Facebook to shift permanently toward more remote work after coronavirus
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"Cost of Living" adjustments are a red herring, what they really are is really "competition density". There are plenty of tech companies paying great salaries in the bay because they have to, otherwise they would just go work for someone else. On the other hand, if you lived in Oklahoma you aren't going to say no to $LOCAL_OFFER+10k just because bay area salaries are $LOCAL_OFFER+90k.
As long as this disparity exists, I forsee bay area salaries and CoL still being high. Until companies move headquarters out of the bay, the trend will continue.
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Similarly, in this thread, Consultant32452 states [2] that the real argument is between those who can demand a high salary regardless of geography, and those who can only demand a high salary _because_ of geography.
The mistake is many people in the latter group think they are in the former.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162855 by hn user nemothekid [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23265158 by hn user Consultant32452
It sounds dramatic expressed that way, but doing so is committing the binary fallacy.
In reality, there is a spectrum of the leverage between employees and employers that depends on many different factors including the employee's knowledge, skills, experience, reputation, trust, institutional knowledge, and even the degree of the employee's willingness to show up regularly in person.
That and the extent to which the employer values any of those.
The covid19 wfh emergency is going to modify that spectrum, depending on the job, cost of living, and the area. But it is not going to get rid of the spectrum altogether, just as it isn't going to eliminate the intrinsic value of cities and metros as factories for creativity, just diminish them a bit for a subset of the employees.
It is not only on remote work, same with Google privacy issues, Zoom issues, micro service/monolithic, Electron... Most of the big conversations on HN have been going on for a long time and still do
Now I've not shown up onsite to ANYONE in 3+ months (we went remote early before shutdown). And it's not clear to me that value has diminished, though I need to up my zoom game a bit.
So some people may be discovering they thought they were geo tied / competitive but may be more broadly valuable or able to serve into that market remotely more easily than they thought?
Probably the only thing I take issue with is your second point. No matter how much companies talk about how much of a "talent shortage" there is, the mythical "overpaid engineer" in an area with high competition density is a lot rarer than they'd appear. To even get and keep a median salary job that lets you move there (and stay there), you're competing with (and often have to lose to) a lot of folks.
Social participation in that world and the learning of what gets rewarded and punished during your formative years helps condition you towards going about solving problems a given way, and alters you as a person. I am sure that I would be different if I spent the early formative years of my career in SV instead of NYC. I'd be solving different problems with different people and moving up career wise through different maneuvers.
So here's my question: will the pivot towards remote work diffuse or further reinforce hub centrality for current tech hubs? To be honest, I'm kind of mentally split on this one. Here's what I could imagine along both sides:
For concentration:
- Lacking differentiation, areas outside of tech hubs will become increasingly commodified (one giant suburb), stratified and divided into castes - Executives will tend to cluster around hub centers, middle managers around suburbs, ICs around exurbs and further; moving up will require "moving inwards" - Customer and capital consolidation into cities will continue - City lifestyle will continue being a status symbol synonymous with affluence, success, clout and social standing
For diffusion: - Propped up by inflated prices out of line with their underlying assets, hubs will crash economically when people have the option to work there without living there - Companies seeking to evade the "geography tax" will learn to work remotely to gain an edge in OpEx over competitors that don't and through lower margins gradually beat competitors that don't adapt into submission - Natural disasters, climate change and pandemics have/will continue to spark continued interest in the "retreat from society" - The pioneer spirit will come into vogue again, as enterprising contrarians try to rough it on the frontier once more, taking risks on developing fringe territory to capitalize off the nonlinear value they add (this, along with DoD funds/braintrust, was how SV began)
I don't know. It's hard to reason about what the outcome will be at this point. Greater flexibility seems like it would lead to heterogeneity. But as always, there are nonlinear second order effects that we can't think of now that will doubtless seem obvious in retrospect. What do other folks think?
Isn't this already the general pattern? I see that continuing, but with a very slight diminishing of the mega-hubs and a slight boost to secondary hubs (Austin, Boulder, etc).
> For diffusion: - Propped up by inflated prices out of line with their underlying assets, hubs will crash economically when people have the option to work there without living there
I think any prediction of the loss of the significance of cities is pretty far fetched. Cities have been robust to millenia of changes, including multiple past pandemics that have always disproportionately affected them vs more remote areas.
> [Companies] will learn to work remotely to gain an edge in OpEx over competitors that don't and through lower margins gradually beat competitors that don't adapt into submission
This will only happen in sectors with competition over thin margins and high OpEx as a percentage of expenditures, like running a manufacturing plant. That doesn't really reflect the kind of tech work done in tech hubs, which is CapEx and creativity heavy. Even pure software has to stay abreast of consumer and cultural trends, which are largely form in cities. A lot of software are dynamic cultural products, similar in many ways to movies, music, and TV shows. It could. however, affect things like consumer-facing tech support, but that has largely already taken place - a lot of tech support for major companies happens out of lower cost cities in the US, not the expensive tech hubs.
The important differences from typical offshoring are that it's costlier, but comes with fewer cultural, linguistic, and time zone challenges.
Productivity as an employee is about meeting a bar (that you partially define along with your employer). Caring about maximizing productivity is the goal of your employer. But you have some leverage in this job market so it's not like they can squeeze you dry. Remote only helps the employee side of that adversarial relationship.
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc. There is a huge social aspect that is lost with WFH that zoom can't replace. Imo that reduction in socializing has reduced my work performance because I've noticed I just sprint ahead for 4+ hours straight and burn out really hard at the end of the day.
I like showing up at work to work together with my co-workers. If you don't then maybe you should get a new job where you like the people you work with.
