Coinbase will be a remote-first company
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests.
But again, maybe I'm the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I'll likely cross it out from my list of places to work.
Also I saw this from the blog post:
>There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are.
Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don't see how that's possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition.
From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway/micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that's already made.
The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k/yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.
I know of coworkers who are single and really looking back to get back to the office because they are sick of being alone in their small apartments for days at a time.
I also know of coworkers who are married with family and can't wait to get back to the office because they need to take breaks from their spouses/kids from time to time.
To think how much money the company was wasting on the office... I still cringe today.
To me the smell of alcohol would be awful? Or maybe I don't like noisy strangers? Or maybe I can't bring my comfortable chair and twin 30" monitors to a pub with me every day?
I think you've fallen pretty deep in the trap of thinking your experience and preference applies to everyone.
I'm merely showing that there is life and work without an office, and better one much of the time.
Yes I prefer twin monitors, two black cats, zero interruptions and some ambient music most of the time. When I get in the other mood, I go sit at the pub. Or I take a walk and meditate on a problem. Or I take a 50 mile ride on a motorbike. Or I fire up the local equivalent of the Uber and give some rides to the people just for the talks. Or whatever else comes to mind.
Those are the choices I would never have had I made a mistake and got another job at the office.
Better for who? Everything you described as "better" doesn't sound that way to me at all. What makes your opinion objectively correct?
>Those are the choices I would never have had I made a mistake and got another job at the office.
Good for you! It honestly sounds like you'd be a pretty terrible person to work with in a team, remote or not.
My ideal set up is a small private office about 5-10 minutes walk from home, preferably with a cafe and gym on the way.
There's a difference between working from home as an employee and a remote consulting job. There is a place for both.
> The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL.
Why is it cynical? It really benefits everyone:
1. "Remote" workers: Workers can stay at their (lower CoL) homes, with their friends, family and culture, and still work on products they couldn't otherwise.
2. Consumers: More competition, as barrier to entry is lower
3. Companies: No need to raise huge funding rounds for the most basic of products or the initial prototype
4. "Local" workers: Not everyone is relocating to your home town, so it becomes a little cheaper CoL for them too
One important difference is that "the flexibility to WFH when wanted" means you need to live near the office. Having the freedom to live where I want, or even work remotely while travelling digital-nomad style would be a huge plus in my opinion.
As for lowering the cost of staff, as someone who lives in a part of the world where developer wages are a lot lower than typical US salaries, if a company is willing to meet me in the middle and I can get a decent pay rise while the US company makes a saving, surely that's a good thing for everyone involved? Companies operate globally now. Why shouldn't that include hiring?
This is a pretty straightforward advantage of the internet. Some jobs have always been "remote". For example, writers still type their manuscripts from anywhere and mail them to editors. However, only some jobs work like this. When I did service or blue collar work I always had to be on the site to physically work the capital.
As for "career ambition", you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.
You don't have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.
Instead, you have the freedom to actually live your life. Be with you family, friends, pursue your passions, even something as simple as being able access nature or travel freely. Whatever living means to you beyond working.
From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult. I understand the power balance as a worker. In any job, I want to put in my time and hard work, earn an honest living, and then be free to live as a real human being.
>You don't have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.
I'm sorry but that came across as both condescending and judgmental. I know plenty of people chose the life they have here because they want to, not because they have to sell their soul or what not. There is a lot more perks from having a fulfilling job other than making a big paycheck, it ranges from working closely with amazing people to tackling challenging and fun problems.
I know for sure the reason I go to work these days isn't because of money, since I'm past the point where I care too much about it.
Finally there is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing financial success. Having desire to "enjoy nature" and having desire to "have money" are both greed, just in different forms. I definitely do not consider myself morally superior just because I enjoy hiking...
>From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult.
I've been both inside and outside of SV (worked in Texas, Bay Area, and now in Seattle), and I have to say your understanding of SV culture is extremely superficial, likely augmented by the cherry-picking examples and sensationalized media portrayal.
I have been in Silicon Valley for 5+ years and I agree with his assessment. Culture here is fake and hollow. A lot of hypocrisy.
I have been swallowed by the corporate machine and endured the bullshit commute, bullshit office and bullshit tasks that made me busy the whole day without making me really rpoductive. Now that I'm working from home, I'm finally realizing what I missed out on.
My quality of life is levels higher than it used to be and I'm way more productive. This pandemic is an awakening for me. I will now refuse to go back to the office more than maybe one day a week and I'm ready to change job to do so.
I would bet that 90%+ of people got swallowed into the corporate machine without thinking too much simply about it because it is the easy and convenient thing to do. I was also saying that I was "fulfilled" with my job and that my goal was not to make money.
Going remote is not the norm and therefore it takes a bit of courage to jump into it.
I've been in SV for more than twice as long as you have and have worked for companies ranging from YC startups to FAANG, I'll say using a blanket statement to describe the culture of SV is pretty silly.
Are there fakery, hollowness and hypocrisy? Absolutely. But there is also so much more to it.
Notice taken. Good for you (not sarcastic). This is why you "have been working remote by choice for years". But as the OP said:
> If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago
...and he didn't. Neither did I. In the past I have worked remotely for about a year, it wasn't great (admitted that company wasn't set up for it). I am doing it now, and I'm miserable about it.
