The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
Yeah, same. Just left a company where all the guys in the trenches were mandated in the office, but the management was allowed to work from anywhere. Assholes.
It may feel like an order (That's an order ensign!), but it's a request, you can say no, they can fire you or grant you your wish, you can leave or grant them their wish.
But agreed, it's really shitty and I wish nobody would be in a situation where they feel like they are effectively ordered. I feel it's a result of your country's (US or India, right?) lack of unions and employee protecting labor laws.
You know perfectly what's going on. They are management (upper caste), you are worker (lower class), hence you _deserve_ suffering. Next life, be born upper management you filthy lowcaste.
That's exactly what happened to me during lockdown - hired at a bank on a fixed-term contract, purely by phone interview. When I started, they required me to work on-site because I wasn't permanent staff and therefore had to be supervised, except my manager wasn't on-site and I was there for over 2 months before meeting him in person - they were actually quite strict about separation because they were worried about the operational risk of an office outbreak.
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
This is completely the opposite of my experience. Most developers work from home, but managers are more likely to be in the office because their job is meeting lots of people.
Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take.
I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office.
I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona lockdowns.
The serendipity thing is real. We have less of it. We have many other benefits and we think it’s worth it, but to think remote doesn’t have downsides is a bit short sighted IMO.
I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions.
When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
> I'm sceptical towards this. I know my own productivity has measurably improved since I started working from home - mainly from the calmer work environment and lack of distractions.
Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
Exactly. Saying remote works best it's a bold statement. You can give significant number of arguments for both "in the office" or "remote". Remote work has benefits, but also downsides. There is a different dynamic between people when they sit together vs when they talk remotely. Each of these interactions will foster different outputs.
Also, each of these cases start from extreme premises. "Bad managers" want workers within the office because they want to micromanage. While all employees are fully responsible, productive and albe to do their work without issues. Again, both of these are extremes and there are a lot of nuances.
By saying "serendipity" here, we abstract it into its own unique cutesy concept, preventing proper analysis of its actual tangible benefits. This leads people to talk about it as if it's some magical emergent property of water coolers.
When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:
- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements
These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.
That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.
All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.
Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:
- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)
- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.
- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
No, "serendipity" here has value primarily not within a single team, but as a discovery mechanism between teams. There's research on this. It has its highest value for new starters trying to figure out how the org fits together, but is also useful for inter-team workflow discovery and reinforcement, especially at the start of projects. You shouldn't need it within a single team unless that team is already dysfunctional (which I think is your point).
Basically all orgs need something that acts as a random mixing function so that connections between areas can form and strengthen. Working in the same building can provide that, if the building layout allows for it, but it's far from the only option.
The problem is that managers, particularly those with a strongly hierarchical, Taylorist mindset, won't necessarily appreciate the value of lateral connections between teams. They end up benefiting from serendipity by accident because when they force people into the office those lateral connections form anyway.
Oh, thanks for pointing this out! I hadn't thought of it explicitly in that way, so I didn't write it down. But all the concrete examples I was running in my mind were indeed examples of inter-team collaboration: "helping the HR team fix their workflow", "addressing issues that the customer support team keeps getting complaints about", "fixing some minor product oversight that leads to a worse experience"
No, I believe managers do useful work. What I mean is that knowledge workers have discovered they have the capability to do their job just as effectively when remote, while managers have simultaneously discovered they don’t have the capability to do their job nearly as effectively when remote; i.e. a lot of managers are realizing they relied on face-to-face interpersonal skills to motivate, track, and manage their employees. Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done.
I know it's not very HN-y to say "I agree", but I think your comment encapsulates wonderfully the general topic, in a concise and very well put paragraph.
edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here.
It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful.
Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine.
Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
> Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done.
So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!
This article rests basically everything on one assertion: organisational productivity is equal or better with remote work. It would be prudent to show some evidence of this when making the subsequent points.
The burden of proof is much higher on remote work. The entire history of civilization from hunter-gatherers to 2019 was built largely with in-person work. If companies are going to make a permanent change to the way work is done, they will need affirmative proof that the new way works better than the old way, otherwise the much more tried-and-true old way is a much safer bet.
This is empirical, but I have yet to hear the cause for failure of a company to be “we worked remotely”. Otoh, hearing that operating expenses were too high, no product market fit, tech debt, etc are the usual culprits across remote and in office companies.
It's a fallacy to not having any data to back up the incumbent method.
"People have drunk alcohol since prehistoric times, so why should people stop now and be sober?". Both sides need to have ample proof.
For most of human history people worked together in person, as tribes! (I think this is at least part of the reason companies so heavily push the "we are your family" meme, trying to artificially create that original level of collectivism and aligned incentives.)
Why does it need to be better? Here's my PoV: I want it, and frankly rely on it at this point, and employers want to hire me. If someone was really worth less working remotely, it could be factored into salary. Lo and behold though, I accomplish the same, or possibly more now than, as I ever did, and my salary has not plummeted. Quite the opposite.
Again, I want to reiterate: if it really made workers worth less, it could be factored into salary. It's not about that. It's about something else that has to do with management and control.
Don't get me wrong, I am not doubting for a minute that remote work has challenges, but that's the thing. We had to work those out. Security, compliance, VPNs, beyond corp, whatever... We already HAD to do it. The only reason now to discard that would be sabotage.
Sure, I don't have any opposition to companies offering it, or employees demanding it -- supply and demand will take care of that. I'm talking about whether I believe we should be making an effort as a society to push the market in one direction or the other.
I think an assumption that I have is that the balance of supply/demand may be prejudiced against remote work, because it takes time for people to accept or be open to new ways of doing things.
I agree that status quo and stability have at least some non-zero probative value, but you have to acknowledge that the status quo only exists because the dinosaurs didn't document their prehistoric internet well enough, so our ancestors had to rediscover the concept of a zoom meeting.
(Edit: obviously I wrote this in jest, but in all seriousness, when considering the value of "how it's always been done" it's extremely important to consider how we happened to stumble upon the status quo, with a holistic and historical bird's eye view. This is consequential to the analysis.)
From personal experience, I am MUCH happier getting out of the house a couple of times a week. Lockdowns felt like house arrest, and commuting 5 days a week felt completely unnecessary and exhausting.
For many people I know this is the case, so I don't think pure remote or location work are "it".
Remote work doesn't force you to stay in your house all week.
I work 100% remote with semi-flexible hours and a big part of this is the freedom to leave my house and do things during the day, like meet up with friends, or go exercise while the sun is out in winter etc.
Yes, I live near a large park. I walk/run there every day, but the point is, the routine of doing everything alone (walking, shopping, working, eating) starts grinding on you.
Well, actually the status-quo was already challenged and proved to be "wrong" during 2 years of pandemic. Companies did not collapse because white-collars worked remotely. If your business was positively impacted by the pandemic, they actually thrived and expanded (even too much). So it is safe to assume that, while being different, remote work is not detrimental to a white-collar company, and more specifically to companies based on software.
It is very interesting to see how strongly the opinions differ on this topic. Both sides have good and understandable arguments. I think that in the future, jobs will also be advertised with the phrase "primarily in the office".
To capture the maximum candidates, they would advertise it so that it sounds like the job can be both remote and in office. Only until the actual offer would you truly find out, and even then, may be not, until you actually turn up and obtain social cues on what the real expectation is.
It's framed as a gift in order to manipulate the negotiating position. The fact is both employer and employee benefit from it, but if the employer can emphasize the benefits to the employee they can extract a bit of value from the relationship.
Although framing it as a gift isn’t implicitly an admission that going to the office sucks, and therefore sparing you from the dread should be seen as a negotiating value?
You can easily defuse the argument though. As a candidate, you can say that remote working is a trade off you are willing to accept because of your interest for the job.
You don’t even have to lie but you can just act like you don’t care about working remotely or not (which, in my personal case, is just the truth).
To be honest, you can easily diffuse the argument even if you do care about working remotely.
Simply put, make it known immediately that you will reject the job offer if it is not full remote, no questions asked. On my end, no "extra" amount of money they'd be willing to offer for coming into the office will sway me and many others.
There simply is no argument, I will not work for you and will go with another option if working remotely is not possible. If my job changes from work remote to not after accepting, I will not come in, and will look for new opportunities.
I've seen a lot of places play the game of accepting remote workers but then the CEO or someone announces back to office which is why I put the additional point there as well.
IMO in today's culture it is a gift. It's a gift in the sense that most companies aren't willing to do it. My quality of life being a digital nomad because of it (+ 4 days a week instead of 5) has shot up drastically.
This is my exact fear (as someone who also has ADHD). I will need to work in-office at the end of the year. I guess I have time to make adjustments, but I still am concerned my output will not be as great.
I am about 4-5x more productive when I disable my internet. The "human" equivalent of "disable internet" is to work when family members are sleeping. Not the healthiest solution, sadly. (Living alone was more productive, but also pretty depressing.)
Of course ADHD is different from person to person. I personally find it easier to work in the office.
At home there's too many distractions and without people around me, I feel less accountable to actually work rather than scroll through reddit.
Despite the people talking around me, I find general chatter less distracting than absolute silence.
I used to find noise annoying in the pre-covid days, but I could cope with it.
Then I worked remotely, and while the silence was deafening for the first week or so, I grew to love it, and the focus it gives me.
Now I am back in the office some days a week, and it is worse than ever, in part as I've tasted what working in silence does for me. But mainly as non in post-covid times everyone takes their meetings at their desks.
Sitting near me today was a team of 5 people all on a call together from their desks, as one person was remote.
In the old days they would have grabbed a meeting room to run that call, but now everyone does it from their desks.
The noise is so annoying, and makes my remote days all the sweeter. Wearing noise cancelling headphones all day hurts my ears and head, plus gives me sweaty ears - which leads to more wax which leads to increased tinnitus for me. As someone with ADHD, tinnitus can really mess with my day.
I don’t have ADHD as far as I’m aware, but in the office noise canceling headphones mostly worked with the caveat that everybody in eyeshot was sitting for the most part. Sometimes when there’d be a flurry of movement for some reason or another with people ping ponging between desks and such my focus would be torpedoed and I’d have to resign myself to being a fourth or fifth as effective as normal until people settled in again.
Because most people don’t like to be told to be in a certain place for a certain amount of time from where they can not leave. There’s another name for this situation.
To an extent, sure, but this is wildly variable based on personal circumstance.
I know plenty of people working 2 jobs and simply don't have time to find a replacement for one. With wages at record lows, that also means if they lose one for any reason, it's not like a little breaky break while they find another, it means something on their extremely narrow budget gets the axe for that week or whatever. Usually healthcare, sometimes food. Sometimes rent, at which point if you don't have a friend's couch to crash on, you're homeless, and then it's astronomically harder to find a job. You are well and truly fucked.
So not everyone is "free to leave the job."
BTW I don't know the OP but the word I was going to drop in was not prison, it was slavery.
Edit: to clarify wages at record lows, I mean for the people working minimum wage or around there. Inflation and cost of living combined to make their real buying power lower than ever.
It will vary by country, I’m sure, but wages overall are not at record lows (nor anywhere near that) in the US broadly, and SWE salaries in particular are near record highs in all of the SWE markets worldwide that we hire in.
While "freedom from labor" might be just around the corner (AGI, basic income etc.), there's still a lot of wiggle room between "confined to a specific chair for 8 hours" and "can spend all day snoozing on the beach" !
To put it another way, there are ways to make money that spark more or less joy, and much of this variation is possible even for "regular folks" working "regular jobs". But most of that possibility space is yet unexplored.
Not sure whose fault that is, but I am reminded of the quote, "the opposite of courage in this country is not cowardice, it is conformity."
Most people just do what everyone else is doing (i.e. the 80% who are dissatisfied with their work) and then wonder why they are dissatisfied with their work.
Humanity would be long dead and gone if they took on this guy's attitude. Freedom to these people is forcing everyone else to do the work of keeping them alive while enjoying the fruits of THEIR labor.
this line of argument doesn’t make sense. you’re complaining that having a job is like being imprisoned. if you feel so strongly about it, you should be an entrepreneur. know that it comes with other tradeoffs you may not prefer.
I can get paid a salary more than most of the world makes and go home to my family at night if I'm a prisoner? Sign me up!
What your argument boils down to is everyone else needs to do the stuff that keeps you alive (grow food, keep your power plant running, emergency services, treat your water) while you sit at home and scroll through TikTok. Sounds just a tad elitist to me.
You get paid to do a certain thing and if that thing requires you to be somewhere at a certain (like EVERY job) then you will be there at that time. I wish I had Superman powers and was essentially immortal, but that's no more realistic than you thinking you ought to be able to do whatever you want while still getting paid to do a job and think that's sustainable for an entire society.
Alternatively, you could start your own business and make your own schedule. However, it's not going to go so well for you with the current attitude you've got. Most likely you're going to have to do things when you don't want to do them if you want your business to succeed.
Before Corona I travelled a lot and now I live so remotely that a office job is out of the question without moving.
The actual remote jobs I've seen in that time all had weird issues like fixed (early) meeting times, more often than not even daily. Or performance tracking that went as far as installing third party monitoring Software while not even getting a dedicated work computer. Or being available at slack the whole time.
If that is what remote work means I don't get it. It's just as stressful if not more, minus the commute.
Those examples are all placeholders for bad managers who don't trust their employees and/or are unable to correctly measure how productive they are.
In poorly managed companies I've worked for it was very easy to get away with doing nothing e.g. I worked with a Service Designer who, when she finally quit, told everyone openly that she hadn't been given any work in a year
Pretty much all of that goes away once you switch from salary to freelance. I think it's mostly a framing-thing where people figure "I pay this person to work for me 40 hours a week" and then they want to get the most out of those 40 hours and feel like they need to make sure that you're actually working and not doing chores around the house.
When you freelance on a project-basis, it's "I pay this person to create this thing for me", but they don't care whether you take 10 or 100 hours to do so as long as you deliver it at the price you agreed upon and the quality is what they expected.
I am not going to go back to project based salaries. I am to lazy to negotiate all the things that come after I think I am done :) Maybe I was just to cheap, dunno.
When I still did freelancing I just asked for a rather high hourly rate and was super efficient in that time. At some point it got hard to find customers tho when other people claim the same for a 4th of the rate or less.
The ultimate solution for a lazy coder like me is just maintaining some websites that make money. My time, my decisions, my money.
It's hard to believe that there's IT companies that would trust you to work on your own personal PC. It's a glaring security issue that sounds like a company problem, not a general difficulty for remote work.
- You can easily steal code - if you were working on a company laptop with USB device protection (can't connect drives to transfer without approval) and heavy website moderation (can't send code to yourself), leaking code would prove way more difficult. Compare that to just copy+paste on your personal computer. (ofc it's possible to steal from company laptops too, but you'll leave a very visible trail).
- You're a security risk if your computer gets stolen: with company laptops remote disable is an easy option, not so much with personal ones.
- Your dev environment can be radically different from others if the company doesn't install some software center (OS, dependancies).
- You can't guarantee your personal PC isn't compromised by virus software, again playing into possibly leaking code.
It's a liability to let devs download code to their personal computers. It's risky from both physical, and intellectual property perspectives.
I've only really worked at 2 different companies. Both had none of the mentioned protections. One was a windows without real AD, and the other was a MacBook I setup myself. I never even heard of USB protection there like.
I really understand where you are coming from, but that's definitely not the standard I have witnessed so far.
That's really interesting to hear, I assumed wrongfully that most places have similar policies in regards to devices (from my experience, and my peers').
Maybe where I'm working we're more harsh than usual:D because we've got the full package - company laptop, transfering anything work related to personal PC is a no go, at home we must use VPN with 2FA, can't connect unapproved USB devices (including mice, keyboards, phone charging, anything), heavy website moderation, and heavy user-based access moderation for anything, and the company laptops are 100% tracked - you have no privacy on it. Even personal phones have to follow some security measures to keep Slack and authentication app (screen sleep <5min, screen lock is a must, and Slack is password protected).
Don't kid yourself, there is nothing you can do to prevent people from 'stealing' code they are working on if they are working from home or any other place where someone is not looking over their shoulder 100% of the time.
There are reasons to force people to work on a corporate machine, preventing them from stealing code is not one of them.
If sufficiently motivated, take pics with your phone. With a good camera, you could minify a lot of code into a tiny font size, take a photo or multiple photos, and OCR them later.
Or encrypt the whole repo and just send it to a bucket somewhere. I mean there's got to be a lot of ways to do it if you really want to.
You can't prevent any kind of theft 100%. The point of these measures is to make stealing as hard as possible without impeding work.
Some guy commented on taking photos - are y'all really planning on taking a photo for every 200 lines, on scripts with lines in the thousands, in repos which contain tens to hundreds of files, which are just for one product? When your company is probably supporting more than a couple products?
This is indeed extremely stressful. When I say work from home, I only have to make sure that I am present for the correct meetings and have the work done. No one cares otherwise.
It’s a gift if you don’t have small children. It’s ridiculously harder if you do. It’s like trying to work in an emergency room, where every minute there’s some emergency, and you’re trying to do something different.
Of course most people working in tech aren’t facing this issue and so think working from home is great for everyone.
I have worked from home from before my kids were born. They’re now 8 and 10. I don’t recognise what you are saying, probably because when I’m at work I’m uncontactable.
More recently it seems people think working at home means you get to do things like washing, cleaning, babysitting etc as well. That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem.
> That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem
How did we get to a point where we consider this opinion to be normal? It is expected someone else to care for your children while you commute hours each day and work 8+ hours at an office? When you get home you still need to spend whatever free minutes you have with your children, cook, put them to bed, wash, clean, find some time to share with your spouse, then repeat daily?
How about we normalize working from home, and spending time with your children and spouse? Is it so bad to have your child do their homework on the desk next to you so you can explain and answer their questions? Play around in the room while you work, so you can actually interact with them, instead of being away for the major part of their conscious life?
Also, is it so bad to go load and start the washing machine while you wait for your build to finish? Maybe load the dishwasher? What do you do at the office at the same time? Go to the kitchen to prepare yourself an unhealthy amount of coffee so you can grind your busywork with more focus?
But when I work from home, I do am able to do things like washing and cleaning. (I'm not going to babysit of course; that implies other people's children.)
When I'm stuck on a problem or frustrated by some issue, doing the laundry is a great way to clear the mind and approach the problem in a new way. Similar to how you often get the solution to a problem in the shower or on the drive home. It's pretty awesome to be able to do that during my work day, and office doesn't really give good opportunities for this.
If the kid is home then either office work was never an option, or there's another parent present. Just make sure you've got a separate room as your home office. (Admittedly not always possible with smaller apartments; this is the real additional cost of working from home.)
I see yes never crossed my mind the one working parent scenario for some reason. In that case you need a good setup. For me dogs barking is way worse than kids noise though. I prefer a baby cry to a dog bark terms of if I am working.
Where and how you live certainly matters. If your neighbours have a noisy dog, working from home won't be as good an option. And of course there's a million other reasons working from home can be problematic, especially in small apartments with too many neighbours, or living in a noisy or distracting environment. Or it might be too hot or cold to work comfortably.
Of course it's also possible for offices to be noisy or otherwise uncomfortable, and you might not have any power to do anything about it. I guess WFH is a great option mostly for people who have a great home.
I beg to differ. We've grown accustomed to the insane idea that someone else should provide childcare for our children while we are away for 8-10 hours a day.
In which world? I started working remotely in 2014, when my youngest one hadn't even born yet (I only had 2 back then, and they were small).
Yet, there was more peace and ability to concentrate at home than there was at my previous office. Less interrupts, no time wasted to driving. And my kids weren't at the kindergarten.
The remote possibility even gave me enough energy to finalize my MSc finally (at evenings), something I wasn't able to do while working at the office for many years. Weird, huh?
I do miss beers with my colleagues though. But that's a bit difficult when none of my colleagues work in the same country, not much difference whether I would be in the office or not.
I don't think there's any "weird setup", other than having a separate room for work/computer. It's pretty good insulator for all the interruptions. And of course, better coffee.
The additional productivity probably came from the added time per day and reduced fatigue from lower amount of noise (office room vs. open office floor). I don't think there's anything weird about it, I at least found working at the office very tiring since concentration was difficult and required energy.
Mostly teaching them. "When dad works, don't bother him". And since I do come out of the room in any case often enough (coffee/toilet/eat/etc), they saw me enough often. But it's not like single productive period is a long time, rather it's a patches of smaller events during the day.
Of course now that they're bigger, everything is a bit different.
Let me ask this directly. Is your wife watching over the kids while you get productive time?
If so, then that's not a luxury many people (including, you know, many wives) with small children have. Hence the comment that you originally replied to makes sense.