Am I really not looking forward to the new remote work future. Maybe someone will come up with a way to restore the socializing I got from work. I don't just want to hang out with friends. I want to work together with people on a common goal, and by "work together" I mean I want to do this in the same space. Just like eating lunch on zoom or going to a virtual bar via facetime is not as good as actually siting at the same table with friends neither is remote work as fulfilling "for me" as actually being in the same space as my co-workers. But then again I like my co-workers and I like the things we are building together.
I don't think this is guaranteed to happen. Another possible outcome is that tech salaries will pin to the lowest common denominator, such that employers will "outsource" much of their engineering work to engineers that live in low cost-of-living markets.
And this change isn't going to improve employee leverage, it's going to decrease it substantially when all companies develop processes to have a significantly higher pool of candidates to hire from. Long-term employees will look at having a company-provided office with a good work environment as a luxury.
This is the path to mediocrity and leaving tons of money on the table in much of the tech industry.
Now, WFH I'm free to set my own schedule. Sometimes I do my best work later in the evening, something that I never had time or energy to do while following the "9-5" schedule.
I don't miss the socialization much, probably because of the roll my family fulfills. The most important difference now is that I have a lot more patience with my family, because I don't feel the constant stress of my old commute and schedule.
I was super productive in the first month of WFH, but that spike is going away, and I think a large part of it is meeting fatigue. The projects we are working on require coordinating with lots of devs within our team and then devs and PMs on other teams. That means lots of meetings here and there to make sure we're all on the same page.
There are days where I have 30 min or 1 hr breaks between meetings, and I just cannot get productive in that short window, knowing I have another meeting coming up (which sometimes I need to prep for).
My team does have lunches together remotely, but having to be tied to the computer the whole day, I often want to drop out of those and just be outside in the sun.
But to your point about burnout, I find that that's the other extreme as well. In those afternoons or days that I don't have meetings, there's a sense that, okay, I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard. While at the office, you'd have occasionally breaks and conversations in the hall when you were getting up for coffee and you could see people's rhythms. At home, I don't see that, so my natural, irrational belief is everyone must be working hard, so I should too.
But FB people ops (or beyond) aren't stupid and hopefully they can come up with ways to intentionally replace this. Won't be the same but something is needed and will be better than nothing or ad-hoc.
This sounds like a normal day in the office for me pre-lockdown :/
The feeling of "I have to go hard now because everyone else is working hard" can also be pretty hard to shake. Especially if most people are heads-down and there's no chatter on Slack or email or anything going on.
1. Companies have to invest in work from home practices and they have just started to do that. Using zoom and creating more meetings to replace in person experiences is not sufficient.
2. People have in effect just brought work into their home, into a house with no child care and generally no prepared work spaces
So please don't use this period as a reference for what WFH looks like when an organization is dedicated to doing it.
So in some ways, the current situation is actually an improvement over a more typical split environment.
Ask me to WFH in a shared room in a tiny SiValley apartment with construction, gardeners and the neighbors music blasting randomly and I will show you how to waste $250k per year.
I’m on my 10th year of wfh with just a handful of days per year in the office and I notice how each time I’m in the office I realize I actually like that guy who is professionaly the most annoying one. This is extremely important for an organization to work. I do it too little and while I wouldn’t want to go 100% to the office I realize I’m not doing it enough.
We are 90% remote. Most remote employees are in the same area though, so sometimes they commute to the office for weekly meetings or just to hang out and work together.
I don’t live in the same country so I’m 100% remote. However, I still travel to the office ( when there isn’t a worldwide pandemic going on ) a few times a year.
I think giving people the option to work in the office when they want to is the best solution. Keep meetings on skype/jitsi, whatever, but give people the option to attend in person. More people will come than you might think.
I manage four small development teams and the one metric I track is velocity or velocity per developer (VPD). If you're familiar with scrum, you probably have a sense of what this means. (Note: this data is tracked in an open spreadsheet and not used to reward or punish but rather to adjust and adapt.)
Anyway, we went full-time remote from in-office 9-10 weeks ago. We did have some experience being partially remote (team members in different offices) before this. A comparison of avg VPD for last 3 sprints in-office (WFO) vs last 3 sprints (WFH):
Team | WFO | WFH
1 | 8.6 | 7.8
2 | 9.2 | 7.6
3 | 8.1 | 7.6
4 | 7.5 | 7.7
My impression is that productivity has held more or less steady and VPD will eventually not be too different from where it was.
I've also talked about this individually with members of my team. The consensus seems to be leaning toward a flexible mixture of WFH and WFO. That's the future I'd like to see.
Suffocating Agile, as is the standard these days, is about pushing away risky, but really valuable tasks, in favor of fine grained, easily estimated and understandable tasks that are only of minor importance but "feel" like progress. They are more amenable to Bad Agile, and so are the tasks that get selected increasingly in the long run.
WFH is far, far better at deep work, which is much more important to the long term value of a company.
Schools are closed.
"Velocity is the sum of the estimates of the stories that were completed in an iteration. If the programmers estimate perfectly, it's simply a measure of the number of hours that the programmers worked, minus interruptions. The number is often confused by estimates that aren't 100% accurate. Velocity measures a strange combination of estimate accuracy and hours worked. It's a great planning tool, but as a metric, it has serious flaws."
https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Productivity-Metric.html
Also, ideally, you should be able to meet your colleagues once in a while to discuss important matters and keep a human connection. But surprisingly lots of trust and friendship can be maintained at distance.
Take time to refresh, slow down during the day and try to maintain social contact despite the lockdown (whatever your local conditions are, you might have to use remote methods of course).
I've been able to work well those last two months but can't wait to hug all my colleagues - miss them as well.
The former are generally pro working from home while the latter feel more swamped and are always talking about how busy they are now.
