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Comment by marcuskaz | Hacker News Reader

We didn't switch to allowing remote work but started remote and always been remote. We had an office space at Pier 38 that was closed by the city in 2011[1], so had to scramble to find space. At that time we thought we would expand more in Bay Area and found a good deal that also could support other employees visiting the Bay Area. For example, in 2013 we held our whole company meetup, but have outgrown it. The main US WordCamp used to be held in SF but now as cost goes up we are moving them around last two in Philly, next in Nashville so another use of the space wasn't needed.

We found it easier to grow and expand all over the world and didn't grow as much in the Bay Area as thought. Currently only 20-30 people of our 550+ live in Bay Area

Also as far as space goes, that is just one photo of the downstairs area of the space. You can see more at https://automattic.com/lounge/ and some early shots here https://customspaces.com/photo/uklO4BLxis/

P.S. I'm the guy in the green shirt in the photo, woo hoo!

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/pier-38-shut-down/

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In my experience, remote work is like a work tax you have to pay, and you have to weigh the tradeoffs.

If you have a completely remote team, you're paying at least something in productivity, because training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero.

Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours.

For a healthy, functioning organization, it might be worth it. However, if your team is already dysfunctional, having remote workers exacerbates the problem. (I have first hand experience)

You have to factor the fact that offices are very distracting and full of interruptions. I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.

Homes can be distracting, too! Working alone isn't "natural" for a lot of people, I feel.

Some people start a family and working from home dramatically lowers the hassle, they still get things done yet get to see their kids.

It just depends on the situation and the person. For some people it's great, for some okay, for some horrible. Luckily, there are a wide range of employment options so you can chose employment that fits your needs/desires.

> I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.

Well, it doesn't matter if you get twice the work done, if it doesn't advance the team twice as much.

If you're working completely independently, sure, work from home. Contractors have far more leeway than salaried employees in that regard.

If you're working remotely but as an integral part of the team, it doesn't matter as much that you're individually getting twice the amount of work done, if it doesn't dovetail with team objectives. Without constant communication, which is facilitated by in-person interactions and communication, the team might actually be working forwards more slowly.

It doesn't matter if you're coding two features instead of one in the same amount of time, if the two features never hit production and the one feature does.

On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too.

Many office environments are noisy too, which doesn't always make them the best place for productivity.

In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves, and for commuting-distance, remote employees to 'hot desk' when they want.

Organizations are generally well acquainted with that sort of "work tax", and the results are fairly well characterized and understood and can be worked around. (Move closer to employees, open a branch office, promote off-peak working hours, transit subsidies).

Remote work is a very recent phenomenon and as such, runs into a completely different set of problems that haven't been as thoroughly solved as a co-located working environment.

It's like picking PostGres/Mysql over Cassandra/Mongo. Sure, both have problems, but the traditional SQL solutions are stable and the problems have known workarounds. With NoSQL solutions, you might be one of the first people who are doing that particular use case, and you'll have to pioneer your own solution, at the expense of the company's business plan/profit.

> In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves

But it's not that simple, because the "remote tax" is paid by everyone, not just by those who decide to work remotely.

I think it works for some companies, not so much for others.

At the company I work for, we're spread around a few countries and are well used to working this way. But despite the benefits, not everyone chooses to work from home - not everyone has a home environment conducive to remote work, and some simply don't like it. We've got decent comms tools, and honestly, the 'remote work tax' is very seldom an issue.

It's not even a tax. It's an alternative (and likely better) work flow. Online and remote-first processes should be the default. Why? Because you can record them, distribute them, play them back and use them as a reference. Even if you don't allow remote and have any level of team colocation this should be the default.

Even meetings make more sense at your computer. Who wants to squint at an overhead in a room full of people? I'd rather get a close-up view of the presentation (screenshare) and be able to hear everyone clearly. I can capture screenshots, take notes, schedule follow ups etc.

You make some good points, but I still think there's a cost.

There are frequent times throughout my working day when I ping the dev who sits next to me (or they png me) to ask if I'm free to chat "IRL" for 2 minutes, and if so we'll do a _very_ quick pairing session on a bug, or get input from the other on a design problem. These things are big enough that they are worth getting a quick check on from someone else, but likely small enough that typing out a more complete explanation, or even having to loop someone else into the full context, is prohibitively expensive. I don't think we'd lose out much from not having that ability - when the other one of us is busy we can't do it anyway - but I think the lack of it does cost something.

> Even meetings make more sense at your computer.

