None of it really matters tbh. Without proper taxation and building policy - it’s all moot. Small town with a bunch of millionaires is just as bad as a big city with them.
Policy is what will dictate whether or not this is good and that’s not within the hands of any company. That’s up to the federal, state, and local governments. (Of which are all fucked - of course)
So will housing costs. The problems facing SF, Seattle, LA will spread to smaller towns. SF, Seattle, LA, will continue to be expensive because people spend $$$$$$ to live there for reasons other than tech jobs. Be careful what you wish for. I live in the Seattle metro, and would live nowhere else in the country, for what its worth.
You already see this happening in rural communities outside of big cities. "Tech-bro" approved towns such as Asheville, Knoxville, Ann Arbor, Twin Cities, etc, etc are getting so expensive the locals can't move. Where I am from in Southwest Michigan has been facing a worsening housing crisis for years.
Luckily for most of the country, the weather isn't as nice as it is on the west coast, so homelessness will probably not explode as much as it has here. On the other hand, you have to deal with shitty weather ;)
I think the reality is that our housing costs and our fuel costs will catch up with Europe's. In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe. So now if you want to visit the rest of your country you're going to have to pony up for fuel.
> In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe.
Or the publicly subsidized healthcare and higher education!
Your logic doesn't really track. People move from HCOL to LCOL, so LCOL becomes more expensive. Yet the HCOL areas continue to go up too?
Also why does public transit matter in a WFH/remote world? Seems to obviate it to a large degree, e.g. subway in NYC, which while used for many things, was majority used for commuting. It was losing large amounts of money even before the pandemic hit
People in hcol cities still need to move around. People from outside of the country move to hcol cities because of their reputation. Rich people live in hcol places because they can.
My logic doesn’t really need to track with whatever you are talking about- look at the cost of housing in high cost of living places; has it gone down during the last two years of pandemic? Has literally -everyone- becoming a remote worker driven down the cost of housing? No; it has made it worse.
Is it cheaper to live anywhere on the planet now than it was 2,5,10 years ago?
Take for instance where I am from- Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is a great town I love with all of my heart but have no wish to live there. Houses are difficult and expensive to buy there! And compared to Seattle it is pennies. Wages aren’t rising in Kalamazoo to match the money coming in: but houses aren’t getting cheaper in Seattle either.
It just defies basic logic. The reason most central areas became so expensive was the need to cluster close to them for work. And in some areas, leisure, but that's the exception.
Residential real estate prices skyrocketing has more to do with government interventions. I fully expect ex tech hubs such as the Bay Area to trend down in prices in real terms over many years
Foreclosure moratorium, eviction moratorium, stimulus checks that allowed new households to form (kids moving out) as well as preventing the normal level of foreclosures, Fed buying trillions in MBS pushing rates artificially low, massive amounts of cash out refis to use in ad hoc projects that sucked up labor and resources for new builds.
Yes migration from HCOL to LCOL will drive pricing up too, but to say HCOL will go higher because remote work is here does not track logically at all. Sure, leisure areas will go up in value, work areas should logically decline. e.g. Manhattan, Chicago, SF, Seattle
What you don’t seem to understand is that people move to hcol areas for leisure. There is a fundamental reason they are expensive in the first place. Seattle for instance is surrounded by ocean, national parks, mountains. Same thing with the Bay Area. It’s not gonna get cheaper.
Nebraska is not going to magically spring up natural beauty and culture.
Yes, every city has a work component and a leisure component. The work component of a given city was largely irreplaceable, while leisure can be substituted by many cities.
If you worked in tech, SF was the pinnacle location to live for your career. If you were in Finance, it was NYC. There was no exception to this. You can live in any of dozens of cities and still get an enjoyable life/leisure. It's not equivalent at all.
So in this new world, an SF home will be worth $4m while an equivalent San Diego one $2m? No way. The disparity in amenities between the two is not big enough to justify that kind of spread, once you remove the work component. The entire reason SF became so expensive was relocations to work for big tech and the concentration of VC money. Not because it was unambiguously the most desirable city in the US or even CA.
So you take away the component that made it expensive to begin with and ??? it goes higher still ???
I have two points I think: there are more components than you are giving high COL areas credit for, and that even if high COL see some sort of exodus, this is not good for low cost of living areas.
I have been working remote for startups since 2019 and for whatever reasons, you could attribute this to low interest rates I suppose in your favor, things have gotten INSANELY more expensive. NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, Miami I don't think they are getting any cheaper. These are Americas Elite Cities and thats going to command a demand that might seem to defy logic.
However I think people genuinely love living in these big HCOL cities. Otherwise it would defy all reason why they have been population centers for hundreds and hundreds of years. Take for instance Amsterdam; has Amsterdam gotten cheaper in the last 500 years?
To my second point, even if we are lucky and the money gets spread around a little bit what happens to the person working for 7$ an hour at the Hyvee in the Ozarks just because a small flurry of people from San Francisco and Seattle decided to settle there? What happens when he can't afford the property taxes on his paid off home anymore because a a random demand driven spike has increase the value of the properties around him to a point where he can't afford his property taxes anymore?
What happens when he can't afford his medical bills because of this? I've seen what happens and its a hunched over old dude outside of a tent on the streets of Seattle.
This isn't really the tech workers fault or the locals fault, but the fault of our government to account for inequality. Just something I've been thinking about. I just don't think that remote work is going to make life easier for anyone in the short term, except for the already spoiled white collar worker.
Certainly people will continue to enjoy living in specific cities and near to things. I don't dispute that. I dispute that real estate will rise in real terms nationally.
Now that the constraint of working in a specific location is gone, yes, people will migrate to areas for desirability of living, not because they're forced to for work. However, price is an aspect of desirability. It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote. People like SF, but not enough to pay such a spread over arguably equivalently nice places that are much cheaper.
So yes, HCOL -> LCOL drives LCOL to be more expensive.
Also the reason cities existed in the past was because people needed to gather together to work/exchange goods. With remote work/internet that goes away, aside from education/leisure.
You seem to be implying Amsterdam exists because people like it, and not because it was a job center. I can assure you there were very few people hundreds of years ago picking cities primarily for leisure. The need to densify/build vertically lessens when there's no concentration of a downtown for work.
> It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote.
Plenty of people want to live in the Bay Area beyond those working in big tech. This isn't Detroit; there are plenty of other industries that hire people here. Not to mention all of the working class people who are commuting in from Richmond, Vallejo, and other LCOL areas. People want to move there for the Mediterranean climate. For the political climate. Not to mention the children of locals who have been living at home for extended amounts of time. Long-time renters. Remote work will not bring down real estate prices as much as you believe. Especially since housing scarcity props up the prices.
The real estate market, like all markets of the modern era, can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.
CoL will come down in California too. You won’t have the rich highly concentrated around the best job centers anymore and that will pull down the CoL in those places.
I don’t think this will happen as fast as you’d like. There are tons of things in cities tons of people just don’t want to give up, chief among them a stronger network. It’s like the difference between remote learning and being on campus, at an Ivy League school.
No one with experience who currently makes top dollar would take jobs that pay them significantly less, especially as cost of living all over the country is skyrocketing. Companies will need to compete for those developers, and they'll have to compete on wages, as well.
I used to work with developers in Eastern Europe who made the same amount of money as their peers in SF made, despite living in countries with median salaries of ~$8,000 USD a year.
People with skills can and do command high compensation packages that are independent of where they do their work from. Market rates for talent already factor in domestic and global markets.
In the short term, with tons of well-funded or high-revenue companies struggling to hire, remote is a way to make your existing comp more attractive by opening it up to a new set of people and out-bidding their local employers.
In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and yet the FANG companies have been in an increasing comp arms race for several years.
It'll take a long time (likely never, for small companies) for more companies to be international-friendly, for communications reasons for non-English-native-languages nearby countries, for HR/tax/legal compliance overhead reasons even for Canada, and for those plus time zone headaches for others.
If you really want to do it with less paperwork as a US company, you can get around the tax headaches even today, hiring through some outsourcing staffing firms. Lots of those in Latin America now. Quite a bit cheaper. Still a bit of a communication hassle. But that hard barrier of not being employed directly keeps things at arms length in terms of affecting the overall salary market.
>If you move, your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity.
I wonder how that will look like in practice, countries differ enormously in required pay for a decent living, especially within the US. Wouldn't states/regions for a few countries work better?
This is the part of universal WFH I just don't get. If you can work from anywhere, then why does the value of your work change depending on what country you're in?
You don’t get 100% of the value you produce, unless you work alone with only your equipment. You get the cost of retaining you, which depends on how many other employers would make you a better offer.
Add to this the fact that SF has deteriorated a great deal as a city since the start of the pandemic. The loss of downtown office worker revenue has decimated local shops and restaurants. It will take time for things to adjust to the new reality that workers just aren’t going back to how things were.
People love to predict this, they seek it. Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment). It's trendy now, which affects people who follow trends, but trends change fast. Talented people want to be around other talented people; smart, intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc. I don't think that will change.
It’s gotten pretty ridiculous in some neighborhoods. I don’t feel like a trend follower by leaving, and I don’t think random internet chatter influenced my decision.
> Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment).
What establishment do you think it's serving? To me, a return to the smaller cities where many of us grew up, or better yet, never leaving in the first place, feels like decentralization, which many of us think is a good thing.
> intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc.
This strikes me as elitist, especially the mention of "sophisticated people". Now that I've returned to my home city, in what Americans often call flyover country, I appreciate hanging out with ordinary people. True, when I do karaoke, I hope the other singers will be good (speaking of arts and beauty), but there are good karaoke singers everywhere.
Amazon is absolutely not going back to office in a significant capacity. I thought Meta had a bifurcated work force where anyone could be remote?
And G employees won't tolerate the forcing to be in office even if a ton like it. It seems they're the ones always demanding more from the employer (someone has to!).
> You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.
I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.
Eventually - and it might take a recession - the downside of “work from anywhere” will be that companies can “hire from anywhere”. That means the Bay Area salary you previously enjoyed may be knocked down through greater wage competition.