My guess is that for the first group it's pretty much business as usual, while the second (not generally producing visible output) feels that meetings are the only signal to indicate work being done. And as a result # of meetings in their area has gone up dramatically.
Would love to hear a counter from managers, perhaps I'm way off the mark.
Now that I work from home, I've more time at my hand so I am working on my hobbies which make me more productive at my work.
Zoom/Phone don't quite replicate that experience - they require focused attention. In person, your attention can "wander" while you are still focused on the conversation. Look how many people maintain eye contact in a cafe while having a conversation. Not many right? But do the same thing on Zoom/Skype/$VideoChat. "Hey, are you paying attention?" When really, wandering eyes are indicative (usually) of deep thought.
I have a heuristic when synchronous communication (phone, video chat) is necessary: When something is:
a) complex, or b) has a significant likelihood of misunderstanding (which is just a more specific version of (a).
Actual face to face... that's got to be for things that are socially critical. Breakups. Hard messages to people who are close. First meetings with the biggest client of your life. Important deals, if they take more than "Happy? Yep." Etc. Stuff where the physical impression makes or breaks the experience.
One executive I spoke to put it like this (paraphrased): "the introverts are loving it and the extroverts hate it. Productivity-wise its neutral to positive, but emotionally a lot of our folks are struggling without work so we're still committed to reopening offices when it's safe to do so."
> Also, it's nice seeing everybody at work, getting lunch, having a coffee break with people, whiteboarding, etc
These are the exact reasons WFH is more productive IMO. Less people coming up to your desk talking nonsense distracting you.
I run a completely distributed company and no one in their right mind would argue that a completely distributed company or even a partially work from home company
can be as good as the same people working TOGETHER in one office
The bonds are much stronger
The interaction is much better
Two superstars together are 10 times better than separately
However, when you do remote, it's only 5 times better
At minimum, it is 50% worse to have a distributed company than have a real same office, same location company
What really makes people say 'working from home is just as good' is a combination of
1) liking it for other reasons (more time with family, less pressure) and rationalizing
2) being able to cut out time wasting things (which they could anyways cut out if they were better at saying no to time wasting stuff
3) not ever having done it for a long time and seeing the long term implications
There is a very good reason that very few companies have become very big and very successful while being distributed companies
What about work visas? Will this encourage more visas, or will citizens become unsettled after more cost effective labor is remotely hired while they’re left competing against far cheaper world economies. I can see arguments for both expanding H1B program, and making it more difficult/selective.
Something about this doesn’t feel right, the pandemic isn’t nearly as bad as was predicted. It’s been devastating, but nothing like 1918. That is to say, perhaps these drastic actions of mass WFH will have implications we can’t predict yet, especially at scale.
Will cities become less congested? How about home life, if WFH becomes standard in 5 years time, and some positions that are easily remote are hard to find physically, will home life become disrupted? (Currently domestic violence, child abuse has soared, though this is most likely due to the stress of the pandemic, and not the WFH itself. Through school, work, etc tends to allow those at risk to form social networks, and reach out for help from their abusers.)
There is something to say about spending time away from immediate family. Some people need the break, others are synergetic and can spend all their time together. Depends on the persons involved. But let’s not celebrate just yet, there’s obvious economic incentives, and it isn’t clear this can be reliably reversed. We’re rarely given the full list of motives, which may not be in our best interest.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork...
I've worked remote before and it was fun, I got more done, and I could go into the office once or twice a week if I really wanted. I worked with a guy in Colorado I never met in person for over a year, but I did eventually meet him while driving through on a trip.
If you've never worked remote before 2020, this is not what remote work even remotely feels like. Everything is very different when it's not a choice. I think we need to keep that in mind.
That's true. But I'm damn happy this is the direction we're moving in, the commute is never fun, open offices are usually draining if you're not with a headset stuck in your focus bubble (which defeats the purpose of the open-office in the first place). Of course, we'll need to find a medium for this, but even an option for remote work is great.
That's a great reminder. Thanks.
I don’t know where we go from here, though.
That said I personally hate working from home. Never ever thought I'd say it but I long for my office cubicle as my work has totally monopolized what's usually my own personal space for side projects and zoning out.
Perhaps its less malicious than you make it sound. Isn't it pretty unprecedented in human history for families to be restricted in such close quarters, cut off from community, for such an extended period of time? People need personal space
There are no eggs to collect or cows to milk in tech work.
Well we won't really know until we finish the third wave too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...
Edit: Wrong word used
If I leave Silicon Valley to settle down in rural Vietnam, I'm not going to work for $50k a year. If I couldn't find something paying at least $150k+, I'd start my own company and live off my savings until I get it up and running.
There's a real market-based reason engineers get paid as much as they do. It's easy to lose sight of that here on HackerNews, but just look at what your white collar, non-tech friends do at work all day. Their productivity can often be easily doubled or tripled by better tech. That is to say, someone generating $30k in value per year for your business could suddenly generate an extra $30-$60k a year with better software to help them.
Something that I haven't yet seen discussed much on this or similar threads are the support and amenities staff. Most of the developers will be alright, maybe even better off, but the Bay Area is full of chefs, shuttle drivers, janitors, and who knows how many other roles that probably won't exist anymore. That's a big permanent shift in employment opportunity for those people.
It's not over.
I doubt we'll get anywhere near the numbers most models claimed with mitigation. Even the 90k/US currently will have to be re-evaluated at the end and pruned (or possibly added to) for any inaccuracies.
Predicting the future is often foolish, and I hope this is a cautionary tale. We'll have to wait until March 2021 to look at the average deaths per year and compare it to 2020 to get a real sense of the picture, but from what I've been reading currently, my hypothesis is that it will be no where near what was predicted a few months ago. (I could be wrong though, but we won't know until 2021).