So, OP's point seems not that something is inherently wrong or bad with either mode of working, rather that people who used to be going to the office may not necessarily be happy, or interested, to become remote workers. (Not even because it works well for you.)
I did a nothing little survey during our past team retrospective, and from a dozen of folks 1) most of them want more days working from home than pre-pandemic, 2) most of them would then want more work time in the office than from home, and 3) all of them are desperately looking forward to going into the office again for any sort of time.
This basically means that they did not modify their lifestyle for remote work.
Purging office bullshit from your life requires some changes in lifestyle, no question about it. The workplace has to be established, distractions (much less than what is in the office, but still) have to be managed. Social needs have to be satisfied sy some other means.
Still, work from anywhere (not home, mind you, and please do not confuse the two) is much better.
I really can't understand how one can be this shallow minded. Maybe the life style required to make remote work effective is not the desirable lifestyle for everyone? Maybe people value different things in life? Or maybe some people actually enjoy the place of their work and the physical presence of their coworkers?
>Purging office bullshit
For a lot of people offices offers a lot more benefits other than bullshit. Maybe your experience with office work came from a place with super toxic work culture? It sure sounds like it from how bitter you sound and I can understand how that contributed to your bias.
>Still, work from anywhere (not home, mind you, and please do not confuse the two) is much better.
For you, and for the type of work you do, maybe. But blanket statements like that is just silly.
There is nothing shallow about this observation.
If they chose not to it's fine. They just missed a different and, in my opinion, a better experience. Their choice.
I cannot in good faith come up with a type of work that genuinely requires being in an office. Not on a workfloor, not in a lab, not in a conference room - an office.
Please enlighten me.
Social aspects of offices are overrated. Less formal association is better if only because no one is forced into them.
I can say the same thing about WFH. If you have made the lifestyle adjustment then you wouldn't crave to be working remotely either.
Btw I don't know what kind of lifestyle adjust you were thinking about that can magically change someone's personality or family situation.
>If they chose not to it's fine. They just missed a different and, in my opinion, a better experience. Their choice.
Exactly, it is your opinion, but not a universal fact.
>I cannot in good faith come up with a type of work that genuinely requires being in an office.
Just like how you prefer WFH even when your job doesn't require you to work from home, a lot of people can prefer to work at an office even though it's not required.
>Social aspects of offices are overrated. Less formal association is better if only because no one is forced into them.
For you, maybe. I find my social interaction at office to be neither overrated nor forced.
If you have a family, and you are trying to escape them to go to an office or be alone in transit for hours commuting every day (which is simply time lost from your life), something might be wrong with your relationships and you should spend some time fixing that (but like, yeah: if you are essentially feeling trapped or something because you hate your family, I guess it makes sense to do anything you can to avoid them :/).
What I see a lot is introverted or ambiverted people tricked into believing their work buddies will call after they leave the company. Tricked into spending time on this shallowness outside of work hours + commute time over spending time with the people in their lives that really matter and will be there for them in darker times.
Sure there are a minority of extroverted people who want to be in the office because they want social time all the time, shallow or not. There are also parents who want some time away from home. On the other hand there are introverted people who want to be in the office because that's the only place they know how to get their social need filled anymore even though it's not truly fulfilling.
I’m sorry you’ve apparently had bad experiences (and I’m trying really hard to be charitable here and not make some sort of dig about how you clearly struggle to make friends and choose to cover it up by asserting that “most” work relationships are shallow and transitory and that people without social skills really just seek out “deeper” and “more meaningful relationship” — whoops, I failed), but this is absolute bullshit.
Most relationships are based, at least in part, by proximity. With co-workers, the initial bond is usually the work itself and the fact that you see each other frequently. The same is true for the people you get to know in primary/secondary school or in college/university. Even online, relationships are often based on being active on the same platforms — proximity.
Obviously there are plenty of people you can get to know and have good interactions with when you’re around each other that will disappear when you aren’t anymore — but how do those “deeper, more meaningful” relationships form? It takes effort from both parties.
Adults spend a significant portion of their lives working. To claim that the relationships people form at work are somehow less real or less important — just because someone you used to work with didn’t respond to your texts or agree to join your MLM, is beyond insipid.
This is anecdotal but by no means unique: the people I talk to most on a daily basis — the people I trust and rely on the most — are largely current or former co-workers. I have built long-lasting friendships and relationships with my co-workers, past and present.
Yes, it’s absolutely possible to build relationships with co-workers without being in the office (the team I’ve worked on for 3 years has been distributed, with most people not having any office to report to), but it’s also a very valid advantage of having an actual office to work from. As remote-first as my team is, the people I’m closest with are people I’ve spent at least some time with in person — people I’ve traveled with or bonded with at off-sites.
For me, being able to physically spend time with my co-workers is hugely important. It doesn’t need to be every day. But a few times a year makes a huge difference in building trust and a rapport that can be more effective at actually getting work done — whether we’re coworkers, work-friends, or form a long-lasting relationship that transcends who signs our paycheck.
I'm talking for people I've known who were in this situation because they won't talk about it themselves... Because they are introverted they are only going to talk about it with people they are close to. I've been close with a lot of introverted people because I love getting to know people and I care about them.
