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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

For me, it was easy. In 2015, we really wanted to move back to our east coast flyover-city home from the Bay Area. Google would not let me work remotely, but Netflix would. So it was a no-brainer.

It turned out to be a great move. In my experience, just about everything is better about Netflix as compared to Google: impact, pay, freedom, culture. The only thing that's worse is that I really miss the on-campus food at Google. And TGIF, eng-misc, etc.

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Guessing not a full time engineer or some kind of niche talent? Never heard of anyone going remote or even being a possibility. Its written into the culture and all job postings.

Most of the large tech companies allow but don’t advertise remote work flexibility for senior staff. I know someone who works remotely at Apple on a team on the other side of the country.

This. A lot of it depends on your VP and management chain. The VP above me at Google was very traditional and believed strongly in "butts in seats", and ironically complained he'd exhausted they bay area talent pool. There was a chance I could have moved to a different team at Google under a more remote-friendly VP, but its future and funding was much less certain, so I left instead.

I can confirm that the option is there. I'm at a big 4 tech company and recently transitioned to remote.

If it is a deal-breaker and you are senior or otherwise considered a key team member they can't let leave, going remote can sometimes work out.

Yeah but once you've spent some time on a team there and are trusted and respected, all that stuff becomes pretty negotiable.

That's what I'd hoped for at Google, and my manager would have been fine with me being remote. However, my VP did not allow remote work. We even lost out on having a fairly famous guy work for our team, because he was unable to transfer a deal he had with his current team where he could work 3 days at home (in Pleasanton, so the commute to Mountain View was terrible).

Out of curiosity, what do you do at Netflix? Jealous

FreeBSD kernel performance tuning for the OpenConnect CDN hosts. See https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an...

I'll never understand the anti-remote-work stubbornness, especially in obvious cases like that. The VP really expects talent to commute from Pleasanton, daily, when they could just work for any other of the Bay Area tech firms remotely, at an equal salary and similar benefits?

Netflix has a lot of remote employees. They also pay well above market rates. It's a good gig if you can get it.

Also from overseas, e.g. from Europe?

Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it. They also insisted part-time work wasn't an option (there were official policies for it that were kept secret!). So likewise, that was really all it took. It baffles me that companies can't be remotely flexible on these things - over 50% of the Google employees I interacted with daily were in other offices (or overseas, for that matter), so the cost of remote workers was already being paid.

> Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it.

Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?

IANAL but I don't think it's necessarily illegal by default under the ADA. The first thing the employee has to do is establish that their condition falls under a protected class and then they can request an accommodation. If the employer can demonstrate that there's no way to reasonably accommodate the employee then I believe they're off the hook - that is a much higher burden for a large company to satisfy than say for a small 10 person start-up.

Depending on the position working remotely is reasonable or unreasonable as determined by the company.

I think it’s pretty typical to say coming into the office is a requirement so full time remote would not be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.

I think the reason why many companies don’t allow as a rule is that by selectively allowing remote work, they are vulnerable to ADA suits.

If it was an existing condition or not a work related injury then most likely they have no legal recourse.

Companies can choose not to be flexible about remote work because IBM ...

> but Netflix would

Hmm, where can I find out more about remote roles there? Is it worldwide or US-only?

https://jobs.netflix.com/search?q=remote

Unfortunately that search includes jobs which say "remote is not available at this time".

All the results (at least on page 1) are local positions.

All say "Remote is not ok".

Unsure for netflix, but when I was on the job hunt, Stack Overflow Jobboard (or whatever it's called now) was a great place to find remote / contract work.

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