As an engineer I do hope that the global compensation level for good talent rises with all of this remote working. It seems to be already happening. Even in humble Vancouver, I hear of mobile developers being offered $320K. That was absolutely unheard of in 2019.
It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is flooded with candidates.
There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble.
The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up.
Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective.
The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.
Your second paragraph sounds like the same thing I meant, essentially "specialization and skill will continue to be required as software continues to be highly influential all over the place."
For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects.
(I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)
The engineers in less expensive locales are not used to the high pay. Even without remote, my team is pushed to hire in the offices outside the Bay Area because engineers demand less money and retention is higher.
Don’t take for granted the power of someone to undercut you at every turn. IT thought they weren’t replaceable. But oversea workers on visas and outsourcing to other countries began taking their jobs and pay
The reverse is also true. At the beginning Airbnb employees will be making SF level salaries. As Airbnb continues to hire and churn employees, average salaries will come down since they won't be paying SF salaries for new positions. They might pay better than other companies, but won't keep SF as baseline.
I am happy for you if you can play a FAANG salary against another offer, and many on HN can, but for the vast majority of tech employees _and_ employers, those numbers are nothing like a baseline.
This might be a plausible outcome, except for two factors:
- Big Tech has been expanding out of CA for over a decade (e.g. Amazon HQ2, Microsoft Atlanta HQ, etc.)
- Tech compensation is highly weighted toward equity (RSUs/etc.).
Taken together, these mean that more regions have at least one big tech player that's paying significantly in equity. This means that even if the salary portion of compensation is reduced for employees living outside SF, their overall compensation will likely still be very competitive.
At the same time, regional markets are heating up as non-tech companies increasingly are staffing up with the same React & Swift programmers needed in SF. Why leave family & move to SF for $180k base when you can make $150k base in Atlanta or Raleigh, where the cost of living is a fraction of SF?
(Given recent actions in the public markets, it's also worth nothing that equity-based compensation frequently is topped up to some extent when stock values remain depressed. It's been a number of years since this broadly happened, but we can generally expect the $100B+ club (at least) to issue meaningful retention grants if stocks stay down while the labor market remains tight.)
I've said as much on other threads. Employers are playing a longer game, and thinking about the salaries of the person who replaces you. So go ahead, move to Colombia but save up.
When there's zero friction and in fact a couple years successful track record involved in managing W2 staff in any country, the salary for new hires will reflect that.
No company will ignore this, because the potential savings are just monumental and there is no stigma attached.
I've been working like this for the past year and a half. I'll never go back to a "normal" office environment.
Winners in this new paradigm: Owners of real estate in lifestyle towns like Boise, Boulder, etc. I also think borders between the US and Latin America (same/similar time zones) will become a lot more fluid. Why not work in Mexico City or Buenos Aires during the winters, for a fraction of the cost of living in the US?
Friends, family, kids, not having all your stuff, cultural and language barriers, etc…
It’s pretty obvious why this doesn’t work for a large portion of people. I am glad for the child free and those who have little need for stuff - but it’s just not… realistic for the rest of us (who are the overwhelming majority of the population). It’s good for that niche 22-28 crowd.
It's actually pretty economical to have a second home in Latin America, with copies of all your creature comforts there. Kids get multicultural friends, new language, and much wider perspective on the world.
When the kids are younger, they don't really need to stick with a specific curriculum throughout the year. As they get older, I imagine the need to dictate your schedule around school increases. And if they're at a boarding school, that really frees up your planning.
That's a different conversation entirely about what you think of boarding schools and your reasons for having children.
Hopefully your reasons for having a child are compatible with the child spending time away from you cos that's going to happen eventually. Your comment suggests you're making a lot it assumptions about what it means for someone to be in a boarding school...
No, I don't think so. The parent offered boarding school as an option if a couple were planning to spend time in different households in different countries.
The implication is that the kids will be sent to boarding school because they are inconvenient for these plans.
Sorry if it came off that way, but what was intended is that if boarding school is an option you want for your children then the parents are not tied to any one place geographically.
Are you speaking from experience or just making shit up? I can’t imagine this going well for some of the kids I know personally. (And kids that I do know who have done this have been “problematic” during these things)
I've studied abroad in SEA and I've met plenty of families with kids. A good friend is an American who grew up in Shenzhen. International schools have awesome communities of expat families or private schools to also interact with locals.
Sounds ideal. Have you checked the laws in your country of (legal) residence about taking your kids out of school?
Also, I'm not sure how the children would integrate with their classmates if they are only in the class 1/2 the year. Even worse if you are in the other country for the winter, i.e you child gets 2 months in the US school, is gone for 4, then back for 2.
AirBnB has to do this just to recruit employees since there are plenty of other companies with the same or better comp (and equity not on the downhill).
City after city is either severely restricting or eliminating AirBnB entirely. It's golden days are behind it. It's trying new approaches, but nothing unique there.
Why work for AirBnB? You could work for another big tech company that actually has room to grow and produce some solid equity returns.
Have laws caught up for this new way to work yet? Last ai checked there are non-insignificant legal and tax issues for small businesses to have employees in other states.
Judging by my employer, small businesses are able to have their payroll companies take care of all that hassle without much cost, so it’s not really a problem.
It depends on scale. I moved during my last job, post-COVID, and the HR department has to make sure the state I was moving to was approved. If not, I was going to have to switch to contracting (fewer hours, fewer employer/employee type rules, more rigidly defined tasks, etc.) because the cost of setting up payroll and taxation in another state was too onerous for just one person, even at the higher levels of the development staff.
I am the employer, and it is a problem even after using a PEO. Plus, having an employee somewhere creates a nexus which is another whole set of problems.
The short answer is no, they haven't. Payroll for something like this is a huge pain in the ass if you're not at this kind of scale. You end up just hiring people as contractors, which has its own set of problems (namely the fact that you can't just do that because it's easier, they have to actually be contractors and not employees).
Not sure the pricing structure, but I remember office depot having an advertisement, it was probably like "As Low as $6" per pay period.
Ths site says $70 a month but that's probably the minimum for the whole company. Then per check fees.
If you have an employee in another state, you are usually required to incorporate or register with the state and then do the filings for that state. I don’t think this office depot thing handles that part for you. In fact, not even Gusto did this and that’s one of the reasons we had to switch to a PEO instead.
In the US, the tricky/potentially expensive part is understanding what labor laws you need to adhere to and what taxation issues you might be creating when you hire someone in a new jurisdiction.
There are companies like TriNet that hire your workers directly on W2 and administer all the payroll and benefits for you. You then just pay TriNet directly instead of doing payroll yourself.
Insperity is one such company--my clients typically have employees in multiple states and we just handle all the details for them. https://www.insperity.com/bpa/zac.mutrux
Yep all of those sweet, sweet nexus events cramping would be remote employers' and e-commerce tycoons' style will keep tax professionals highly paid for years and years.
A good example is working remotely in another country. The US does not allow foreigners on a visitor visa to work remotely. It's a bit of a gray zone, since if you fly into the US for a business meeting, that's not regarded as "working in the US". But flying in for 1 month and working remote the entire time is.
Same with California income. Working in Nevada and then decide to work remote from California? That's CA income and taxable by CA. But of course people rarely even mention they're working in another state and rarely pay taxes owed.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned corporate tax yet. A worker in a foreign country (potentially) exposes the home company to corporate tax by the foreign company. Ianatl and there are probably a million caveats, but I've had multiple companies and tax people warn me about this.
Imagine Apple USA being taxed by New Zealand, for example. That's the main reason Apple employees are employed by Apple NZ
Sounds nice in some ways. The stickler here is the focus on working in PST still. You’re not gonna get to travel to the EU and work async it sounds like. Which - while making sense - isn’t going to make a good portion of people who want this particularly happy.
After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot.
In other news - sounds like comp is going down at Airbnb. Not a surprise.
Some people don't care about the local timezone, even without a need to stay up odd hours.
And for western Europe, you don't even need to work ridiculous hours. If my current core hours (9am - 3pm) were in PST and I worked in Paris, I could finish my workday at 11pm in Paris.
I used to work for a company in the UK and live in the west coast. It’s mildly challenging but my experience was if you were competent to plan out your day’s work you’d be fine.
If you ran into a show-stopper, capture it and being it up in your morning standup. They were all still in the office for at least a couple of hours when we got in.
Working remotely and working asynchronously are two very different things. COVID didn't necessitate asynchronous work by any stretch, so I think it will take some time for even the tech industry to move toward that. If for no other reason because it required much better communication skills than probably 80% of people have. A lot of developers, regardless of skill level, would not do very well in a truly asynchronous environment.
"After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot."
that's a pretty realistic approach in my opinion. My company has people in India and Europe and it sucks royally to set up meetings with them. Either they have to work at night or the US people have to. If I had to decide, I would mandate at least a 4 hour overlap in working times.
I really liked working from Hawaii. I kept pt hours. I woke up at 6 with the roosters crowing. I felt a like code farmer. Then I'd be done by 2 and felt like I had a whole day to enjoy. It was awesome. I'm actually a night owl in my pacific tz non traveling life
I've been considering this. I like to get up early anyways, so being up and it immediately being core hours sounds good. Get to enjoy the afternoon at the beach etc.
I wonder if we could see areas of major cities cropping up that operate on a different timezone's schedule, similar to how "chinatowns" formed in many cities. For example, having a neighborhood in a major European city that operates on Pacific time (restaurants, streetlights, noise complaints, etc) could make it easier for anyone that's working remotely in the target timezone.
For companies like this that profess to care about their employees (and I believe them), what’s the justification for paying less in e.g. London than USA given London is just as expensive? Will progressive companies start adjusting pay according to cost of living rather than the local labor market?
> what’s the justification for paying less in e.g. London than USA
You mention it in the next sentence - the local labor market. UK developers earn a fraction of what US developers do. We can debate the root causes but it seems irrelevant why it's true, only whether or not it is true.
I'm not sure why cost of living should factor into comp at all. I can have a much higher COL than you, but if you bring more value to the company, and you can get better offers than I can, you should make more than me.