It's all guessing at this point though. This whole thing we're in, was a guess, and the costs are high.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but my main hobby outside of work is outdoors related. I consistently spend my Friday nights driving 3+ hours to the mountains. The idea of being able to up and move to a mountain town, save the hours I'd be commuting to work AND commuting to the mountains, is so exciting to me. And that's on top of just the happiness I'd get being able to look out my window and see (what I consider) nature vs the cookie cutter buildings of suburbia Silicon Valley. Where are the cyclists, the surfers, the skiiers/snowboarders, dirt bikers, rock climbers, etc etc in these threads? I really can't believe there are that few of us...
But on top of just hobbies, I'd be so excited to see what society could look like in a much more remote world. I think a lot of people would spread out and leave Silicon Valley (but not everyone obviously). I think you'd see more small/medium sized towns pop up across the US that would develop their own uniqueness and character. Traffic deaths would likely go down because people would drive less. Maybe general physical fitness/health would go up because people aren't sitting in their cars and have time to exercise? People working minimum wage jobs would likely have better access to housing as demand spreads and isn't as concentrated. We could see a maaassssive change in the lives of the population, and I'm optimistic it would be for the better.
Note: I'm not saying everyone should be fully remote, or that working remote works for everyone, but the general lack of any real optimism about what life COULD be like in these threads is surprising to me.
This may be different in firms where the workers actually have a say in the management of the company, but god knows there aren’t too many of those
This is fear mongering to say the least. Nobody is stopping those companies hiring from the said regions today. And it is super unlikely western engineers would want to relocate to the said regions given the choice.
Let's all admit outsourcing is a thing and it has been for more than 20 years. The reason outsourcing is dialed back is much more interesting to understand, and offers insight from perspective other than costs.
The high CoL in Bay Area is not sustainable. Software engineering is already democratized in a way, Bay Area no longer holds monopoly.
The high salary here is a reflection of prosperity of past decade of internet bloom, but there is no momentum to keep it that way as the party will end never-the-less eventually.
If anything, I see those remote working as a welcoming trend, to redistribute tech talents and money across US/Canada. Yes, the salary will go down, but it probably reflect better the reality we are already living.
I disagree. If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently? Just set up their business in a foreign country and recruit internationally? And if they're still hiring domestically, why are you so sure they're going to dramatically reduce salaries? They still have to attract talent. If an employee wants to move from the bay area to Wyoming, and their employer says their pay will be cut 50%, what's to stop them from applying to Twitter or another company allowing full remote with (I'm assuming, I haven't checked) a much more competitive salary?
"while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life”"
I've seen far too many emails sent by people at 11:30 PM and followed up with another email at 6 AM for me to believe this hasn't already happened. Not to mention the self imposed aspect of it (neither of those emails NEEDED to be sent at those times).
I understand why a person who REALLY wants to live in the Bay Area would be concerned about that. But for most of us in the world, not much is changing. In fact, salaries for the rest of us might go up because demand for our labor will go up.
Few companies were very accepting and open about remote work or had the structure to support it with any kind of scale (hiring, HR, legal, team structure, meetings vs async communication, ...)
If companies adapt their processes and workflows to include remote workers as first class employees, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to seamlessly integrate team members not only across the country, but across the globe.
This avoids the usual cost of outsourcing (communication and coordination overhead, lack of integration, etc), while still opening up a large, much cheaper labor pool.
This doesn't have to be primarily negative, but it very much has the potential to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and should be considered.
god forbid we earn the same as everyone else with our skills instead of an arbitrarily inflated quantity thanks to luck of the draw wrt lat/lon we were born near.
The potential reduction in housing cost alone(one of the largest inhibitors to developing wealth for most Americans) should be a massive cause for celebration. We can stop orienting our lives and our cities around commuting (and therefore cars) and start focusing on people.
People complain about the loss of the workplace as a social environment. What about the opportunities to create new social environments that aren't centered around work?
I wrote more about this here, if you're interested https://manyfoxgiven.com/2020/01/21/remote-work-promise/
That said, I also hold out great hope for this development. I’m already looking at places I’d like to live because I’d like to live there, not because there are jobs.
Reality is crumbling now that the pandemic proved that we can be as productive without an office. Some people are lying to themselves to justify why they have lost so many hours of their life in an office.
I don't have all the equipment at home, so I only go to the gym once a week (well before lockdown, now I go 0 times but did end up getting some equipment).
Also the food. The office had free healthy food. Now I have to make my own lunch, which is often cheap easy crap and late in the day.
Also I miss socializing with adults that aren't my spouse. She's great and all, but we've already heard all of each other's stories. :)
I very much value all the extra time I get to spend with my family, and I also value the fact that when we wanted to spend a week in the mountains I could just up and go and work from there.
But there are definitely tradeoffs.
No! You'll now be able to make friends outside of tech! Imagine being able to work from the diner, or a coffee shop, or a bookstore, or a another country entirely! You're going to be able to make friends with so many different people. It would be a wonderful thing for the world.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think it would go a long ways toward breaking humans out of the bubbles they tend to stay in. Maybe people would start to empathize and understand one another better.
* Not everyone is equally productive when working remotely. For a variety of reasons some people just work better in offices.
* Mixed office/remote teams are unstable. People will be drawn to offices if only for career reasons, which makes it harder for the remote works, hence makes the office more attractive, etc.
* Some jobs are just better done in person. Auto repair is not a remote job. Same for manufacturing.
What I hope for is that companies will realize they don't need everyone to commute to the office every damn day. I freed up about 3 hours of transit time and reduced my annual carbon emissions by about a ton just by commuting one day less in the Bay Area. There's no reason why most white collar jobs can't work from home a couple of days a week. This would already be a huge improvement.