You seem to think that introverted people are not as good as everyone else because they struggle to make friends. That is fucked up. That is the kind of shit they deal with all the time and you wonder why so many introverts have social anxiety.
I never said all work relationships are shallow and I'm not devaluing shallow relationships either. I'm saying shallow relationships have less value for introverted people and it takes social energy for them to participate in these relationships that could be better spent elsewhere.
I personally love being in an office where I can spend time with my co workers. I go to the social events, I spend time with them outside of work. Because I have more social energy than introverted people and I don't care that I won't see most of these people in a few years.
I personally think the ideal situation for an introvert is a long term job working at a small company with the same people. Unfortunately that's hard to come by. Most introverted people would be better off with remote work because they can then live in the same city as their close friends and don't have to expend so much social energy just to get a paycheck.
No, that’s absolutely not what I said or even insinuated. To be very clear, there is absolutely no value judgment on being an introvert or an extrovert. Instead, I think people who undermine and write-off people who appreciate being around others as superficial and “surface” (like you have repeatedly), are assholes trying to overcompensate for something. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m not a classic extrovert. I’m definitely comfortable around people and probably come across as a typical extrovert, but I’m perfectly happy being alone and had to work extremely hard as a child to be be more comfortable around others. And I’ve had diagnosed anxiety (sometimes so crippling I couldn’t pick up the phone and call to order pizza and at times couldn’t even leave my house), since I was 6 years old — so you can fuck right off with the insinuation that only introverts have social anxiety or that they are even remotely linked. They aren’t. So stop with the straw man arguments.
Remote or in-person, if you want to build an actual friendship with someone — whether they are a coworker or not — it takes work on both sides. Most of the people we call “friends” at various times in our lives will not be around for prolonged periods of time — just as most of us won’t be on beck and call to a person they went to school with 20 years ago and only interact with as much as liking the occasional Facebook post. That has absolutely nothing to do with remote work.
Those “close friends” you speak of for introverts — a not insignificant portion of those friendships were absolutely built at work.
You’re the one putting negative value judgments on those who dare opine that they enjoy having an office because they like to engage with others by undermining and dismissing their relationships — not me.
I specifically said I'm in the camp of wanting to work in an office and enjoying those connections and relationships. Did you miss that part? What am I missing here?
I don't want to devalue extroverted people! I'm not trying to attack you or anyone else for liking to make more connections with people.
I think I must have triggered you with the word 'shallow' lots of extroverted people (including me in the past) get triggered by that word because they know they are not shallow on the inside. I'm not calling you or other extroverted people shallow or superficial because you like to spend time around people. I should know because people have accused me of the same. What I am saying is that on average extroverted people have more friends and acquaintances than introverted people and spend more time with people they don't know that well. And most importantly that extroverted people have the energy to do that and derive energy from that.
Introverted people loose energy by spending time around people they are not close to. Building relationships requires more energy for them. This is why remote working because work does consist of many shallow (can't think of another way to put it) relationships and that is draining on an introverted person if those relationships don't have a long term trajectory.
I'm also not saying that extroverted people can't have social anxiety. They can. 100% and it can be even worse.
What I am saying is the reason that introverts have more social anxiety on average is because people judge them for being introverted. Because they have less of themselves to give. It sounded very much like that was what you were doing in your previous post by first assuming I was introverted and then directly attacking me for 'strugling to make friends'. A trait of many introverted people. I fail to see how that is not a value judgement against introverts. It came across as very cruel and mocking.
Nope, still friends with many of them after years I've left the company.
>If that's your thing because you're extroverted then great but a lot of people in tech are more ambiverted or introverted, they value deeper more meaningful relationships.
I've cultivated deep and meaningful relationships through work, just like I did it through school as well.
It sounds like you are projecting your person experience onto everyone to be honest. I'm sorry that you have not established any real and meaningful relationships through work, but the same isn't true for many of us.
I think it happens more easily in smaller companies for sure. Big corporations seem more hollow.
At work, it is often a routine, that you talk to people, maybe befriending some of the frequent encounters. That dynamic is reduced if not lost, with WFH.
Extroverted people actively pursue social activities outside of the work, but if you are not, then it is possible work could be only opportunity you are speaking with people outside of you circle.
But my first few years as an engineer, I loved going into the office. We played ping pong, we drank, we socialized, played games. There were even free snacks! Pretty good ones. Maybe for a lot of engineers that all feels silly, but I'd never thought I'd have a job that cool.
You can call that all "bullshit perks" or whatever, but it made the start of my career so motivating and fun.
I work fulltime remote now. I'm the CEO of a company, and we're fully remote. It has huge advantages, but I wouldn't trade that first office experience for anything.
This might be true for you but it’s not true for everyone.
Do you have any data or research to back up this assertion? How is it rated today, how should it be rated instead?
Why continue engaging in a circular argument about individual preferences if you’re saying it’s subjective?
If it’s subjective why must a norm either way be a thing? Isn’t that putting pressure on people that DON’T want office culture?
You’re the one making how they phrased a comment a blanket statement. I’m inferring it as their personal preference alone. Detach from semantics and literally perceive it as another person typing text into a box.
It’s silly to expect everyone to language in a vague way so as not to appear too opionated based upon your sensibilities.