Of course, I'm talking about comparing equally skilled and experienced employees. Can you rephrase your answer without conflating employee aptitude and CoL/local Labor market?
They're linked, intrinsically. If the someone's "market" (whether that's local, or global, or front-end, or full stack, or whatever) prices then at $80k/yr a business is going to try to pay them that much or less. Whether you want to admit it or not, locality plays a role in that.
I'm still not sure I'm understanding you. What I'm asking about is the question of compensation conditional on experience and skill being identical. So by definition, I'm taking experience/skill differences out of the picture. So we have
Alice: backend engineer in London, able to get $120K from UK companies
Alicia: backend engineer in NYC, able to get $250K from US companies
with identical skill/experience. And we say for the sake of argument that cost of living is identical in London and NYC.
Now suppose Alicia's company wants to hire Alice.
Certainly, I agree that it makes perfect sense in a free labor market for the US company to try to get Alice for $120K.
But the company I work for (a well-known US tech company) makes many claims about how "fair" its compensation program is. So what I'm inviting you to discuss is whether or not that company would have a hard time making an argument that adjusting according to the local labor market is actually "fair".
Essentially, Alice is being penalized for happening to be in a locality where her skills are valued less. But that is out of her control. Would it not be "fairer" for a company to adjust compensation as follows:
1. Firstly, according to skill / experience
And then, either
2a. That's it, end of story: skill / experience only.
or
2b. By local cost of living, within equivalent skill levels.
The article explicitly says they’re paying everyone the same pay across localities now.
But for the many company’s that don’t, the justification is simply that the cost of Human resources is not based around output but around market dynamics like other resources. Fresh fruit in Japan costs more than it does in California not because the Japanese fruit is better per se, but because the cost of production is higher.
I don't accept the premise, but student loans and healthcare are high costs that US folks bear that UK folks don't.
You keep trying to pretend that the local labor market is irrelevant. Until you accept that it isn't, or at the very least accept that companies don't think it is, you're going to keep talking past everyone here.
> While you’ll be responsible for getting proper work authorization, we’re actively partnering with local governments to make it easier for more people to travel and work around the world. Today, 20+ countries offer remote work visas, and more are in the works. While working from different locations isn’t possible for everyone, I hope everyone can benefit from this flexibility when the time is right.
I think currently this is a big caveat. Getting a work permit in other countries is not that easy, even for Americans or other countries with more prestigious passports. Maybe with AirBnB clout it is easier than without but I'd say it's still quite an issue.
That being said, I'm really excited for what the future could provide with AirBnB focusing on this. Maybe it will be easier not just for Americans and the like to work in other countries but I really hope it will be easier for others from places such as Africa and Latin America to work in Europe and the US as well.
Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
I work at a remote first company and HR have given a nod and a wink to this, but with the requirement that you maintain a permanent address and pay taxes in a country where they have an office.
Haha yes, exactly. However, AirBnB figured out how to change culture (and law?) to rent our homes out to strangers, maybe they'll lead the way here as well.
>> Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
Are you sure this is the case? You’re not allowed to get hired locally but I believe you can work online for a company based in your country of residence provided you don’t stay long enough to become a resident of the new country (which you can’t on a tourist visa). I visited Canada for 6 months on a tourist visa. I had a full immigration interview at the airport when I arrived and they were perfectly happy with me working freelance/online for those 6 months. They were just clear I couldn’t become an employee of a Canadian company.
Yeah; I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. They don't care if you do work online while visiting, just that you're not looking to stay or to take a local job (that they'd prefer to go to a resident). The legal language may be a little fuzzy since I bet it was written before remote work (telecommuting if it even existed at the time :P) was as much a thing, but I'd challenge anyone to find a case of someone penalized for working for doing their job remotely from another country.
That said, if you're working for a multinational company, you may want to be careful. Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
> Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
My employer adopted a similar policy (just not as publicly announced as Airbnb's), and the way they work around this problem is by, assuming you reside in A, allowing you to travel and work in B but explicitly disallowing you from entering an office location in B.
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
I think a couple dozen countries offer digital nomad visas now, the ones I've looked into in detail just require you to be employed remotely by a company outside the country and earn at least a couple thousand USD per month.
I do wonder which country would in effet cause troubles to travellers on a tourist visa, contributing to the local economy by renting a temporary home and other living expenses but happen to be working on their laptop every day of their 90 days trip.
I find it hard to imagine any country actually cares, and even if they do, I find it hard to imagine they could reasonably check whether anyone is there for tourism, or just to work.
Self-imposed limits on imagination do not restrict the possibilities and imagination of government agencies, nor restrict what other people think is "fair and reasonable"
Like you, I also wish the world worked in the way I like to imagine it should.
They do. Actually the amount of taxes in some countries if you end up messing up and staying over 180 days is significant. And then there is health care. Maybe not an issue in those third world countries with private one, but with public systems real question for them.
Is health care really an issue? They'd really only need to cover emergency issues? Everything longer term I would assume you'd have to go back to your home country to get covered.
Is there any country that gives out 90+ day tourist visa? Obviously you still have to follow the rest of immigration law (so no overstaying your welcome).
I don’t think they even try to get work visas. A lot of countries have tourist visas up to 90 days. And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
I think this is what AirBnB are doing. A lot of countries have a requirement for you to reside in it for at least half the year to be able to be taxed there and be considered an employee. A lot of countries allow people to visit for limited time, as long as you don’t interfere with the local job market - e.g being a tourist. Those two are not in conflict and you can do what AirBnB are doing right now, without much more accounting difficulties. Though I’m not an accountant and take my words with a grain of salt.
Maybe someone with more knowledge of the law could chime in, but
>And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
seems wrong to me. If I work in another country I'm still working, which means I need to pay taxes in my host country after a certain time (in Norway it's the first day afaik, in some European countries it's after a few months).
It's annoying, of course, but I'm using the resources of the host country while earning money, so it feels understandable.
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
> I don’t think they even try to get work visas. A lot of countries have tourist visas up to 90 days. And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
this has been discussed to death on DN forums. Basically yes you're breaking the law but if you don't get caught no one will know. Some people don't like taking this risk while some don't mind.
Well traveling within the EU should be simple enough. Haven't done it outside but I have a few questions.
If I'm on paid leave, I'm still earning money, and I go to Asia - am I breaking the law? I'm still "doing" the activity that's earning me money.
If I'm on my paid leave, and fiddle with my blog, which gets ad revenue - am I earning money and thus doing illegal economic activity?
Not a lawyer so would love a more rigorous definition of "doing work" that is applied in Asia so I know if I'm overstepping. Maybe you can point me to some of those discussions?
to test your theory, i invite you to present this exact scenario to border officials anywhere in the world. This is not meant as a snarky comment but a very literal statement. If you are turned around and refused entry, what you plan to do is illegal.
As already mentioned, “Asia” is not a legal or political entity.
> If you are turned around and refused entry, what you plan to do is illegal
That's... an overstatement. Asking weird questions that indicate a risk of tourist visa overstays which nobody else bothers to ask (even if it is perfectly legal) will put you at risk of rejection, whether or not the law allows what you're trying to do.
I actually did - a bunch of times back when UK was part of EU, and I didn’t have a EU passport myself.
Traveling to UK, permanent resident of Bulgaria (EU), Russian passport.
Border guard - “What are you doing in UK?”. Me - “Working on the clients premises and in their offices.” - “Sure come on in.”
All on tourist visas. Now I have BG citizenship there are no questions, but I wouldn’t think the sentiment is much different. As long as I’m not _employed_ by a company from the country I’m visiting, and stay a month or two, its fine, at least in the Europe. (I’m a contractor employed by BG company with clients in UK)
by “Asia” I meant no disrespect but I know little about the legal state of things there so seemed prudent to generalize
I know some people are very excited about that, and some think that is going to be a new norm. I have not worked for the corps for at least 4-5 years, but before that I always assumed there are only small amount of people who can really work for company remotely.
I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
I have very little believe that a majority of people can work from home, especially when travel. You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours. So I do understand why airbnb is telling their employees to do so, but curious how long it is going to last, and curious how real it is going to be (considering that it could be up to management approval as well). But I doubt that other companies will follow that.
I used to take my PowerBook into the bathroom stall at work when I needed some alone time to concentrate, but it was embarrassing to get busted when it crashed and made that reboot sound so everybody else in the bathroom knew what I was up to.
I've done some work-cation. Like instead of 1week off I'll take 2 and work the second. If I'm in a different time zone, I've felt even more productive. Work with out distraction for a few hours show up for a meeting or answer slack when people start working. My mood might even be better because I'm doing something cool on vacation before or after work.
The only people doing 8 hours of "work" are the people scheduling back to back meetings all day
I think even that is probably an over-estimation. I suspect most folks can work productively (as in, being intensely focused on an activity) only for 2-4 hours a day, and the rest of the time is just "fluff" (which may or may not be necessary for staying productive). From that perspective, regular 9-5 in an office really "steals" our time, because we can't use it on more productive things.
If anything I’ve been seeing lots of articles lately saying that because there are fewer boundaries between life and work when you’re remote lots of people are working far more than they did when they were in person. Idk the numbers but that’s definitely what happened to me.
Just to clarify the hours of productivity. I meant the person will allocate only 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours, and most of the time will be on FB, reading news, and spending time in chats. And whatever is left going to use for some work :)
>You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours.
Literally nobody is productive for 9 hours straight. You end up doing low-value make-work projects because in a culture that values "time in seat" the work expands to fill the available time.
> I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
Remote manager here. This is definitely a huge problem with people new to remote work.
I actually don't care at all if people are doing something else during the day and getting their work done at night or whatever they want to do. However, a significant number of people really struggle to get work done at all when they first go remote and lack a repeatable schedule and the feeling of social pressure to be working like their peers. It takes a lot of coaching and mentoring to get these people back on track with their remote-ready peers.
Many other people have no problems working remote, though. IMO, the key to success of a remote team is to coach and mentor all new remote workers very intensely in the first months or year, but then also to be willing to remove people from the team if they just can't get work done remotely. You absolutely don't want a few bad apples to ruin remote work for everyone else.