It's probably a bit bleak to say, but those people will likely be replaced by others who are productive working remotely given the new, wider talent pool a fully remote company will have access to.
This person was division I MIT crew, this person runs 200mi ultra-marathons, many coworkers have done an Ironman or two, many are cycling 100+mi/wk, many are running marathons or 10mi a day at sub six-minute pace.
Where I grew up the number for any of these things would be zero, but here it feels common. I'd guess partly highly selective entry from top schools biases towards people that are also athletes, or that there's some positive correlation with competitive/ambitious people and making sure to exercise. I suspect the normal no-exercise indoorsy stereotype is actually wrong when compared to other people on average.
How many times can you have the same conversation with someone complaining about <outdated software library> and being underpaid at <six figure salary>? It's amazing to me how few people in this industry have exposure to the world of experiences outside of the pinhole purview of techworld concerns. Going remote means you actually get to choose your day to day friends, experiences, social life, and culture instead of having them forced upon you! Craft your life the way you want to live it.
I can think of one big reason why HN readership is suddenly worried about the prospect of universal WFH: they realise that the supply in the labour market is going to suddenly double. No longer will companies be able to justify paying them huge amounts of money because people from all over the world are just as good and able to work for much less.
Remember a lot of people here are now addicted to money. They don't much else in life besides that.
I had looked in the past for remote work for precisely the reasons you mentioned. On top of that my partner would love to move back to Vancouver Island for a spell. Also Toronto is bloody expensive.
We've discussed all kinds of different options... but one of the core motivators would be affording a house, with some land. Being closer to family—mine or hers—and spending more time outdoors.
Also not having to commute 1+ hour each way—yes, please.
There are people that would benefit from remote work - they might like living close to the mountains, no commute and they can still stay very productive while fully remote.
There are also people who don't care about mountains, live close to work and are more productive while working in the office among other people.
Both groups are right in what they value most, and as long as there is no detrimental effects to the business/employer - both seem like good options.
If you're willing to go far enough up the mountain, real estate is still quite affordable.
And I think you'd be welcomed if you actually live in a small town full-time (as opposed to keeping a vacation home) and get involved with the local community. Many of these places -- the ones just out of organic-grocery-store range -- have been losing population for decades.
Of course, in California, you have to make your peace with living in the Red State within the Blue State, in case that's a thing for you.
Competition. Some believe that once orgs and managers get comfortable with a fully remote team, whats to stop them from replacing or supplementing office-only team with a cheaper remote-first one. That increases employer options and shifts market power over to them.
Work/life. Some like the hard separation between work and home. They are just not comfortable losing that wall.
Social setup. Some are scared shitless when they realize they will lose their only social setup: office, and will have to start fresh and actually talk to people who don't share their view of the world.
Family. For a lot of people, office is a convenient escape from family that does not get questioned. Take that out and it will drive them nuts to be around family all the time.
Income. Some believe that more competition will lead to lower salaries lesser opportunities, forcing a move to a lower income area leading to lower income and that sounds bad.
I see it as the opposite. If an employer goes from mandating everyone be in office all the time, to allowing ICs to have a choice, doesn't that treat them less like an undifferentiated drone and acknowledge that some people work better WFH and others don't, or that for some projects you might want to be away from the office for extended periods of time?
More people/better infrastructure in Gunnison, CO would be great. Maroon Bells getting a housing development and a golf course? Not so great. I'm worried that more people in small mountain towns near national forests has the potential to slowly eat away the national forest.
I'd say they are out there riding bikes, skiing or climbing, not discussing WFH arrangements for the third time this week :D
My wife and I decided to be in a major metropolitan area because of our kids and schools... but back before, we were living in more rural, mountain areas with a lot of access to outdoors.
At some point, we're going to get a small trailer for my use as an office, or an office trailer. It's something I would want anyways.
I think one good compromise with this is having a remote-first company pay for either a home office, or the membership fees for a coworking space. Some people really enjoy the interpersonal interaction. Me? I get enough of it via Slack and Zoom, and the occasional in-person conferences and on-sites.
One of the positives I can see us moving towards is greater interpersonal interaction with the local neighbors, and greater mixed-use spaces like it used to be. You work from home some of the days, and then walk down the street for the coffee and bagals. You talk with the neighborhood grocers. You can hang out at the community gardens. You make your living with things that could be done remote, but there is a much better sense of community where you live. When you spend money, it would be within the local community, so it helps distribute the wealth to people who you live side by side.
And ok, maybe if you don't like to cook, instead of using one of those apps to get some food from across town, you support your neighbors who love to cook.
In other words, instead of bonding primarily with the people you work with, your main community is the one you live in. I think that's generally a good thing.
There's a project called the Urban Farming Guys. They do a lot of hard work for developing food resilency, and transformed one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City into something that is great. Imagine living there, because you cared about the work they did. You work the remote job by day, and then walk over to their makerspace to teach the neighborhood kids about coding. When they ask for donations, you could spread some of the wealth from working with a remote tech job. You would have a choice to live with the people who share the same values that you do.
Here's the thing. I think a lot of people feel that they will be disconnected from people if they work remote. But I think if they were able to choose where they live, they might find that they are even _more_ connected with the people they live with, in the neighborhood they live with. I think there is a modern malaise of disconnection and brokenness, and that won't really be solved without reconnecting to your local community. The interpersonal camaderie at work is an imperfect substitute for what I think most people crave without realizing they crave it.
The schools are the main thing preventing us from moving to a small town in nature. Most of them have really bad schools. If they don't it's because they're a rich-people enclave and housing's very expensive.
Remote work may have as devastating an environmental impact as the automobile (if not more).