As a parent myself, working from home, I can't relate to what you describe, at all. What you describe sounds like a communication and relationship problem first and foremost.
If those same "emergencies" are urgent to you and demand your attention only when you work from home then the issue lies someplace else.
Quite the opposite. Working close to my kids is incredibly convenient. When school or daycare calls that they're sick, then I can easily pick them up without having to travel home first.
It's exactly having kids that makes working from home extra convenient. Though of course it definitely helps to have a separate room for your home office.
Let's not bring any nuance to this conversation. It's all about "ME ME ME ME ME AND ME!". I don't have children, so obviously my arrangement is superior and has to be codified for everyone and anyone everywhere and you are WRONG if you disagree.
(Seriously, this debate is about as dumb as any other american political debate, just bunch of myopic people screaming at each other with no ability to think.)
It's seen as a gift because employees have come to treat it as a perk. There's isn't a good negotiation reason for an employer to treat it as a default because they can use it as leverage to get less salary from you in return for remote.
As long as candidates see it as a possible alternative to additional compensation, it'll be treated as a perk that can be revoked. Execs would do the same thing with bathroom access or access to drinking water if it was practical.
> But there seems to be this returning perspective in the tech industry that remote work isn’t a fairly standard work practice, but is instead something that is a gift to employees. A privilege to be earned. A perk to bestow upon the most deserving.
It was always seen this way, right? Thus perspectives like Tim Ferris' "Four Hour Workweek" that revolved primarily around getting to work remote as a top priority.
> Did we adapt? Absolutely. Arguably, we thrived. Companies suddenly had access to a talent pool that was always there, but they were ignorant of. No longer did they have to limit themselves to people who lived near the office, or have to offer hefty relocation packages. Real estate expenses fell through the floor.
When I put my rational hat on, this is how I feel. Suddenly your talent pool expanded to not just a bunch of new people, but a bunch of new people at vastly different local salary rates. Personally, I think it's unethical to lower pay to match regional rates, but this reason alone made me think the era of the SF engineer had come to an abrupt halt as covid forced companies to accidentally discover massively productive engineering pools in places like India and the Philippines. Tell as many stories as you like about the time you had a bad remote engineer in India, one can't deny the pool is simply massive and for every one "ten-x engineer" in SF there's five hundred in India, just have to find them.
Anyway my buddy in NYC was telling me a bunch of companies were suddenly discovering they were able to maintain revenue while cutting out multi million dollar real estate expenses for their manhattan offices stacked with little snackies and bubbly water. Seemed obvious to me. There you go, that's a couple salaries right there, now you can hire even more remote workers. Why weren't we always doing this?
Then there's the simple ethical arguments around decreased pollution from decreased pointless commuting, increased mental health benefits from not having to sit in traffic mad for 120 minutes a day every single day, losing hours of your day to the commute, whatever else.
Now let me put my hat on that lets me get into the mind of a not very good manager or business leader that's successful less for sharp mindedness and more for winning a lottery of one form or the other and thus having access to more capital: I don't trust my workers, I need to see with my own eyes that they're working for all the hours I pay them to work, I don't realize that it makes more sense to understand our relationship as one of product output for salary rather than an arbitrary idea of time for money (I, as a non engineer, have no idea how long it takes to build things, but I demand 8 hours every day anyway). I don't trust those engineers out in India, I can't see them, where's my money going? Also, guess what buddy, when I was your age I took the train to work every day and didn't buy a coffee cause that's just how I remember us doing things, so suck it up and you should too! Improving technology should only be used if I, the least familiar with these technologies, can think of a way to generate profit off of them.
I know I'm quite cynical but this has been my experience sometimes. Most times though I've found companies to be quite adaptable and take the lessons learned as a gift: woah nice, we don't have to pay for an office? Why didn't we think of this sooner?? Everyone's remote and thus documentation is suddenly a lot more important to fill in the gaps that used to involve juniors tapping seniors on the shoulder? Woah, our business and knowledge base is so much more sustainable now, awesome! Keep doing more of that!
I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs.
I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that can truthfully deduct the cost-for-living from the compensation they are offering. It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
Also, from my personal point of view, it's the time I'm saving for myself, not the money. Electricity is quite expensive nowadays, and my standing desk and audio/video equipment also wasn't payed by my employer.
What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".
//edit: fixed typos and added a/v equipment to my ramblings
That's pretty normal, isn't it? Many services do location-based pricing, a friend of mine just sets his location to Turkey to get rebates from Adobe, Microsoft etc.
My company allows fully flexible work, but due to the nature of our work we tend to hire locally. A recruiter made a mistake and arranged an interview for me in the wrong city, and I was hired as the only fully remote employee for a local team.
Does it have challenges? Yes. Am I a valued employee? Yes, I am potentially one of the most valuable employees after my first year in my team. Easily top 20%.
I visit my team every few months for a week. Mostly the point is so we can go out for dinner and I get to have some drinks with them. The workday itself is changed very little by being in person.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
That's like saying the price of goods and services should be about the cost of producing them. No no no: the price is about what buyers will bear. In the same way, salaries are about what the worker will bear.
If there is an arbitrage lever to maximize profit, any business will use it.
Very much this. It makes the process of salary negotiation completely tied to perception rather than reality, which isn't necessarily bad for the employee. It just means that the justifications for a higher salary need to change from "your salary offer is too low because it shouldn't depend on where I live" to "your salary offer should be higher because I can improve your business in x, y and z"
Also, the expectation by employer that by paying an average salary they get 100% performance has to change. Employees can optimise for pay or life depending on what the company is willing to offer.
Until the moment companies once again collude to drive and hold prices down. Suddenly those competitors aren't too low after all and the "tried and true" isn't so useful.
Corporations have enough staff that they can lay off hundreds or thousands of workers without a single worry. They can hold out not paying you the rate you want for much longer than you can afford not paying your bills and eating. Eventually, you will accept a lower salary and if you don't there are plenty of others who will. The vast majority of all employed people have next to no leverage compared to the companies that hire them and companies know it.
You need only one company to not go along to hoover up all the great talent.
The large problem with the collusion before was that the 3-4 that already paid top of the market salaries colluded to keep them the same. It doesn’t mean they weren’t still top of the market for someone with a given level of experience.
No because the pool of workers at that company vs the others combined is small. This in turn will make entry in that pool excessively competitive which again will serve to drive down the wages in that pool. Once the tiny pool is saturated they might as well benefit from entering with the others in agreement as well.
Employers are the buyers of labour. If food prices depend on what the consumer can bear, then labour prices should depend on what the employer can bear. And most of them can bear a lot more than they're currently paying.
It is a market. Employers and consumers will pay what they have to be satiated. If they can’t afford that, they’ll have to make do with less. If something is priced too high and there are viable alternatives, they’ll consider those alternatives.
That is the big fundamental problem of employer-employee relations. They hold more power and it's easier for them to organise with other employers without anyone being aware of it. The only way to balance that is for employees to also get organised. Or ban corporations, I suppose.
This depends on the worker... if we're talking about a job that 'anyone' can do, sure... worker is replaced within a week, and the worker might need more than a week to find a new job.
But a professional in a small team, usually witha bus factor of 1? This means a hard time finding a new employee + months of training, while the old worker probably found a new job before they even quit at the first one.
But if the current employee turned around and asked for double their wage their current employer would say no - they have leverage in that they can walk away and it would cause a lot of hardship for the company in the short term, but it's amazing how little the company is willing to part with to ensure that that employee stays.
Some companies care, and people don't leave because of that. Some don't care, and people leave. Nobody writes a blogpost saying: "i got a raise so I didn't quit", because noone reads that... a blog post saying "company has huge profits, only offers small raise, so I quit and find a better job" is a whole different thing.
> Nobody writes a blogpost saying: "i got a raise so I didn't quit"
There are plenty of blogposts from the other side, about "never give a raise to a flight-risk, because their loyalty is already shot". The business strategy is to quietly hire a (typically cheaper) replacement, then fire the uppity employee.
> though you have to admit in basically all situations the employer has more leverage than a single employee
This depends on how happy/able the employee is to leave to find an alternative.
A while ago I was at a trade fair in Germany and happened to see an advert from a jobs website, it read (roughly translated): "Hate your job ... ? It's your own fault!" (ie that you've not yet left the job you claim to hate...)
the employer has more leverage in who they choose to hire and what they choose to pay - but potential employees hold all the leverage about where they choose to work and the amount they are willing to accept.
I do not think so. Transaction costs for employee are small - several months of lost pay (before finding new employer), which would be mostly covered by severance pay or unemployment insurance anyway. Transaction costs for employer depends, they generally pay for lost productivity during training-in period and lost institutional knowledge in case of high-knowledge workers.
Must be nice being wealthy. Most people can barely go a single month without a paycheck.
> severance pay or unemployment insurance
Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
And this is quite good compared to what happens almost anywhere outside of Europe.
> Transaction costs for employer depends
For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal. Only small companies suffer significantly when losing an employee.
> Must be nice being wealthy. Most people can barely go a single month without a paycheck.
Not necessary wealthy. For people with median pay, it is more about financial responsibility. According to EU-SILC data more than half EU population has financial reserves for at lest three months.
> Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
Here in Czechia it is 2 months notice period, then severance pay is 3 months (for > 2 years of employment), and then 5 months of government unemployment benefits on ~half pay. So 10 months to find a new job.
> For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal
Even in large businesses you can have small teams with domain experts, losing them can be costly.
"Market" is just another way of saying "Power differential."
Most corporate cultures are inherently authoritarian, with money being used as a proxy for power.
Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority.
Stock is an even more specific proxy for power, which is why stock options that have real value are usually reserved for those at the top of the hierarchy.
This is also why remote working is unpalatable. Even if it increases productivity it also enhances worker autonomy and reduces the power differential. That's not acceptable in an authoritarian culture.
Attitudes to remote work can be a useful indicator of how central hierarchy is in the culture.
> Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority.
Why does any company every pay more than the legally required minimum, then?
if you have 0 employees and nobody will work for you until you raise your pay to three times the legally required minimum, you raise because otherwise there is no power differential.
If you have 10 employees and you want to hire 3 more but to do that you have to increase their pay by 25% in relation to others then you might decide not to because this decreases power for everyone (should they find out what you're paying these others)
> "Market" is just another way of saying "Power differential."
Oh come on. This is a cynical or Marxist take, but it's pretty obviously untrue. A flea market, farmers market, FB marketplace doesn't have a substantial power imbalance. A market may have a power imbalance, but it is not required. People can exchange goods/services at equal power, and routinely do so. And if I understand economics correctly, that's the purpose of a "free" market: no artificial power imbalances.
This is an important point: according to Adam Smith, a free market is a market without power imbalances, a market on which everybody can trade as equals, with transparency. He was fully aware that companies would try to dominate the market, make it less free, form cartels, and generally conspire against the interests of consumers, workers and other smaller players on the market. He even suggested that workers may have to get organised in order to counter the power imbalance posed by corporations.
It's only later laissez-faire and neoliberal capitalists that turned "free market" synonymous with a lack of regulation and a playground for the biggest and most powerful companies.
it is not about what they 'can' bear, it's about what they are willing to bear - it is not the same thing - the company can decide what they are willing to bear, and the employee can decide what they are willing to work for. Doesn't sound like a problem that needs fixing.
Because that's labor theory of value which is Marxism and marx is just some guy.
Arguments against will be that value "is" what people are willing to pay for them, which is some combination of supply and demand, but I find this just too simple. Technically it's true that the "value" of something is the price someone last paid for it, but then we get situations where we say a Bitcoin is worth 40k usd or whatever tf the price is right now. And then suddenly its value is 20k, and if you ask why you'll get thirty answers, all wrong. Maybe the price was 40k to someone and 20k to someone else, but the value? Nah. And the price alone tells us basically nothing.
The interesting thing for me is the third person. Me, in this case, to whom Bitcoin is worth 0, or less than 0 because I would consider it a labor cost to own a Bitcoin (figuring out a wallet or whatever). How does someone to whom a Bitcoin is worth 40k then then around and say "Bitcoin is worth 40k" to someone like me?
To capitalists trying to nod their heads and say ah the price is high, supply must be down or demand must be up, I say, good luck predicting human behavior, that usually goes great.
For me though I agree with you, the value of goods is some combination of their production costs, in any meaning of the word "value" that matters.
"But what if someone spends an entire lifetime of labor producing a single widget nobody wants? Clearly demand plays a part in value!" I don't know, go away. Why would that happen? Sure, ok, also include in value calculus that hopefully people only make things that people actually want. (the capitalist argument here is, the profit is to be found in the margin between cost to create and the price set by desirability - to which I say exactly, profit should be eliminated)
Edit: someone else had a comment they deleted talking about how profit is necessary so as to have surplus to save in case of equipment failure, I'll paste my response here cause my thumbs put in the labor so by golly I'll get the Payout
Traditionally, are profits sequestered to be used as savings like that? In my experience the equipment breaks and both companies go bankrupt because the executives in the c corp spent the profit on themselves already and are happy to just go find a new investment.
Actually in my experience the other company, the co-op, doesn't go bankrupt, because the workers are smart enough to safeguard their well being with rainy day funds. This might be one of the reasons coops are repeatedly shown to be far more resilient than traditional companies.
IMO OP is right on the money with the labor theory of value. If the value is what offer and demand agree on, exploitation disappears, in Marx's theoretical model.
While I am not an expert, I remember reading about it on "The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives", by Callum Williams. It made sense to me.
While linking to the sources is useful, I would appreciate any argument correcting the above since, as I said, I am not an expert and it makes perfect sense to me.
>If the value is what offer and demand agree on, exploitation disappears, in Marx's theoretical model.
This is not true; Marx's model of exploitation (known to modern economists as the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Model (PECP)) does not concern itself with what demand and offer agree on within a labor negotiation. Marx says that workers do not sell their labor, they sell their labor-time (e.g. X units of time/goods) during which they exercise their labor-power. The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced during that time is where this 'exploitation' comes in.
The idea that exploitation is a matter of opinion or agreement adds a moral or justicial spin to what Marx considered to be a fact of the capitalist economy. Whether the people involved are happy with the situation or agree to it does not change this discrepancy of value or its representation in money.
Correct, Marx talks about exploitation the same, whether of wood or labour power.
Marxism is explicitly amoral, it does not concern itself with that is morally right. It is a social science that analyses the contradictions within the material world and their consequences.
> The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced
I am thinking how can one value this time. If it is valued by the market (how much someone is willing to pay for it) we would end up with the same problem, no?
Value produced can be measured as the price of commodities sold. Thus there is a clear difference between the cumulative price of commodities a worker produces in an hour and the amount they are paid for that hour. The difference is appropriated by the owner of the means of production (the capitalist) as profit.
The capitalist wants to pay as little as possible per hour, but will on average long term not be able to pay less than the cost of living. Capitalists pay just enough so that workers as a class reproduce themselves (so there are more workers), but less than the value the workers produce.
No, what people will pay for the product in a market it's the price. Marx talks about the "value", which is different than price. The price is equal the value only in very limited and simplified models. Offer and demand will change the price, but not the value, for example.
What is the "value"? Well, the prices cannot be explained only in terms of offer and demand (a society with an offer of 100 pens and demand for 100 pens and offer of 100 planes and demand for 100 planes still would not sell pens and planes for the same price) nor entirely because of the price of raw materials (because this only postpones the explanation: from where came the price of the raw materials?). It also cannot be explained only based on subjectivity, because there exists a number, which is a very objective measure, representing the price if you balance offer, demand, assume competition and discard several perturbations. The "value" tries to explain this basis value that later will became the price and show objectively and numerically how the wealth is produced and distributed.
This "value" is measured by Marx as the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce the product. Given a car, the value represented by a car can be measured by the mean time necessary for the workers to produce that car in the industry plus the value transferred by the machines and tools used by those workers (whose value came from the workers that produced these machines and tools). Both manual and intellectual work need to be taken into account and you can also assume that some complex tasks or more intense work can produce more value than simple tasks in the same time.
Given this, you can compare the value produced by a worker with the value of the things that the worker can buy with its salary. This is how Marx measures these things and shows the exploitation in the society.
There is no global "value", there is no global "worth".
There is bid price, ask price, and last sale price.
Do they indicate "value" to the specific people making those transactions, bids and asks? Sure. Does it have to be the same for everybody? No, and that's why trade happens.
There's also risk in producing "them" (goods, services, research), not just cost. If you want the price of your producing work to be the price of goods derived from your work, then be a shareholder, not an employee.
Because it's stupid to go to a huge amount of effort to figure out your exact unit cost to reduce prices to when customers are prepared to pay more, and cost structure usually isn't linear enough to make this practical anyway.
It's like asking "why shouldn't workers work for subsistence income instead of asking for more money?": the obvious answer is "because the only reason they would consider doing so when they don't have a choice"
For the same reason that you don't want to earn the exact minimum you need to survive. You want more/better. So does the person selling the widget; so why charge the absolute minimum for their widget if they can get more for it? That extra money goes towards their "more/better".
People go hungry and homeless. This is visible today.
This is literally why one function of the state is to act as a non-market-participant so it can provide a safety net. There are some things markets can't and shouldn't try to do.
Yes! I can't wait for food production and distribution to be put in the hands of government officials. Access to food is going to be equalized so hard!
The market has been taking care of it for too long, we're getting too fat, we need a few decades of food controlled by the police to get back into shape.
Being fat can be a sign of malnutrition. Americans aren't just fat because they eat too much, many are fat because they live in food deserts or have no time to cook and no access to affordable healthy food.
You're not helping your argument with this example imo.
Except the market ain't going to bear it, not for a long time anyway.
If I am a CEO of a remote-first company and it truly doesn't matter for me where the employees are located it makes no sense to overpay for labor in high cost of living area.
So if there's a company A that pays $X in high COL area, and $X/3 in a low COL area. And then there's a company B that pays $X/2 everywhere. Then people from the low COL area would go to the company B, and people from the high COL area would go to the company A. As a result, company B gets the same results 2 times cheaper.
Repeat this process enough times and the salaries will be equalized. Of course it's not immediate, there are companies rigidly set in their ways; there are people who won't move no matter what; there is limited supply of both companies and workers; etc, etc. But eventually the market forces will do their thing.
"As a result, company B gets the same results 2 times cheaper" - that's just an assumption. If I turn it around, it sounds - "people on average in high COL area do the same work two times faster than in low COL area".
The assumption they're claiming lunarhustler made is that engineers in Silicon Valley and engineers in (say) Utica, NY work at approximately the same speed and quality.
The assumption dorwi's asking you to make is that moving to Silicon Valley somehow makes you work twice as fast, or that only engineers who work twice as fast live there.
Basically, lunarhustler is making the assumption that humans who can program end up at roughly the same quality no matter where they live or how much you pay them, while dorwi is making the assumption that how much you are paid is directly related to your productive output.
If you're paid $300k/year it's probably some kinda fancy faang job. How productive you are in that environment doesn't necessarily translate into productivity in others. And vice versa.
Beyond that, highest paid people I know aren't paid well because they're 5x as productive, they're paid well because they solve really hard problems - the types of problems you don't run into at most companies.
To use an analogy: neurosurgeons aren't expensive because they're really good at "doctoring". Even if you had all the $$$ in the world you wouldn't consult one for a sprained ankle.
There are reasons to want to live in a high COL area that attract people to live there regardless of job prospects alone. If you want to hire young smart people who're into culture and nightlife and not having to drive everywhere, the best will be in expensive cities.
There are places in e.g. Europe where a young smart person can live like a king on their American tech salary, while still putting off most of it into savings... I assure you the culture and nightlife aren't bad there either.
> But eventually the market forces will do their thing.
After you're necessity for that market equalization is long gone.
We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize. The Market is manipulated and owned, and not by us. The tipping point is past, and the majority of society has yet to realize, our only hope at this point probably requires violence and capital destruction, sadly.
Not quite sure what you mean. Normal people in the western world are richer are better off than ever before. The same goes for people in South Korea or Singapore, countries which have recently joined the rich world.
"Normal people in the western world are better off than they were at any/nearly any given time in the past."
and
"There is a staggering amount of wealth inequality in the western world right now, and there are very concerning signs about what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture."
Global inequality has been going down at a tremendous rate over the last few decades. (Mostly by China and to a lesser extent India going from dirt poor to middle income.)
Not sure what you mean 'what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture.'? All those are doing ok as far as I can tell. At least not worse than in the past.
I'm talking about inequality within the developed nations—specifically, the US (I believe it also affects the UK; I don't feel qualified to talk about such effects beyond that, due to lack of information).