That’s an incentive problem not a “be in the office” problem. Or you’ve hired lazy bums. Or the work isn’t interesting enough.
If the people are screwing around then fire them. More than likely the job is dull or not challenging or not rewarding enough. That’s a call for the company to step up their game and bring in A level talent.
Or don’t and keep on getting the C team that’s only doing busy work as a boss is looking over their shoulder.
> If the people are screwing around then fire them
You try firing someone in markets like NZ, Aus, lots of parts of Europe etc. Some people have for sure identified remote work as a meal ticket for life, it's frustrating.
I don’t think this necessarily true. I can work just fine remote for weeks on end, but after a month of that I need a day in the office to recalibrate my focus.
When does the definition of talent extend beyond developers and system architects and product delivery? Airbnb’s support organization, particularly with respect to guest advocacy, is abhorrent.
I was just recently in a situation where a host rejected the rental price after booking, and convinced the support team that i agreed to the adjusted price, which was then charged against my card. (To be fair there was some messaging back-and-forth between myself and the host prior to the booking that gave credence to this, but nothing official.) When i rejected the new price the host agreed to cancel, then again convinced airbnb to execute a guest cancellation, forfeiting all but $613 of a now $4400 booking.
It took me roughly a week with those funds tied up before i found someone in their support team (O.G. Lou G, i love you man) to actually listen to me and reverse everything.
This on the heels of renting a condo with hammer drills running upstairs 8 hours a day for the last three days of my trip and zero consideration or recompense from the host or airbnb.
I've had nothing but excellent experiences, going on 70+ distinct trips now. Many of them wouldn't even have been possible without Airbnb. Sorry it hasn't worked out so well for you
I keep going back, even with the bs that I’ve experienced, because the good outcones are so much better than what the traditional hospitality industry provides it’s worth the risk (to me). That said i bring my own linens and a thermal camera to look for electronic shenanigans.
I just think it’s important to recognize that the hosts are completely carrying the company’s brand.
AirBNB is pretty awful to use as a customer. It's so shady and packed with hidden fees, at least speaking as someone who's only used it a few times.
Unfortunately, hotels have been massively deteriorating in quality these last few years.. the hotels I've stayed in over the last few months weren't cleaning rooms more than once a week (and doing a half-assed job then), the front desk, kitchen, and room service were all massively understaffed, and they were more expensive than ever while still having the same awful internet/TV setups.
If AirBNB eliminates the ruinously large cleaning fees, I'll probably just stop staying in hotels for good
Something similar happened to me this last February: I had a 5 week rental in Baja Sur (Mexico). Due to a serious medical emergency (covid booster vaccine gave me ischemic lacunar stroke) I was hospitalized 2 days before my trip and hence had to cancel it. You can imagine, in the middle of the hospital brain fog and all, I just cancelled through the standard process without thinking twice.
Days later after I was stable and out of the hospital, I found out that the cancellation gave me back I think $200 usd of the around $2000 I had paid....
At some level I kind of felt it as abusive. But I'm sure there are enough small prints somewhere to which I agreed to that explain why it's OK. And given my health issue I decided not to worry about that (puts things in perspective haha). I was more sad that I had to cancel the vacation/trip my wife and I planned, due to that emergency.
Recently booked a 3 month stay in an airbnb in Denver. 5000$ a month which was a big sacrifice but I wanted to stay somewhere where I would be comfortable . I get to the place and it's nothing like the pictures. I tried really hard to evaluate this possibility but still couldn't catch it, they had done some really creative photography. The appliances are disgusting, the place smells like cigarettes and some kind of industrial cleaner that was used to try to cover up the cigarettes.
So I ask the owner If i can leave, with the offer that I won't leave any type of review just so he won't be scared of that outcome. He rejects my offer and basically laughs at me for falling for his listing.
After all this airbnb then takes down my review because "I had tried to manipulate the owner by offering not to leave a review if he let me leave"
Now I understand why places like this have good reviews. It's unbelievably easy to get negative reviews taken down.
Pretty sure the unspoken rule for years was to book the minimum then make contact for the rest at a good discount. Airbnb knows this which is why they charge such a high fee and don't give rats butt about most clients.
I like that he specifically mentioned open floor plans. This is the number one reason why I don't want to return to the office. I kinda do want to go back. But I need my privacy and some quiet. I can't do the open floor plan ever again.
It always annoyed me that they couldn't even be honest and say it was save rent, they had to make it seem like open floor plan was a positive thing because it "increases collaboration"
It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.
I think a lot of founders and their friends are using the office as a replacement for a healthier separate social circle and social life that they lack (a lot of people lack that, and they do too), so for them they're really just hanging out and like the potential for “increased collaboration” for that reason
I guess the point of that post is that the same type of managers who want to keep the cube seat warm are the same type of managers who'll want to micromanage WFH; switching to remote won't change their desires and expectations.
Introversion/extroversion isn't a distinctive feature of Myers-Briggs - it shows up in more scientifically-respectable personality measures, like the five-factor (OCEAN) model.
Yes, it features prominently in the MBTI, but my point is that "Whatever people think of Myers-Briggs [my experience is that extroversion is important]" doesn't make a lot of sense because introversion/extroversion is a widely-accepted concept that the MBTI uses, not a concept that comes from the MBTI.
(1) Healthiest = great social circle at work that bleeds into social circle out of work
(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work
(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work
(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)
(5) No social circle anywhere
This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.
Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.
100%. I've had...three people in my life who I stayed close to after changing jobs. Two of them I worked with in two different workplaces, which I think is a large reason why (the relationship necessarily was > a single workplace), but even then, I'm not working with them, have in fact moved across the country from them, and so the relationships have atrophied some (though we still talk periodically).
Your rankings make no sense to me. I don't understand why you deem someone who has separate social circles inside and outside of work as "less healthy".
Agreed. This appears to be the most best, and also most resilient option.
God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.
I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.
It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.
Yeah; the few times I've suggested friends apply for jobs where I work, it's always been with the understanding "in a department different than mine". It's "hey, the culture, comp, and work here is pretty good, you might like it", not "let's work together".
I think what they suggested is actually the reverse: coworkers becoming friends, not friends becoming coworkers.
It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.
The comment I was responding to listed "and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company" as the only time they had #1 happen. I was responding to that.
This seems a little too idealistic, I'm afraid. It'd be amazing to have friends from work with whom one could start companies outside etc. But most folks perceive a job as just "a source of income", nothing more. And that is healthy on its own, otherwise we're in a perpetual servitude of the employers, because we link our personal happiness to "the job".
(4) is common among people who move internationally more than once or twice. Making friends as an adult is already difficult, and knowing that you will move on after a couple of years makes it even more difficult. You have a reason to socialize with your coworkers, so they will become the center of your new social life. If you moved to a popular expat destination, you may be able to find other expats who are similarly disconnected from normal life. Beyond that, making friends requires crossing cultural barriers, which takes a lot of effort and extraversion.
(4) is me, as I have a wife and young son. I have great friendships and relationships in work, but my non-work time is with my family. Not as rare as you’d think.
Are you under 40? I think when I was in my 20s and early 30s I would agree on (1). But when I got married and had kids case (2) became optimal, because my social circle filled up with people who had kids of the same age / went to the same school.
The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.
I couldnt disagree more. Maybe if your goal is to start a company with the people you work with this might be true...
But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.
Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
The benefit of open floor plan is very well established: you can get far more employees into a given amount of space (and therefore rent) than you can with cubes or offices.
Pretty sure the open office was a response to the cubicle hell that was prevalent in so many offices. As a child my dad took me to his bring your kid to work day. We sat in his cubicle all day and I felt like I was in prison.
I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.
Man I'd love a return to cubicles at the least. With enough space open floor plans can feel less terrible but sound just carries across these big open rooms.
Start your own company. Get your “boss” office, and roam the staff shared office when you want. Problem solved. Don’t ask your employer to fulfill your capricious dreams.
Exactly my thoughts, thanks for noting it! The only thing I don't agree on is that these dreams are somehow "capricious" (esp. given they were the norm just a little over 10 years ago or so; in that respect, "open office" is the capricious dream of the "modern" management) ;)
It must be possible for all the remote workers to gather together and actually rent/make an office like this right (with like, 10 people in, 10 small offices and a shared lunchroom/kitchen)? If you’re not looking for a bunch of profit the rent would sort of remain bearable too.
Depends on the company, I think. Some companies are geographically remote, so that's not quite possible. For others yes, things like WeWork exist although might be a little pricey (but probably worth it!). Or just a warehouse-type location equipped with temporary walls that could be rented too :-)
Every picture I've ever seen of a place like WeWork has shown an open floor plan. They might have offices, but they're going to be extra expensive.
And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.
In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.
I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.
On their front-page, they advertise "Private, move-in ready offices" for "1-20+" people as one of the options, which is why I mentioned them. Of course, that could just mean "open-office space private to a particular company", and that's what makes it a bit confusing. But yes, other options are clearly just open-office space.
For sure - although it's always interesting to hear what people like or not about it, and how they work around issues like distractions/attention scatter and the pure "don't watch over my shoulder when I need to check HN". Maybe it all depends on personal sensitivity to such things and the ability to focus/zone in to the music, but that still feels like a coping mechanism rather than something that naturally comes to most (and I'm saying that despite being able to hyper-focus myself, after many years in an open environment).
I think it depends a lot on your emotional approach to work. For me, I'm a decently good engineer, but at my heart I'm quite extroverted and the thing I like most about working is being around smart people and making friends and stuff. The engineering itself is not the core of my existence, it's getting to live the role of the engineer. I guess I also don't mind putting headphones on and focusing, and I really like getting distracted out of that because, well, I like human interaction and helping people and stuff.
That's a good way to put it, thanks for sharing! Agreed that it may not be the same for extroverts vs introverts. I think it doesn't have to be "either-or" - both open-office and private-office plans need to co-exist, the trouble starts when everyone is bound to the same requirements.
“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”
This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.
Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.
Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.
Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.
Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.
- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)
- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.
Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.
There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.
Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!