I personally far prefer WFH/anywhere. But I've always been very introverted and reclusive. I love the freedom of being able to work alone from any location, but I know many or perhaps most people crave some kind of in-person socializing; even just eating food together. I generally feel better avoiding that, but many feel worse.
People should be free to choose whatever makes them happiest and fits their lifestyle best. Everyone's different, and neither option is objectively better. There's a huge range of personalities and dispositions out there. I will always seek remote work and will prefer remote-first/remote-only companies, and many will do the opposite, and we're both making the right choice.
is the alternative to working in an office really working alone? Should it not be moving your interactions and realtionships to alternative channels, not eliminating them?
If I crave social contact, I message a friend online, or rarely, call them. If I don't crave it, then I don't.
> Still, work from anywhere
And this is the contradiction I find hard to manage. Not saying it's impossible, more in the "not sure how to do it"
Good equipment is important. A nice desk is important.
If you're hopping over AirBnbs, it's hard to carry all your stuff with you and have a good desktop experience wherever you go.
Working outside (from a balcony) is usually not great. Screens are not great on sunlight, then there's rain, wind, etc. And concentration suffers a bit
It looks a bit complicated at first glance.
The point is that remote work allows you to carve out that lovely workplace just about anywhere as opposed to being forced to some arbitrary and thus by definition suboptimal location.
I just rent houses in nice places by a sea. Mediterranean usually, but also Goa and Caribbean and whatnot. I think the shortest strech was two months or so. Median is about a year or two. At these time scales moving 30kg or so of equipment isn't much of a problem.
A desk and a chair - now that I prefer to DIY, desk from some local wood stock, chair - take a nice leather auto seat from some local auto salvage shop, mount it on an office chair's base. Done in an evening, costs almost nothing, much superior to every overpriced office chair, usually given away when I move out.
Ah yes, the "if it's not working you're doing it wrong rsponse". See also: Agile Methodology
Ironincally these types of back-forths are far more common in remote, async conversations than face-to-face.
You might get more honest results after people are back in the office for a bit.
I've been working from home for several years, but to be truely productive I need a separate working space with a good desk, good chair and multiple large monitors.
On occasion I've worked from an airport or a cafe, but the noise, seating position, table height, having to work on a small laptop screen etc just don't work for me. I would imagine this was the case for most people, and the image on sitting on a beach sipping pina coladas while making bank is an oversold pipe dream.
Some cafes are ok, many airports are not, and anybody who ever tried to work in the sun knows how bad that can be :)
This sounds great, unless you have a mortgage on a house which needs paying regardless of whether you're living there, and children in school who can't be moved all the time. Although I'll admit that since my employer is looking at 100% remote, it opens the door to moving to a nicer/cheaper house outside of the office-commutable bubble.
Perhaps a compromise is using shared office space closer to home (short commute, separation of home/work life, social interaction while you're making a cup of tea).
So you can travel for a month or 2 during their summer vacations in what would be like vacations for your kids and "working from a different place" for you.
That's also really convenient if you have family in a far away country, to be able to work from there a much longer time that you could have taken vacations.
>> Then enjoy the evenings and weekends with them in a new place
So pay all the costs and negatives of being away from home and get something similar to what you already have? No thanks.
This is the key part--many people desire a home they can build a life in, but limiting it to the commuting orbit of a few select cities really limits the possibilities of what that home can be.
The selection at a price point is worse, and the extra financial resources it consumes lower what the home can be.
This is before you get into being part of the captive tax base of a poorly-run city with little incentive to change...
I think this is what people are missing. If you have to go to work then the location of your work is one of the strongest factors in choosing where to live. For me, that means being no more than 30 minutes away from work by bicycle or public transport (I own a car but it's a luxury, not a necessity). If I could live anywhere then for a start I'd be somewhere where housing costs much less. I'd be somewhere near the kind of countryside that I enjoy like the Lake District, rather than the Fens which has some nice qualities but is mostly boring.
All the things that are touted as pros and cons of both WFH and office working are highly dependent on the individual, the company, the type of work, people's housing situation, disability, and many small life choices.
Whenever this topic comes up I'm always rather disappointed to see how many people struggle with the idea that their situation is not everyone's situation, and make blanket statements about how WFH or offices are the better option, end of argument. Ultimately it's a personal preference, and highly dependent on situation.
What I'm hoping for with all this is that a lot of companies see that remote working can be ok, and it gets easier for those who want to WFH to do so, either full time or just when necessary. It's going to be much harder for many companies to have blanket "no WFH" rules, although I'm sure there will be many that will revert to the norm.
If more people initially chose to work at the office, then the minority WFH people will inevitably be at a disadvantage and they would feel potentially left out of a lot of developments that take place in the office. Then they may end up forcing themselves to go to the office from time to time or move to a different company where more people WFH.
Or if more people initially choose to WFH, then the value of going to office gets diminished and then one may start WFH more and more since not a lot of people go to the office in the first place, then the places becomes pretty much full remote and the company may just close it down to save real estate cost. Then you either are forced to embrace WFH or you have to find a different job with a different culture.
This is a bit of a false premise, I've been working from home for over a decade and I don't mind human interaction at all, I get plenty of it when hanging out with friends and family, but I do prefer my office space at home to some open space office with lots of noise and people constantly coming by and asking for stuff.