I think I'd also disagree with this to some extent. I think it's easier to get distracted at a computer, distracts others who work next to people who are talking into a mic on their computer, and can add overhead with connection issues (I find adding a remote employee adds ~3-5 minutes an hour of overhead, and they are involved less in the meeting). That said, we don't have computers in meetings other than the one that is running the screen, so people aren't getting distracted by (or working on) other things, and we have a tendency to (politely) walk out of meetings that we feel we aren't adding value to.

>On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too

On yet another hand working in an office and having to deal with remote workers is also a tax on the local workers productivity.

Lost count of the number of times I've had to take time out of my work schedule to VC with remotes to solve misunderstandings that would never have happened if they were working in the same room.

Company I work at also has several people who have remote worked from the very early days and don't seem to understand the entire culture of the place and workflow has changed which throws spanners in the works at times.

It's almost as if remote work and in-office work both have their plusses and minuses, the choice to do one vs. the other involves trade-offs, and one size does not fit all. Crazy, I know!

> On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too.

The difference here is who ends up paying the tax. For remote work, the employer pays the lion's share of the "tax". In a traditional setup, the employee pays the brunt of the "tax".

And the difference here is that the 'tax' the employer pays lessens or disappears as employees get used to working remotely; whereas for the employee, there will always be a cost in time and money to commute.

With employees working remotely, the employer can also make big cost savings by needing a much smaller office space.

The employer is paying for it, it just isn't clear what ledger column the cost appears in.

If an employer isn't paying me enough to cover travel costs and another offers work from home, it is a reason to switch jobs.

I suspect that and a dozen other tiny reasons are why work in office jobs tend to pay more than work from home jobs.

Assuming that employers don't pay for commuting is a bit much. More stressed / sleep-deprived / commuting-fatigued employees are less effective at their jobs and, crucially, for the cases in which someone commutes while still spending all their desired time on leisure and sleep, then the commute time is clearly one-for-one substituted for work time.

There's plenty of research as to the negative effects of commuting (e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/urban-survival/201501/c...)

Regarding commuting, it depends on how you look at it.

For example, commuting has been instrumental in helping me lose 35 kg in 10 months, from size 46 to size 36.

I made the decision to always commute walking (30 minutes commute which I do 4 times a day because I also wanted to have lunch at home with my family). Once you factor in that your commute is 30 minutes instead of 10 minutes (or 0 minutes if you work at home), things are rather easy.

So I end up spending 2 hours a day walking, which turns out to be an activity that I happen to like a lot (its been a bit of an evolution, possibly inspired by the "Love what you do" approach to things as opposed to "Do what you love") and therefore I do not see it as a time waste at all.

"Chemotherapy is actually kind of nice considering the money you save on haircuts"

You know you could have a shorter commute, go to the gym for ~30-45 minutes of real exercise, and have more free time in the day, right?

Don't long walks qualify as "real exercise"? The op's weight loss seems to indicate so. Even without the results, you can't discount the fact that they might get far more enjoyment out of long walks than being crammed in a smelly Gym each day. It's not always about being efficient with your time. Often the most enjoyable things in life are the least time efficient.

There's a bit of irony in describing walking as "not real" exercise.

In my case, I'm not sure. I had a long history of being a member of gyms to where I did not go because I always found something better to do. In fact, in the past I even was paying for two gyms and I did not go to any of them. I suspect I'm not alone here, if all members of a gym decided to go, they would not fit in the gym. I always hear that the lion's share of revenue for a gym comes from people who never go.

I think that what worked for me (goal: increase activity) was to build the activity as a part of routine that was too inconvenient to skip, and then ending up liking that routine. I do not see anymore commuting as busy time, for me it is part of my free time, an activity that I do want to do. In other words, on weekends I now usually go hiking and I do not consider as busy time.

Glad that worked out for you! Highly dependent on circumstances, though. I have a 30 minute _drive_ to get to my office, and it's supposed to be 117 degrees next Monday. Walking is pretty impractical in Phoenix in general, and the public transportation is awful. So yes my exercise happens in a dedicated gym.

That's a very lopsided view. Offices also come with their own hangups. It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons and then deciding. Also, to be fair, sometimes there are a lot of imaginary cons that people think will happen when they go remote, but in reality, they don't happen. So it's also worth for companies to try both and see(though this might be a stretch, I admit).

Out of curiosity, was that remote workers while having an onsite presence? Or fully remote?

I ask because from what I've seen, the partially remote situations have generally been more dysfunctional than fully remote. When it's one person who missed the conversation, it just makes their life miserable; when it's everyone else, it makes -your- (the person with the info's) life miserable, and that leads to better communication processes and documentation.