As for what's happening with our politics...if you can't see that the current situation is wildly different than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago, then I'm sorry, but you have not been paying close attention. We have people proclaiming themselves as actual literal neo-Nazis storming the Capitol building in an attempted coup, in open collaboration with certain members of Congress and the wife of a sitting Supreme Court judge. And while some of the people involved in the Jan 6 coup attempt are, indeed, being convicted as they should be, to my knowledge, none of the politicians who are complicit have been publicly investigated. This is not normal, it is not healthy, and while it is not entirely due to the increasing wealth inequality, to claim that that has no part in the level of polarization today and the rise of extremism...well, it would be an extraordinary claim, and thus require extraordinary evidence to support it.
I mean, yes, this is true, but it doesn't follow that times never actually get worse.
This is a case where, at least in certain respects, times are provably getting worse than they were before.
If politics are too fuzzy and nebulous for you, look at generational economics: I don't recall the precise figures off the top of my head, but the baby boomers are still holding wealth vastly disproportionate to their share of the demographics, and younger generations have vastly less income and wealth than they did at the same time in their lives, while over the same period, prices of many important things—like homes, health care, and higher education—have all risen much faster than the rate of inflation. The kind of house that someone working minimum wage could have afforded in 1960, they'd now need a white-collar job (probably requiring a college degree) and several years of savings to buy.
You can't just handwave all of that away as "eh, people have complained about times getting worse since the Ancient Greeks".
"Being a scientist, I had to check the math. Turns out it's even worse. You could have made $53,000 (£44,000) a day or $20 million per year since Jesus was born and still not make the profits Shell did in 2022." - Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, Climate Scientist, Chief Scientist @nature_org
, Prof @TexasTech
> We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize.
It might be there are people who are able and willing to burn money for a long time. Sure as hell it doesn't stop me the startup founder to set whatever salary ranges I believe are efficient.
I run a remote-first company, and this is basically how we do it.
We don't give people different offers based on where they say they live.
Rather, we have a salary range for a job, and we look for people who are attracted by that salary range. This usually means people in SF, NYC, and other high COL cities disqualify themselves, so we end up hiring many people outside of tech hubs.
In other words, if you simply stop hiring in the top 20% COL cities, you can hire talent at significantly less salary ranges simply because we're not competing with Google, Amazon, etc in Silicon Valley or NYC.
Which allows us to hire a greater quantity of people. E.g. 2 engineers at $150k instead of 1 engineer at $300k.
But the key to this is not making a salary decision based on location. Instead, just set a salary range and you'll find what parts of the country people are willing to work at that range.
One thing I don't like that is a bit specific to my own situation about most companies that aren't really remote first, but switched to it due to circumstance is that to them remote means - "you will literally always be located at XYZ address and do all your work from there".
I have my home address, but I actually only spend maybe 4-6 months of the year physically located there. This kind of pisses off most employers due to the tax situation as well as them treating it as if I'm gaming the system by being physically located for much of the year in lower cost of living areas (though sometimes I've even gone to higher cost of living areas for months at a tiem).
A situation like this where the salary doesn't really depend on location so it wouldn't be treated like I'm actively trying to game anything would actually be preferred in my situation, and to many others I know as well.
> A situation like this where the salary doesn't really depend on location so it wouldn't be treated like I'm actively trying to game anything would actually be preferred in my situation, and to many others I know as well.
Exactly. We've had multiple employees move to different cities/states during their tenure. That wasn't a problem with us (from an employer perspective) and there was also no expectation that salary would be adjusted in response to a move, since location wasn't factored into the original offer in the first place.
Strategy only works for so long and for small companies. Then you will have to adjust. Salaries and the employment market are highly dynamic and competitive. No strategy works forever.
May I ask how big your company is? And how many senior (as in, actual VPs, Directors or Architect level) employees you have? In my experience, I found all these candidates to be present in HCOL areas and the real good ones had plenty of options paying HCOL comp.
For run of the mill junior-ish employees who are treated as disposable cogs by my company, your strategy worked effectively. So we ended up with junior employees in LCOL or foreign countries (mostly Canada and Mexico) and senior levels in SFBA / NYC.
That doesn't disagree with what I said. With remote, employers get leverage over workers and they will use it to push down their salaries. HCOL workers will eventually have to bear the new levels.
There is no real equilibrium in markets, only forces that push constantly in one direction (maximizing profits, lowering costs, increasing capital efficiency).
Wow, how have I not heard of this framing before? So then, are there equivalent analogies to the laws of thermodynamics? An equivalent entropy as an arrow of time?
Not really. In vaguely thermodynamic terms, businesses are very open systems. Thermodynamics doesn't have to say very much about systems far from the equilibrium.
> I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued, that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that can truthfully deduct the cost-for-living from the compensation they are offering. It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
It's mostly about what you can negotiate to be fair. Refusing to pay you more is their way of telling you they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer where you are which is legitimate. They will reassess if you show them a better offer from a competitor if they really want you. A big part of negotiation rests on your best alternative to what's being negotiated.
> It's different, and you need to adjust your processes
So you actually agree it's complicated from a company point of view.
> Refusing to pay you more is their way of telling you they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer where you are which is legitimate.
Except when they collude to drive down wages or pay for laws to make it harder for workers to organize keeping them weak. Also "where you are" has been made irrelevant for many workers because they can get employment anywhere without going anywhere. That means what's really being said is that they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer anywhere.
Employees could collude too, saying "we refuse to work for anything less than X$".
Except that employees would do the same thing that employers do all the time and walk across the line as soon as someone offers them a compelling deal, even if it isn't at the "collusion" price.
Paying a given salary in Germany is a lot more expensive for a company than paying the exact same salary in America. There are both more taxes on the employer side and more labor regulations that cost money to comply with. The number of hours worked tends to be different, too.
This is true, and still true to some extent once you compensate you can't compare the two numbers. There are large costs associated with living in the US like health insurance that just don't exist in the UK where I live.
That would only really make sense for the location of the sales office, I guess?
Where you put your developers shouldn't make much of a difference to how much business you have?
However you are up to something: big cities tend to be more productive. That's the reason people and businesses put up with the higher rents and other inconveniences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
While it is true, the best you can do is vote with your feet. I have had the situation where I was offered "locally competitive salaries" (not in the USA though), and every time I've rejected it I had a 50%-100% better offer within few weeks . There ARE companies that will pay better and independently of your location, you do need to be good though (as in companies are proactively seeking you out) and keep searching.
A good indicator is the finances of the company. If you are going to be another cog contributing marginal value, for whatever reason that is, then it's going to be difficult to argue for better salary (thought they MIGHT give a higher salary, to everyone, like e.g. Google). If you can however have a big impact and they have good revenue or funding, then it's a lot easier to argue for higher salaries: "so you are making $300k MRR or just raised $5M of VC money with 4 employees? And you have more tickets and bug fixes to improve growth and reduce churn that you can feasibly do? Great, let's talk how I can effectively help to slash those tickets and then we can discuss my compensation*".
* though if the company is crushing it so much, and specially because your marginal tax rate might be already at 50%, evaluate asking for some Stock Options/RSUs/etc.
I’m really surprised that nobody has set up address as a service yet so that you can claim for example to live in New York by virtue of an address auto command “a New York salary”.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems illegal on its face. Just from a tax perspective for the government, I feel like people would immediately start trying to game it for taxes.
I don't know if it matters but I have a limited company and am an employee of said company, which means I deal with taxes on my own and can perform work for (almost) any company in the world - I just invoice them like any supplier. Maybe this is the future? Though some companies would rather you were their employee I suppose.
> I have a limited company and am an employee of said company, which means I deal with taxes on my own and can perform work for (almost) any company in the world
which means you're a contractor, rather than an employee. I do think this is a better way tbh, as you can potentially own all of your healthcare costs, and optimize your taxes properly. And you can probably charge a lot more as a contractor, to make up for the lack of job security etc.
I don't get a lot of tax optimisation (my home country makes it really hard to do anything useful) but I DO have a much easier time getting better-paid work from the US. Otherwise I'd need to go through something like oysterhr.com, boundlesshq, etc.
It might be a better idea for high income people. But it is often used to take advantage of regular employees.
It is a poor reflection of our tax system that running your own entity that you then pay yourself out of can have lower taxes than simply earning money as an employee.
I think an awful lot of employers would prefer you were a contractor; in the USA at least, it is the IRS/government that prevents this from happening more by putting the fear into said employers that they will be fined and forced to pay back taxes for anyone improperly classifying people as contractors when they are in fact employees.
It was the tax reform act of 1986 that removed the "safe harbor" provision for engineers and computer professionals.
In the city where I currently live, lots of small businesses try to claim that their employees are contractors. Those businesses depend on the ignorance of their workers.
Are contractors taxed less than companies in the US?
In France, companies also like to contract out a lot, either to "freelance" or regular outsourcing shops.
The reason I put freelance in quotes is that there's no such thing here, legally. You have to have some form of company, through which you invoice the client.
But then, whenever you want to get the money out of the company to pay rent and eat, you'll be hit by, more or less, the same taxes the employer would pay. For a given unit of work, it's not cheaper to contract out, there's no real tax loophole.
As far as I know, the state doesn't really care. It may even prefer it, since contractor rates are usually higher than salaries, so they get to get more tax.
The only situation where it would crack down on this is if the would-be employee complained. Since this is considered a "precarious" arrangement, if the contractor can prove that they're basically an outsourced employee, they can ask to be converted to an actual employee and the state will back them up.
Contractors are taxed at a higher rate, or really, the same rate, but in an employee situation, the employer must pay half of the tax.
However, depending on what you do, people can end up paying less in taxes overall as a contractor because you have more flexibility for deductions. There are very little options for an employee to deduct any expenses in the US, whereas, a contractor could potentially deduct the cost to commute to an office, their cellphone and home internet (if used for work) and even a portion of their rent/mortgage for a home office.
Incidentally I like this because it makes it easy for American companies to give me money (I do not live in the US). Though I also have to give an accountant more money to deal with SS/public pension contributions and US/Irish totalization agreements.
There’s plenty of virtual office / forwarding address services, but claiming you live at one when you don’t for a pay gain risks (1) fraud against your employer; and (2) tax fraud (if eg in a different city / state / country).
What’s the definition of where one lives? For example what if you wanted the NYC salary and you rented out a bunk bed for $50/month and traveled around the country while working remote?
Cities definitely don’t have the resources to track you down and I’m not sure employers especially larger ones have any mechanisms in place to keep track. I’m not advocating for this just surprised it’s not more well known. Though I suspect it’s common and just not talked about much for obvious reasons. Certainly there are also jobs that require you to physically work from a given state as well for example.
How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes? Is that any different?
Whether something is illegal is different from whether it's easy to enforce. It's hard to say how likely they are to enforce this, but you're definitely taking a risk by pretending to live somewhere.
What makes it more problematic is that it's not just tax offices that would be interested in finding out. The company you work at may also get in trouble with the tax office as they pay employment taxes too, so they are probably interested in the fact that you're deceiving them. If your manager suspects you're not being truthful and follows up with HR this could easily get you in trouble. As remote work becomes more popular, it becomes more likely that companies will pay attention to this.
Knowing all of that, I'd find it quite hard to justify playing these games. It just seems like asking for trouble, with a pretty good chance of getting it.
Legality is different than enforcement, but the two aren't totally separate.
For example, it's de facto not illegal to drive 5mph over the speed limit on the highway. No police officer will pull you over for that unless they have some other prior reason. So in that sense, lack of enforcement has made the practice legal.
In US, it is relatively easy to commit fraud. The question is: what happens if you get caught. Is it a slap on your wrist or a catastrophically failure (termination, prison time)
You can, for example, get employed at 10 companies and then outsource all the work (someone got caught doing it and it was in the news).
If you want to cheat, you can, but you probably should not be discussing it on hacker news.
>How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes?
They probably have a "permanent address" at a friend's house or through some service. And it's probably technically fraud. That said, the US is not really setup for citizens not to have a permanent address in one state--even if just for things like driver's licenses. You can do things by the books for tax purposes but I suspect a lot of people moving around don't.
Wonder if it's meant to be like it is with professional sports, where players on a visiting team often have to pay taxes in the state of the home team.
(1) and (2) are separate. The IRS/state department of revenue won't care, and they won't tell your employer. Say you live in HCOL, actually live in LCOL, and at the year claim a refund from HCOL and file properly with LCOL.
You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.
> The IRS/state department of revenue won't care, and they won't tell your employer
California FTB very much cares if you are collecting SV salary but are not paying CA taxes by living in LCOL areas. Unless you are a CPA, please do not spread lies.
The state of California can only tax you for the time you lived in California. Now, they may well throw a fit and try to claim you don't live out of state and use your employer information to substantiate it. But legally, they would not be able to keep you from getting a refund and paying elsewhere.
That article is mostly about business income or investment income like sale of real estate in California. It does not apply to people living outside of California and earning wages from California based companies. Imagine all the Tesla employees in Texas and other states. They would all be paying California income tax, which is of course not the case.
Your employers makes you sign some document about your place of residence in order to determine your salary. If you say California there, then I am sure CA-FTB will have standing when they come after you for unpaid taxes. Or, you might be perjuring yourself in some way. (IANAL so won't commit to the exact legal definition of that word).
Or, for a different perspective, someone won't pay you a premium because you want to live in Manhattan because they don't actually care where in the country you live.
My state's DMV is able to identify postal addresses that are not physical residences. My guess is that they get this data from USPS, which requires remailing services to register their business. Wouldn't be surprised if the DMV also checks for how many people at a given address have applied for a government ID and if it exceeds a particular threshold, flag it for investigation.
Yea but you could legally run a bunk house or even just keep a spare bed “available” for someone for $50/month or something and they “live there”. Not saying it would be worth it per-se but definitely ways around that for anyone who is willing. The government can’t regulate something like that very well.
IANAL. Let's say you do that trick of renting a bunk in state X and actually go live in another state Y. Now what if your employers does not want any ties with the state Y and hence avoids establishing a nexus there? By your actions, state Y has a reason to come after your employer since their employee lives in Y (by how Y decides its residency requirements). Pretty sure a legal battle will ensue with you branded as a liar and a deceiver. Depending on how pissed your employer is, it might even go on your personal records which can haunt you next time someone runs a background check while hiring you.
RSUs are US taxable at vesting as ordinary income, so that doesn't really help, no. Stock Options are complicated, but if you follow the right procedures and timelines, can end up taxed as capital gains, which is roughly half the tax rate, although there's a lot more risk there.
There's a way to make RSUs behave more like Stock Options for tax purposes for private companies in this particular example [1]. It's not exactly the same, but for the sake of delaying paying taxes on a risky on unsellable stock, they are virtually the same (at a liquidity event they DO behave totally different, but they are basically the same at vesting events).
So yeah, you do need to learn about the different examples. It's something people just talk about in the valley and ultimately/generally is where the "high compensation" from tech comes from. In other countries/cities people don't even know what any of these things are.
I don’t buy it. Most of their reasons are why it’s better for them and not why it benefits the employees. The employees are still being discriminated against for living in low cost of living areas by being valued at less, regardless of what their final disposable income is.
For example, moving to a low cost of living area is something I did as a choice so that I could save more, and this came with a cost: my friends live further away now. They’re saying I should be penalised for this by not being able to save more compared to their employees who stayed in the high cost of living area.
And if someone moved to a high cost of living area because they wanted to make more, is that different in some way? Would not paying them the amount for a similar quality of life not be the same type of discrimination?
> "It’s something that kind of happened organically," Sid says. "Every time we hired someone, we’d discuss what a reasonable compensation would be. And many times, it came back to what they were making beforehand, and that really depended a lot on where they were.
What a bunch of hypocrites. The perfectly know that what a person is currently making does not come "organically" into the conversation. The employer does whatever is in its power to have this information from the candidate.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
But they are not hiring you for "value", you are just a body in a seat filling a "role".
Real game to play is: you ask for X money, they propose Y money, agree and do Y amount of work and not the X amount of work. It's entirely reasonable to "quite-quit" even at non-minimum-salary compensation levels.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
What, no! It should be about what offers you can get from other places. If your offer is close to your local salaries, then that mean the company thinks you would have a hard time getting a better offer from somewhere else.
That depends entirely on how unique my value proposition is to the company making the offer. If I'm a commodity, yes, salary offers will trend to cost of living.
For example, I can get x$ from Google, but that doesn't mean SAP or ASML should also pay me x$: I don't know anything about their respective ecosystems, so I wouldn't be able to contribute much of value.
I think it is complicated because a large number of management jobs are "bullshit" (see [1]). I.e. they could be eliminated, and productivity would not be affected, or it could even be improved.
Remote work does an exposé on the usefulness of these roles. And of course, those holding them, would be eager for everyone to return to the office work theater.
There certainly are bullshit jobs and people doing valuable roles in bullshit ways, but Graeber’s claim that more than half of societal work is bullshit is also clearly bullshit, and not just because I read some of the book and sighed heavily before putting it down, but also because of claims like this that I didn’t see in the book but are in the Wikipedia page:
> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code...
To think that code can be “fixed permanently” shows a complete lack of understanding and insight into programming, and brings to mind the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect - if Graeber is so wildly wrong about a subject I know well, why do I trust him on those I don’t?
MVP's are supposed to be temporary, that's a weird cherry pick. Regardless, code is contextual and relies on so many things other than its own quality at the time of that assessment being made that to say it's been fixed permanently, as if there's some Platonic ideal code that can be written, is, in my view, something I'd only hear from someone new to the industry or not in the industry at all, like Graeber. The job is about solving problems in the clearest way possible over time, not once. Managing change is of central importance. If your product is good, it will change. If it changes, bugs will inevitably be introduced. That's not shoddy practice or the fault of some poor architecture decision.
I imagine that the only bug that gets fixed "permanently" is in a product that nobody uses enough for it to need change. Like some failed MVPs.
I've been in the industry over 20 years, and in my experience agile steers everything to be MVP in the pursuit of velocity, even on projects where they are replacing an existing platform and there is no time to market benefits to rush it.
And it looks great at the start, the project is making great progress until people start to leave and the tech debt starts to kick in. By that stage all the "high performance" agile rock stars have pissed off to another company and left behind their legacy.
And then its death by 1000 cuts, things aren't logged correctly, no proper exception handling rather just do a print(e) and falling over, any integrations with 3rd parties aren't documented when they break and its just a mess.
There's always the human factor in capitalism. And with the human factor comes ego.
IIRC, Graeber roughly compares CEOs to feudal kings. You want more people under your rule as a metric of success. Also, the "king" often seeks to have a big "court" (top-level managers) to reflect their prestige.
The effect is cascading. The "king's court" members want their own smaller courts (second-level managers) and compete with their peers for power, as measured by the headcount. As we go down, unecessary hires will start to occur, only to justify a title.
And everyone involved in the theater has an incentive to turn a blind eye on the situtation.
Whether we hire a dedicated manager or have the responsibility rotate among teammates really depends on a bunch of factors both internal and external to the team / company.
Most people who get a job in America (can't speak for other places) are not interested in managing. It's too messy. If more doers took on management work - we'd be able to push out shitty managers. Until that happens though, my recommendation is to immediately move to a different team or company as soon as a shitty manager is installed.
Do you want to play that game? Because if location doesn't matter then there are a billion people in India who are willing to do your job for much much less.
In salary per value to the company you are extremely overpaid, assuming you live in the west.
I don't think you want to open that can of worms.
Edit to add:
All those people moving from India to the US for the money could then stay in India.
You're not competing with the remote work crowd. You are competing with local cost of labor. If the market switches to just value added, unrelated to location, then you're screwed.
Yes, I want to play that game. I want people in India to be paid more, if possible. I want to open that 'can of worms'.
The big problem is that labour in India isn't all that productive. Offshoring isn't some magic bullet. Companies have tried that and are still trying.
Google, Microsoft etc have offices in India. They also keep their offices in the US and Europe not just out of imaginary obligation to westerners, but because it makes economic sense.
See also how Apple still does lots of the design work in the US, but manufactures in China. They would off-shore more off the design work as well, if they could. (And if Apple could but would not, someone else would do it and eat their lunch.)
There are great people in India. It's just more conducive for them to get better pay if they manage to get an H1B and move to the US.
If they could just "work remote", then you (as an American, or at least someone who can and does work in the US? Well, applies to any western country) are no longer competing with "people from India who manage to get an H1B and have a family situation compatible with moving countries", but suddenly with ALL qualified workers in India.
Big tech in the west employs HUGE numbers of expats from lower paid countries. A very large portion of which Big tech paid for the H1B (or equiv) and relocation costs.
If you are remote, then you're only valued on your output. And I'm not saying you're in a poor position against a random engineer from India (nor presumably from a random engineer in the US), but you'll be in a poor position against the equivalent of your amazing local coworker who moved from India (or hell, any European country with less pay) because that's where the job was.