> The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL.
While this could be true, it's entirely up to you if you want to work for such a company. Great developers will not work for cheap regardless of where they're from, and just because you live in a cheaper place doesn't mean the work you're doing is somehow lower value than the work employees in the SF office are doing.
Haha so you do dislike human interaction to some degree, or at least human interaction beyond family and friends. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, but a lot of people thrive, if not prefer those "noisy environment" you described.
>Great developers will not work for cheap regardless of where they're from, just because you live in a cheaper place doesn't mean the work you're doing is somehow lower value than the work employees in the SF office are doing.
That's not how market economy works. Doesn't matter how great a developer is, in 99% of the case there is someone who's just as good but is willing to take half the pay because they live at a place that's 1/4 as expensive when it comes to CoL. A senior engineer at Google would get paid $350k+ in Mountain View, but I guarantee you plenty of people with that level of talent who live in much cheaper areas would gladly take 60% that much, if not less. In the end what count as "work for cheap" all comes down to supply/demand. And due to the supply increase and we'll see the price point drop.
Also, I don't really know any software engineers that "thrive" in noisy environments. If you need noise cancelling headphones to thrive, then the environment is definitely an issue.
I'm one of them, and I'm also exceptionally good at multi-tasking. I also never wear noise-cancelling headphones. You call that kind of environment "noisy" I call it "stimulating".
Not everyone works the same way.
Here in Australia, plenty of grads are just as good as someone who might get hired at FANNG. How much are they paid? With the exchange rates taken into account, half as much.
What I think we’ll see is a reduction in SF salaries and CoL, and an increase in ex-SF salaries and CoL.
Once you’re a professional and know your worth, then you know what’s a cheap salary and what’s not.
What I’m saying is that “what you’re worth” is heavily influenced by the area you live, and a $X in SF developer is only worth $X in SF.
They are not worth $X in Thailand; you are welcome to try and get SF salaries for a remote role and see how that works out.
I think you’re speaking from a myopic high-CoL view. High performing FAANG engineers take substantial paycuts to work in lower CoL areas within the US, or overseas, all the time. We get a lot of them here in Australia.
As another example, leading machine learning researchers in China are making a fraction of leading ML researchers in SF.
If you’ve had a look at who’s leading in ML research these days, you’ll realise the disparity.
If Google and Amazon remote only for example, salaries would go up everywhere as they competed to hire the best developers who never want to leave their hometowns.
They wouldn’t hit the SF rates, as the necessity isn’t there, but for most things will improve.
For entry level staff, Keep in mind, there is a floor for developer salaries... and that is the salary of any other job available. For example, in VA you can’t pay developers less than 60k or else the new grads will just walk off into construction work and trade schools. For a company that is remote only, they also have to worry about their targets simply moving to get a better job too. They can’t stiff someone in Mississippi for their salary, or else the person will just move to NYC.
Because the option will also be extended to all your colleagues.
And the moment a team gains a single remote worker it gains a load of process and ceremony. Every conversation becomes a scheduled meeting, every scheduled meeting books a meeting room with AV equipment, every meeting gains five minutes of AV setup time, everything that would have been a group of people at a whiteboard turns into a presentation prepared in advance by a single person, and every lightweight task tracking system gets replaced with Jira.
All of which is done with the best of intentions - you don't want Remote Person to be excluded, or unable to see the whiteboard. And the changes aren't terrible - plenty of companies use Jira quite happily. Some people would even prefer a 20 minute scheduled meeting to a 10 minute interruption! But each change makes your life slightly more like the cliches and jokes about corporate life.
It's not all downsides of course; if you get to avoid commuting or working in an open-plan office you might find on balance it's less alienating.
Regarding location: I don't have roots in SF/NYC/Seattle where all the well-paying tech jobs are, and have no desire to make any of those cities my home. Lived in NYC 5 years, that was enough for me. Visited SF for a weekend for an interview, was appalled by the blatant homelessness on the streets. I'm not really interested in living anywhere long-term where a "starter home" goes for $1m, especially a boring suburb like Mountain View or Menlo Park (to be fair I've never visited, but I grew up in the suburbs of DC and U.S. suburbs just aren't my thing). While working remotely, I've been able to travel the world, and more recently settle down in a (first-world) country where my cost of living is no more than 1/3 of what it was in NYC, with increased quality of life.
Regarding the office bullshit part - every office job I've ever had has office bullshit. You're expected to be there between 10:30am-5:30pm, or whatever the mandated hours are, passive aggressively enforced by some dreaded morning standup where for some reason the time is non-negotiable. You can bust your ass off for the first 4 hours of the day (probably the limit of productive work before reaching diminishing returns). Then it's 2:30pm and you've done a day's work but your brain is fried so you know you're not going to be productive, but you can't just leave early because then your PM and co-workers on other teams will think you're a slacker, and the executives will be concerned that their secretaries, oops I mean "executive assistants", who get paid a fraction of your salary despite working longer hours, will start to get jealous. So you have to figure out a way to burn the next 3 hours, maybe have your IDE up in one monitor while reading HN in another.
Meanwhile when I WFH, when I know I'm not going to be productive, I just do something else and don't have to put on this facade of looking like I'm being productive 8 hours/day. As a night owl I'll get into a flow state and pull an all-nighter one day, and then take the next day off. I don't set an alarm clock before I go to sleep because I'm more productive when I'm well-rested.
