Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

At a former company that shall remain nameless, the bigwigs from the head office came out to announce the closing of our satellite[1] office. They offered a relocation package to the head office for some of the folks working one of the projects we had in the remote office. Except it was kind of a crap relocation offer: same salary moving to a more expensive part of the country working for a person everybody thought was an idiot.

They also gave everybody a month to accept or decline that offer.

In practice, that meant that everybody at the remote office spent a month getting paid to look for a job. It was a bit like the job center in The Full Monty, but folks were actively supporting each other: helping each other practice whiteboard questions, going over each others' resumes, etc.

If you can get current on some new technology on company time or raise your profile, do it. Folks who didn't get a relocation offer got to clean out their desks the day the bigwigs showed up.

I don't have numbers from the group of people formerly of that office, but from my experience it's a hell of a lot easier to find a job if you have one than if you don't. If your company seems shaky, the time to start looking is now.

[1] Edited per suggestion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181222 originally read "remote".

That was kind of them. The one time I actually got let go from a programming job was when the company shut down suddenly: I showed up Monday morning and found out that there was an all-hands conference call at 9 AM. Everybody in our office dialed into it and it was a recorded message that the company had shut down and we were all unemployed effective immediately.

Yeah, it's the first I've seen or heard about that happening. I suspect the company wanted to keep some of the people, but greatly underestimated how little anybody was interested in working at headquarters.

In some states, subject to some limitations, that is illegal.

E.g., California's WARN layoff notice requirements:

Per Chapter 4, Part 4, Sections 1400-1408 of the Labor Code, WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring that employers give a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local representatives prior to a plant closing or mass layoff. Advance notice provides employees and their families time to transition and adjust to the prospective loss of employment, time to seek alternative jobs and, if necessary, time to obtain skills training or retraining to successfully compete in the job market. For more information, visit WARN Frequently Asked Questions. ...

https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...

Are you sure that still applies if the company is bankrupt? Even if it does how are they supposed to comply when there is no money.

I don't know, hence my "subject to some limitations" weasel.

My principle point was to make known that immediate layoffs without notice or compensation are not something all employees are required to immediately and unconditionally accept. Know and assert your rights.

Searching "warn notice layoffs bankruptcy" gives some additional information.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=warn+notice+layoffs+bankruptcy&ia=...

A bankrupt firm virtually always has assets. The question is how these are distributed amongst creditors. Inclusive of employees.

I believe it does. In the case of California, there is an exception for "unforeseeable circumstances." Bankruptcy is usually very predictable. The law doesn't mean you can't go bankrupt; you just have to give people warning.

The fact is the MO of most companies is to deny anything is wrong right up until the moment everyone gets fired. One needs look no further than the Telltale games saga.

Isn’t it a good thing that many companies are paying their remote employees the same? That means people dont have to take a paycut to live where they want.

"Remote office" here doesn't mean working at home. It means an office that isn't in the same city as company headquarters.

"Satellite office" may have been a better term.

Without revealing too much, this was a remote office, rented by the company, with folks in a variety of roles, including management. Not a couple of random remote employees.

The question of paying remote employees the same as "regular" employees is complex. Switching to the hypothetical:

If a company is headquartered in Louisville, KY, and somebody wants to work from e.g. Los Angeles, it would be ludicrous for the remote employee to accept the same salary in LA as in Louisville because the cost of living is much higher in LA. Considering the opposite situation, I find it unlikely that a company headquartered in LA is going to jump at the chance to pay an LA salary to somebody in Louisville.

I've always found this incentive structure perverse. Take Peter Norvig and place him in LA vs Louisville. In either case he's a remote employee working from a home office. <very profitable company> will want to pay him differently depending on where he lives and depending on where their HQ is. And yet his output is the same. Let's say he prefers less dense cities, maybe then his output is even higher in Louisville, as the lower cost of living affords him a better home setup and a social circle that all can afford to live nearby each other.

Society seems to want to cram people into as small a space as possible near work places, optimizing for business progress. Seems to me to make sense in the short term and fail in the long term. Here's to hoping a silver lining of the pandemic is better utilization of space towards human happiness and the health of the global ecology. :)

The elasticity of talent of the average engineer is so much higher than that of Peter Norvig it doesn't really make sense to discuss it. For an individual person it doesn't matter where they work if theres no replacement, but for any engineer, it matters.

A company will pay as little as it can to any employee. Including Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig's minimum acceptable offer is just far higher than Average Joe/Jane Progammer's minimum.

Right now, LCoL area employees complain about getting paid less in absolute terms. If they get bumped up to HQ payscales, the HCoL-area employees will (rightly) complain that they're now being paid less in relative terms than the LCoL-area folks, despite producing the same value as them. So there's no winning, no "fair" answer.

I don't think you'll get an LA salary in Louisville. But you can get a high salary for Louisville from an LA company.

In the long run I imagine this affects the cost of living in an area for people that work for companies in that area. Ex. what happens to smalltown Iowa when people get remote jobs and drives up prices for housing and food?

If they are remote employees, why would the employee's city matter to the employer in either of the cases you mentioned (beyond any tax or employment law implications)? If the company is sure enough that the remote candidate from Louisville is talented enough for the job, it makes no financial sense for the company to lose that candidate over salary if they would have paid the same amount to a candidate in a different, more expensive city.

One exception I can see is if the company would pay a premium for remote employees living in a city where they have an office, so that they can be asked to come in if there is an emergency.

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