing with cultural issues, timezone issues, and often poor tooling. And even when it works well, a video call just isn't a substitute to being in the same room. A key lesson here is to simply rely less on this and push your processes in a more asynchronous direction. E.g. having scrum related meetings over a video meeting is even more painful than having them in real life. They are inherently synchronous in nature. Going asynchronous reduces meeting pressure. We have a lot of tools to support that these days. Most of which came out of the OSS community which out of necessity tends to favor asynchronous processes because remote is a defacto reality in pretty much most of them.
Another lesson is that once you get used to this actually being a workable situation, hiring locally at greater expense becomes harder to defend. Basically it levels the playing field and your premium rate is going to be more related to what you can do then it is to where you are doing it.
When there are lots of qualified people willing to work at a quarter your rate, maybe that is going to be a challenge long term. In reality it's not so bad; you get what you pay for also remotely. Worse, you actually need a certain level of maturity and skills to compensate for people being remote. So, that biases rates to the premium end of the spectrum. But still, expecting San Francisco rates just because you are based there or used to be based there on a remote project that also has people from India, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, would probably not be long term sustainable. You can literally get an entire team for those rates and it wouldn't be that bad of a team.
Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand.
Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp.
I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.