Also open offices suck. Maybe I wouldn't be so appalled by office jobs as much if we at least got our own cubicles. As fun as it is to make fun of cubicles, they're a hell of a lot more comfortable then being on an assembly line of desks in a giant coliseum. Though no matter where your office is, it eventually gets boring. Variety is always good, and remote work gives you that freedom.
You also need to realize that offices are not made to be productive but are made so that people can escape their daily life: Kids at home, or wife that you don't want to see anymore. Just check all the people with kids that cannot wait to go back to the office.
Offices are made to be productive, including by aggregating everyone into one physical place and fitting it out with functional, ergonomic and productive equipment — beyond your desk, it also includes whiteboards, meeting rooms, and even the water cooler.
It’s also a place of team and social bonding. Am I the only one that misses drinks with my colleagues, or dinner at a local restaurant after work?
I would invite you to revisit that assumption. Offices are made to FEEL productive. Who decides on getting an office? All the research shows that open spaces are a huge fad and make people on average less productive (for work that require deeper stretch of concentration).
> Am I the only one that misses drinks with my colleagues, or dinner at a local restaurant after work?
I am missing those things but as you said yourself they are AFTER WORK
So is that really a surprise?
Offices are meant to be productive, but real estate in SF, NYC, etc makes it too expensive to design offices for productivity.
The fact that companies still pay $$$ for an office in the bay area is for management purposes and making sure that employees are "buts in seats" for 40+ hours a week
Most companies I've worked at everyone just goes home after work, and there was little camaraderie. People generally didn't even grab lunch together, just ate at their desks. At every job I've had there are at most 2-3 people I continue to stay in contact with afterwards. At some companies there were maybe monthly happy hours, which at some companies were fun, but that would basically the extent of it. I did really enjoy participating on one office's sports teams, but only big companies have that.
Office life certainly would have been way more enjoyable if I had more friends in the office, but the atmosphere at most of the companies I worked at just wasn't conducive to that. I wonder if I just had bad luck in working at companies with little social atmosphere, or if my experience is the norm.
I think that a big reason for this is the politically correct nature of the office. In university for example you can say whatever the hell you want, so one can more freely express themselves and find their group. But in offices, you're expected to exhibit professionalism and not offend anyone. So basically you can't talk about politics or anything controversial - basically anything actually interesting, limiting conversation to boring small-talk and making it hard to make real connections/friends. I mean if I spoke anything I just wrote about in an office that'd be sacrilege and I'd probably be fired the next week.
You can work remotely and commit literally half that amount of time to the company and maintain the same output. That's 20+ hrs/week of loss you've now reclaimed for yourself.
You can spend some of those 20+ hrs on social activities and events. I made plenty of friends at local video game tournaments. We actually have common interests compared to an office where you're stuck with whomever happens to work there.
Also working in an office was the best with a small team in a separate room with a nice view, the noise from open office plans is so bad for people like me, who can't work with music in the background on the headphones.
Music I find too distracting and white noise too harsh (makes me feel like I have a hangover) but pink noise is soothing, almost like being in the womb and really helps me focus
When people have this issue I always recommend NYC. I know it's not the easiest city to live in, even with a tech salary, but at least the gender imbalance is not a problem at all.
My first "real" job had WFH options for T/H which I regularly took advantage of, and from April 2014 on I've been 100% remote.
I rode out a few consulting gigs and then went full-time for a NYC company, my requirement was that I was able to WFH - and then I stayed living in Cincinnati at the time.
I very thoroughly enjoyed my all-expenses paid quarterly trips to NYC, and I very much enjoyed not having to have any commute. I worked from home or various coffee shops near me - and got to make a few friends that way.
Now I run my own e-commerce business. The business is registered in the US, all customers and business relations are all US based. I live in Bali, Indonesia and my two employees live near Manilla in the Philippines - so we're 100% remote.
I love having the option to work from home, explore the copious cafes and restaurants often, as well as occasionally will go to co-working centers. It all depends on my mood - but I have the option for it all!
I have the added benefit of living in a heavily dense for remote workers - so whenever I want to be social and co-work, I can call any number of people to hang out.
It's given me the option to travel the world, work at any time of the day I want, save countless hours on "meetings", saved a fortune in commuting hours and gas - I could go on.
So I fully empathize with enjoying the work environment, but I also love having all my benefits of working remotely. If you're 100% remote and struggling with the social aspect - you just need to find something that works for you.
- Tourist Visa (30 days) - Visa On Arrival (30 days + 30 days extension) - Social Visa (180 days) - Business Visa (Valid for 1 year, but max 60 days at a time) - Bonus Visa: Emergency Visa for COVID-19 (Unknown - We're allowed to stay until they lift the restriction. Not much info right now, just know I'm legally allowed to be here even though I've overstayed my current 60 days on the Business Visa)
Correct - after you hit those limits you do a visa run. Just involves leaving the country and coming back. No one cares if you were gone for 6 hours or 6 years. I usually either do a morning flight to Singapore and evening flight back if I don't want to disrupt my life, or I'll take the opportunity to do a 1-2 week trip somewhere.