- ...training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero.

How is that any different that in office? In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Remote communication often happens via email, or text, and can naturally document in an informal way. Technical documents are no harder, or easier, to 'train' employees to create when working remotely or in office.

- Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours.

This is really more a problem with dispersing your team, than it is with remote working. You can have a remote work company with everyone in the same time zone.

Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

> In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document.

Exactly, because if everybody is colocated, you can pick up on subtle social cues and figure out what's important and what people are working on just based on what people are talking about. If you spend that much face time with people, unless you're completely socially stunted, you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

> Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

There are tradeoffs to everything, and I think on this board, things have swung too far to the other side. Remote work is not an absolute panacea, and carries with it costs. Just like NoSQL is not the end-all be-all of datastores, remote work isn't the right solution for many teams.

> you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

and then a year later when you have to figure out why something was done a certain way what do you do? or when some of the people that "were there" have left and nobody else remembers?

If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything: even working in an office I always send an email after a meeting or random chat to the person involved to document what we talked about, what was decided and why. I might also cc other people that should be kept in the loop, which is also something you cannot do if you just talk.

> If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything

Remote working enforces discipline, which is good in the long run, but is not very rewarding in the short run and requires the pre-loading of effort.

Humans are really bad at making those sort of trade-offs. That's why many of us still eat fast food, smoke, and don't exercise.

Even though you're "doing the right thing", there are immediate up front costs for theoretical (but very real) benefits down the road. Even though you're doing the right thing, maybe an organization isn't quite prepared to pay the costs to do things that way. Hence, "work tax".

Also, my assertion that remote work is mainly for healthy organizations holds sway. It really magnified and focuses a light on an organization's details and flaws, and many people don't like that.

Maybe there just aren't any pictures here, but is there real work space too? Standing desks? External monitors? A place to put my own keyboard and mouse and leave them there. Why would I go into an office that isn't ergonomically friendly. I don't care how hiply aesthetic it is, I want function.

It's what I don't get about the whole outsourcing, tech sector debate; if bay area tech employees are so expensive, why not hire people that are equally or at least sufficiently as qualified in other parts of the USA, where you could get away with paying them less even though it would provide them with wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives. Essentially the question is why the heck outsource to places like India, where people don't speak proper English and the technical skills are lower in many ways, which is only compounded by communication issues, let alone why hire H1B visas from, e.g., India at Silicon Valley rates; when you could have hired net far better Americans in the long run. Western and American society suffers from a shortsightedness that will end up destroying not just the USA, but the advancement of all of the rest of humanity through that kind of mentality. You can only live on the inertia of others for so long before momentum ceases.

It sounds like there would be a huge competitive advantage in starting your own company and doing just that. You can pay much less, get much better work, and rake in the profits as you shut down your idiot competitors one by one.

That's probably overstating the case a bit. If you're hiring remote workers from other parts of the USA, I'd say you can pay somewhat less, get roughly equivalent work, and reap the profits so long as you have the skills to manage a distributed team.

Because many of the workers who are "good" come to the Bay Area for the money, the lifestyle, the location, and the job selection. If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? You also typically get to work on "cooler" stuff since the companies out here can afford to make bigger and riskier bets. There aren't too many AI/ML positions around the rest of the country, but it's hot right now here.

> If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere?

Because California, number one, and because everything costs 3-10X what it does elsewhere. I could easily double my salary if I moved to SV, but I'd have to live in a van in the parking lot like a hobo, instead of being able to afford a decent house and have a goodly amount of disposable income.

> why the heck outsource to places like India

You vastly underestimate just how cheap outsourcing is

Maybe he does... BUT I used to work for a consulting firm that would sometimes bid against far east outsourced providers when local firms had projects.

This is anecdotal but over and over again, this was the scenario:

  1. local firm collects bids
  2. As courtesy firm tells us we were 2-5x more expensive than winner, winner is in far east.
  3. 1,2,3 years latter firm returns to us asking if we can re-submit but on a more shorter timeline (maybe the project would have been 2-3 engineers for 6 mo)
  4. We come back with a new bid that is 8-12x more, has a bigger team than we would have used orgiinally, less favorable risk analysis..
  5. They paid us to take them on! Often-times we had to throw away almost everything their Bangladesh contractors had been working on for years (fundamentally bad schema, no unit tests, bad bad code)...