Just wait until 250,000 of your fellow outdoor enthusiasts move to Wyoming...
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
Why should I hire someone and pay them a bay area salary if there are equally talented folks in that geography that are perfectly happy making what's market for _their_ location?
This is only a perspective that highly paid engineers living in the bay area share. The rest of the world doesn't work this way.
This describes 90+% of HN posters these days, to be fair. You’re absolutely completely right in your argument.
In the long term with enough companies doing remote work though, this starts to blur the boundaries between job markets and we might expect salaries to start to be affected by other cities, in the same way that different suburbs within a city share the same comp rates.
When someone good is on the line, it’s not hard to justify the Bay Area salary when you were willing to pay it if they were in the bay.
Source: kept Bay Area salary when moved remote and was able to easily negotiate Bay Area salary at future companies.
Right now, you wouldn't. However, if going full remote turns into a trend, then you're not competing with other talented folks in that geography making what's market for their location because they don't have a location, but rather with every other company which offers remote work. They're remote. Won't this drive up market standard prices for engineers in places where markets are less populated by tech right now, while lowering the market price in places like the bay area? After all, if I'm a company, why would I pay $BAY_AREA_ENGINEER more money for the same job I can get done by $KANSAS_ENGINEER for less? Remote work, if taken to the furthest conclusion, will obviate any discussion of "location" based payment because every engineer would be in the same location: the Internet.
Sure, if you can grow that subset to 100% then you can keep all the pizza for yourself, but the reason tech salaries are so high is the companies are that profitable.
If Zuckerberg is paying Alabama rates to everyone, it will be trivially easy to poach talent from him, and he knows this, so while he might have in mind a pool of "superfungibles" making $ALABAMA in $WHEREVER, you will not see Big Tech start slashing the compensation of the people they want to keep.
Who knows what will happen over some time if this really becomes big. Lots of people will leave the Bay Area and the cost of living will drop, in some places dramatically. Those 2m starter homes will get cut in half or more if this becomes wide scale.
Regardless, companies will still want to attract and recruit the best people they can and if that means having to hire from an expensive zone then they will. Or their competitors will and they'll be out competed. If anything though, over enough time if this becomes the norm than I'd expect places like the Bay Area to see the cost of living decline.
Obviously, you're free to work wherever you want but I simply fail to understand the sentiment here.
The "same" house that costs $1M in the Bay Area costs $300k in Atlanta. A pound of chicken or gallon of milk is also half the price. Day care for children? Twice as expensive in CA. Why should FB pay Bay Area living wages to someone in Atlanta, when they can pay them top dollar for their own market?
Does this suggest a company should have to pay the entire workforce, whatever they pay the individual in the highest-cost-of-living area? These are businesses, not charities.
As a side note, Bay Area inflated prices will probably drop as a result of this.
Because they are now competing globally as an employer as well.
Also, all of those companies say "less expensive areas" while they really mean "lower wage areas" - which doesn't necessary align with the former preposition.
Exactly. Also, if you live in the “middle of nowhere” or even outside a major metro area on the east and west coasts of the US, the quality of healthcare substantially declines. Considering that the third leading cause of death in the US is preventable medical errors, living outside of these areas can literally be a death sentence. It is only a matter of time before it is likely to become the case for an individual, healthy or not.
As somebody with 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, plus type 1 diabetes, remote work helps tremendously. But, living in the boonies would literally, in no exaggeration, kill me. So, I need a salary that allows me to live in a major decent metro area, plus allows me to pay for my healthcare. That is non-negotiable. Every day, working in the US is looking less appealing. I can legally work in select places in other parts of the world, and plan on leaving the US. There are other places in the world that have universal healthcare, that do not have huge disparities in quality across similar geographical areas.
You can find out more about healthcare quality worldwide and the US by examining the data on http://HealthData.org
Secondly, it's not likely the case that Facebook needs the "absolute best talent" across the board -- it's more likely that they do for some positions (and will pay appropriately) and not so much for others. And for where it stands there, I'm pretty sure Facebook knows what that Pareto frontier looks like -- at least in recent history, they have generally outbid their weight class competitors [1] in terms of total compensation.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
The price a company is going to pay for your labor depends on how hard it is for them to replace you. If FB can replace a SWE in Atlanta with another for 90k$, that is what they will pay. It has nothing to do with the value of the work you're doing.
I largely agree with your comment, but I disagree with this sentence. Water is almost free in most civilized areas because it's not subject to free market economics (for good reason). Basic water supply is usually provided by the local government (and this applies to places where it is scarce). If water were treated the same way health is in the US, its price wouldn't be anywhere close to free.
This is of course the big problem. Facebook is admitting that developers elsewhere in the world are just as good as developers in Silicon Valley. Or if you want to put it another way: if Silicon Valley is special, it's NOT because the developers.
Now the market is crowded, scaling is a simple economic problem, the network effect is turning on its head and there isn't any revolutionary software to build on the horizon. Times have changed but the narrative hasn't caught up yet.. its going to suck when it does honestly. Software is just so commoditized and cookie cutter at this point i can't see it being a great career for much longer.
Now if you're a single person in SF, that's a different story.
Those companies are only paying this much because the cost of living there is so high.
It's so obvious that I now feel silly for not realizing this fully before experiencing it myself.
Then again if companies can still turn a profit offering these salaries, then perhaps the work is actually that valuable?
On the other hand there might be an upside to being paid half: you're unlikely to deliver less value than your cost.
Any corona-related layoffs start with the most expensive (comparing to value brought) employees.