If the job is "anywhere, because it's remote", then I'm saying that you may not be on the winning side of this change.
Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
> Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
Sure. I just mostly see this argument made by silicon valley people moving to Texas or whatever, and asking why they should not continue getting silicon valley comp.
Most just think they're clever and exploiting the system, and the thought that they'd get paid lowly Texas (or Ohio) salaries never occurred to them.
Though I do think 'off-shoring' from California to the Ohio vs off-shoring from California to India have important aspects in common.
For better or worse, agglomeration effects are real, and for some ineffable reasons software people are more productive when located in Silicon Valley, rather than Ohio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
However the pandemic forced an investment in making remote-work work. That's not even so much an investment in technology (hardware or software), but more taking the time and effort to figure out what works and doesn't work. It's full of soft factors.
There are time zones issues, communication issues, and culture issues that are difficult if not impossible to cost-effectively overcome for offshoring to countries like India.. Otherwise all jobs would have been offshored already, whether local employees "wanted to play that game" or not. Employers aren't hiring locally out of the goodness of their hearts.
Yes please. If companies could replace highly paid Americans with lower paid Indians without hurting the bottom line they should do so without hesitation.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. It usually turns out that these lower paid employees are significantly worse, and Indian nationals who are highly competent demand salaries similar to Americans.
This is underselling the value of economic clustering. Even if everyone works from home, there are advantages to drawing from local talent pools (people know people and can vouch for their work, cultural norms make it easier to work together, there are less labour law difficulties, there is less geopolitical risk of parts of your team being sanctioned because you hired Chinese or Russian programmers, etc, etc).
All else being equal, the only reason to hire a distant programmer is to pay them less. From the firms perspective they can't easily tell if a distant programmer is more effective than a local programmer so it is a struggle (market-for-lemons style) to justify paying the same amount. If the costs are equal, may as well hire local.
It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee (including the risk of a bad hire), not the value they provide. Companies can't measure the value individual programmers provide anyway.
> Even if everyone works from home, there are advantages to drawing from local talent pools (people know people and can vouch for their work, cultural norms make it easier to work together, there are less labour law difficulties, there is less geopolitical risk of parts of your team being sanctioned because you hired Chinese or Russian programmers, etc, etc)
You could reframe these points so that they look like advantages of global businesses... you'll have someone to vouch for and evaluate people across multiple talent pools (increasing talent supply), the majority of your team will never be sanctioned simultaneously (diversifying that risk), and as for cultural norms, don't we all know that diversity is strength.
Saying there are no advantages to global remote first besides cost is underselling it; there are important advantages, for one
> It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee
asynchronous remote makes documentation and written communication central, which at the end of the day makes it easier to replace employees.
Cost is important too, if you can literally hire 50% more workforce that's one hell of a deal.
Maybe "Where do you live?" should be one of those questions employers shouldn't be allowed to ask? Like what's your religion or what's your sexual orientation?
So long as there are governments involved in the employee-employer relationship, this can’t happen. I don’t actually care where you live, but I do care that I can legally employ you, pay you, pay taxes/social charges, and that I understand the obligations of the arrangement we’re contemplating entering.
It could be set up completely differently. Employer could pay 100% to the government and government could pay employee after properly taxing the income. But that would require work from the government that it doesn't want to do.
Which government(s)? Taxes and social charges can vary by city, county, state, and country. If I'm going to hire scotty79 with no knowledge of where in the world they live, which governments would I coordinate with and how would I know that?
Employment rules, customs, and laws vary by at least state and country (and minimum wages vary by city). How would I know what laws applied to the employment relationship?
Federal obviously. Somebody has to know what's up with all this mess. If I'm from another country government should know that and tax accordingly. I have no idea how placing burden of knowing all this on every single employer helps anybody (except IRS).
In fact, it's much more at the state level. I owe the IRS the same no matter where I live in the US (leaving aside deductions for state and local taxes). But I need state residency for my driver's license and state taxes. The IRS doesn't care if I live in Nevada or California. But California certainly cares if I claim to live in Nevada and actually live in California for 8 months out of the year.
Great so Califonia has business in knowing if some worker lives in California. So they should be the one to ask. Employer doesn't have to know.
Do you report and pay federal taxes and state taxes separately? Or do you just deal with IRS and they forward the docs and the money to the state you live in?
>Do you report and pay federal taxes and state taxes separately?
Yes. They are separate sets of forms that you pay (or get refunded) independently. They're basically unrelated exxcept to the degree that deductions/refunds may come into play.
The employer is making various deductions and payments, e.g. into unemployment, based on the state you live in. So your employer really does need to know your state of residence.
This just wouldn’t work in the US. The regulations vary greatly from state to state and even city to city. Choosing to employ a person in a state for the first time can be a very costly decision (in both time and $$$) for a small business. The second, third, fourth, etc. employees are marginally less expensive but “breaking the seal” and hiring that first employee in a new state isn’t something that every business takes lightly.
The question is, should it be like that? Shouldn't government handle the legal differences between states so that employers don't have to deal with that?
No. Because the system of government in the US is such that states have the responsibility for lots of things rather than the federal government. However, that has the side effect of making the state you live in actually matter. I can't (or am at least not supposed to) just establish an address of convenience somewhere that has the lowest taxes.
If you're going to have a republic of states, those states are going to be able to have different laws. The minimum wage in New Hampshire is $7.25/hr, while it's $15/hr in neighboring Massachusetts. If I'm an employer in New Hampshire hiring remote workers for $12/hr, that's legal if they work in NH, but not legal if they work in MA.
NH has sovereignty to set their minimum wage (subject to the limit of the federal minimum wage). They might do that to attract business there. Massachusetts has the same sovereignty to set their minimum wage. Which state should give up their sovereignty so that an employer [possibly out of state] could practically hire people without knowing where they live?
So if I'm in NH and scotty80 and scotty81 agree to work for me for $12/hr and I am structurally precluded from finding out where they live or work, what happens if it turns out that scotty80 is in NH (above minimum wage) and scotty81 is in MA (below minimum wage)? Is it legal?
My idea is that you report to the government that you want to hire me. And I contact the government with the information where I live.
You suggest how much you are willing to pay me to the government. And I get information how much I'll be earning after taxes and required social security fees.
If I don't agree or the amount you proposed is illegally low then I can't work for you until you decide to bump up the salary.
If I agree I start working. You pay to the government the full amount. Government taxes it and transfers the rest to me as a salary.
If you pay too little or too late you are on the hook with the government. But you don't need to know where I live or what the taxes are.
With electronic system the whole procedure of hiring could probably take an afternoon or less and zero knowledge.
I’m with you here. When I want a process to be completed in less than an afternoon, I often add several interactions with a governmental agency to the mix in order to speed things along.
You might not have much of it in the US but once those interactions are moved online they can be very quick and effective. Tax forms for example. It's common in other countries for the tax to be calculated for you, then you can just log in, chcek it out and confirm or adjust, which can be done for free in about 10 minutes while eating a burger.
You're kind of asking what's the point of having states and that's a fair question, but one that's been long decided. As long as you've got states with the power to make their own rules, people who want to live in and do business in those states will have to follow those rules (this is theoretically one of the biggest benefits of states existing).
Having states and different rules is fine however if you have that, single point of contact which knows all the rules for you might be immensely useful.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
It's a balancing act. If companies pay based on value added to the company, they will wind up paying more than average in low COL areas, and less than average in high COL areas; so they won't be able to hire people in high COL areas at all. If they scale pay based on COL, they'll be able to hire people in both areas. So yes, it's not "fair" to people in lower COL areas, but it's not arbitrary either.
> [...] so they won't be able to hire people in high COL areas at all.
You say it like it's a bad thing. If they can hire people for relatively cheap purely from low COL areas, and make the company work, they should totally go for that. That's the whole reason behind having offices in even cheaper areas like Vietnam, instead of just the American Midwest.
Of course, if you can't actually run your business purely on people from low COL areas, that means there must be something the people from the high COL areas bring to the table that's worth it for your business. And that's proves the original commenter's point that the company should pay you according what value you bring to the company.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
It's called the "job market" for a reason. Both sides (employers and employees) are trying to maximize their returns. It's never going to be solely about the value we as developers (or any other occupation) bring to the company.
My current employer uses a formula that adjusts between NY cost of living and local cost of living, half way. Found it super generous (unexpected) to be honest...
> … some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area.
Keep in mind that not all companies are competing for talent globally. [1]
The real question is whether companies that compete in a local or regional market will be able to continue to pay local rates to anyone with specialized skills who can also go remote, or if they’ll just give up and find some other solution.
> What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".
I’ve worked remote and managed remote teams for a long time. I would say it is indeed more complicated.
You may not struggle with remote work and may do fine interacting remotely, but that’s not true for a lot of people. It’s very common to hire good engineers into remote positions and discover that they can’t focus at home, they misinterpret digital communications, or that they just wanted a remote job because they read somewhere that they could work 2 hours per day and nobody would be able to tell.
The obvious retort is that you just need to hire “right”, but that’s not an easy thing to do.
It isn't more complicated, it is just different. Here, let me hire for an office instead...
"You may not struggle with office work and may do fine interacting in person, but that’s not true for a lot of people."
I have people who do far better at home than in the office, and some on the other end of the spectrum. People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.
What is hard is tooling and setting up processes that work for remote people. The world is at the start of figuring that out at scale and there is lots to learn. But hiring is always going to be the same game, finding the right people for the role and its requirements.
If I were hiring for an oil rigger it would not be more complex than hiring for a great developer. It will definitely be different, but all recruitment is different and sees different challenges. But it's always going to be about knowing what to ask, knowing your industry, and doing your very best to find a process that selects fairly and efficiently. Remote work hiring is just a different challenge that we are all just getting used to. People are hard problems to solve.
> finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.
Are you claiming that the complexity of managing in-office is usually, roughly the same as managing remote teams? I'm asking towards magnitude/degree, not if both are sometimes true.
If not, you are stating the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes"
In my experience, more people struggle with remote than in-office. I've found a lot of satisfaction in returning to a primarily in-person team for this reason. But that's just my experience, an anecdote. Not everyone should be like me, and I'm not saying everyone should return to the office or that WFH is bad. What I am frustrated about is that it seems like many people take dogmatic pro-WFH positions and do not acknowledge the nuance of these issues.
I am saying exactly the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes", this is the nexus of the original comment.
Case in point, you struggle with WFH, others thrive. I just don't see any problems with employees not enjoying WFH as being significantly more complex than, say, an issue with someone struggling to get into the office on time. Or being stressed out by a stupidly long commute, or having no time with their children. And so on. There are pros and cons abundant that pretty much level it all out.
I see the nuances. That's what I meant by stating "it's different": I'm currently working with an all-remote team. And it's awesome. Sure, there are moments where I miss them (in terms of in-person interaction), but once in a while we come together and do team building. And that's great.
You really need a team of like-minded people w/r to remork work. They started working as a company with people from different company locations forming "a team". And after Covid started, they realized it's perfectly fine to add people to the team that do not sit in offices.
Thinking back, at my past employer, we had a subsidiary in another city, and failed to work with them. It would have been so much easier if we'd been able to do that. But management didn't like it, so it didn't work.
The cost of living isn't the employer's problem, it's the employees. The cost of living can eventually drive up wages, but only in so far as other regions draw away labor with a better wage to cost ratio.
An employer, especially one that isn't just a Human being but a company, will only pay you enough to make you sign and incentivize you to work. They don't care at all how you make your living.
The cost of living thing is a mess. I think it will get sorted out as it becomes clear remote workers can and do still get offers. The current thinking seems to be “if you live in a low cost area, that means there is no competition for you”. Which used to be true, and is not true.
And there are tons of just dumb things in remote work policy today. My company does cost of living adjustment based on the state you’re in. So if you were to move to a high cost city in a low cost state (Bozeman, MT), it’s a brutal effective pay cut. But if you move to low cost city in an expensive state (Yreka, CA), it’s a huge effective pay raise. Despite, theoretically, the employer getting the same value.
I think these will sort themselves out over time, but it’s annoying in the short term.
During the hiring process Gitlab literally reclassified my city based off of data from a free crowd sourced website with about 10 data points. They struck their original offer and reduced it by ~10k just as I'd passed the final round.
They refused to even talk about it, even as I protested they'd wasted so much of my time and I was about to sign. I walked away and found a much better paying job elsewhere.
Unethical, but could you seed the crowd sourced site with datapoints that increase the cost of living data, increasing the offer they'd make you next time?
This is great. Let’s all pick some random town on the beach in Costa Rica, pump it up to Manhattan-level cost of living in the crowdsourced DB, apply to Gitlab.
Even companies that try to be more granular than the state level can only do so much. Even if you leave out my relatively nearby major metro, I bet there is 2x difference in housing prices across the suburbs/exurbs/smaller cities around the area based on school systems, how rural towns are, and other factors.
> It should be about the value I bring to the company
Your salary has never been even related to the value you bring the company. That is just the absolute maximum they're willing to pay. Your salary is the lowest your company thinks they can pay to get a suitable employee. They pay remote workers less because there are remote workers willing to work for less, simple as that.
I think it defies belief that the highest-paid CEOs bring so much value to their company that it covers their salaries and other compensation. They are, to me, a clear indication that compensation rates are only loosely correlated to value.
There is some correlation, don't get me wrong, but it looks like people are generally undervalued at the low end of the compensation spectrum and overvalued at the high end.
> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years
Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.
> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team
I guess that can happen. I suspect in the majority of cases, you keep your shitpay even if you become a supremely efficient pillar.
Employers are not friends, they're businesses who thinks like psychopaths, so manage your expectations and get as much money as you can from them. You need them but they need you, so get the juice and move on when it gets hairy.
I don't assume that we are friends, but your manager knows who performs and who doesn't. So it's matter of saving his own head. So, become effective and expert and so you will always be able to get your salary corrected..and if doesn't work, you are ready to go out and search for something new
No no, you stick around, reduce productivity, find suitable job offers for each of your coworkers and also show the offers to your employer. Then when the company descends into chaos and the building is pretty much on fire they still wont pay :)
that's how the new generation is solving this problem. Not showing up on time on meetings, not participating on meetings, not preparing good tickets to work on, but expecting good tickets to come off the trees, always complaining, not delivering... yup that's what we see everywhere.
Long long before the cloud and smart contracts I was fooling around with a DSL with the mission to measure what was consumed precisely (cpu cycles, kb*s worth of memory, storage, read/write, bandwidth) so that anyone may exchange the idle cycles of any computer for currency.
It was identified as a stupid idea from the start but I was curious what kind of concessions it involves. Like you cant just call a useful method anymore, it has to be known what it costs precisely given the exact work load.
It didn't take long for my mind to be blown by the completely insane overhead. Counting consumption of system resources is consumption too! While exact calculation is not very complicated every step of the way I felt tempted to just estimate it. Sorting out micro transactions in a secure way???...
Eventually I got distracted by the parallels with our society. Job agencies here charge 95% of the salary earned but the administrative overhead hardly ends there! The real cost is hidden in the estimated stuff. After all the taxes and subsidies are calculated someone at the tax office has to repeat the calculations. In some almost fixed percentage of cases mistakes are made and it takes judges, lawyers, law makers, lobby groups. Tons of expensive transactions along the way.
Before you can even get to work there are licenses, permissions, diplomas, certifications, health and sanity checks.
If your job is to dig holes one would think it involves little more than a pair of good boots and a shovel. End of the day you want a shower, a good meal, a roof over your head and some guarantee you don't have to dig holes the entire year round. (We are mistaken to think people in poorly paid grunt work are interested in trying to make ends meet.)
If you have just 20 people digging holes their performance becomes extremely measurable. They know exactly how good they are at their job. Rewarding them involves such an enormous clusterfuck of fuzzy params which may accumulate to 10 fold their salary (or more!) that their performance becomes irrelevant to their reward. The cost of accounting for it would be much larger than the cost of poor performance.
What we can do is reward their boss or their supervisor. We do that to maintain the illusion that every bit of overhead needs to be there. It is all there for a reason ofc, it is a legacy system slowly migrating from manual paperwork to automation.
You could have a very simple government app like Uber so that those who dig holes may dig holes. Customers and hole diggers can review the quality of the holes themselves. Contractors can use the API to have expensive fast holes, cheaper slow ones, an all you can eat rate or a hybrid between the 3.
But that is not going to happen, in stead we build machines to dig the holes, deploy even more administration, engineers, designers, repair shops etc lots of complicated skills required and the hole diggers can get social support while looking for other work which involves even more circus of estimates portrayed as measurement.
Some sub set of the bean counting is incredibly important and their work makes modern society what it is. Don't ask me to measure it tho.
Simplicity has its appeal. We could build monasteries where each monk maintains 1 module. If it worked for kung fu why not for array sort?
In another hand, employees try to do as less as possible for the money they get. How many devs get hired as senior dev, because their experience (in number of years) but then turns out they are code monkey ready to really work 3 hours/day? Nobody is perfect and nobody is saint.
> Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations,
You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance.
> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team.
Straight out of college I worked at a place where they handed me a 1 year contract where I was paid below market rate. When I was reaching the end of my contract I asked for a meeting to review my salary. I had a meeting but it's outcome was a firm "we want you here but we will only offer you the same pay". I sat on that and on the day before my auto renewal would kick in I handed my resignation. I was immediately pulled into a meeting with my manager where they promply offered me over 20% pay hike.
Do you honestly believe I only gained importance the moment I resigned? They were the same people who said a few days earlier in no unclear terms I was not getting a raise.
The most ridiculous aspect of your unfounded personal belief is this idea there's this universal performance evaluation law where every manager and every boss is binded to hand over rigorous pay adjustments reflecting anyone's performance, and that there is no such thing as being exploited. Back in the real world, the whole economy revolves around people trying to get more value while paying less, and there's a almost universal pressure to not only eliminate any kind of leverage from employees but also make them perfectly replaceable cogs in their machine. You are pressured to not discuss salary with your peers, let alone other employees. You get what you are paid, and you should feel happy for it. If you work hard that just means your boss is getting more returns over his low investment.
Just reading how you write, I can Tell you: you are an average, lonely, angry and spoiled dev. IMO, Twitter is a better place for you to voice such rants.
For sure I assume that everyone did their homework and found a great company to work. That's the step 1! The step 2 is to be the best version of you. That's the most important factor on your salary, assuming the step 1!
Personal attack and flamewar comments will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this to Hacker News again, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: we've asked you more than once before not to post like this. If you don't want to be banned on HN, we need you to heed these warnings.
Personal attack and flamewar comments will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this to Hacker News again, we'd appreciate it.
You are so funny for thinking that. What existing employees earn is irrelevant. It is as simple as you need X now and it costs Y. Without X you possibly don't have a company anymore which costs 10 000 times Y.
Germany. Prices went through the roof last year, and are currently capped by the government at 0.40 € per kWh. But only for 80% of your average consumption per year. So 8 hours work a day cost me roughly 0.50 € in electricity. Same goes for gas prices, they also went quite high.
But then again, I'm grateful that we are in the position to get support from the government.
Your salary is the cost to replace you with someone else.
In person jobs have a smaller market. Everyone is subject to the same COL, so the min salary the employer must pay has a certain floor to it.
Remote jobs have a larger market. If you're remote, your employer may as well hire someone from Ohio that is willing to work for half your salary. You have to compete on cost with those cheaper employees.
Fwiw, about 6 years ago I was working for a company that addressed this is a really solid way.
They had a main office in South Carolina in an area with very low cost of living and salaries that matched. They had an office in Phoenix and an office in Seattle.
Ended up standardizing pay based on Phoenix since it was in the middle. This was actually a really big deal because the majority of the company was in South Carolina while only about 40 people were split between Seattle and Phoenix.
Why limit yourself to the CoL due to geographical location? How about the CoL of someone who is single and someone who has 2 kids in college? How about the CoL of someone who needs expensive drugs as opposed to someone healthy?
Oh you adjust to CoL? Well, then I expect my salary to be indexed on the inflation. Oh no? You only do the standard 3%? But what about CoL?
As a side note, a salary is not about the value you bring to the company either. It's just how much they have to pay to find someone with your skills.
> But crucially, how much time I spend in the office is my choice.
this is it really, wish we can move past this adversarial phase of remote vs office and just let people choose what works for them, as individuals and where reasonably accomodative as teams.
nothing can suck the life out of a team or individual like multi level mgmt bureaucracy involving themselves in every little decision.
Definitely. I wish I could communicate the misery I feel from being told I have to be in a specific place all day every day. I really enjoy my work, but being forced to be somewhere all day is soul crushing.