It is really strange to me that anti-open-office people (and in general anti-office people) often don't understand (or don't believe?) that other people just have radically different preferences to them.
A “closed” office design includes private inner sanctums, small group common areas, and large group common areas. Think academia: my grad student friends have shared or sometimes private offices in little clusters of 5 that surround a small conference room or lounge. Then down the hall is the big department lounge. A much greater range of preferences are satisfiable with this layout. The same people are also allowed to have varying preferences depending on the time of day or phase of project, and to wander with their laptops.
I'm not arguing that offices shouldn't have closed spaces, I'm arguing that there exist people who like open offices, despite the weird remarks in this thread from people who think that, like, only managers would.
The person to whom you're responding probably made that comment because of GP's statement "I think a lot of people who spend work hours browsing the web don't like them." Which in itself is pretty cynical.
As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.
That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)
And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.
I went to this office one day a week. But guys in the neighboring cubicles were playing soccer. Not all day but during times of the day. They seriously had a soccer-ball they played with. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry but it was definitely a detriment to productivity. Collaboration. Soccer yeah
Or maybe he already knows that the only thing worse than annoying co-workers are co-workers you have asked to keep quiet?
I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.
The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.
Right in general you don't want people to hate you. You want to be polite. You don't want enemies. But if they behave that way to begin with it's not like a simple plea will change their behavior much except for a little while perhaps.
Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. The kind of people who play soccer at work will definitely listen to you when you ask them not to do that.
I hate open floor plans! Give me a proper cube, yes SPEND the money on your workers, don't just cheap out and throw in a picnic table in a big room and call it 'Collaboration', BS!
If you’ve ever been to AirBnb’s office you’d know it’s nothing like that. The AirBnb office is fairly open but it’s way nicer than most people’s homes.
These days I’ve found the office is so empty that none of the normal downsides apply. It seems like an unstable equilibrium because why would they keep paying rent for this giant office but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
My company reduced floor space in 2020, so the open-floor office I was sitting in previously doesn't exist anymore, but after working from home for some time, you notice just how noisy an office building really is - even when you are alone in a smaller room, you can hear people talking in the hallway, in the office next to you etc. etc. So that needs some getting used to too...
I have been blessed to have a private office for the first 10 years of my career and wfh the last 10. Neither is perfect and I’d really like to work from an office 1-2 days per week. If I did, I wouldn’t mind open plan tbh. The whole reason to come in one day per week would be to be interrupted and interrupt others. And meetings. I still have 4 days for focus work, it would be ok. Going to be office to sit alone used to feel great, now it seems pointless. I’d plan for zero peace and quiet and zero privacy at the office but I’d see it as the whole point of going there.
This is how I’m working currently. I go into the office 0-2 times a week depending on work load. When deadlines are really tight I work from home completely for focus when it’s more relaxed i go into the office once or twice a week which I enjoy because I get to spend time with my colleagues e.g having lunch together, shooting the breeze or even collaborating on work stuff.
2016 to 2018 I was at a company where most of the office was in person, but I was allowed hybrid unofficially. I'd end up coming in on most days, but usually around 11 or 12. And I'd occasionally leave early. When I was in the office I cherished seeing my coworkers, socializing, and solving problems together. I think that was my ideal work arrangement. Now I'm fully remote but it feels like I'm just paying the rent on my own office space. I'm chained to my desk for video calls and frequent Teams pings. My office is 2hrs away and I can't just go in. There's almost no camaraderie on the team. People do their jobs and log off. Not even basic water cooler discussion type stuff.
I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.
Honestly I started doing push ups and pull ups and squats at home during the pandemic. Not a ton. 6 sets of 8-12 during the day. A set takes me a minute or two. At this point I rarely break a sweat and just do them during the day whenever I get up for water or the bathroom.
My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.
I'm kinda of curious how this works if you are remote:
"Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans."
Is this like just plan to be in the SF office during normal 9-5 work hours for a week every 13 weeks or is this like plan on a week long 24-7 corporate retreat away from your family every 13 weeks.
If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
> If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
If you can't make the time to spend a few days a quarter with your workmates in exchange for the most generous and fair remote working package then perhaps you're not a good fit for Airbnb. Which is totally fair. But they're not exactly taking the piss here. For many (many) people a week long retreat is a perk not a burden.
Haha - I hear you - its a treat if you are single or a DINK (dual income no kids) and need some solo social time. Especially if Monday and Friday are travel days.
But if you have a family you actually like/love - then a full week away really is a non-starter. Especially if its Sunday night and Saturday morning travel. School plays and parent teacher conferences don't get planned based on the AirBNB week long retreat schedule.
And if you are in a dual income family with the stereotypical two kids - if both of you guys are in similar work situations - then on your "on" week - you're gonna be the one doing 2 school pickups and all after school driving.
Although there are sometimes reasons for it (e.g. community-related conferences that tend to span a weekday and a weekend day), for the most part I sorta resent conferences that force weekend travel. Sometimes I want to take the weekend for myself, but I want it to be my choice.
I worked with plenty of family people (and been the family person) who could find two weeks per year in exchange of complete WFH flexibility the rest of 50 weeks of the year. Especially since steps were taken to accomodate them and not schedule things in the middle of "parent-teacher conferences" and "school plays".
I also did notice that there are plenty of parents who will blame their children for things they themselves don't want to do and not be honest about it. It's not the children that are at fault there though.
In the end, there are plenty of WFH jobs that don't need on-site time at all so you can pick and choose. It's a great market for an engineer to be in now.
Surely the trade off of spending 50 weeks a year with your kids (when they're home sick, school holidays, etc) you wouldn't be able to with a normal job is worth 2 weeks of not being at home a year?
Are you suggesting it would be better if jobs requiring travel were illegal because they represent a loophole to discriminate against people with families?
>If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
>If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
And that's okay! If people don't like it or can't make it work with their lifestyle, they don't have to work there
Plenty of people with families are able to make arrangements like this work, so I don't think it narrows it nearly as much as you seem to imply. Plus, this setup allows new pools of people to work for Airbnb who were originally unable. If I had to bet, I'd say this move is a net increase in available hiring pool.
It is also not clear who will pay for travelling, if you can work from anywhere but must be in a very specific place and time then travel cost can be significant. Assume I want to work from a small town in North Sweden where housing is really affordable while internet is still fast how will I get to SF?
I work at Automattic (no proper offices, fully remote), which (pre-pandemic) does meetups once or twice per year per team, plus one for the whole company. Meetups are typically a week long. I’ve had the chance to visit Lisbon, Hawaii, and soon Cancun on the company’s dime, so I can’t see a world where I am upset about “having” to attend these trips :)
I recognize that kids makes it difficult. And there are also folks who find it hard to travel much at all. But I’ve found I have the opposite problem: remote work can be extremely challenging from a energy and social point of view without meetups. I’ve never met most people on my current team, and don’t have strong social relationships with them. Those are really only possible to build in person. I come away from meetups with a sense of camaraderie, energy, and vision that’s difficult or impossible to replicate over Zoom.
So for me, I have found remote work more difficult during covid without meetups. I burn out more frequently, and struggle to find as much energy as I’ve had in the past.
True remote work — not 4/5 days, or in close proximity to an office where most work — would be less viable for me without meetups. Just as remote work is less viable for some with meetups. And working in the office has huge drawbacks as well for plenty of people. So it’s all a balancing game, and I wouldn’t say that meetups should be ditched because of this.
I do want to note that when I think of a meetup, a lot of it is social and having a good time. While “real work” obviously happens too, it’s not like these trips are consumed by it. Getting paid to go to a pleasant location of your choice with nice lodging and a decent food/drink budget is super nice. If it was just going to a soulless office at a minimal budget with no expectation of having a good time, I probably wouldn’t be so much in favor of them :) But with a nice mix of meaningful conversations, socialization, brainstorming, and fun, they have a positive impact on my work/life balance. And I’m more productive as well. So it’s a huge win all around for me, and I hope most.
I think the sweet spot would be quarterly weekly meet-ups for culture building which occurs during normal hours from 9am-5pm and occur at the local office versus some "get away" all inclusive conference center where there is a packed schedule of 24/7 culture building (aka drinking, etc.) from 8am-11pm.
If its during normal work hours - employees with kids can live within 1-2 hours can suffer the commute for a week every quarter and socialize but still be home in time for dinner with the kids/wife.
Conversely - the single folks/DINKs can go out and paint the town from 5pm-11pm and experience the actual local nightlife.
The problem with this is that as companies go further and further remote, there’s no such thing as “the local office.” My team is in multiple countries, let alone multiple cities or towns in the same country. Forcing people to still live within commute distance of the office just for four events a year seems pretty restrictive. Currently, I could move anywhere in the world (assuming I could get a visa), and it’d work out. Or more reasonably, I can follow my wife for her career in health care to a different city. Or I could move back to the east coast US to be closer to family. All without changing jobs, teams, and especially pay. I think that freedom is pretty huge, and definitely understated if moving is a serious possibly in one’s life.
A week of travel a quarter is not at all unusual for a lot of professional jobs including people with families. In fact, for a fair number of jobs, that would be considered not a lot of travel.
I used to travel every 6 weeks in my 20s for work and it was fine. I won’t travel at all now and it’s also fine. People will figure out what works for them, there will continue to be high paying jobs that are flexible.
Absolutely. There are consultants who pretty much live on the road and there are people who basically don't travel at all. Personally, I hit being away about 50% of the year at peak (including vacation). I doubt if I'll ever hit that again.
If they can, people should find something that works for them because they'll probably hate it otherwise.
> Everyone will still need a permanent address for tax and payroll purposes
I spent a lot of time outside US while waiting for my wife's visa to process and quickly wrote some advice on maintaining US domicile & "permanent address" while abroad:
Sorry about the misspellings and slightly ugly personal site but I hope that this helps somebody who may be considering working or staying from abroad for a bit!
Like full time RV'ers you could pick a domicile state and a mail forwarding service in that state. Texas, Nevada, Florida, and South Dakota are popular for tax, insurance, and legal reasons.