"We ran these surveys and asked people what they want to do. Twenty percent of our existing employees said that they were extremely or very interested in working remotely full time. And another 20 percent on top of that said that they were somewhat interested"
Another way to read this, is that 80% employees are not interested in remote. Companies doing this at large will probably realize that remote work is not popular as it made out to be.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/21/21265780/facebook-remote-...
But will they care once the cost savings are realized? Similar things happened with open office floorplans.
That coupled with Facebook not reducing its office footprint and this transition supposedly taking a decade makes me wonder if people are making this a bigger deal than it actually is.
It definitely involves learning new habits and skills as part of the adjustment, which does involve some effort and possibly pain on the part of employees.
So I'm sure most people aren't interested up front. That doesn't say much about what their preference would be after some time to adjust.
> In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year.
> “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. “We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range — I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”
Sure they can, but the Silicon Valley has an immense human capital in skills, talent and knowledge that you can't find easily in the rest of the world. The type of complexity, the scale of the systems and the engineering culture that you can find in SF is not common around the world. My experience as a developer in an European country is that it is really difficult to encounter engineers with a real experience in developing truly complex systems and companies with true engineering cultures. This is simply due to the fact that the majority of the companies that need that high quality of engineering and are willing/capable to pay for it are based in the Bay area, therefore creating an ecosystem that is unique in the world. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, but I don't think the "they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world" is as easy at it may look.
The effects of such decisions are going to be immense; people in the developed countries still live in a bubble thinking they are not going to be affected, but things will probably change dramatically the next couple of years.
Highly unlikely, there's still a lot of value in face-to-face meetings.
I see very likely Bay Area salary is now peaked. It is not like companies prior to the pandemic aren't looking for alternative. Now this is just in full acceleration mode.
If you've ever tried scheduling a call between India, East Coast US, Europe, and West Coast US...you've dealt with the fact that there's only a few hours a day such a call can occur, greatly limiting the ability to schedule last minute meetings.
1. Increased eye strain from staring at a screen all day. Look up "Computer Vision"
2. "Zoom" fatigue. Less participation in meetings because interruptions need to be repeated to be heard.
3. More hours sitting in the same chair in the same position.
4. No pre/post meeting conversation to catch up/tie up loose ends. (This wont work in a zoom meeting where you cant turn and lower your voice to the person sitting next to you).
5. Now no second place. The US is already losing it's third place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place . Where are you going to make friends and find a romantic partner?
6. Transfer of real estate cost to employees. Especially couples. Now you might need two offices in your house.
7. Machine learning employee monitoring programs. i.e. spyware on your own computers. Is your APM up to par? Cant fake me you scrag.
8. Video monitoring in your own home. Can your boss see (and hear?) you working at your desk?
9. Habit building: used to hit the gym before heading home? Now it's less convenient to get there.
10. You now have to feed yourself, at your own expense. You get to clean the mess too.
11. Live in a the city in a tiny bedroom or studio apartment? Do you have roommates? Have fun working in that environment all day.
12. Attention seeking children/pets at home while you're trying to work
13. No more office perks.
14. Have an annoying neighbor who wont turn the music down? Live next to a hospital?
I could go on
This story (and many others!) were created and posted well before any of the details were mentioned.
I'm not saying that's bad, but it was strange getting e-mails from people with links to fully formed news articles even while I was watching the announcement live.
#notspeakingforfacebook
I would prefer either one without mixing. One shoe in one shoe out is a great way to make it extra hard to manage.
Anyway details aside, it can be done, it's just it has to be a deliberate effort from everyone in the office.
1. Level IC5 or higher (this is what most would call "senior").
2. Can't have performance less than meets expectations in last two reviews.
3. Permission from team and manager.
More jokingly: I guess Facebook employees didn't get the hint when they got the biggest open office plan in the world. Zuck must have been very confused when they made the worst office in the world yet people still showed up. Now he's pretty much telling them to stay away. I assumed he's tired of interacting with "people" all the time, while building a social network.
And is it really so much easier to get rid of them? Presumably they'll have the same legal protections they previously did, and having to be physically removed from the building isn't exactly a major limitation on firing.
Unlike a lot of folks, I don't have much against them. The people I've interacted with have been a decent, diverse, crew, and I use the platform fairly lightly.
The chances are better than even that I wouldn't be considered a "cultural fit" with the company (I'm a bit "long in the tooth," and I've found that's a "showstopper," these days).
Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
Still not sure if I would take any jobs there, but it hasn't gotten past the initial phase anyway, so it has not been a decision that I've had to struggle with.
Anecdata: I'm 40+ and as far as I can tell, I fit in just fine.
> Also, I specialize in writing native Apple software in Swift. I don't think that's a stack they are really interested in.
A recent earnings release said that 90+% of FB ad revenue is from mobile. Between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsAp, IOS is definitely a company priority (although I don't think we've publicly released stats on Android vs. IOS).
I don't actually know if/how-much Swift we're doing vs. ObjC (I'm on the server side of things, not the client)
Folks here who benefit from commute cut will keep celebrating WFH like new age of something, but for many companies, especially multinational corps, that's desperate temporary measure and it sucks for most folks in one way or another.
Managers don't want it, many employees don't want it. Don't keep your hopes up just because few companies change their policies a bit to look more attractive for new hires. Also as other state, expect some salary re-adjustments based on that.
Side note, Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class" talks about a lot of the effects and benefits of people clustering in cities (but in my opinion he only does a so-so job talking about the causes), and I'd be curious to see what other urban planners think about changes like this.
Yes, some companies are 100% remote and they do well, but I think it is because they hire from another less competitive (for compensation) pool. I.e. they pay low end silicon valley salaries in cheap markets and manage to get very high-end talent.
> Among the advantages of a dispersed workforce, Mr. Zuckerberg said, is that it will enable more demographic and ideological diversity if recruits aren’t required to work in tech strongholds like the San Francisco Bay Area.