Our employer is moving offices soon (just down the road) and my manager recently gleefully announced that he had "good news" and that we "would remain a hybrid team after the move"
Everyone on the team looked at one another awkwardly. It had never been discussed that anything else was a possibility.
The problem is even though all jobs are being advertised as "hybrid" or WFH 3 days a week, the contracts don't reflect that. They all stage your place of work is the office.
Now if my manager complains I'm late, I point out that I have a 45-50 minute commute with trains that come only every 20 minutes with very few backup options. 2 cancellations and I'm 40 minutes late. Tough. Either let me work from home full time, pay me more so I can live closer to the office, or be more flexible.
It doesn’t matter where you work, as long as you get the work done
Good tech orgs list expectations for each role, and every senior role requires you to be improving the impact of others’ work as well as your own. Clearly that applies to managers — it’s literally their job — but many top IC roles pay the big bucks because you come up with projects and promote them under your own steam.
If you can do that all remotely, good for you. A lot of us cannot and we need people to be in the office N days a week for there to be some kind of personal overlap, where we can go from good to great, together.
If you make p30 salary writing unit tests for a 250,000 employee printer company then staying at home 100% of the time sounds like bliss. If you’re expected to be levelling up every six months at a series A with 30 engineers and you don’t want to come back into work post COVID… well the printer company is hiring!
The author talks about technology but everyone having laptops (versus desktop PCs) makes this worse, not better.
In our case, our government forces our BPO(Business Process Outsourcing) companies to return the employees to the office because of the economy. There are small businesses and infrastructure that are invested near office hubs. So, if people stops going to the office those small businesses will shut down.
If the company won't comply, the tax perks will be remove.
I've worked either both fully remote and fully in the office over the past decade depending on job at the time, and noticed little difference in work productivity at home vs. the office.
The major difference has been in the dead time around work. Time spent commuting, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, etc. When working in an office, nothing much is achieved during those (maybe some socialising or reading), and work takes them out of my time rather than their time.
Working remotely gives that dead time back to me, allowing me to spend it on things I consider more valuable (e.g. playing a musical instrument, doing some DIY around the house, gardening, putting on washing, etc.).
It's that which I feel has given me a better quality of life than the act of not working in an office. If an employer is paying me, I don't object to doing that work where they request. What I do object to is the extra hours that takes out of my life that they aren't paying me for (typically commuting).
Productivity is purely dependent on the individual or even teams. But I definitely agree with the “dead time”.
It would be a utopian world where employees respect and consider living conditions (eg single vs married; cost of living in specific area) and commutes. Make yourself valuable to negotiate better terms, or look for something better.
>Make yourself valuable to negotiate better terms, or look for something better
I could not agree more. You would always have leverage with salary negotiations during interviews if you can justify the value you bring on the table. For technical positions, unless the hiring process does not involve any technical assessment, it's quite easy to spot who knows what they're doing from those who are just good on paper.
I find the dead time is shared and my employer frequently benefits.
For example, I sometimes lay off work but remain in my home office, and lightly task switch between personal stuff and work stuff.
By this I mean I answer some messages, mind some not-very-engaged, long-running tasks, or scratch some itch not on the schedule. Sometimes I reinstall a system.
Without the physical toll of going to the office in person, there are frequent opportunities to catch up, or get ahead at work.
On the other hand, if I go into the office, I do it the other way, doing shopping or running errands before or after work as I usually pass by locations that I wouldn't make a trip for if I was totally home.
The “physical toll” is a good description. I think forcing people to drive through stressful traffic into an office where they sit all day, especially if it’s a big office park and there’s nothing interesting to walk to, exacts a massive physical toll on people. And in the process inflicts massive external costs on society.
Yeah, it’s nice to be able to say toss the laundry in the washer or get the dishwasher going during the breaks I’d be taking anyway so when the work day ends, I can immediately flip over to leisure/personal time activities. No commute helps with that too.
It’s taken a while to adjust to this and fully take advantage of it, but it’s enabled me to spend time on hobbies and work on my personal projects far more than would have ever been practical when I was working in an office. Back then I’d get in from work, feel too tired to do much of anything but scroll through social media or occasionally watch a TV show, with chores getting pushed off until the weekend. Once the weekend rolled around, by the time chores were out of the way and I felt like doing me things it was already halfway through Sunday and I needed to start thinking about Monday.
Why is work seen as a gift?
In german, they employer is the "Arbeitgeber", i.e. the "work giver", while the employee is the "Arbeitnehmer", the "work taker".
Which is really wrong IMHO. The employee is giving his work to the employer.
If it's anything like in my language (Polish, where the expression is very similar), the meaning shifted over generations and was quite the opposite 150 years ago.
I suppose back when the demographic pyramid was still a pyramid, being offered a job, especially as a young person, was seen as somewhat of a favour.
In german "geben/nehmen" itself has no implication of exchange or lack thereof and can mean one or the other or anything in beween, unlike the related English word "gift" which does somewhat come from "given" or "gegeben" but only means given without reciprocation.
I was referring to the title of the original post: “Why is remote work seen as gift?”.
So I’m asking why see work as a gift in general? And from there I brought up the fact that in german, work is something that is given by the employer to the employee. Which is really the wrong way round.
Because, as you indicated , there is an exchange happening. The employee is giving work and is getting money in return.
When you are in the office, the company has almost all your attention. There is almost nothing to distract you from work.
When you are at home, there are a million things to distract you. There's laundry that needs to be done, the kitchen cleaned, kids that want to play, there's a full fridge with stuff to make a sandwich, a TV that you can turn on, etc.
When you are forced to go to the office, you are forced to take care of everything you need to do outside of working hours. You have to make sure you have child care available, you have to make appointments for service technicians in your free time, or ask someone else to take care of it.
Seen like this, I think it's obvious remote work is a perk for the employee. Employee gets more flexibility, but employer gets less attention. So I understand why employers would pay more for people who come to work on site.
I disagree employers don't have a win on the remote work setup. For one, they can reduce a lot of overhead for the upkeep of physical offices. There's also giving the idea of giving the employee more time for themselves, when in truth they really actually extended his work hours; just at the comfort of their homes and at their own pace. While it's not perfect for everyone, remote work has its perks for both employees AND employers.
More time often isn't really what the employer wants. I knew someone who put in a lot of hours, but always in the afternoon / evening -- when everyone else already went home. Which sucks for everyone who needs to coordinate with them, because you always need to wait a day for them to get back to your emails...
"When you are at home, there are a million things to distract you."
Nothing distracts me when I work from home. I was far less productive in the office with ping-pong games, chattering coworkers, long commutes, etc. When at home I just focus on the work and the day flies by. It's a hell of a lot less stressful too.
When I go into the office people are yelling into their mobile phones constantly and distracting me, I get bored people coming over for social chit chats, then end up wandering down for a coffee.
Then there is the the 5 minute round trip each time to take a piss or get a water refill, the wandering around between meeting rooms for 5 minutes that would just be a 10 second call drop and reconnect in teams. And because I'm in the office I don't have a feeling of guilt when I waste any of this time because fuck it, that's what they are pushing for.
If I were given unlimited money, I wouldn't go to Office, but I would go to Home. Remote work allows me to spend more time in the place that I actually care about. Easy choice.
Many people point out that this makes team cohesion harder. I don't care, my economic output is meaningless in the context of greater life. I'd like to do the least amount of bullshit work and the most amount of important work possible, and the majority of the important work I do as a rich non-farming westerner takes place at my house or in my neighborhood. My coworkers at Office tolerate me, but my friends and family at Home love me.
I view remote work as a wonderful transaction heavily tilted in my favor. The company gets the same work they'd get out of me otherwise, and it gives up a monopolization on my physical being. I'll take a salary hit for that any day. People ought to start realizing that unless they're involved in the production of goods or services necessary for other people to physically remain alive, your job literally doesn't matter. You have X hours between when you wake up and when you go to sleep. The more of those you can spend practicing the art of civilization and the fewer of those you spend grinding out increases in shareholder value the richer society will be.
I really hate working fully remote so much. I love going to the office and meeting people. It gives me energy and a sense of belonging. I would never want to work for a fully remote company.
I don't follow. If you're working remotely, you don't need to spend 8h of your waking time with other office drones. You can spend it near people you care about, interacting with your coworkers briefly as needed.
Do your zoom meetings occupy eight hours a day? because that's what working in an office is.
When I work from home I might have a few meetings in a day, but I'm just a few steps away from hugging my wife, and nuzzling my dog any time I want. While the people at my office might be casual acquaintances and in some cases friends, they'll never ever compare to the bonds of family.
It's always funny how these interactions go on HN.
Office worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that.
Remote worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that. Also here's an insult.
For some bizarre reason, for the folks in the office it's always like "I like this style of stuff" and for the folks remote it's always "I like this other style, but also you're a drone / have no social life / think work is the only place you get any social interaction".
We have quite a large employment market and there are enough in-office, remote-friendly, remote-only employers. Just match your preferences with theirs. Some friends of mine have been remote for ages and they're quite productive. My own org is all in-office and I like to think we're doing well. It's the kind of place I like to work at.
It's just preference matching. I want to work at a place where everyone wants to work in-office. I have that. You want something else and you have that. Yep, there's folks who'd like to do what we do but can't work here because we want them to be in-office. And there's folks like me who like other orgs but I can't because the team isn't around.
While that's true, and I feel you do well in calling it out, I also think it's because in my anecdotal experience HN is mostly pro-WFH.
When looking at the wider pool of people commenting on this issue outside HN, I see antagonism on both sides. I've seen pro-WFH people being called lazy, entitled, antisocial, uncaring (because they're "killing downtowns"), elitist (because not everyone can WFH, and usually those who can have higher paid jobs), among other litanies of derogatory terms.
The truth is, this is an issue that people feel threatened about; however you look at it, assuming an even split of full-remote, full in-office, and hybrid, and assuming you're only happy with one of those options, you'll find your potential work pool diminished by 2/3rds. That's not a small amount. So people will take it personally and try to fight - some with logic and studies, others with underhanded means - for their preferred choice. Of course, I don't think things will reach those equal proportions anytime soon, if ever. So people who prefer WFH are waging a battle for a small % of overall jobs. You can see how that'd feel threatening - to have gotten something you love, and now seeing your options diminish or outright vanish. It is especially pernicious when cases of people with deep commercial real estate investments clamor for a return-to-the-office with all kinds of negative things to say about those who prefer WFH.
I prefer working in an office, but I don't prefer it to the tune of thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs and ~10 days per year of driving during rush hour (plus all the extra micromorts and risk of much higher costs that come with that).
I wish people would stop posting articles that imply that remote working is somehow objectively better when it has already been made more than clear that it doesn't work well for everyone.
I really miss the contact from the office but since most people don't go in any more, it is not worth much of my time to travel there.
Yes, we employ some people fully remotely, which is fine because that's what we knew at the time so we do get the benefit of the wider pool.
However, just because "I work really effectively at home", it doesn't mean that there are people who are not taking multiple trips to the shops, to school etc. since they can and although they could be doing their work when they get back, there is also a good chance that they won't or they'll be distracted etc.
Our productivity has definitely been lower during remote-only working although it is hard to attribute that to any one specific thing. The truth is that particularly in non-quantifiable work like development, it is hard to get a thermometer on how productive people are. The gut is unreliable and we want to trust people but if for no other reason, the office has less distractions for most people who can concentrate on their work more.
Could people make it work better? Yes. Will it always work well for everyone? No.
No. Because in your made-up equal productivity scenario we can just as easily make up the idea that people are less happy working remotely.
The reality is that some people like remote work and some don’t. Some organizations have chosen to be remote and some haven’t. Nobody’s right or wrong. They can make the choice that they believe is best for them — sometimes that choice requires trading off things they like for things they don’t. For example, I work for a remote company and I really dislike remote work. But I really like the company I work at, so I choose to work there.
> I wish people would stop posting articles that imply that remote working is somehow objectively better
> we can just as easily make up the idea that people are less happy working remotely.
We can make up the idea that the sun is blue, but I think you missed my point. Please note I talk about productivity.
In the context of people claiming remote/in-person work is more productive and asking each other for proof, discussing about burden of proof, why not simply assume that remote is exactly as productive as in-person? Unless some undeniable proof is presented.
I find it an elegant way to diffuse this proof-of-burden.
Personally I decided a long time ago which one I prefer.
> I find it an elegant way to diffuse this proof-of-burden.
I can see why.
OK, let’s assume you’re right and they’re equally productive.
But who actually cares about productivity? Many individuals and individuals who speak for organizations say they do but their actions don’t match that.
And OK, let’s say people actually care about productivity. Remote work isn’t automatically better because you guessed that the pollution savings are large.
Now, you can just kind of handwave that away and say of course it’s large.
But aren’t there other changes that result from remote work? How do you rank those vs. pollution and commuting time?
It will be quite easy for you to win this argument when you assert that all your assumptions are correct.
This dilemma is precisely what people who benefit from remote work went through when most companies weren't remote friendly.
My honest opinion is that most people that enjoy the office enjoy it because it's where they've gotten most of their socialization in their adult lives. As a result, they haven't built up lives outside of work. To make matters worse, our communities haven't developed to support people having "lives" outside of work (at least out here in the suburbs).
My hope is that as remote work becomes more prolific, people will rely on their local communities more for their social lives and all of these wonderful small towns will thrive again.
It surprises me that the biggest knock on HN against people who prefer the office generally boils down to "get a life." Honestly, it's pretty insulting.
And I've never seen someone comment, "I'm pro-office because I have no social life." So why is that the prevailing sentiment?
To me it's more like those in favor of remote work find people who prefer office work very threatening and really look to knock them down a peg or two and discredit them. And what better way to do that than ad hominem'ing and insulting their social life?
It’s also difficult to admit to oneself that one is just insulting others because one dislikes the others’ opinions and has no evidence to back up one’s insult.
You're taking what OP said in bad faith. But in my experience most of the people who want to come into an office is precisely because they're lacking a certain social component in their normal lives.
There are so many quantifiably superior reasons to want to work remotely:
- Commute time
– gasoline savings
– can walk one's pets
The only pros I can think of for going into an office are a little more contextual to the specific employee:
And no, I’m not taking what OP said in bad faith. I’m taking it as exactly how they meant it.
They have no actual evidence (besides their keen observation and desire to discredit in-office work) and to say that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives.
Yet they claim that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives. I’m not sure but the traditional context of saying someone has a poor/nonexistent social life is rarely that of a compliment.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's not really possible to solve that issue once and for all for all companies in the world, but is rather dependent on team culture and can differ between teams and be a factor in why some people choose one job and others choose another one.
After having worked remotely since the beginning of the pandemic, I’d say that I’m not totally against working in the office but I am going to avoid it if there’s any significant commute whatsoever. If I could arrive with a mere 10-20 minute walk, it wouldn’t be so bad and I could maybe even see opting into being there at least part time. My patience for commuting is gone though.
> I work really effectively at home", it doesn't mean that there are people who are not taking multiple trips to the shops, to school etc. since they can
If you don't pay hourly, who cares how people manage their salaried time? You should measure by outcomes whether people are sitting there all day in the office too.
Why do you cut time going to shops or whatever out of work time, but not commute times? I have a feeling in a lot of cases the two balance out. And one of those things doesn’t make people miserable and obese. You also make the claim that your teams remote work has been less productive and in the same breath that there’s no good way to quantify it. It’s entirely possible your gut Feeling is just wrong.
So you think the solution is to force a bunch of people to hang out with you? I'm sure they'd be thrilled to stop doing what worked for them so as to please you.
Why don't we ask people what their preferences are and organise teams accordingly? People who prefer remote can work with others remotely, while those who prefer more time in the office could work with others who'd prefer that.
Ok not all teams could be reorganised, but I expect in reality a lot could be shuffled around.
Yes, I was pretty on the side of the remote work until the pandemic. I don't think it's mentally healthy for most people. Long commutes aren't mentally healthy either though, so I understand people that want to leave that behind. I've got a less than 10 minute commute and I can easily bike that if I need to.
Society is already too segregated with technology and I really do not think it's a good idea to move all of our in person communication to zoom calls. I really believe a lot of our current issues are due to the face people aren't communicating face to face enough and they've don't think of people on the other side of their screen as real people.
I think a hybrid work setting could be great in the right circumstances, but 100% wfh just isn't a great idea imo. If you are 100% wfh you need to force yourself to find some other social group.
Additionally, I'll add we have whole generation of kids being brought up on primarily electronic communication. They're not getting appropriate social skills to begin with and then we're talking about throwing them into a remote work world for their entire lives. I think this is just a recipe for increasing their already poor mental health.
> Yes, I was pretty on the side of the remote work until the pandemic. I don't think it's mentally healthy for most people.
I think we would need to somehow separate the mental unhealthiness of remote work from the mental unhealthiness of dealing with a worldwide deadly airborne pandemic. It could be that remote work in and of itself is great, but remote work with the additional mental/emotional toll of a pandemic is not so great.
I suspect that remote work was great before the pandemic, and will be great after the pandemic, and that in fact the pandemic is what caused our growing cultural communication issues (not to mention the other things that coincided with the pandemic: worldwide political turmoil, for example).
The pandemic was so bad for mental health due to he fact people were locked down and unable to socialize. If it wasn't for that, the majority of people wouldn't have been affected so badly.
It was the social impact and not the disease itself that caused so many problems.
How about we treat adults as adults and let each one decide for themselves?
Everyone has an opinion on remote work and I’m fine with it, my problem is when PHBs mandate work from the office and make that decision for everyone regardless of personal preferences and situations.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadBut agreed, it's really shitty and I wish nobody would be in a situation where they feel like they are effectively ordered. I feel it's a result of your country's (US or India, right?) lack of unions and employee protecting labor laws.
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office.
I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona lockdowns.
The serendipity thing is real. We have less of it. We have many other benefits and we think it’s worth it, but to think remote doesn’t have downsides is a bit short sighted IMO.
When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?
When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:
- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements
These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.
That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.
All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.
Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:
- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)
- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.
- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
Basically all orgs need something that acts as a random mixing function so that connections between areas can form and strengthen. Working in the same building can provide that, if the building layout allows for it, but it's far from the only option.
The problem is that managers, particularly those with a strongly hierarchical, Taylorist mindset, won't necessarily appreciate the value of lateral connections between teams. They end up benefiting from serendipity by accident because when they force people into the office those lateral connections form anyway.
edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here.
It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful.
Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine.
Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!
They need you around to fall back on. Honestly, this is at least 75% of the reason behind the pushback on Remote.
Just before COVID, I had enough of the isolation, lack of contact with my team and working outside of the rest of the world's flow.
COVID forced another 2 years of it on me.
Now I work in a bar to meet people and do all the human contact things.
I write software 3 days a week, still remote, and enjoy the balance.
Again, I want to reiterate: if it really made workers worth less, it could be factored into salary. It's not about that. It's about something else that has to do with management and control.
Don't get me wrong, I am not doubting for a minute that remote work has challenges, but that's the thing. We had to work those out. Security, compliance, VPNs, beyond corp, whatever... We already HAD to do it. The only reason now to discard that would be sabotage.
I think an assumption that I have is that the balance of supply/demand may be prejudiced against remote work, because it takes time for people to accept or be open to new ways of doing things.
Not surprising, given remote work didn't exist for 99% of that time period.
> they will need affirmative proof that the new way works better than the old way
If they couldn't find enough evidence during the last few years they have bigger problems than the choice between remote and office work.
I agree that status quo and stability have at least some non-zero probative value, but you have to acknowledge that the status quo only exists because the dinosaurs didn't document their prehistoric internet well enough, so our ancestors had to rediscover the concept of a zoom meeting.
(Edit: obviously I wrote this in jest, but in all seriousness, when considering the value of "how it's always been done" it's extremely important to consider how we happened to stumble upon the status quo, with a holistic and historical bird's eye view. This is consequential to the analysis.)
For many people I know this is the case, so I don't think pure remote or location work are "it".
I work 100% remote with semi-flexible hours and a big part of this is the freedom to leave my house and do things during the day, like meet up with friends, or go exercise while the sun is out in winter etc.
That's nice for you.
From personal experience on the other hand {statement of preference}
You guys can go to office together, and leave the rest of us out of this?
You can still do that. My friend rented an office a five minute walk from his home - it costs him 3% of his salary.
That's a completely different issue from remote vs in-person work. You should learn to be comfortable being alone/by yourself, especially as a man.
You don’t even have to lie but you can just act like you don’t care about working remotely or not (which, in my personal case, is just the truth).
Simply put, make it known immediately that you will reject the job offer if it is not full remote, no questions asked. On my end, no "extra" amount of money they'd be willing to offer for coming into the office will sway me and many others.
There simply is no argument, I will not work for you and will go with another option if working remotely is not possible. If my job changes from work remote to not after accepting, I will not come in, and will look for new opportunities.