Pretty much the only "usual" route I haven't tried is the KITAS/KITAP which is a working visa. You would get this if you're either working for an Indonesian company, or running an Indonesian business and issue yourself the visa. These are good for 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years I believe.
Might be different for SaaS companies though where servers are distributed, haven't looked into that.
I've found I can almost all of the benefits of going into an office by having a nearby coworking space / community which I like, often more-so.
I'm pretty sure 90% of the people commenting on this thread have never actually lived through working without an office for years, and these people have no idea what they are talking about.
Here's what happens to so called WFH people:
Phase 1. It's exciting to work independently and productivity rises for a couple of weeks.
Phase 2. Working from home gets old very very fast, and you end up pushing yourself to go work at more public places like coffee shop (otherwise your productivity goes down no matter how productive a person you are).
Phase 3. If you work out of coffee shops for a long period of time, this gets old too. Not everyone reaches this state but many people do. You would rather work from a fixed place with less uncertainties than floating around different coffee shops every day. And this is why coworking spaces exist and people pay a lot of money to work out of coworking spaces.
Everyone paying ludicrous rent in SF proper who can now move, saving thousands per month
> If I wanted to stay home forever
> most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction
Your company being a remote business, doesn't mean that you ONLY MUST work from home. It means you have the flexibility. You can work 3 days from home, 2 days from an office or co-working space, enjoy being around your friends and like minded folks or elsewhere.
Your entire response is based on false assumptions or a purposefully wrongly painted picture of WFH. Maybe your view is badly skewed because your only WFH experience is a pandemic lockdown, which is not what true WFH looks like, just like going to the grocery store with 2 metre distance and a face mask is not how normally people go to grocery stores when there isn't a pandemic.
This gives me time to see my colleagues, interact with them in person, quickly accomplish certain tasks that can't be easily done over a call or screenshare, and have that social interaction (probably only matters to those that enjoy their colleagues, but still, it's a thing).
This would save me some money each year in gas and in time driving and would strike a good balance for me. Sadly, I think my job is going to go back to 100% in office. But I also know that my general feelings on this are very in the middle and finding a local (to me) company that'd be willing to do this is pretty low.
The communication concerns you are talking about do exist when there is a mix of office-based and remote staff. But those problems evaporate when everyone is remote. You learn new communication styles, and everything is different, but it works. That being said, I do agree that if you have a split company, the remote staff ends up being a little out of the loop. For some people, that is acceptable, for others it is not. I'm in that boat at the moment, and I accept it because the benefits of being at home outweigh my desire to be involved in all decisions.
As far as lowering costs go, yes it is a cost saving measure and it does mean that cheaper talent gets hired in. And sometimes the talent is lower quality because of that as well. Again, whether or not that is acceptable depends quite a bit on your own career goals and motivations. I am a 47 year old coder, transitioning out of coding, who has already accomplished all I wanted to in this industry. Someone 20 years younger than me who is ambitious will certainly desire a different working environment than I.
Very happy WFH, and have.. on and off, for years. Sometimes self-employed.
Also like part time digital nomad-ing.
Companies that are WFH friendly tend to have less meeting waste and office culture time wasting. The last company I spent time at had a nice building but horrible amenities. The kitchens were swampy and busy, meeting rooms difficult to schedule, inaccessible VPs who were always in meetings, etc. because decisions took forever the workforce also spent a lot of time waiting, and the socializing was endless. I just find less of that when working for a company that has tuned away from that.
That includes organizations where there was no office (well, a condo in the Philippines, for people who wanted to collect occasionally or when local weather impacted connectivity).
It's easier if everyone worked a PST schedule, but in other instances... having hand-off overlaps allowed for teams to work independently but also leverage their counterparts.
Agency is worth a lot to me.
This isn't cynical, but the sword cuts both ways. Eventually, those lower CoL areas will equalize towards a higher CoL as folks begin moving there to WFH. The other way around will occur there too, as the discount to entry or mid level IC engineers will erode over time, and the good ones will cost more because of trajectory, while the more middling ones likely will experience some erosion due to increased labor market competition.
With that said, I can't really speak as to what the second order effects or black swans will be regarding the shift to remote first. Some speculation:
- Will suburbs become more or less attractive as commute becomes less important of a perk?
- Will more remote tracts of land previously relegated to just outside the reach of exurbs become more or less attractive now that inhabitants are no longer precluded from virtual labor market participation?
- Will a caste system solidify around those who continue to commute to the office versus those who do not, or will it dissolve as the majority moves towards working and collaborating virtually?
- What will the effect of timezones be? Will we begin to see nations organize around timezone based vertical blocs as economies increasingly shift towards virtual labor and knowledge work?
I've had a similar experience. WfH does a lot to inhibit those conversations by raising the bar to informal conversation. A mixed environment will tend to mean that informal discussion happens in the office first, and over video link when people remember to ask the others. I've seen this blow up into major tension with as few as three or four people involved.
I think a lot of people are low to mid-level ICs whose career ambitions don't include promotions. No few are quite attached to the freedom, the romance, of being a digital nomad.
Remote First != stay at home forever. You're being deliberately inflammatory towards people who prefer to have control of their surroundings, including the people they surround themselves with.