I have similar anecdotal evidence from Norway. A bank outsourced running IT systems to a company from India. A year later they hired a local company to fix/redesign things.

Yep, many people who have been in the industry have heard this one before and/or inherited the project-from-hell that has been touched by half a dozen offshore dev firms and basically needs to be scrapped. There's a reason why we aren't all jobless while other countries take all our tech jobs; it's highly-skilled labor, which means that the quality of the end product is directly influenced by the skill of the workers. The time differences and language / cultural barriers (I forget the name for it, but IIRC there was something in Indian culture around ~"my part is done" which is part of why e.g. There's so much trash in the cities -- basically it's not your problem -- please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting this) certainly don't help set up these situations for success.

One thing I've struggled to understand, even after years of working with a great team of relatively low-cost engineers in India, is this:

If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?

With all the close ties between the Indian IT sector and Silicon Valley I would expect it to be common practice especially among startups to try recruiting the best away from, say, InfoSys by simply paying them what you'd end up paying an inferior engineer locally.

As far as I can tell this is not done very often. Anybody know why? Or am I just not aware of it?

I don't think startups would have enough funding or the time to take advantage of it. MVPs would be done by the founders because of the time constraints (setting up a whole outsourcing setup would take a bunch of time). Also, if you fully outsourced all the startups tasks then your group that your outsourcing to doesn't need you. If a startup was well funded and has larger projects I could see that though.

The three big challenges I see are how to identify the rock stars, management culture, and time zone. It's possible to overcome all of those, but you'd need significant expertise hiring and managing Indian teams.

The hardest part would be to build a team of true startup hustlers, because the outsourcing industry has not been built around those types of people. Traditionally you have to have very strong top-down management and clear requirements since the mentality on the other end is to do what your told, avoid giving bad news, and maximize billable hours. This is something that large companies with established products can do a lot easier than startups.

In general the reduced execution risk is not worth the cost savings because you don't yet have a business, you are trying to build one. The safer bet for a startup very tight team working hand in glove where every employee is obsessed with the high-level product.

They just don't have the technical ability their western counterparts do, obviously some do but finding them is a crapshoot. Also if you pay people too much they won't stay with you and that will be a much bigger issue when you can pay someone more than they would otherwise be getting (even if it's costing you less)

There's also control, if you outsource your whole project then why do your workers even need you? They could just do it themselves and cut you out completely.

There's no grand mysterious reason. Businessmen want cheaper. They are like "Indians are already used to low payments, let's offer them 15% more so they are ecstatic". In my observations, there's nothing else to it.

I suspect there are cultural issues that break down communications.

I've seen people who've got really cool sites to show that they've worked on in their spare time, or worked on with local collaborators.

Somehow, and it's hard to pinpoint how, when they try to work with someone in the West, it breaks down. Understandings that are natural to you sitting in one part of the world may have been completely missed by your remote guy in the East. Doesn't always happen, but it's enough to warrant a risk premium.

"If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?"

Doesn't that remove any kind of gain from outsourcing? What would be the point? You now have the downside of SV salaries and the downside of managing remote teams across the globe.

"With all the close ties between the Indian IT sector and Silicon Valley I would expect it to be common practice especially among startups to try recruiting the best away from, say, InfoSys by simply paying them what you'd end up paying an inferior engineer locally."

Usually those worth their salt aren't working for Infosys in the first place.

> If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?

If you're paying them a Western salary, why not relocate them to be local? In my personal experience this is what I see happen when we do ID an engineer who isn't local but good

Your conclusion of destroying all of humanity might go a bit far - but I agree with the general idea of hiring people where they are is more competitive and I would say better overall.

Remote work allows for a better diversification of work forces across regions. For example, if somebody who lives in Detroit because that is where they were born and family is can have the same high tech job as people in the Bay Area it helps Detroit be more resilient and flexible to regional business fluctuations.

Too many companies IMO pay "based on location", which would mean that the person in Detroit gets about 20-30% of the Bay Area person doing the same work. If you make $100k a year in the Detroit Metro doing computer stuff that is still non-management, you're doing fantastic. For $1m out there you can get a literal mansion. In the Bay, you can get a totally unremarkable single-family home on a street with a bunch of people who can barely afford their property tax bills. Houses in such neighborhoods in Detroit are about $10k and you can literally buy property by the block in some areas.

Because the executives and rich people who bankroll companies aren't yet sold on remote work, and those who are mostly prefer to just hire where labor is the cheapest (eg. India, Eastern Europe)

If they were equally qualified they would still demand a comparable salary. A full stack dev in Houston makes nearly as much as one in SF with the same qualifications.