I've seen a lot of places play the game of accepting remote workers but then the CEO or someone announces back to office which is why I put the additional point there as well.
Also, noise cancelling earphones did NOT help while I was still in the office.
At home there's too many distractions and without people around me, I feel less accountable to actually work rather than scroll through reddit. Despite the people talking around me, I find general chatter less distracting than absolute silence.
Then I worked remotely, and while the silence was deafening for the first week or so, I grew to love it, and the focus it gives me.
Now I am back in the office some days a week, and it is worse than ever, in part as I've tasted what working in silence does for me. But mainly as non in post-covid times everyone takes their meetings at their desks.
Sitting near me today was a team of 5 people all on a call together from their desks, as one person was remote.
In the old days they would have grabbed a meeting room to run that call, but now everyone does it from their desks.
The noise is so annoying, and makes my remote days all the sweeter. Wearing noise cancelling headphones all day hurts my ears and head, plus gives me sweaty ears - which leads to more wax which leads to increased tinnitus for me. As someone with ADHD, tinnitus can really mess with my day.
unlike a prison, you're free to leave the job.
I know plenty of people working 2 jobs and simply don't have time to find a replacement for one. With wages at record lows, that also means if they lose one for any reason, it's not like a little breaky break while they find another, it means something on their extremely narrow budget gets the axe for that week or whatever. Usually healthcare, sometimes food. Sometimes rent, at which point if you don't have a friend's couch to crash on, you're homeless, and then it's astronomically harder to find a job. You are well and truly fucked.
So not everyone is "free to leave the job."
BTW I don't know the OP but the word I was going to drop in was not prison, it was slavery.
Edit: to clarify wages at record lows, I mean for the people working minimum wage or around there. Inflation and cost of living combined to make their real buying power lower than ever.
By those standards every single human to ever live has been in prison. Humanity will only be free once we're in a post-scarcity society.
To put it another way, there are ways to make money that spark more or less joy, and much of this variation is possible even for "regular folks" working "regular jobs". But most of that possibility space is yet unexplored.
Not sure whose fault that is, but I am reminded of the quote, "the opposite of courage in this country is not cowardice, it is conformity."
Most people just do what everyone else is doing (i.e. the 80% who are dissatisfied with their work) and then wonder why they are dissatisfied with their work.
What use will the wealthy and powerful have for the unproductive masses after robots can do all their work for them?
Is more likely that strong AI and robots will be used to ever more effectively control and oppress most of humanity than help or free them.
https://wikidiff.com/simile/comparison
Unrelated, but what a definition… using the same word to define itself, and several times.
However, you are not free to force others to pay for you to do that; and that's what you're asking for.
What your argument boils down to is everyone else needs to do the stuff that keeps you alive (grow food, keep your power plant running, emergency services, treat your water) while you sit at home and scroll through TikTok. Sounds just a tad elitist to me.
You get paid to do a certain thing and if that thing requires you to be somewhere at a certain (like EVERY job) then you will be there at that time. I wish I had Superman powers and was essentially immortal, but that's no more realistic than you thinking you ought to be able to do whatever you want while still getting paid to do a job and think that's sustainable for an entire society.
Alternatively, you could start your own business and make your own schedule. However, it's not going to go so well for you with the current attitude you've got. Most likely you're going to have to do things when you don't want to do them if you want your business to succeed.
The actual remote jobs I've seen in that time all had weird issues like fixed (early) meeting times, more often than not even daily. Or performance tracking that went as far as installing third party monitoring Software while not even getting a dedicated work computer. Or being available at slack the whole time.
If that is what remote work means I don't get it. It's just as stressful if not more, minus the commute.
In poorly managed companies I've worked for it was very easy to get away with doing nothing e.g. I worked with a Service Designer who, when she finally quit, told everyone openly that she hadn't been given any work in a year
When you freelance on a project-basis, it's "I pay this person to create this thing for me", but they don't care whether you take 10 or 100 hours to do so as long as you deliver it at the price you agreed upon and the quality is what they expected.
When I still did freelancing I just asked for a rather high hourly rate and was super efficient in that time. At some point it got hard to find customers tho when other people claim the same for a 4th of the rate or less.
The ultimate solution for a lazy coder like me is just maintaining some websites that make money. My time, my decisions, my money.
It's a liability to let devs download code to their personal computers. It's risky from both physical, and intellectual property perspectives.
I really understand where you are coming from, but that's definitely not the standard I have witnessed so far.
Maybe where I'm working we're more harsh than usual:D because we've got the full package - company laptop, transfering anything work related to personal PC is a no go, at home we must use VPN with 2FA, can't connect unapproved USB devices (including mice, keyboards, phone charging, anything), heavy website moderation, and heavy user-based access moderation for anything, and the company laptops are 100% tracked - you have no privacy on it. Even personal phones have to follow some security measures to keep Slack and authentication app (screen sleep <5min, screen lock is a must, and Slack is password protected).
There are reasons to force people to work on a corporate machine, preventing them from stealing code is not one of them.
Or encrypt the whole repo and just send it to a bucket somewhere. I mean there's got to be a lot of ways to do it if you really want to.
Some guy commented on taking photos - are y'all really planning on taking a photo for every 200 lines, on scripts with lines in the thousands, in repos which contain tens to hundreds of files, which are just for one product? When your company is probably supporting more than a couple products?
Of course most people working in tech aren’t facing this issue and so think working from home is great for everyone.
More recently it seems people think working at home means you get to do things like washing, cleaning, babysitting etc as well. That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem.
How did we get to a point where we consider this opinion to be normal? It is expected someone else to care for your children while you commute hours each day and work 8+ hours at an office? When you get home you still need to spend whatever free minutes you have with your children, cook, put them to bed, wash, clean, find some time to share with your spouse, then repeat daily?
How about we normalize working from home, and spending time with your children and spouse? Is it so bad to have your child do their homework on the desk next to you so you can explain and answer their questions? Play around in the room while you work, so you can actually interact with them, instead of being away for the major part of their conscious life?
Also, is it so bad to go load and start the washing machine while you wait for your build to finish? Maybe load the dishwasher? What do you do at the office at the same time? Go to the kitchen to prepare yourself an unhealthy amount of coffee so you can grind your busywork with more focus?
When I'm stuck on a problem or frustrated by some issue, doing the laundry is a great way to clear the mind and approach the problem in a new way. Similar to how you often get the solution to a problem in the shower or on the drive home. It's pretty awesome to be able to do that during my work day, and office doesn't really give good opportunities for this.
> It’s like trying to work in an emergency room
So… nothing about unsupervised. Either the working parent is doing that as per their comment, or a daycare as per mine.
In reality if the kid is home the parent is not getting much work done.
Of course it's also possible for offices to be noisy or otherwise uncomfortable, and you might not have any power to do anything about it. I guess WFH is a great option mostly for people who have a great home.
Yet, there was more peace and ability to concentrate at home than there was at my previous office. Less interrupts, no time wasted to driving. And my kids weren't at the kindergarten.
The remote possibility even gave me enough energy to finalize my MSc finally (at evenings), something I wasn't able to do while working at the office for many years. Weird, huh?
I do miss beers with my colleagues though. But that's a bit difficult when none of my colleagues work in the same country, not much difference whether I would be in the office or not.
I hope I'm wrong but this comment reads like it came straight out of this piece of satire - http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html
The additional productivity probably came from the added time per day and reduced fatigue from lower amount of noise (office room vs. open office floor). I don't think there's anything weird about it, I at least found working at the office very tiring since concentration was difficult and required energy.
Of course now that they're bigger, everything is a bit different.
If so, then that's not a luxury many people (including, you know, many wives) with small children have. Hence the comment that you originally replied to makes sense.
Plus if you worked an office job instead you would need day care, which is still an option for you when working remotely (unless you prefer nannies?)
If those same "emergencies" are urgent to you and demand your attention only when you work from home then the issue lies someplace else.
It's exactly having kids that makes working from home extra convenient. Though of course it definitely helps to have a separate room for your home office.
(Seriously, this debate is about as dumb as any other american political debate, just bunch of myopic people screaming at each other with no ability to think.)
As long as candidates see it as a possible alternative to additional compensation, it'll be treated as a perk that can be revoked. Execs would do the same thing with bathroom access or access to drinking water if it was practical.
It was always seen this way, right? Thus perspectives like Tim Ferris' "Four Hour Workweek" that revolved primarily around getting to work remote as a top priority.
> Did we adapt? Absolutely. Arguably, we thrived. Companies suddenly had access to a talent pool that was always there, but they were ignorant of. No longer did they have to limit themselves to people who lived near the office, or have to offer hefty relocation packages. Real estate expenses fell through the floor.
When I put my rational hat on, this is how I feel. Suddenly your talent pool expanded to not just a bunch of new people, but a bunch of new people at vastly different local salary rates. Personally, I think it's unethical to lower pay to match regional rates, but this reason alone made me think the era of the SF engineer had come to an abrupt halt as covid forced companies to accidentally discover massively productive engineering pools in places like India and the Philippines. Tell as many stories as you like about the time you had a bad remote engineer in India, one can't deny the pool is simply massive and for every one "ten-x engineer" in SF there's five hundred in India, just have to find them.
Anyway my buddy in NYC was telling me a bunch of companies were suddenly discovering they were able to maintain revenue while cutting out multi million dollar real estate expenses for their manhattan offices stacked with little snackies and bubbly water. Seemed obvious to me. There you go, that's a couple salaries right there, now you can hire even more remote workers. Why weren't we always doing this?
Then there's the simple ethical arguments around decreased pollution from decreased pointless commuting, increased mental health benefits from not having to sit in traffic mad for 120 minutes a day every single day, losing hours of your day to the commute, whatever else.
Now let me put my hat on that lets me get into the mind of a not very good manager or business leader that's successful less for sharp mindedness and more for winning a lottery of one form or the other and thus having access to more capital: I don't trust my workers, I need to see with my own eyes that they're working for all the hours I pay them to work, I don't realize that it makes more sense to understand our relationship as one of product output for salary rather than an arbitrary idea of time for money (I, as a non engineer, have no idea how long it takes to build things, but I demand 8 hours every day anyway). I don't trust those engineers out in India, I can't see them, where's my money going? Also, guess what buddy, when I was your age I took the train to work every day and didn't buy a coffee cause that's just how I remember us doing things, so suck it up and you should too! Improving technology should only be used if I, the least familiar with these technologies, can think of a way to generate profit off of them.
I know I'm quite cynical but this has been my experience sometimes. Most times though I've found companies to be quite adaptable and take the lessons learned as a gift: woah nice, we don't have to pay for an office? Why didn't we think of this sooner?? Everyone's remote and thus documentation is suddenly a lot more important to fill in the gaps that used to involve juniors tapping seniors on the shoulder? Woah, our business and knowledge base is so much more sustainable now, awesome! Keep doing more of that!
I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that can truthfully deduct the cost-for-living from the compensation they are offering. It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
Also, from my personal point of view, it's the time I'm saving for myself, not the money. Electricity is quite expensive nowadays, and my standing desk and audio/video equipment also wasn't payed by my employer.
What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".
//edit: fixed typos and added a/v equipment to my ramblings
Imagine haggling with a supplier like this. Crazy we put up with it.
Does it have challenges? Yes. Am I a valued employee? Yes, I am potentially one of the most valuable employees after my first year in my team. Easily top 20%.
I visit my team every few months for a week. Mostly the point is so we can go out for dinner and I get to have some drinks with them. The workday itself is changed very little by being in person.
That's like saying the price of goods and services should be about the cost of producing them. No no no: the price is about what buyers will bear. In the same way, salaries are about what the worker will bear.
If there is an arbitrage lever to maximize profit, any business will use it.
I just don't think this is true for the overwhelming majority of employees, including developers.
Corporations have enough staff that they can lay off hundreds or thousands of workers without a single worry. They can hold out not paying you the rate you want for much longer than you can afford not paying your bills and eating. Eventually, you will accept a lower salary and if you don't there are plenty of others who will. The vast majority of all employed people have next to no leverage compared to the companies that hire them and companies know it.
The large problem with the collusion before was that the 3-4 that already paid top of the market salaries colluded to keep them the same. It doesn’t mean they weren’t still top of the market for someone with a given level of experience.
But a professional in a small team, usually witha bus factor of 1? This means a hard time finding a new employee + months of training, while the old worker probably found a new job before they even quit at the first one.
There are plenty of blogposts from the other side, about "never give a raise to a flight-risk, because their loyalty is already shot". The business strategy is to quietly hire a (typically cheaper) replacement, then fire the uppity employee.
This depends on how happy/able the employee is to leave to find an alternative.
A while ago I was at a trade fair in Germany and happened to see an advert from a jobs website, it read (roughly translated): "Hate your job ... ? It's your own fault!" (ie that you've not yet left the job you claim to hate...)
Must be nice being wealthy. Most people can barely go a single month without a paycheck.
> severance pay or unemployment insurance
Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
And this is quite good compared to what happens almost anywhere outside of Europe.
> Transaction costs for employer depends
For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal. Only small companies suffer significantly when losing an employee.
Not necessary wealthy. For people with median pay, it is more about financial responsibility. According to EU-SILC data more than half EU population has financial reserves for at lest three months.
> Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
Here in Czechia it is 2 months notice period, then severance pay is 3 months (for > 2 years of employment), and then 5 months of government unemployment benefits on ~half pay. So 10 months to find a new job.
> For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal
Even in large businesses you can have small teams with domain experts, losing them can be costly.
Most corporate cultures are inherently authoritarian, with money being used as a proxy for power.
Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority.
Stock is an even more specific proxy for power, which is why stock options that have real value are usually reserved for those at the top of the hierarchy.
This is also why remote working is unpalatable. Even if it increases productivity it also enhances worker autonomy and reduces the power differential. That's not acceptable in an authoritarian culture.
Attitudes to remote work can be a useful indicator of how central hierarchy is in the culture.
Why does any company every pay more than the legally required minimum, then?
If you have 10 employees and you want to hire 3 more but to do that you have to increase their pay by 25% in relation to others then you might decide not to because this decreases power for everyone (should they find out what you're paying these others)
Oh come on. This is a cynical or Marxist take, but it's pretty obviously untrue. A flea market, farmers market, FB marketplace doesn't have a substantial power imbalance. A market may have a power imbalance, but it is not required. People can exchange goods/services at equal power, and routinely do so. And if I understand economics correctly, that's the purpose of a "free" market: no artificial power imbalances.
It's only later laissez-faire and neoliberal capitalists that turned "free market" synonymous with a lack of regulation and a playground for the biggest and most powerful companies.
Arguments against will be that value "is" what people are willing to pay for them, which is some combination of supply and demand, but I find this just too simple. Technically it's true that the "value" of something is the price someone last paid for it, but then we get situations where we say a Bitcoin is worth 40k usd or whatever tf the price is right now. And then suddenly its value is 20k, and if you ask why you'll get thirty answers, all wrong. Maybe the price was 40k to someone and 20k to someone else, but the value? Nah. And the price alone tells us basically nothing.
The interesting thing for me is the third person. Me, in this case, to whom Bitcoin is worth 0, or less than 0 because I would consider it a labor cost to own a Bitcoin (figuring out a wallet or whatever). How does someone to whom a Bitcoin is worth 40k then then around and say "Bitcoin is worth 40k" to someone like me?
To capitalists trying to nod their heads and say ah the price is high, supply must be down or demand must be up, I say, good luck predicting human behavior, that usually goes great.
For me though I agree with you, the value of goods is some combination of their production costs, in any meaning of the word "value" that matters.
"But what if someone spends an entire lifetime of labor producing a single widget nobody wants? Clearly demand plays a part in value!" I don't know, go away. Why would that happen? Sure, ok, also include in value calculus that hopefully people only make things that people actually want. (the capitalist argument here is, the profit is to be found in the margin between cost to create and the price set by desirability - to which I say exactly, profit should be eliminated)
Edit: someone else had a comment they deleted talking about how profit is necessary so as to have surplus to save in case of equipment failure, I'll paste my response here cause my thumbs put in the labor so by golly I'll get the Payout
Traditionally, are profits sequestered to be used as savings like that? In my experience the equipment breaks and both companies go bankrupt because the executives in the c corp spent the profit on themselves already and are happy to just go find a new investment.
Actually in my experience the other company, the co-op, doesn't go bankrupt, because the workers are smart enough to safeguard their well being with rainy day funds. This might be one of the reasons coops are repeatedly shown to be far more resilient than traditional companies.
While I am not an expert, I remember reading about it on "The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives", by Callum Williams. It made sense to me.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49374783
While linking to the sources is useful, I would appreciate any argument correcting the above since, as I said, I am not an expert and it makes perfect sense to me.
This is not true; Marx's model of exploitation (known to modern economists as the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Model (PECP)) does not concern itself with what demand and offer agree on within a labor negotiation. Marx says that workers do not sell their labor, they sell their labor-time (e.g. X units of time/goods) during which they exercise their labor-power. The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced during that time is where this 'exploitation' comes in.
The idea that exploitation is a matter of opinion or agreement adds a moral or justicial spin to what Marx considered to be a fact of the capitalist economy. Whether the people involved are happy with the situation or agree to it does not change this discrepancy of value or its representation in money.
Marxism is explicitly amoral, it does not concern itself with that is morally right. It is a social science that analyses the contradictions within the material world and their consequences.
> The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced
I am thinking how can one value this time. If it is valued by the market (how much someone is willing to pay for it) we would end up with the same problem, no?
It must be intrinsically valued, I am assuming.
The capitalist wants to pay as little as possible per hour, but will on average long term not be able to pay less than the cost of living. Capitalists pay just enough so that workers as a class reproduce themselves (so there are more workers), but less than the value the workers produce.
What is the "value"? Well, the prices cannot be explained only in terms of offer and demand (a society with an offer of 100 pens and demand for 100 pens and offer of 100 planes and demand for 100 planes still would not sell pens and planes for the same price) nor entirely because of the price of raw materials (because this only postpones the explanation: from where came the price of the raw materials?). It also cannot be explained only based on subjectivity, because there exists a number, which is a very objective measure, representing the price if you balance offer, demand, assume competition and discard several perturbations. The "value" tries to explain this basis value that later will became the price and show objectively and numerically how the wealth is produced and distributed.
This "value" is measured by Marx as the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce the product. Given a car, the value represented by a car can be measured by the mean time necessary for the workers to produce that car in the industry plus the value transferred by the machines and tools used by those workers (whose value came from the workers that produced these machines and tools). Both manual and intellectual work need to be taken into account and you can also assume that some complex tasks or more intense work can produce more value than simple tasks in the same time.
Given this, you can compare the value produced by a worker with the value of the things that the worker can buy with its salary. This is how Marx measures these things and shows the exploitation in the society.
There is bid price, ask price, and last sale price.
Do they indicate "value" to the specific people making those transactions, bids and asks? Sure. Does it have to be the same for everybody? No, and that's why trade happens.
Being a shareholder requires capital, which the vast majority of people don't have.
It's like asking "why shouldn't workers work for subsistence income instead of asking for more money?": the obvious answer is "because the only reason they would consider doing so when they don't have a choice"
But that tendency comes with a lot of asterisks.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted though.
Seems like a dangerous analytical framework.
This is literally why one function of the state is to act as a non-market-participant so it can provide a safety net. There are some things markets can't and shouldn't try to do.
The market has been taking care of it for too long, we're getting too fat, we need a few decades of food controlled by the police to get back into shape.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the average American waistline, but yes, this part is absolutely true. Unhealthily so.
You're not helping your argument with this example imo.
If I am a CEO of a remote-first company and it truly doesn't matter for me where the employees are located it makes no sense to overpay for labor in high cost of living area.
So if there's a company A that pays $X in high COL area, and $X/3 in a low COL area. And then there's a company B that pays $X/2 everywhere. Then people from the low COL area would go to the company B, and people from the high COL area would go to the company A. As a result, company B gets the same results 2 times cheaper.
Repeat this process enough times and the salaries will be equalized. Of course it's not immediate, there are companies rigidly set in their ways; there are people who won't move no matter what; there is limited supply of both companies and workers; etc, etc. But eventually the market forces will do their thing.
The assumption dorwi's asking you to make is that moving to Silicon Valley somehow makes you work twice as fast, or that only engineers who work twice as fast live there.
Basically, lunarhustler is making the assumption that humans who can program end up at roughly the same quality no matter where they live or how much you pay them, while dorwi is making the assumption that how much you are paid is directly related to your productive output.
Beyond that, highest paid people I know aren't paid well because they're 5x as productive, they're paid well because they solve really hard problems - the types of problems you don't run into at most companies.