Even physically, I find personally, it'll require quite bit of investment to make WFH viable/productive for it to be permanent, to have a permanent "work" room set up. Limited space shared with my personal computer and equipment are not very ideal for the productivity.
Still then, I would certainly prefer getting out of my place and working outside of my home.
It's one thing someone joins the company knowing that it's a remote job, I'm curious how people are adjusting to this change.
I'm curious though how this attitude will change if a lot more companies (and eventually a majority) move to remote work. Currently (pre-pandemic) when I WFH my friends are all at their offices. So is my partner. I'm alone. Therefore I like going into the office a few days a week for the social aspect, even if it's just a chat at lunch. If more people are WFH though I might be able to meet my local friends at lunch. Or meet specific people at cafés or other locations to work together for a couple of hours. I would be able to invest in a better home office setup too.
People see quite divided on this issue (I love WFH/I hate WFH) so maybe it's important to keep in mind that the WFH you are currently experiencing is nothing like a normal WFH (due to the pandemic) and if lots more people start WFH then WFH in general has the possibility to change drastically and be much less solitary.
Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed.
Multisig works great across distances. I’ve built coordination apps for multiple distributed parties to propose and approve and sign Bitcoin transactions before. It’s pretty straightforward.
But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Let’s just accept that the world is complex and people are different. I don’t think it’s necessary to convince the other side everyone should work from home from now on.
Thank you for that nuanced view. Many comments here want to drive home the point about how all office offers is "bullshit" and "distraction and toxic culture", and anyone who enjoys working at an office with coworkers don't care about actual productivity and only want to do it because they want have someone to gossip with during the day...
There was literally a top comment here that implies someone isn't even living the life of a "real human being" if he's not WFH. That is such a ridiculous stance to take.
People have different personalties and value different things in life and are in different situations in life, there is no one solution that would make everyone happy.
Remote work is not WFH. It is not a discussion about the home vs office environments. This is largely irrelevant.
The fundamental shift that Remote Work will bring is that it will allow people to separate physically where people live from their work activity. This means that people will no longer have to live close to their jobs - for whatever definition of "close" you have. It's one degree of freedom that everyone can get when choosing where to live.
And it is a very important degree of freedom. When choosing a place to live, one has many things to consider: is this a good environment for my growing family, will I be surrounded by like-minded people, can I find good schools, is the weather good for the kind of activities I enjoy doing the most, etc, etc... but none of that will matter in a location if the jobs are not there. In the current situation, people flock to where the jobs are because they can't afford to choose a nicer place with no jobs.
If you prefer the office environment, you can and will be able to have that even when Remote Work becomes the norm. The key point is in understanding that your office can now be in SV, Texas, Croatia, some city in South America, South East Asia or the Ukraine and you will (should) not be missing out in any professional opportunity.
If you know of companies that have made changes like Coinbase, please help me build the list by sharing anonymously here: https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0
Aside: Companies, please stop using Medium for your corporate blogs. It’s super unprofessional.
Pros: I save an insane amount of time due to not having to waste my time commuting. Even a 10 min bike ride takes much longer in reality since you have to properly dress, come in, out, settle down, prepare etc... So I have much more free time. Also no distrations is 10/10. We have an open office and the distractions cause a severe drop in my productivity. All talks can easily be had through Slack. In fact I much prefer Slack since there is not BS time wasting: you have a talk with a VERY SPECIFIC agenda, nothing else.
Cons: connections, and I'm not talking about "nice to see a human face" or that kind of mundane-waste-of-my-time-BS-water-cooler-conversionation. I'm talking practical things: new business connections by meeting random people for example can be easily done face-to-face without sending any cold emails, there is no denying that "many businesses/connections get done during the smoking break"
To understand what real “remote first” might mean, let’s define the status quo: “in-person first”.
To me, in-person-first companies are those in which being a remote employee means hampered career potential, and mingling with the right people at the headquarters is sooner or later required to advance.
By that logic, remote-first companies either flip that on its head, or at least make personal presence not a factor while encouraging remote participation.
Becoming X-first implies a fundamental shift. Improving X does make you more X, though.
> To address all of these, we will form a cross-functional team to oversee this transition. This group will identify the changes we must make to become a remote-first company (e.g., around people management, recruiting/talent, culture and connection, and documentation and async work…), host open design sessions with all of you to surface ideas, considerations, dependencies, and concerns, and partner with internal experts to redesign how all of this works for a remote-first Coinbase.
In the definition I believe makes sense there is just one defining trait, and the author manages to tiptoe around it.
It’s unclear whether the changes promised are cosmetic (to convince remote workers they aren’t disadvantaged) or fundamental (actually making remote staff equivalent or even prioritized first before on-location staff).
Covid has forced many companies to run the previously-risky experiment of whether they can thrive while remote, and it's unsurprising that those that can remain productive will use it to evolve + reduce costs.
Historically most other services were Rails/Sinatra with Postgres. These days there’s a lot more Golang being used for new services.
There’s also some services that are serverless, using Lambda and DynamoDB but these are a minority.
For the employee though it’s going to be tough in the long run. Building relationships at work is one great way to get things done not just in the team but also across teams. So code might get written but the overarching dynamics about how things happen in a workplace are changing big time. We don’t see the effects of them until sometime.
Hire anyone in the world at reasonable salaries.