"wo decades ago, Silicon Valley startups popularized the idea of open floor plans and on-site perks, which were soon adopted by companies all around the world. Similarly, today’s startups have embraced remote work and flexibility"
You bosses adopted open floor plan to save money, no matter how miserable it made your employees. Now you're "embracing" remote work only because you can't hire anyone to work in your miserable offices.
Ive worked for a coding bootcamp since before covid. We used to be in person only and Ive gotten to see the ups and downs of the full-remote transition for at this point hundreds of jr devs entering the field.
Long story short everything I thought would get negative blowback or go up in flames didnt. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never does.
Our students work through around 1000 hours of computer science fundamentals remotely, build a portfolio of fullstack applications remotely, get hired at FAANG companies and startups remotely, make their employers happy remotely and get more of our graduates hired remotely.
As someone who used to work in and believe in traditional academia I still can't believe there's no catch. But increasingly it's becoming clear that there's not.
Except that the students can't hook up with eachother and there's no free bad coffee.
Also society could still totally collapse at any moment I guess.
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PS I love the green futurism manifesto vibe of airbnbs statement, I wana work there now
definitely, my best friend cant stand it and another engineer mentor friend has suffered really legitimately from it, but honestly its a good reminder, and a privilege check on being in a relationship and living in a walkable mixed-zoning area
I think this depends largely on whether you live alone. I would never go back to an office, even part time. One of my best friends lives by himself and struggled hard during the covid-induced requirement to work from home.
Much like schools double as a day care for children, work often doubles as a social club for adults.
Even then, I think remote work can be a gain...but companies should be providing stipends/reimbursement for coworking spaces rather than investing in offices. Then the org still has to learn to function remotely, but enables people to connect with others through the social construct of 'work', without most of the downsides, a bunch of new upsides,and missing few of the upsides of being in an office with your actual colleagues.
I've lived by myself for years now and haven't had a huge problem with the working from home part of things, but I also had a fairly healthy online/non-work social life beforehand.
What full remote has done is made it harder for me to consider moving. Sure, I could move anywhere, but I'll show up there knowing essentially no one and have to just go out and meet people by force of will. There's no group of people at my new office I could connect with and at minimum get some recommendations of places to go. Even if you don't become friends with your coworkers, having some amount of in-person social contact is important for most folks, and knowing you have to build that yourself is daunting.
I didn't mean to imply a value judgement either way; the concept seems to be somewhat underappreciated by people who haven't worked remote before. There's a massive dropoff in interpersonal relationship building, largely owing to the watercooler type conversations, overhearing a conversation in a hallway and chiming in, or (if you're a smoker) standing around outside with the other smokers musing over work issues or after work plans.
I think it will be worse for people who uses their work as main source of connections with other people. I guess society should take loneliness seriously for once, as it has a very negative impact on people's health.
I know someone who became mentally ill when the bootcamp switched from in-person to remote and had enough stress to develop schizophrenia from the stresses of trying to apply for jobs remotely and alone in 2020.
There's downsides to both. When schools switched to remote I was able to travel home and study next to my partner, instead of being in a depressed state on-campus.
I think the general rule is that going remote increases variance.
That can be good when it lets people tailor their environment to their own peculiar interests. And it can be bad for people where the normalizing environment of a shared social space helps them drag some deficient attribute back up to a healthy level.
i think academia's future is remote. school too - especially if people want to travel nomadically.
Academia has actually had this model for a long time - people moving with their families for postdocs every few years and keeping in touch remotely with old colleagues
while this sentiment may be popular here, there are numerous, well-understood and well-documented benefits of human interaction that are not possible via a screen.
Work from anywhere is truly advantageous for people without families, or people who have much older children (maybe). Also, if collaboration is centered around Pacific Time, then it effectively rules out many of the 170 countries. Add in 4 1-week onsites per year, and the logistical challenges become mind-boggling, never mind the other more subtle aspects. How will this work in practice?
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 440 ms ] threadThe latter two are for tax reasons of course. Still made me chuckle though.
Policy is what will dictate whether or not this is good and that’s not within the hands of any company. That’s up to the federal, state, and local governments. (Of which are all fucked - of course)
You already see this happening in rural communities outside of big cities. "Tech-bro" approved towns such as Asheville, Knoxville, Ann Arbor, Twin Cities, etc, etc are getting so expensive the locals can't move. Where I am from in Southwest Michigan has been facing a worsening housing crisis for years.
Luckily for most of the country, the weather isn't as nice as it is on the west coast, so homelessness will probably not explode as much as it has here. On the other hand, you have to deal with shitty weather ;)
I think the reality is that our housing costs and our fuel costs will catch up with Europe's. In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe. So now if you want to visit the rest of your country you're going to have to pony up for fuel.
Or the publicly subsidized healthcare and higher education!
Also why does public transit matter in a WFH/remote world? Seems to obviate it to a large degree, e.g. subway in NYC, which while used for many things, was majority used for commuting. It was losing large amounts of money even before the pandemic hit
My logic doesn’t really need to track with whatever you are talking about- look at the cost of housing in high cost of living places; has it gone down during the last two years of pandemic? Has literally -everyone- becoming a remote worker driven down the cost of housing? No; it has made it worse.
Is it cheaper to live anywhere on the planet now than it was 2,5,10 years ago?
Take for instance where I am from- Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is a great town I love with all of my heart but have no wish to live there. Houses are difficult and expensive to buy there! And compared to Seattle it is pennies. Wages aren’t rising in Kalamazoo to match the money coming in: but houses aren’t getting cheaper in Seattle either.
Residential real estate prices skyrocketing has more to do with government interventions. I fully expect ex tech hubs such as the Bay Area to trend down in prices in real terms over many years
Foreclosure moratorium, eviction moratorium, stimulus checks that allowed new households to form (kids moving out) as well as preventing the normal level of foreclosures, Fed buying trillions in MBS pushing rates artificially low, massive amounts of cash out refis to use in ad hoc projects that sucked up labor and resources for new builds.
Yes migration from HCOL to LCOL will drive pricing up too, but to say HCOL will go higher because remote work is here does not track logically at all. Sure, leisure areas will go up in value, work areas should logically decline. e.g. Manhattan, Chicago, SF, Seattle
Nebraska is not going to magically spring up natural beauty and culture.
If you worked in tech, SF was the pinnacle location to live for your career. If you were in Finance, it was NYC. There was no exception to this. You can live in any of dozens of cities and still get an enjoyable life/leisure. It's not equivalent at all.
So in this new world, an SF home will be worth $4m while an equivalent San Diego one $2m? No way. The disparity in amenities between the two is not big enough to justify that kind of spread, once you remove the work component. The entire reason SF became so expensive was relocations to work for big tech and the concentration of VC money. Not because it was unambiguously the most desirable city in the US or even CA.
So you take away the component that made it expensive to begin with and ??? it goes higher still ???
I have been working remote for startups since 2019 and for whatever reasons, you could attribute this to low interest rates I suppose in your favor, things have gotten INSANELY more expensive. NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, Miami I don't think they are getting any cheaper. These are Americas Elite Cities and thats going to command a demand that might seem to defy logic.
However I think people genuinely love living in these big HCOL cities. Otherwise it would defy all reason why they have been population centers for hundreds and hundreds of years. Take for instance Amsterdam; has Amsterdam gotten cheaper in the last 500 years?
To my second point, even if we are lucky and the money gets spread around a little bit what happens to the person working for 7$ an hour at the Hyvee in the Ozarks just because a small flurry of people from San Francisco and Seattle decided to settle there? What happens when he can't afford the property taxes on his paid off home anymore because a a random demand driven spike has increase the value of the properties around him to a point where he can't afford his property taxes anymore?
What happens when he can't afford his medical bills because of this? I've seen what happens and its a hunched over old dude outside of a tent on the streets of Seattle.
This isn't really the tech workers fault or the locals fault, but the fault of our government to account for inequality. Just something I've been thinking about. I just don't think that remote work is going to make life easier for anyone in the short term, except for the already spoiled white collar worker.
Now that the constraint of working in a specific location is gone, yes, people will migrate to areas for desirability of living, not because they're forced to for work. However, price is an aspect of desirability. It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote. People like SF, but not enough to pay such a spread over arguably equivalently nice places that are much cheaper.
So yes, HCOL -> LCOL drives LCOL to be more expensive.
Also the reason cities existed in the past was because people needed to gather together to work/exchange goods. With remote work/internet that goes away, aside from education/leisure.
You seem to be implying Amsterdam exists because people like it, and not because it was a job center. I can assure you there were very few people hundreds of years ago picking cities primarily for leisure. The need to densify/build vertically lessens when there's no concentration of a downtown for work.
Plenty of people want to live in the Bay Area beyond those working in big tech. This isn't Detroit; there are plenty of other industries that hire people here. Not to mention all of the working class people who are commuting in from Richmond, Vallejo, and other LCOL areas. People want to move there for the Mediterranean climate. For the political climate. Not to mention the children of locals who have been living at home for extended amounts of time. Long-time renters. Remote work will not bring down real estate prices as much as you believe. Especially since housing scarcity props up the prices.
The real estate market, like all markets of the modern era, can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.
I used to work with developers in Eastern Europe who made the same amount of money as their peers in SF made, despite living in countries with median salaries of ~$8,000 USD a year.
People with skills can and do command high compensation packages that are independent of where they do their work from. Market rates for talent already factor in domestic and global markets.
In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and yet the FANG companies have been in an increasing comp arms race for several years.
If you really want to do it with less paperwork as a US company, you can get around the tax headaches even today, hiring through some outsourcing staffing firms. Lots of those in Latin America now. Quite a bit cheaper. Still a bit of a communication hassle. But that hard barrier of not being employed directly keeps things at arms length in terms of affecting the overall salary market.
>If you move, your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity.
I wonder how that will look like in practice, countries differ enormously in required pay for a decent living, especially within the US. Wouldn't states/regions for a few countries work better?
People love to predict this, they seek it. Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment). It's trendy now, which affects people who follow trends, but trends change fast. Talented people want to be around other talented people; smart, intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc. I don't think that will change.
What establishment do you think it's serving? To me, a return to the smaller cities where many of us grew up, or better yet, never leaving in the first place, feels like decentralization, which many of us think is a good thing.
> intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc.
This strikes me as elitist, especially the mention of "sophisticated people". Now that I've returned to my home city, in what Americans often call flyover country, I appreciate hanging out with ordinary people. True, when I do karaoke, I hope the other singers will be good (speaking of arts and beauty), but there are good karaoke singers everywhere.
And G employees won't tolerate the forcing to be in office even if a ton like it. It seems they're the ones always demanding more from the employer (someone has to!).
I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.
The thing is, we're used to the high pay now. Cut that and you're gonna cut efficiency. It's going to be hard to justify it.
Create bad will with your money makers good luck getting anywhere realistically.
There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble.
The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up.
I don't know which is right.
Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective.
The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.
For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects.
(I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)
- Big Tech has been expanding out of CA for over a decade (e.g. Amazon HQ2, Microsoft Atlanta HQ, etc.)
- Tech compensation is highly weighted toward equity (RSUs/etc.).
Taken together, these mean that more regions have at least one big tech player that's paying significantly in equity. This means that even if the salary portion of compensation is reduced for employees living outside SF, their overall compensation will likely still be very competitive.
At the same time, regional markets are heating up as non-tech companies increasingly are staffing up with the same React & Swift programmers needed in SF. Why leave family & move to SF for $180k base when you can make $150k base in Atlanta or Raleigh, where the cost of living is a fraction of SF?
(Given recent actions in the public markets, it's also worth nothing that equity-based compensation frequently is topped up to some extent when stock values remain depressed. It's been a number of years since this broadly happened, but we can generally expect the $100B+ club (at least) to issue meaningful retention grants if stocks stay down while the labor market remains tight.)
When there's zero friction and in fact a couple years successful track record involved in managing W2 staff in any country, the salary for new hires will reflect that.
No company will ignore this, because the potential savings are just monumental and there is no stigma attached.
Winners in this new paradigm: Owners of real estate in lifestyle towns like Boise, Boulder, etc. I also think borders between the US and Latin America (same/similar time zones) will become a lot more fluid. Why not work in Mexico City or Buenos Aires during the winters, for a fraction of the cost of living in the US?
It’s pretty obvious why this doesn’t work for a large portion of people. I am glad for the child free and those who have little need for stuff - but it’s just not… realistic for the rest of us (who are the overwhelming majority of the population). It’s good for that niche 22-28 crowd.
It’s nice for summer break but it’s really hard to take kids out of school or to switch schools mid year.
Hopefully your reasons for having a child are compatible with the child spending time away from you cos that's going to happen eventually. Your comment suggests you're making a lot it assumptions about what it means for someone to be in a boarding school...
The implication is that the kids will be sent to boarding school because they are inconvenient for these plans.
From the language you’re using, it sounds like you are saying this is a possible way for this snow bird to LA lifestyle to work for a family.
But that you have not tried it yourself. Is that right?
Also, I'm not sure how the children would integrate with their classmates if they are only in the class 1/2 the year. Even worse if you are in the other country for the winter, i.e you child gets 2 months in the US school, is gone for 4, then back for 2.
I agree though about Boise. And all of Florida... etc.
Why work for AirBnB? You could work for another big tech company that actually has room to grow and produce some solid equity returns.
Not sure the pricing structure, but I remember office depot having an advertisement, it was probably like "As Low as $6" per pay period. Ths site says $70 a month but that's probably the minimum for the whole company. Then per check fees.
A good example is working remotely in another country. The US does not allow foreigners on a visitor visa to work remotely. It's a bit of a gray zone, since if you fly into the US for a business meeting, that's not regarded as "working in the US". But flying in for 1 month and working remote the entire time is.
Same with California income. Working in Nevada and then decide to work remote from California? That's CA income and taxable by CA. But of course people rarely even mention they're working in another state and rarely pay taxes owed.
Imagine Apple USA being taxed by New Zealand, for example. That's the main reason Apple employees are employed by Apple NZ
After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot.
In other news - sounds like comp is going down at Airbnb. Not a surprise.
And for western Europe, you don't even need to work ridiculous hours. If my current core hours (9am - 3pm) were in PST and I worked in Paris, I could finish my workday at 11pm in Paris.
If you ran into a show-stopper, capture it and being it up in your morning standup. They were all still in the office for at least a couple of hours when we got in.
that's a pretty realistic approach in my opinion. My company has people in India and Europe and it sucks royally to set up meetings with them. Either they have to work at night or the US people have to. If I had to decide, I would mandate at least a 4 hour overlap in working times.
You mention it in the next sentence - the local labor market. UK developers earn a fraction of what US developers do. We can debate the root causes but it seems irrelevant why it's true, only whether or not it is true.
I'm not sure why cost of living should factor into comp at all. I can have a much higher COL than you, but if you bring more value to the company, and you can get better offers than I can, you should make more than me.
Now suppose Alicia's company wants to hire Alice.
Certainly, I agree that it makes perfect sense in a free labor market for the US company to try to get Alice for $120K.
But the company I work for (a well-known US tech company) makes many claims about how "fair" its compensation program is. So what I'm inviting you to discuss is whether or not that company would have a hard time making an argument that adjusting according to the local labor market is actually "fair".
Essentially, Alice is being penalized for happening to be in a locality where her skills are valued less. But that is out of her control. Would it not be "fairer" for a company to adjust compensation as follows:
1. Firstly, according to skill / experience
And then, either
2a. That's it, end of story: skill / experience only.
or
2b. By local cost of living, within equivalent skill levels.
But for the many company’s that don’t, the justification is simply that the cost of Human resources is not based around output but around market dynamics like other resources. Fresh fruit in Japan costs more than it does in California not because the Japanese fruit is better per se, but because the cost of production is higher.
In what sense is the cost of production of a programmer higher in the USA than in the UK?
You keep trying to pretend that the local labor market is irrelevant. Until you accept that it isn't, or at the very least accept that companies don't think it is, you're going to keep talking past everyone here.
That's your problem right there - you believe them.
I think currently this is a big caveat. Getting a work permit in other countries is not that easy, even for Americans or other countries with more prestigious passports. Maybe with AirBnB clout it is easier than without but I'd say it's still quite an issue.
That being said, I'm really excited for what the future could provide with AirBnB focusing on this. Maybe it will be easier not just for Americans and the like to work in other countries but I really hope it will be easier for others from places such as Africa and Latin America to work in Europe and the US as well.
Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
I work at a remote first company and HR have given a nod and a wink to this, but with the requirement that you maintain a permanent address and pay taxes in a country where they have an office.
Are you sure this is the case? You’re not allowed to get hired locally but I believe you can work online for a company based in your country of residence provided you don’t stay long enough to become a resident of the new country (which you can’t on a tourist visa). I visited Canada for 6 months on a tourist visa. I had a full immigration interview at the airport when I arrived and they were perfectly happy with me working freelance/online for those 6 months. They were just clear I couldn’t become an employee of a Canadian company.
That said, if you're working for a multinational company, you may want to be careful. Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
My employer adopted a similar policy (just not as publicly announced as Airbnb's), and the way they work around this problem is by, assuming you reside in A, allowing you to travel and work in B but explicitly disallowing you from entering an office location in B.
Like you, I also wish the world worked in the way I like to imagine it should.
I think this is what AirBnB are doing. A lot of countries have a requirement for you to reside in it for at least half the year to be able to be taxed there and be considered an employee. A lot of countries allow people to visit for limited time, as long as you don’t interfere with the local job market - e.g being a tourist. Those two are not in conflict and you can do what AirBnB are doing right now, without much more accounting difficulties. Though I’m not an accountant and take my words with a grain of salt.
>And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
seems wrong to me. If I work in another country I'm still working, which means I need to pay taxes in my host country after a certain time (in Norway it's the first day afaik, in some European countries it's after a few months).
It's annoying, of course, but I'm using the resources of the host country while earning money, so it feels understandable.
Oh wait
So you can't open your work laptop while on vacation?
You cannot always take the law literally....
this has been discussed to death on DN forums. Basically yes you're breaking the law but if you don't get caught no one will know. Some people don't like taking this risk while some don't mind.
If I'm on paid leave, I'm still earning money, and I go to Asia - am I breaking the law? I'm still "doing" the activity that's earning me money.
If I'm on my paid leave, and fiddle with my blog, which gets ad revenue - am I earning money and thus doing illegal economic activity?
Not a lawyer so would love a more rigorous definition of "doing work" that is applied in Asia so I know if I'm overstepping. Maybe you can point me to some of those discussions?
As already mentioned, “Asia” is not a legal or political entity.
That's... an overstatement. Asking weird questions that indicate a risk of tourist visa overstays which nobody else bothers to ask (even if it is perfectly legal) will put you at risk of rejection, whether or not the law allows what you're trying to do.
Traveling to UK, permanent resident of Bulgaria (EU), Russian passport.
Border guard - “What are you doing in UK?”. Me - “Working on the clients premises and in their offices.” - “Sure come on in.”
All on tourist visas. Now I have BG citizenship there are no questions, but I wouldn’t think the sentiment is much different. As long as I’m not _employed_ by a company from the country I’m visiting, and stay a month or two, its fine, at least in the Europe. (I’m a contractor employed by BG company with clients in UK)
by “Asia” I meant no disrespect but I know little about the legal state of things there so seemed prudent to generalize
I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
I have very little believe that a majority of people can work from home, especially when travel. You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours. So I do understand why airbnb is telling their employees to do so, but curious how long it is going to last, and curious how real it is going to be (considering that it could be up to management approval as well). But I doubt that other companies will follow that.
I remember some studies mentioning that the real productive time in a daily 8 hr shiFt was 4-6 hours. If that's so, then it's completely doable.
Hopefully someone has a fresh link to one of those studies.
I used to take my PowerBook into the bathroom stall at work when I needed some alone time to concentrate, but it was embarrassing to get busted when it crashed and made that reboot sound so everybody else in the bathroom knew what I was up to.
And that would allow me to see the sunset the whole year. Would try to go to the park with my kid at 4pm every day.