To use an analogy: neurosurgeons aren't expensive because they're really good at "doctoring". Even if you had all the $$$ in the world you wouldn't consult one for a sprained ankle.
After you're necessity for that market equalization is long gone.
We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize. The Market is manipulated and owned, and not by us. The tipping point is past, and the majority of society has yet to realize, our only hope at this point probably requires violence and capital destruction, sadly.
And who is 'us' in that comment?
Seems to be all going pretty well.
"Normal people in the western world are better off than they were at any/nearly any given time in the past."
and
"There is a staggering amount of wealth inequality in the western world right now, and there are very concerning signs about what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture."
Not sure what you mean 'what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture.'? All those are doing ok as far as I can tell. At least not worse than in the past.
I'm talking about inequality within the developed nations—specifically, the US (I believe it also affects the UK; I don't feel qualified to talk about such effects beyond that, due to lack of information).
As for what's happening with our politics...if you can't see that the current situation is wildly different than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago, then I'm sorry, but you have not been paying close attention. We have people proclaiming themselves as actual literal neo-Nazis storming the Capitol building in an attempted coup, in open collaboration with certain members of Congress and the wife of a sitting Supreme Court judge. And while some of the people involved in the Jan 6 coup attempt are, indeed, being convicted as they should be, to my knowledge, none of the politicians who are complicit have been publicly investigated. This is not normal, it is not healthy, and while it is not entirely due to the increasing wealth inequality, to claim that that has no part in the level of polarization today and the rise of extremism...well, it would be an extraordinary claim, and thus require extraordinary evidence to support it.
This is a case where, at least in certain respects, times are provably getting worse than they were before.
If politics are too fuzzy and nebulous for you, look at generational economics: I don't recall the precise figures off the top of my head, but the baby boomers are still holding wealth vastly disproportionate to their share of the demographics, and younger generations have vastly less income and wealth than they did at the same time in their lives, while over the same period, prices of many important things—like homes, health care, and higher education—have all risen much faster than the rate of inflation. The kind of house that someone working minimum wage could have afforded in 1960, they'd now need a white-collar job (probably requiring a college degree) and several years of savings to buy.
You can't just handwave all of that away as "eh, people have complained about times getting worse since the Ancient Greeks".
Can't afford to buy a house or start a family at anything like the rate 50 years ago that's for sure.
You can always afford to start a family. The question is what trade-offs you want to make.
People used to do with less.
It might be there are people who are able and willing to burn money for a long time. Sure as hell it doesn't stop me the startup founder to set whatever salary ranges I believe are efficient.
We don't give people different offers based on where they say they live.
Rather, we have a salary range for a job, and we look for people who are attracted by that salary range. This usually means people in SF, NYC, and other high COL cities disqualify themselves, so we end up hiring many people outside of tech hubs.
In other words, if you simply stop hiring in the top 20% COL cities, you can hire talent at significantly less salary ranges simply because we're not competing with Google, Amazon, etc in Silicon Valley or NYC.
Which allows us to hire a greater quantity of people. E.g. 2 engineers at $150k instead of 1 engineer at $300k.
But the key to this is not making a salary decision based on location. Instead, just set a salary range and you'll find what parts of the country people are willing to work at that range.
I have my home address, but I actually only spend maybe 4-6 months of the year physically located there. This kind of pisses off most employers due to the tax situation as well as them treating it as if I'm gaming the system by being physically located for much of the year in lower cost of living areas (though sometimes I've even gone to higher cost of living areas for months at a tiem).
A situation like this where the salary doesn't really depend on location so it wouldn't be treated like I'm actively trying to game anything would actually be preferred in my situation, and to many others I know as well.
Exactly. We've had multiple employees move to different cities/states during their tenure. That wasn't a problem with us (from an employer perspective) and there was also no expectation that salary would be adjusted in response to a move, since location wasn't factored into the original offer in the first place.
For run of the mill junior-ish employees who are treated as disposable cogs by my company, your strategy worked effectively. So we ended up with junior employees in LCOL or foreign countries (mostly Canada and Mexico) and senior levels in SFBA / NYC.
There is no real equilibrium in markets, only forces that push constantly in one direction (maximizing profits, lowering costs, increasing capital efficiency).
In fact, if you think about it, the upper limit to profit margin is
Look familiar?It's mostly about what you can negotiate to be fair. Refusing to pay you more is their way of telling you they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer where you are which is legitimate. They will reassess if you show them a better offer from a competitor if they really want you. A big part of negotiation rests on your best alternative to what's being negotiated.
> It's different, and you need to adjust your processes
So you actually agree it's complicated from a company point of view.
Except when they collude to drive down wages or pay for laws to make it harder for workers to organize keeping them weak. Also "where you are" has been made irrelevant for many workers because they can get employment anywhere without going anywhere. That means what's really being said is that they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer anywhere.
Except that employees would do the same thing that employers do all the time and walk across the line as soon as someone offers them a compelling deal, even if it isn't at the "collusion" price.
Perhaps the company doesn't see it worthwhile to argue over peanuts.
Btw, it's getting bigger in the US as well over the least few decades.
Singapore is a place with a smaller gap, and less regulation. That's part of the reason they went from third world to first world.
Where you put your developers shouldn't make much of a difference to how much business you have?
However you are up to something: big cities tend to be more productive. That's the reason people and businesses put up with the higher rents and other inconveniences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
A good indicator is the finances of the company. If you are going to be another cog contributing marginal value, for whatever reason that is, then it's going to be difficult to argue for better salary (thought they MIGHT give a higher salary, to everyone, like e.g. Google). If you can however have a big impact and they have good revenue or funding, then it's a lot easier to argue for higher salaries: "so you are making $300k MRR or just raised $5M of VC money with 4 employees? And you have more tickets and bug fixes to improve growth and reduce churn that you can feasibly do? Great, let's talk how I can effectively help to slash those tickets and then we can discuss my compensation*".
Classic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
* though if the company is crushing it so much, and specially because your marginal tax rate might be already at 50%, evaluate asking for some Stock Options/RSUs/etc.
which means you're a contractor, rather than an employee. I do think this is a better way tbh, as you can potentially own all of your healthcare costs, and optimize your taxes properly. And you can probably charge a lot more as a contractor, to make up for the lack of job security etc.
It is a poor reflection of our tax system that running your own entity that you then pay yourself out of can have lower taxes than simply earning money as an employee.
In the city where I currently live, lots of small businesses try to claim that their employees are contractors. Those businesses depend on the ignorance of their workers.
In France, companies also like to contract out a lot, either to "freelance" or regular outsourcing shops.
The reason I put freelance in quotes is that there's no such thing here, legally. You have to have some form of company, through which you invoice the client.
But then, whenever you want to get the money out of the company to pay rent and eat, you'll be hit by, more or less, the same taxes the employer would pay. For a given unit of work, it's not cheaper to contract out, there's no real tax loophole.
As far as I know, the state doesn't really care. It may even prefer it, since contractor rates are usually higher than salaries, so they get to get more tax.
The only situation where it would crack down on this is if the would-be employee complained. Since this is considered a "precarious" arrangement, if the contractor can prove that they're basically an outsourced employee, they can ask to be converted to an actual employee and the state will back them up.
However, depending on what you do, people can end up paying less in taxes overall as a contractor because you have more flexibility for deductions. There are very little options for an employee to deduct any expenses in the US, whereas, a contractor could potentially deduct the cost to commute to an office, their cellphone and home internet (if used for work) and even a portion of their rent/mortgage for a home office.
Cities definitely don’t have the resources to track you down and I’m not sure employers especially larger ones have any mechanisms in place to keep track. I’m not advocating for this just surprised it’s not more well known. Though I suspect it’s common and just not talked about much for obvious reasons. Certainly there are also jobs that require you to physically work from a given state as well for example.
How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes? Is that any different?
What makes it more problematic is that it's not just tax offices that would be interested in finding out. The company you work at may also get in trouble with the tax office as they pay employment taxes too, so they are probably interested in the fact that you're deceiving them. If your manager suspects you're not being truthful and follows up with HR this could easily get you in trouble. As remote work becomes more popular, it becomes more likely that companies will pay attention to this.
Knowing all of that, I'd find it quite hard to justify playing these games. It just seems like asking for trouble, with a pretty good chance of getting it.
For example, it's de facto not illegal to drive 5mph over the speed limit on the highway. No police officer will pull you over for that unless they have some other prior reason. So in that sense, lack of enforcement has made the practice legal.
You can, for example, get employed at 10 companies and then outsource all the work (someone got caught doing it and it was in the news).
If you want to cheat, you can, but you probably should not be discussing it on hacker news.
They probably have a "permanent address" at a friend's house or through some service. And it's probably technically fraud. That said, the US is not really setup for citizens not to have a permanent address in one state--even if just for things like driver's licenses. You can do things by the books for tax purposes but I suspect a lot of people moving around don't.
https://www.annuity.org/personal-finance/taxes/residency-req...
Ultimately it comes down laws, regulations and taxes. Company wants to make it easy for itself to deal with that.
You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.
California FTB very much cares if you are collecting SV salary but are not paying CA taxes by living in LCOL areas. Unless you are a CPA, please do not spread lies.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications...
If the reason is bullshit, there's no need to bullshit back.
If the reason isn't bullshit (e.g. coz they want you in their Manhattan office on a moment's notice) then having a virtual address won't help.
WA has no state income tax, but a beefier payroll tax, so it's cheaper for me but more expensive for the company.
You know the old saying, noting is certain except death, and the will of the department of taxation for the state of (California|New York).
.. where are those tax exempt? In the UK they're treated as income at the time of vesting, which is not unreasonable https://frazerjames.co.uk/rsus-a-tech-employees-guide/
So yeah, you do need to learn about the different examples. It's something people just talk about in the valley and ultimately/generally is where the "high compensation" from tech comes from. In other countries/cities people don't even know what any of these things are.
[1] https://zajacgrp.com/insights/what-you-need-to-know-about-do...
There are perfectly valid reasons why that's not the case, see here:
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...
For example, moving to a low cost of living area is something I did as a choice so that I could save more, and this came with a cost: my friends live further away now. They’re saying I should be penalised for this by not being able to save more compared to their employees who stayed in the high cost of living area.
What a bunch of hypocrites. The perfectly know that what a person is currently making does not come "organically" into the conversation. The employer does whatever is in its power to have this information from the candidate.
But they are not hiring you for "value", you are just a body in a seat filling a "role".
Real game to play is: you ask for X money, they propose Y money, agree and do Y amount of work and not the X amount of work. It's entirely reasonable to "quite-quit" even at non-minimum-salary compensation levels.
Play the game as fits your needs. For example, adjust your work output and use the freed time to look for a better employer.
Also, if anybody asks, I live in Bermuda.
What, no! It should be about what offers you can get from other places. If your offer is close to your local salaries, then that mean the company thinks you would have a hard time getting a better offer from somewhere else.
For example, I can get x$ from Google, but that doesn't mean SAP or ASML should also pay me x$: I don't know anything about their respective ecosystems, so I wouldn't be able to contribute much of value.
It's complicated because a large number of managers haven't figured out how to manage a remote team.
Remote work does an exposé on the usefulness of these roles. And of course, those holding them, would be eager for everyone to return to the office work theater.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code...
To think that code can be “fixed permanently” shows a complete lack of understanding and insight into programming, and brings to mind the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect - if Graeber is so wildly wrong about a subject I know well, why do I trust him on those I don’t?
More so than ever with the push for MVP and agile ticket stat chasing.
I imagine that the only bug that gets fixed "permanently" is in a product that nobody uses enough for it to need change. Like some failed MVPs.
And it looks great at the start, the project is making great progress until people start to leave and the tech debt starts to kick in. By that stage all the "high performance" agile rock stars have pissed off to another company and left behind their legacy.
And then its death by 1000 cuts, things aren't logged correctly, no proper exception handling rather just do a print(e) and falling over, any integrations with 3rd parties aren't documented when they break and its just a mess.
(I know that in eg France is basically impossible to fire people, so I can see why they might have lots of bullshit jobs.)
There's always the human factor in capitalism. And with the human factor comes ego.
IIRC, Graeber roughly compares CEOs to feudal kings. You want more people under your rule as a metric of success. Also, the "king" often seeks to have a big "court" (top-level managers) to reflect their prestige.
The effect is cascading. The "king's court" members want their own smaller courts (second-level managers) and compete with their peers for power, as measured by the headcount. As we go down, unecessary hires will start to occur, only to justify a title.
And everyone involved in the theater has an incentive to turn a blind eye on the situtation.
See also how share prices often increase when layoffs are announced.
Whether we hire a dedicated manager or have the responsibility rotate among teammates really depends on a bunch of factors both internal and external to the team / company.
Most people who get a job in America (can't speak for other places) are not interested in managing. It's too messy. If more doers took on management work - we'd be able to push out shitty managers. Until that happens though, my recommendation is to immediately move to a different team or company as soon as a shitty manager is installed.
In salary per value to the company you are extremely overpaid, assuming you live in the west.
I don't think you want to open that can of worms.
Edit to add:
All those people moving from India to the US for the money could then stay in India.
You're not competing with the remote work crowd. You are competing with local cost of labor. If the market switches to just value added, unrelated to location, then you're screwed.
The big problem is that labour in India isn't all that productive. Offshoring isn't some magic bullet. Companies have tried that and are still trying.
Google, Microsoft etc have offices in India. They also keep their offices in the US and Europe not just out of imaginary obligation to westerners, but because it makes economic sense.
See also how Apple still does lots of the design work in the US, but manufactures in China. They would off-shore more off the design work as well, if they could. (And if Apple could but would not, someone else would do it and eat their lunch.)
There are great people in India. It's just more conducive for them to get better pay if they manage to get an H1B and move to the US.
If they could just "work remote", then you (as an American, or at least someone who can and does work in the US? Well, applies to any western country) are no longer competing with "people from India who manage to get an H1B and have a family situation compatible with moving countries", but suddenly with ALL qualified workers in India.
Big tech in the west employs HUGE numbers of expats from lower paid countries. A very large portion of which Big tech paid for the H1B (or equiv) and relocation costs.
If you are remote, then you're only valued on your output. And I'm not saying you're in a poor position against a random engineer from India (nor presumably from a random engineer in the US), but you'll be in a poor position against the equivalent of your amazing local coworker who moved from India (or hell, any European country with less pay) because that's where the job was.
If the job is "anywhere, because it's remote", then I'm saying that you may not be on the winning side of this change.
Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
> Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
Yes, and that's progress! That's good!
Most just think they're clever and exploiting the system, and the thought that they'd get paid lowly Texas (or Ohio) salaries never occurred to them.
Though I do think 'off-shoring' from California to the Ohio vs off-shoring from California to India have important aspects in common.
For better or worse, agglomeration effects are real, and for some ineffable reasons software people are more productive when located in Silicon Valley, rather than Ohio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
However the pandemic forced an investment in making remote-work work. That's not even so much an investment in technology (hardware or software), but more taking the time and effort to figure out what works and doesn't work. It's full of soft factors.
Why pay to get H1B and shipping for someone from India when you can just hire that same person in place and not only save on that, but also salary?
Offshoring in my experience does not usually work on an individual basis.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. It usually turns out that these lower paid employees are significantly worse, and Indian nationals who are highly competent demand salaries similar to Americans.
But it's literally the exact same people, in this case. Big tech currently pays to move them to the US, and then pays them higher salary.
That is very different from spinning up a department in India.
All else being equal, the only reason to hire a distant programmer is to pay them less. From the firms perspective they can't easily tell if a distant programmer is more effective than a local programmer so it is a struggle (market-for-lemons style) to justify paying the same amount. If the costs are equal, may as well hire local.
It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee (including the risk of a bad hire), not the value they provide. Companies can't measure the value individual programmers provide anyway.
You could reframe these points so that they look like advantages of global businesses... you'll have someone to vouch for and evaluate people across multiple talent pools (increasing talent supply), the majority of your team will never be sanctioned simultaneously (diversifying that risk), and as for cultural norms, don't we all know that diversity is strength.
Saying there are no advantages to global remote first besides cost is underselling it; there are important advantages, for one
> It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee
asynchronous remote makes documentation and written communication central, which at the end of the day makes it easier to replace employees.
Cost is important too, if you can literally hire 50% more workforce that's one hell of a deal.
> All else being equal, the only reason to hire a distant programmer is to pay them less.
Yes. To give some example where not everything else is equal:
There can be benefits from covering more timezones, or benefits from covering different jurisdictions (and tax regimes).
Tell that to the kid getting paid 14 cents an hour on the other side of the planet to make your $1,500 iPhone.
Most people will be envious of the transaction relationship be it employee/employer or consumer/seller and feel that they were cheated, regardless.
The wage was too low, the product was priced to high from one side and the wage was too high and the product priced too cheap from the other.
There is actual cheating but it seems like people are never(rarely) actually satisfied, and social media has made it worse.
Making remote work and pay for productivity more common and accepted, would help that kid. That's good!
Employment rules, customs, and laws vary by at least state and country (and minimum wages vary by city). How would I know what laws applied to the employment relationship?
Do you report and pay federal taxes and state taxes separately? Or do you just deal with IRS and they forward the docs and the money to the state you live in?
Yes. They are separate sets of forms that you pay (or get refunded) independently. They're basically unrelated exxcept to the degree that deductions/refunds may come into play.
The employer is making various deductions and payments, e.g. into unemployment, based on the state you live in. So your employer really does need to know your state of residence.
NH has sovereignty to set their minimum wage (subject to the limit of the federal minimum wage). They might do that to attract business there. Massachusetts has the same sovereignty to set their minimum wage. Which state should give up their sovereignty so that an employer [possibly out of state] could practically hire people without knowing where they live?
You suggest how much you are willing to pay me to the government. And I get information how much I'll be earning after taxes and required social security fees.
If I don't agree or the amount you proposed is illegally low then I can't work for you until you decide to bump up the salary.
If I agree I start working. You pay to the government the full amount. Government taxes it and transfers the rest to me as a salary.
If you pay too little or too late you are on the hook with the government. But you don't need to know where I live or what the taxes are.
With electronic system the whole procedure of hiring could probably take an afternoon or less and zero knowledge.
It's a balancing act. If companies pay based on value added to the company, they will wind up paying more than average in low COL areas, and less than average in high COL areas; so they won't be able to hire people in high COL areas at all. If they scale pay based on COL, they'll be able to hire people in both areas. So yes, it's not "fair" to people in lower COL areas, but it's not arbitrary either.
You say it like it's a bad thing. If they can hire people for relatively cheap purely from low COL areas, and make the company work, they should totally go for that. That's the whole reason behind having offices in even cheaper areas like Vietnam, instead of just the American Midwest.
Of course, if you can't actually run your business purely on people from low COL areas, that means there must be something the people from the high COL areas bring to the table that's worth it for your business. And that's proves the original commenter's point that the company should pay you according what value you bring to the company.
It's called the "job market" for a reason. Both sides (employers and employees) are trying to maximize their returns. It's never going to be solely about the value we as developers (or any other occupation) bring to the company.
Keep in mind that not all companies are competing for talent globally. [1]
The real question is whether companies that compete in a local or regional market will be able to continue to pay local rates to anyone with specialized skills who can also go remote, or if they’ll just give up and find some other solution.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Sounds like your interview at companies who employ the former, not later.
https://www.zenefits.com/workest/cost-of-living-vs-cost-of-l...
They all want to sell nationally or internationally whilst paying based on what they think the local market value for labour should be.
I’ve worked remote and managed remote teams for a long time. I would say it is indeed more complicated.
You may not struggle with remote work and may do fine interacting remotely, but that’s not true for a lot of people. It’s very common to hire good engineers into remote positions and discover that they can’t focus at home, they misinterpret digital communications, or that they just wanted a remote job because they read somewhere that they could work 2 hours per day and nobody would be able to tell.
The obvious retort is that you just need to hire “right”, but that’s not an easy thing to do.
"You may not struggle with office work and may do fine interacting in person, but that’s not true for a lot of people."
I have people who do far better at home than in the office, and some on the other end of the spectrum. People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.
What is hard is tooling and setting up processes that work for remote people. The world is at the start of figuring that out at scale and there is lots to learn. But hiring is always going to be the same game, finding the right people for the role and its requirements.
If I were hiring for an oil rigger it would not be more complex than hiring for a great developer. It will definitely be different, but all recruitment is different and sees different challenges. But it's always going to be about knowing what to ask, knowing your industry, and doing your very best to find a process that selects fairly and efficiently. Remote work hiring is just a different challenge that we are all just getting used to. People are hard problems to solve.
Are you claiming that the complexity of managing in-office is usually, roughly the same as managing remote teams? I'm asking towards magnitude/degree, not if both are sometimes true.