This is of critical importance in tech, especially with companies that control the digital public square such as Facebook or Twitter. Allowing employees to live in different political climates, near family, in different lifestyles (more rural), etc. is badly needed. Otherwise, the world's digital public squares fall victim to the ideological monocultures of San Francisco and Seattle.
(I think it's a weak argument)
https://www.redfin.com/MO/St-Louis/1219-Washington-Ave-63103...
Now I do not have any proof of this but I am working at company which would have may be 5K work force in IT organization. Here I am regularly surprised that hardly 10-15 names out of 100s pop up every time on any important issue for projects which I have some relation with.
Doing same analysis with facebook would mean there would be 250 or so employees who can seriously negotiate salaries with them for being critical to company. Of course some people would get lucky or unlucky despite being less or more important. But I think this is delusional to think that most of ~50K strong workforce in FB will be able to get their compensation demands like bay area salary in middle america accepted by company.
Could it be possible to work from home most of the days, but not all of them?
I don't live in US and don't want to immigrate at the moment for a variety of personal reasons. But I am competent and professional, and would be happy to deliver just as much as a SF-based engineer for half the pay.
(When I said cool, I meant, it's really cool for me. It might not be as cool for a US-based HN reader).
This will be a boost for "tier 2" metros with tech companies that support this pattern. Salaries will be going up in those metros. Also if you can WFH for FB, you should be able to WFH for all the other major tech companies which will compete for you using salary and stock etc...
The rest of the source announcement covered that. It was noted that individual productivity was the same or better, but there were concerns about collaboration.
The ideal setup is 1-2 days per week WFH and flexible WFH while traveling for the holidays so you don't have burn through vacation days IMO.
I'm disappointing none of these tech companies are acknowledging the happiness that comes from camaraderie and togetherness. (Note: I don't have a family though)
I love the company of others; and the unpredictability of what my day has in store when I venture out my front door.
Everybody working from home for me sounds like one step closer towards a blander, lonelier, disengaged, dispassionate, oppressed workforce.
Exactly, which is why I work so I can experience camaraderie and togetherness with the people I actually want to: my family and my friends. Working from home allows me to do that more, much more than working in an office.
That is ridiculous. A job is a job. Also what prevents anyone from keeping a California phone number and a PO Box in Menlo Park or wherever? At what point have you 'moved'?
Note: I don't advocate doing this. I neither work in CA nor at Facebook. I just wonder if this doesn't open things up for being to game the system.
For example: https://www.palmspringstaxandtrustlawyers.com/nonresidents-w...
On the other hand, you are almost definitely reading this comment on a device that was manufactured in a "low cost of living area" (namely: China) by people who get paid far below Western wages. Likewise, most of the clothes you wear were manufactured in a "cheap" country by people who get paid next to nothing. If you had bought these goods from a US- or Europe-based manufacturer, you would have paid far more, and the people who produced the value would have received higher wages.
So if Facebook shouldn't be allowed to reduce the pay of workers who move to less expensive areas, why don't we apply this logic across the board? Why is it okay for you (or me) to reduce the pay of our own workers (by which I mean the people who work who work for us indirectly, by creating the goods we consume) just because they live in less expensive areas?
It seems to me that you can't have it both ways.
And a market is a market. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, your salary/wage is, to some degree, determined by where you are, among many other variables.
The incentive is clearly to stay and cost FB more money per head.
This really does look like it could be the end of new urbanism and the revenge of the suburbs.
Frankly, working remotely is giving me the opportunity to actually participate in the city culture I wanted so badly, but on a scale that's much easier to digest and enjoy.
Same price as NYC but it's a boring sprawling suburb no different from Florida or Texas. Sure the mountains and weather are nice but I'm not paying rent to the trees.
Hey, here’s a thought. Let people choose how and where they work best.
/thread.
Personally, this is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to get paid less for doing the same amount of work. In a remote world, deciding where to live should be a personal decision of how one spends their income. Facebook doesn't pay employees less because they decided to drive an expensive car to work.
Facebook, along with all other tech companies, make crazy amounts of revenue per employee. The pay reductions will be a rounding error on the company's budget. Why not keep salaries the same and get the absolute best talent in every market across the world?
Tech companies have always paid less to staff in cheaper cities like Pittsburgh, but the ratio usually still favors the employee (i.e. they make 90% of the Bay Area base salary and their cost of living is 20% as high). Workers can also hack the system by getting irrevocable, long-term RSU grants and then getting transferred to cheaper markets.
Salaries WILL be the same everywhere in the world. They will just be a lot lower than you are used to.
This is THE reason driving all these companies to announce the shift to remote: it’ll be a massive cost saving. Access to talent that can’t live in a center where they have offices is nice, but hardly justifies the overhead of remote work
Because people living in those other markets will be more than happy to take a "reduced pay" for SF standards, since that's way higher than any other local wage.
If a company suddenly allows working remotely full time, they've suddenly increased their supply of talent, as moving to another city will no longer be a roadblock when they consider Facebook.
At the same time, if more and more companies go with a remote friendly approach, the supply of job openings that applicants have access to will also increase.
Theoretically, this will lead to some sort of equilibrium where compensation is actually based more on the value/output of your work than other factors.
To make an analogy, an apartment building in SF serves the same purpose as an apartment building in Ohio, yet they charge vastly different rents. You're paying less in Ohio for something that provides the same utility (shelter), because of factors outside of the direct utility of the apartment.
Facebook pays Bay Area salary only because they have to, to get the talents they want.
In fact, developers everywhere benefit from the high salaries of the Bay Area, as it sets the general expectation for the profession.
The variation won’t be as dramatic within a region but it’ll be there.