The only people doing 8 hours of "work" are the people scheduling back to back meetings all day
In other words, a 4-6 hour workday means 2-3 hours of work getting done.
Literally nobody is productive for 9 hours straight. You end up doing low-value make-work projects because in a culture that values "time in seat" the work expands to fill the available time.
Remote manager here. This is definitely a huge problem with people new to remote work.
I actually don't care at all if people are doing something else during the day and getting their work done at night or whatever they want to do. However, a significant number of people really struggle to get work done at all when they first go remote and lack a repeatable schedule and the feeling of social pressure to be working like their peers. It takes a lot of coaching and mentoring to get these people back on track with their remote-ready peers.
Many other people have no problems working remote, though. IMO, the key to success of a remote team is to coach and mentor all new remote workers very intensely in the first months or year, but then also to be willing to remove people from the team if they just can't get work done remotely. You absolutely don't want a few bad apples to ruin remote work for everyone else.
That’s an incentive problem not a “be in the office” problem. Or you’ve hired lazy bums. Or the work isn’t interesting enough.
If the people are screwing around then fire them. More than likely the job is dull or not challenging or not rewarding enough. That’s a call for the company to step up their game and bring in A level talent.
Or don’t and keep on getting the C team that’s only doing busy work as a boss is looking over their shoulder.
You try firing someone in markets like NZ, Aus, lots of parts of Europe etc. Some people have for sure identified remote work as a meal ticket for life, it's frustrating.
I was just recently in a situation where a host rejected the rental price after booking, and convinced the support team that i agreed to the adjusted price, which was then charged against my card. (To be fair there was some messaging back-and-forth between myself and the host prior to the booking that gave credence to this, but nothing official.) When i rejected the new price the host agreed to cancel, then again convinced airbnb to execute a guest cancellation, forfeiting all but $613 of a now $4400 booking.
It took me roughly a week with those funds tied up before i found someone in their support team (O.G. Lou G, i love you man) to actually listen to me and reverse everything.
This on the heels of renting a condo with hammer drills running upstairs 8 hours a day for the last three days of my trip and zero consideration or recompense from the host or airbnb.
https://youtu.be/3raZyaHhiyU
(TV max volume from six feet away for relative comparison)
I just think it’s important to recognize that the hosts are completely carrying the company’s brand.
Unfortunately, hotels have been massively deteriorating in quality these last few years.. the hotels I've stayed in over the last few months weren't cleaning rooms more than once a week (and doing a half-assed job then), the front desk, kitchen, and room service were all massively understaffed, and they were more expensive than ever while still having the same awful internet/TV setups.
If AirBNB eliminates the ruinously large cleaning fees, I'll probably just stop staying in hotels for good
Days later after I was stable and out of the hospital, I found out that the cancellation gave me back I think $200 usd of the around $2000 I had paid....
At some level I kind of felt it as abusive. But I'm sure there are enough small prints somewhere to which I agreed to that explain why it's OK. And given my health issue I decided not to worry about that (puts things in perspective haha). I was more sad that I had to cancel the vacation/trip my wife and I planned, due to that emergency.
I've been near Todos Santos since January and the prices on Airbnb are, frankly, ludicrous for monthly rentals.
But then again that's the new normal, sky high rents everywhere.
Hopefully the infection hasn't spread to India, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.
So I ask the owner If i can leave, with the offer that I won't leave any type of review just so he won't be scared of that outcome. He rejects my offer and basically laughs at me for falling for his listing.
After all this airbnb then takes down my review because "I had tried to manipulate the owner by offering not to leave a review if he let me leave"
Now I understand why places like this have good reviews. It's unbelievably easy to get negative reviews taken down.
It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.
So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
> So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
Can't WFH work without micromanagement?
At least I can say that I never felt more free than during the work from home phase in the pandemic.
I have a dream that one day we will shit hard on that sort of stuff instead of validating it. See also "alpha male".
(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work
(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work
(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)
(5) No social circle anywhere
This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.
Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.
The third I married.
God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.
I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.
It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.
It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.
(1) Healthiest - Doing my morning work at a place where I know a few other coders who like to chat but don't bug me
(2) Less healthy - Same thing, but in the afternoon with beer.
Lol, in my experience mixing groups of friends has rarely been a good idea.
seems like it would lead to dating and that could be problematic for various well known reasons.
The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.
Work is not a place to make friends.
But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.
Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.
It is beyond insulting.
Nobody has ever proved any benefits to open plan offices. Their pathologies however are well documented e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.
Dreams? You are stuck in some weird emotional place.
And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.
In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.
I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.
The idea is to have a building/location with actual private offices after all.
“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”
This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.
Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.
Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.
Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.
Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.
- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)
- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.
Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.
There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.
Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!
As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.
That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)
And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.
I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.
The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.
Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.
Where are the external monitors? The laptop chargers? The plants? The photos of family? The screens in meeting rooms? The whiteboards?
They're missing all of those, there's a guy trying to work on a laptop while in a hammock?
I'll stick with my home office, thanks.
[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2019/01/29/airbnb-headquarters-s...
This is a hugely stupid move that companies made.
It was done because the benefits are tangible and immediate, and the costs are soft and indirect. CFO wins over HR.
People should recognize what a big deal this is.
I won't do it either.
I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.
My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.
https://www.pragprog.com/titles/jsrw/effective-remote-work/
Airbnb employees can live and work anywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199833
"Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans."
Is this like just plan to be in the SF office during normal 9-5 work hours for a week every 13 weeks or is this like plan on a week long 24-7 corporate retreat away from your family every 13 weeks.
If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
If you can't make the time to spend a few days a quarter with your workmates in exchange for the most generous and fair remote working package then perhaps you're not a good fit for Airbnb. Which is totally fair. But they're not exactly taking the piss here. For many (many) people a week long retreat is a perk not a burden.
But if you have a family you actually like/love - then a full week away really is a non-starter. Especially if its Sunday night and Saturday morning travel. School plays and parent teacher conferences don't get planned based on the AirBNB week long retreat schedule.
And if you are in a dual income family with the stereotypical two kids - if both of you guys are in similar work situations - then on your "on" week - you're gonna be the one doing 2 school pickups and all after school driving.
I also did notice that there are plenty of parents who will blame their children for things they themselves don't want to do and not be honest about it. It's not the children that are at fault there though.
In the end, there are plenty of WFH jobs that don't need on-site time at all so you can pick and choose. It's a great market for an engineer to be in now.
Another new and perfectly legal way to discriminate!
>If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
And that's okay! If people don't like it or can't make it work with their lifestyle, they don't have to work there
It is business travel after all.
I recognize that kids makes it difficult. And there are also folks who find it hard to travel much at all. But I’ve found I have the opposite problem: remote work can be extremely challenging from a energy and social point of view without meetups. I’ve never met most people on my current team, and don’t have strong social relationships with them. Those are really only possible to build in person. I come away from meetups with a sense of camaraderie, energy, and vision that’s difficult or impossible to replicate over Zoom.
So for me, I have found remote work more difficult during covid without meetups. I burn out more frequently, and struggle to find as much energy as I’ve had in the past.
True remote work — not 4/5 days, or in close proximity to an office where most work — would be less viable for me without meetups. Just as remote work is less viable for some with meetups. And working in the office has huge drawbacks as well for plenty of people. So it’s all a balancing game, and I wouldn’t say that meetups should be ditched because of this.
I do want to note that when I think of a meetup, a lot of it is social and having a good time. While “real work” obviously happens too, it’s not like these trips are consumed by it. Getting paid to go to a pleasant location of your choice with nice lodging and a decent food/drink budget is super nice. If it was just going to a soulless office at a minimal budget with no expectation of having a good time, I probably wouldn’t be so much in favor of them :) But with a nice mix of meaningful conversations, socialization, brainstorming, and fun, they have a positive impact on my work/life balance. And I’m more productive as well. So it’s a huge win all around for me, and I hope most.
If its during normal work hours - employees with kids can live within 1-2 hours can suffer the commute for a week every quarter and socialize but still be home in time for dinner with the kids/wife.
Conversely - the single folks/DINKs can go out and paint the town from 5pm-11pm and experience the actual local nightlife.
If they can, people should find something that works for them because they'll probably hate it otherwise.
I spent a lot of time outside US while waiting for my wife's visa to process and quickly wrote some advice on maintaining US domicile & "permanent address" while abroad:
https://www.kylehotchkiss.com/blog/domicile
Sorry about the misspellings and slightly ugly personal site but I hope that this helps somebody who may be considering working or staying from abroad for a bit!
You bosses adopted open floor plan to save money, no matter how miserable it made your employees. Now you're "embracing" remote work only because you can't hire anyone to work in your miserable offices.
Long story short everything I thought would get negative blowback or go up in flames didnt. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never does.
Our students work through around 1000 hours of computer science fundamentals remotely, build a portfolio of fullstack applications remotely, get hired at FAANG companies and startups remotely, make their employers happy remotely and get more of our graduates hired remotely.
As someone who used to work in and believe in traditional academia I still can't believe there's no catch. But increasingly it's becoming clear that there's not.
Except that the students can't hook up with eachother and there's no free bad coffee.
Also society could still totally collapse at any moment I guess.
----------
PS I love the green futurism manifesto vibe of airbnbs statement, I wana work there now
Do you believe that remote work is a net gain for society but is a net negative for many individuals?
Much like schools double as a day care for children, work often doubles as a social club for adults.
What full remote has done is made it harder for me to consider moving. Sure, I could move anywhere, but I'll show up there knowing essentially no one and have to just go out and meet people by force of will. There's no group of people at my new office I could connect with and at minimum get some recommendations of places to go. Even if you don't become friends with your coworkers, having some amount of in-person social contact is important for most folks, and knowing you have to build that yourself is daunting.
So what? 2 birds with one stone and all.
That can be good when it lets people tailor their environment to their own peculiar interests. And it can be bad for people where the normalizing environment of a shared social space helps them drag some deficient attribute back up to a healthy level.
Academia has actually had this model for a long time - people moving with their families for postdocs every few years and keeping in touch remotely with old colleagues
mountain towns would like to have a word here.