If not, you are stating the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes"
In my experience, more people struggle with remote than in-office. I've found a lot of satisfaction in returning to a primarily in-person team for this reason. But that's just my experience, an anecdote. Not everyone should be like me, and I'm not saying everyone should return to the office or that WFH is bad. What I am frustrated about is that it seems like many people take dogmatic pro-WFH positions and do not acknowledge the nuance of these issues.
Case in point, you struggle with WFH, others thrive. I just don't see any problems with employees not enjoying WFH as being significantly more complex than, say, an issue with someone struggling to get into the office on time. Or being stressed out by a stupidly long commute, or having no time with their children. And so on. There are pros and cons abundant that pretty much level it all out.
You really need a team of like-minded people w/r to remork work. They started working as a company with people from different company locations forming "a team". And after Covid started, they realized it's perfectly fine to add people to the team that do not sit in offices.
Thinking back, at my past employer, we had a subsidiary in another city, and failed to work with them. It would have been so much easier if we'd been able to do that. But management didn't like it, so it didn't work.
How could a statement about recruitment be contorted into one about management
An employer, especially one that isn't just a Human being but a company, will only pay you enough to make you sign and incentivize you to work. They don't care at all how you make your living.
And there are tons of just dumb things in remote work policy today. My company does cost of living adjustment based on the state you’re in. So if you were to move to a high cost city in a low cost state (Bozeman, MT), it’s a brutal effective pay cut. But if you move to low cost city in an expensive state (Yreka, CA), it’s a huge effective pay raise. Despite, theoretically, the employer getting the same value.
I think these will sort themselves out over time, but it’s annoying in the short term.
They refused to even talk about it, even as I protested they'd wasted so much of my time and I was about to sign. I walked away and found a much better paying job elsewhere.
Your salary has never been even related to the value you bring the company. That is just the absolute maximum they're willing to pay. Your salary is the lowest your company thinks they can pay to get a suitable employee. They pay remote workers less because there are remote workers willing to work for less, simple as that.
There is some correlation, don't get me wrong, but it looks like people are generally undervalued at the low end of the compensation spectrum and overvalued at the high end.
no shortage of threads here or reddit or elsewhere: "new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years" and the like.
there is a reason jumping every 2-3 years gives a better raise than sitting in the same job.
Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.
I guess that can happen. I suspect in the majority of cases, you keep your shitpay even if you become a supremely efficient pillar.
Employers are not friends, they're businesses who thinks like psychopaths, so manage your expectations and get as much money as you can from them. You need them but they need you, so get the juice and move on when it gets hairy.
It was identified as a stupid idea from the start but I was curious what kind of concessions it involves. Like you cant just call a useful method anymore, it has to be known what it costs precisely given the exact work load.
It didn't take long for my mind to be blown by the completely insane overhead. Counting consumption of system resources is consumption too! While exact calculation is not very complicated every step of the way I felt tempted to just estimate it. Sorting out micro transactions in a secure way???...
Eventually I got distracted by the parallels with our society. Job agencies here charge 95% of the salary earned but the administrative overhead hardly ends there! The real cost is hidden in the estimated stuff. After all the taxes and subsidies are calculated someone at the tax office has to repeat the calculations. In some almost fixed percentage of cases mistakes are made and it takes judges, lawyers, law makers, lobby groups. Tons of expensive transactions along the way.
Before you can even get to work there are licenses, permissions, diplomas, certifications, health and sanity checks.
If your job is to dig holes one would think it involves little more than a pair of good boots and a shovel. End of the day you want a shower, a good meal, a roof over your head and some guarantee you don't have to dig holes the entire year round. (We are mistaken to think people in poorly paid grunt work are interested in trying to make ends meet.)
If you have just 20 people digging holes their performance becomes extremely measurable. They know exactly how good they are at their job. Rewarding them involves such an enormous clusterfuck of fuzzy params which may accumulate to 10 fold their salary (or more!) that their performance becomes irrelevant to their reward. The cost of accounting for it would be much larger than the cost of poor performance.
What we can do is reward their boss or their supervisor. We do that to maintain the illusion that every bit of overhead needs to be there. It is all there for a reason ofc, it is a legacy system slowly migrating from manual paperwork to automation.
You could have a very simple government app like Uber so that those who dig holes may dig holes. Customers and hole diggers can review the quality of the holes themselves. Contractors can use the API to have expensive fast holes, cheaper slow ones, an all you can eat rate or a hybrid between the 3.
But that is not going to happen, in stead we build machines to dig the holes, deploy even more administration, engineers, designers, repair shops etc lots of complicated skills required and the hole diggers can get social support while looking for other work which involves even more circus of estimates portrayed as measurement.
Some sub set of the bean counting is incredibly important and their work makes modern society what it is. Don't ask me to measure it tho.
Simplicity has its appeal. We could build monasteries where each monk maintains 1 module. If it worked for kung fu why not for array sort?
You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance.
> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team.
Straight out of college I worked at a place where they handed me a 1 year contract where I was paid below market rate. When I was reaching the end of my contract I asked for a meeting to review my salary. I had a meeting but it's outcome was a firm "we want you here but we will only offer you the same pay". I sat on that and on the day before my auto renewal would kick in I handed my resignation. I was immediately pulled into a meeting with my manager where they promply offered me over 20% pay hike.
Do you honestly believe I only gained importance the moment I resigned? They were the same people who said a few days earlier in no unclear terms I was not getting a raise.
The most ridiculous aspect of your unfounded personal belief is this idea there's this universal performance evaluation law where every manager and every boss is binded to hand over rigorous pay adjustments reflecting anyone's performance, and that there is no such thing as being exploited. Back in the real world, the whole economy revolves around people trying to get more value while paying less, and there's a almost universal pressure to not only eliminate any kind of leverage from employees but also make them perfectly replaceable cogs in their machine. You are pressured to not discuss salary with your peers, let alone other employees. You get what you are paid, and you should feel happy for it. If you work hard that just means your boss is getting more returns over his low investment.
For sure I assume that everyone did their homework and found a great company to work. That's the step 1! The step 2 is to be the best version of you. That's the most important factor on your salary, assuming the step 1!
Good luck
Edit: we've asked you more than once before not to post like this. If you don't want to be banned on HN, we need you to heed these warnings.
Never happens. I have no idea where you got this from, but someone fooled you really hard.
Looks like you know all companies and every relationship between employee and employeer to come up to a bold conclusion. Or maybe you are just a fool.
Alright, Mr Gilbert, cloud engineer, microservices architect, UX person, whichever. What is your value to the company?
Well, I help to design a.....
No, your VALUE. As in, money. How much money do you make the company?
Errrr......
Why is this surprising? People like to pay less for things.
But then again, I'm grateful that we are in the position to get support from the government.
In person jobs have a smaller market. Everyone is subject to the same COL, so the min salary the employer must pay has a certain floor to it.
Remote jobs have a larger market. If you're remote, your employer may as well hire someone from Ohio that is willing to work for half your salary. You have to compete on cost with those cheaper employees.
They had a main office in South Carolina in an area with very low cost of living and salaries that matched. They had an office in Phoenix and an office in Seattle.
Ended up standardizing pay based on Phoenix since it was in the middle. This was actually a really big deal because the majority of the company was in South Carolina while only about 40 people were split between Seattle and Phoenix.
Why limit yourself to the CoL due to geographical location? How about the CoL of someone who is single and someone who has 2 kids in college? How about the CoL of someone who needs expensive drugs as opposed to someone healthy?
Oh you adjust to CoL? Well, then I expect my salary to be indexed on the inflation. Oh no? You only do the standard 3%? But what about CoL?
As a side note, a salary is not about the value you bring to the company either. It's just how much they have to pay to find someone with your skills.
Reducing your inconvenience and keeping your pay the same is a gift.
You even regain time and money you'd have lost on commute.
So these things should be considered when negotiating.
this is it really, wish we can move past this adversarial phase of remote vs office and just let people choose what works for them, as individuals and where reasonably accomodative as teams.
nothing can suck the life out of a team or individual like multi level mgmt bureaucracy involving themselves in every little decision.
Everyone on the team looked at one another awkwardly. It had never been discussed that anything else was a possibility.
The problem is even though all jobs are being advertised as "hybrid" or WFH 3 days a week, the contracts don't reflect that. They all stage your place of work is the office.
Now if my manager complains I'm late, I point out that I have a 45-50 minute commute with trains that come only every 20 minutes with very few backup options. 2 cancellations and I'm 40 minutes late. Tough. Either let me work from home full time, pay me more so I can live closer to the office, or be more flexible.
I think that last claim is missing data to back it up.
Good tech orgs list expectations for each role, and every senior role requires you to be improving the impact of others’ work as well as your own. Clearly that applies to managers — it’s literally their job — but many top IC roles pay the big bucks because you come up with projects and promote them under your own steam.
If you can do that all remotely, good for you. A lot of us cannot and we need people to be in the office N days a week for there to be some kind of personal overlap, where we can go from good to great, together.
If you make p30 salary writing unit tests for a 250,000 employee printer company then staying at home 100% of the time sounds like bliss. If you’re expected to be levelling up every six months at a series A with 30 engineers and you don’t want to come back into work post COVID… well the printer company is hiring!
The author talks about technology but everyone having laptops (versus desktop PCs) makes this worse, not better.
The major difference has been in the dead time around work. Time spent commuting, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, etc. When working in an office, nothing much is achieved during those (maybe some socialising or reading), and work takes them out of my time rather than their time.
Working remotely gives that dead time back to me, allowing me to spend it on things I consider more valuable (e.g. playing a musical instrument, doing some DIY around the house, gardening, putting on washing, etc.).
It's that which I feel has given me a better quality of life than the act of not working in an office. If an employer is paying me, I don't object to doing that work where they request. What I do object to is the extra hours that takes out of my life that they aren't paying me for (typically commuting).
It would be a utopian world where employees respect and consider living conditions (eg single vs married; cost of living in specific area) and commutes. Make yourself valuable to negotiate better terms, or look for something better.
I could not agree more. You would always have leverage with salary negotiations during interviews if you can justify the value you bring on the table. For technical positions, unless the hiring process does not involve any technical assessment, it's quite easy to spot who knows what they're doing from those who are just good on paper.
For example, I sometimes lay off work but remain in my home office, and lightly task switch between personal stuff and work stuff.
By this I mean I answer some messages, mind some not-very-engaged, long-running tasks, or scratch some itch not on the schedule. Sometimes I reinstall a system.
Without the physical toll of going to the office in person, there are frequent opportunities to catch up, or get ahead at work.
On the other hand, if I go into the office, I do it the other way, doing shopping or running errands before or after work as I usually pass by locations that I wouldn't make a trip for if I was totally home.
It’s taken a while to adjust to this and fully take advantage of it, but it’s enabled me to spend time on hobbies and work on my personal projects far more than would have ever been practical when I was working in an office. Back then I’d get in from work, feel too tired to do much of anything but scroll through social media or occasionally watch a TV show, with chores getting pushed off until the weekend. Once the weekend rolled around, by the time chores were out of the way and I felt like doing me things it was already halfway through Sunday and I needed to start thinking about Monday.
That's the summary
Which is really wrong IMHO. The employee is giving his work to the employer.
I suppose back when the demographic pyramid was still a pyramid, being offered a job, especially as a young person, was seen as somewhat of a favour.
Wrong… you mean they feed you.
So I’m asking why see work as a gift in general? And from there I brought up the fact that in german, work is something that is given by the employer to the employee. Which is really the wrong way round.
Because, as you indicated , there is an exchange happening. The employee is giving work and is getting money in return.
When you are at home, there are a million things to distract you. There's laundry that needs to be done, the kitchen cleaned, kids that want to play, there's a full fridge with stuff to make a sandwich, a TV that you can turn on, etc.
When you are forced to go to the office, you are forced to take care of everything you need to do outside of working hours. You have to make sure you have child care available, you have to make appointments for service technicians in your free time, or ask someone else to take care of it.
Seen like this, I think it's obvious remote work is a perk for the employee. Employee gets more flexibility, but employer gets less attention. So I understand why employers would pay more for people who come to work on site.
Nothing distracts me when I work from home. I was far less productive in the office with ping-pong games, chattering coworkers, long commutes, etc. When at home I just focus on the work and the day flies by. It's a hell of a lot less stressful too.
Then there is the the 5 minute round trip each time to take a piss or get a water refill, the wandering around between meeting rooms for 5 minutes that would just be a 10 second call drop and reconnect in teams. And because I'm in the office I don't have a feeling of guilt when I waste any of this time because fuck it, that's what they are pushing for.
Horses for courses.
Have you ever actually… seen an office?
Yeah, the company maybe but not the job to be done
Many people point out that this makes team cohesion harder. I don't care, my economic output is meaningless in the context of greater life. I'd like to do the least amount of bullshit work and the most amount of important work possible, and the majority of the important work I do as a rich non-farming westerner takes place at my house or in my neighborhood. My coworkers at Office tolerate me, but my friends and family at Home love me.
I view remote work as a wonderful transaction heavily tilted in my favor. The company gets the same work they'd get out of me otherwise, and it gives up a monopolization on my physical being. I'll take a salary hit for that any day. People ought to start realizing that unless they're involved in the production of goods or services necessary for other people to physically remain alive, your job literally doesn't matter. You have X hours between when you wake up and when you go to sleep. The more of those you can spend practicing the art of civilization and the fewer of those you spend grinding out increases in shareholder value the richer society will be.
Seems to work out better as people have a few weeks of gossip and rants to offload vs seeing everyone daily.
We can, and should, strive to fill our social needs outside of work.
Why? Because work environment can change drastically, more frequently than friends and family. It is, on average, less stable.
I prefer to spend my working time AND leisure time with people I care about.
When I work from home I might have a few meetings in a day, but I'm just a few steps away from hugging my wife, and nuzzling my dog any time I want. While the people at my office might be casual acquaintances and in some cases friends, they'll never ever compare to the bonds of family.
Office worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that.
Remote worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that. Also here's an insult.
For some bizarre reason, for the folks in the office it's always like "I like this style of stuff" and for the folks remote it's always "I like this other style, but also you're a drone / have no social life / think work is the only place you get any social interaction".
We have quite a large employment market and there are enough in-office, remote-friendly, remote-only employers. Just match your preferences with theirs. Some friends of mine have been remote for ages and they're quite productive. My own org is all in-office and I like to think we're doing well. It's the kind of place I like to work at.
It's just preference matching. I want to work at a place where everyone wants to work in-office. I have that. You want something else and you have that. Yep, there's folks who'd like to do what we do but can't work here because we want them to be in-office. And there's folks like me who like other orgs but I can't because the team isn't around.
When looking at the wider pool of people commenting on this issue outside HN, I see antagonism on both sides. I've seen pro-WFH people being called lazy, entitled, antisocial, uncaring (because they're "killing downtowns"), elitist (because not everyone can WFH, and usually those who can have higher paid jobs), among other litanies of derogatory terms.
The truth is, this is an issue that people feel threatened about; however you look at it, assuming an even split of full-remote, full in-office, and hybrid, and assuming you're only happy with one of those options, you'll find your potential work pool diminished by 2/3rds. That's not a small amount. So people will take it personally and try to fight - some with logic and studies, others with underhanded means - for their preferred choice. Of course, I don't think things will reach those equal proportions anytime soon, if ever. So people who prefer WFH are waging a battle for a small % of overall jobs. You can see how that'd feel threatening - to have gotten something you love, and now seeing your options diminish or outright vanish. It is especially pernicious when cases of people with deep commercial real estate investments clamor for a return-to-the-office with all kinds of negative things to say about those who prefer WFH.
I really miss the contact from the office but since most people don't go in any more, it is not worth much of my time to travel there.
Yes, we employ some people fully remotely, which is fine because that's what we knew at the time so we do get the benefit of the wider pool.
However, just because "I work really effectively at home", it doesn't mean that there are people who are not taking multiple trips to the shops, to school etc. since they can and although they could be doing their work when they get back, there is also a good chance that they won't or they'll be distracted etc.
Our productivity has definitely been lower during remote-only working although it is hard to attribute that to any one specific thing. The truth is that particularly in non-quantifiable work like development, it is hard to get a thermometer on how productive people are. The gut is unreliable and we want to trust people but if for no other reason, the office has less distractions for most people who can concentrate on their work more.
Could people make it work better? Yes. Will it always work well for everyone? No.
Would that not make remote automatically better because of all the pollution and time lost commuting?
The reality is that some people like remote work and some don’t. Some organizations have chosen to be remote and some haven’t. Nobody’s right or wrong. They can make the choice that they believe is best for them — sometimes that choice requires trading off things they like for things they don’t. For example, I work for a remote company and I really dislike remote work. But I really like the company I work at, so I choose to work there.
> I wish people would stop posting articles that imply that remote working is somehow objectively better
> we can just as easily make up the idea that people are less happy working remotely.
We can make up the idea that the sun is blue, but I think you missed my point. Please note I talk about productivity.
In the context of people claiming remote/in-person work is more productive and asking each other for proof, discussing about burden of proof, why not simply assume that remote is exactly as productive as in-person? Unless some undeniable proof is presented.
I find it an elegant way to diffuse this proof-of-burden.
Personally I decided a long time ago which one I prefer.
I can see why.
OK, let’s assume you’re right and they’re equally productive.
But who actually cares about productivity? Many individuals and individuals who speak for organizations say they do but their actions don’t match that.
And OK, let’s say people actually care about productivity. Remote work isn’t automatically better because you guessed that the pollution savings are large. Now, you can just kind of handwave that away and say of course it’s large.
But aren’t there other changes that result from remote work? How do you rank those vs. pollution and commuting time?
It will be quite easy for you to win this argument when you assert that all your assumptions are correct.
My honest opinion is that most people that enjoy the office enjoy it because it's where they've gotten most of their socialization in their adult lives. As a result, they haven't built up lives outside of work. To make matters worse, our communities haven't developed to support people having "lives" outside of work (at least out here in the suburbs).
My hope is that as remote work becomes more prolific, people will rely on their local communities more for their social lives and all of these wonderful small towns will thrive again.
And I've never seen someone comment, "I'm pro-office because I have no social life." So why is that the prevailing sentiment?
To me it's more like those in favor of remote work find people who prefer office work very threatening and really look to knock them down a peg or two and discredit them. And what better way to do that than ad hominem'ing and insulting their social life?
It’s not that surprising because it’s difficult to admit to oneself.
Just one’s observations though.
There are so many quantifiably superior reasons to want to work remotely:
- Commute time
– gasoline savings
– can walk one's pets
The only pros I can think of for going into an office are a little more contextual to the specific employee:
- Poor home environment (noisy, distracting, etc)
– Loneliness
> Loneliness
I mean those can be pretty huge issues.
And no, I’m not taking what OP said in bad faith. I’m taking it as exactly how they meant it.
They have no actual evidence (besides their keen observation and desire to discredit in-office work) and to say that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives.
Yet they claim that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives. I’m not sure but the traditional context of saying someone has a poor/nonexistent social life is rarely that of a compliment.
So you are saying that working from office is objectively worse.
If you don't pay hourly, who cares how people manage their salaried time? You should measure by outcomes whether people are sitting there all day in the office too.
People are either allowed to stay home or not.
I don't wanna be forced to go in so other people can feel good about me being there.
Ok not all teams could be reorganised, but I expect in reality a lot could be shuffled around.
Society is already too segregated with technology and I really do not think it's a good idea to move all of our in person communication to zoom calls. I really believe a lot of our current issues are due to the face people aren't communicating face to face enough and they've don't think of people on the other side of their screen as real people.
I think a hybrid work setting could be great in the right circumstances, but 100% wfh just isn't a great idea imo. If you are 100% wfh you need to force yourself to find some other social group.
Additionally, I'll add we have whole generation of kids being brought up on primarily electronic communication. They're not getting appropriate social skills to begin with and then we're talking about throwing them into a remote work world for their entire lives. I think this is just a recipe for increasing their already poor mental health.
I think we would need to somehow separate the mental unhealthiness of remote work from the mental unhealthiness of dealing with a worldwide deadly airborne pandemic. It could be that remote work in and of itself is great, but remote work with the additional mental/emotional toll of a pandemic is not so great.
I suspect that remote work was great before the pandemic, and will be great after the pandemic, and that in fact the pandemic is what caused our growing cultural communication issues (not to mention the other things that coincided with the pandemic: worldwide political turmoil, for example).
It was the social impact and not the disease itself that caused so many problems.
That's what needs to be removed from these calculations. Now, you can have that social life outside of work.
Everyone has an opinion on remote work and I’m fine with it, my problem is when PHBs mandate work from the office and make that decision for everyone regardless of personal preferences and situations.