I have a hard time believing this is true in general. I live and work in Austin. When I was interviewing for the job I have here I interviewed at a few companies in SF and received offers at two to do basically the same kind of work I do here. The offers in SF were substantially larger than what I accepted in Austin. After looking at my budget more closely I decided to stay put because after taxes, cost of living changes, etc I found that there wasn't much of a difference and that I'd rather not move.

I understand that this is just a single anecdote but I work with quite a few people who have moved here from SF – and have friends who have made the opposite move – and they have all reported something similar.

A quick jaunt to Stack Overflow Jobs, Glassdoor, or h1bdata.info will show you that in the vast majority of cases, no. Different markets have wildly varying pay.

If you meant "overall net income", then the Houston dev would likely come out ahead after taxes and rent/mortgage.

That's not really going off the beaten path enough to find bargains. If remote work was more reliable and easy to find, I'd be sorely tempted to move someplace out in the sticks, albeit where there is high-speed internet access, where land and living expenses are significantly cheaper than any urban area by considerable multiples.

Plus, you get to be out in the sticks, not cheek by jowl with a million other people.

Almost every comment you have made with this account is either dead or flagged. I am surprised that your account is still active.

I think some companies think, as long we're willing to have remote workers in the first place, why not get the cheapest? Obviously you can also pay someone in India less and provide them with "wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives".

My experience with Indian devs has been their English is as "proper" as anyone's, and their technical skill levels vary with about as much variation as in the U.S., where there are also plenty of not very good developers.

The thing is, once a company has decided to prioritize saving money on developers, they are probably willing to take devs who are really not very good to get cost savings (whether they realize it or not), and there are a lot of companies in India which exist to help them do that. If they wanted to hire not very good developers at cheaper rates in the U.S., they could easily do that too. Perhaps the people making the decisions fool themselves into thinking the rock-bottom-rate devs they are hiring in India are magically highly skilled, and somehow it's easier to fool yourself this way when they are on the other side of the world.

Groupthink and investor pressure

Why not offer dorms for people to live there on a daily to weekly basis? It looks like a fantastic place to work but it seems like not a lot of people live near there.

It would be totally awesome to get a group of developers together and hack away at stuff not having to worry about going home for a few days.

Because that's an extremely expensive project that nobody would use in addition to the already super expensive space that they are closing because nobody uses it.

Also I can't imagine many people want to be at work for days at a time and not go home

There are also city regulations against using office space as living space.

The downside of working remotely all my days are at work, or is it all my days are at home :-)

Not only is it expensive, it's often difficult and cumbersome to deal with zoning and occupancy laws in a office or area that was set up mainly for business use

Most places have zoning restrictions where commercial property is not authorized for use as a dwelling. I would imagine they would need a fight a zoning variance battle to set up something unconventional like that.

> It would be totally awesome to get a group of developers together and hack away at stuff not having to worry about going home for a few days.

lol to me this is the opposite of "totally awesome"

"work for us, never go home, leave your family behind"

Yep, company dorms, company stores, etc. have been tried before. We've made labor rules prohibiting them because we realized that the line between dependence and outright slavery blurs more quickly than many expect. It's a trap.

Sadly, this gung-ho "for the company" attitude, which arises from a combination of naivety and boredom, is one of the essential characteristics that VCs want to see in prospective founders. It's one of the biggest reasons they push the "You must be young and pure to be an innovative founder!" angle, although most people aged 25+ can see pretty clearly that experienced founders would be a great benefit to any company. That experience threatens the VC game, so they keep it as far away as they can.

Research indicates that older founders perform better:

http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2010/05/the-anat...

You and me both, but there was a time when I would have been perfectly fine with this, because I lived it.

Well, it was the military, and you'd have to replace "hack away" with "non-stop exercise and dumb chores", but the analogy still fits I think.

At least in the military you stay fit!

I take it you are young and don't have a family?

Most people over 25 want to go home at the end of the day to their friends/family and don't want to live in dorms.

I would rather be unemployed than in that situation.

There are apparently plenty of large Japanese companies that own apartment buildings for their employees to live at, simply because the economies of scale make that cheaper than paying them extra so that they can all rent from hundreds of different landlords. I doubt many in the US would go for it; can you imagine if your boss was also your landlord?

This is cool when you're in college, or maybe like one year out of it.

Older adults (aka anyone over 23) typically prefer to have their own space.

And many people, surprisingly enough, don't want their job to be the sole focus of their existence.

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