List of companies going full remote after Covid | Hacker News Reader

List of companies going full remote after Covid

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93 pointsgeoffreyy47 comments

If you want to remain an IC then remote is probably the best option, but if you want to climb up into a leadership role I don’t really see how you get there in a remote role.

Also Facebook’s admission that salary will be tied to cost of living wherever you choose to live sets a bad precedent. Anyone who thought they could just keep their Bay Area salary is going to be disappointed, and it gives cover to every other company thinking of going remote to do the same.

I’m also wondering how easy it would be to change jobs once you go remote. The benefit of being in the Bay is that the number of companies is so high that it makes it easy to interview if you’re looking for a change. While possible to interview remotely it’s much more difficult since the number of companies open to that is still small.

Gitlab pretty publicly has the same pay system in terms of living area with a direction relation to pay.

True cost of living is such a nebulous thing to calculate no matter how meticulous the data source is.

> Also Facebook’s admission that salary will be tied to cost of living wherever you choose to live sets a bad precedent […]

Facebook didn’t set this precedent, GitLab did with their Salary Calculator years ago [1].

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

I mean a big co doing it.

I don’t get why the pay adjustment is so controversial. Facebook (and Google, and Apple, etc.) already have offices throughout the world, and they already set pay based on the local market and cost of living. Not sure why “remote work” independent of an office should be any different, or why this is surprising?

It’s different when you’re already hired at one salary level and then forced to take a cost of living pay cut based on some fuzzy cost of living calculator.

I rarely find publicly available cost of living calcs to accurately reflect lived cost of living.

You will get a pay cut if you relocate from one office to another today, e.g. moving from New York to Huntsville, Alabama will result in significant decrease in salary.

Correct, but I'm still pretty sure that $BigTechCompany pay is still pretty darn good for the area and the work is probably more interesting too. At the end of the day, $200k in Alabama for an experienced developer is still a fraction of the cost for the same experienced dev onsite in Menlo Park.

Forced? If you want the same salary than stay where you are.

Google sets pay on local market rate only, not cost of living - they're very specific about this. And generally, the local market rate tends to lag the CoL increases,

Exactly. It’s usually by local market, which isn’t necessarily a reflection on cost of living.

So now if I say I want to move to Miami where the software eng market is limited, what exactly should I expect as far as pay cut goes based on cost of living?

Back when I was looking at SV companies they had several satellite offices, but the perception at the time was that if you wanted to climb the ladder you had to be at HQ. That would be Mountain View, Cupertino, etc.

It feels like that wouldn’t change even after COVID-19. Partial remote work is definitely coming and I hope it’s permanent, but needing to be at HQ on a semi-regular basis doesn’t seem like it would go away. It’s also probably why the LA-SF airline routes will probably bounce back rather quickly.

As far as I know, ALL big tech cos have paid differently based on where you live since forever. If you work for Google Pittsburgh you make less than Seattle/Bay/NYC, if you work for <FAANG> London office you make less than American hubs. I don't know why people are surprised that that applies to remote workers as well.

Published Cost of living calculators rarely reflect reality in my experience. I definitely don’t pay anything close to the average cost of living for a single person in San Francisco, for example.

Hard to tell whether you are getting a “fair” deal when cost of living is so different depending on your individual situation

Isnt it pretty obvious? People are under the illusion they are paid for the work they do.

They are not and never have been. They have always been paid what someone is willing to pay them for the work they do.

It's subtle but important distinction.

Salary is a function of demand and supply like any other price on an open market.

This is why its important to not think in terms of work when negotiating a salary. Instead you need to think in terms of cost to find someone to take your place.

If that cost is more than your salary, you can ask for more.

> They are not and never have been. They have always been paid what someone is willing to pay them for the work they do.

“Willing” is the wrong word. People are paid based on what the company can get away with paying them, as long as it’s less than the amount that they are “willing” to pay (then they don’t get hired).

In other words, the labor market is more like a 2nd price auction than a 1st price. This is obvious when considering the “go get a competing offer and show it to your current employer who will match” strategy. You just changed the 2nd price!

Truth.

Yes, companies have an information advantage in labor economics. People need to stop treating it like an Econ 101 equation.

But it is. Just because people are conditioned to avoid sharing information doesnt mean they cant break that norm and gain the advantage.

Unions are exactly that.

This is like saying python is the same as COBOL because they are both computer languages. Unions are not something studied in Economics 101 as labor economics is its own field of study and typically isn’t covered until 300 or 400 level courses.

Yes but lots of people locked into a 4 year vesting schedule based on Bay Area COL. I don't think they're going to take those back. So even with a pay cut, you're likely to come out ahead -- maybe even paid-for-house ahead.

> Also Facebook’s admission that salary will be tied to cost of living wherever you choose to live sets a bad precedent. Anyone who thought they could just keep their Bay Area salary is going to be disappointed, and it gives cover to every other company thinking of going remote to do the same.

But that's good, some people in sv make more money in a year than some other people make in their entire life. If this was allowed it would probably destroy so many places. Faang salary makes you a king just about anywhere in the world besides a few major cities, in my home town you could buy a flat per month and still have some money to invest somewhere else.

I don't think any of these companies are going "full remote". It seems like the strategy is more like, remote if you want it but there is still an office.

I think the likely outcome is going to simply be more mix of remote and onsite in the future. Any company that makes it through this is going to realize remote works fine. I'm sure there will be some companies that will still insist onsite-only, and they'll lose a bunch of employees who just realized they prefer remote.

Regardless, what I really hope is that at the least this helps companies shift towards more remote-friendly culture and policies. Things like: every meeting has a conference link; one person remote, everyone remote; more async communications and decision making. If you do sit in a room together, have some empathy for remote people, and make sure you have high-quality video and audio, no tapping on the table or "side-conversations" while hovering over a mic, and make sure you have remote videos feeds visible and are sharing the screen you're discussing.

It would be great to see a list like this amended to include how this type of thing is handled at the company as a whole (eg top-down, global policy as opposed to varying by individual teams/managers) - like a "remote-friendly" ranking scale, or maybe a "Joel test".

The list says Spotify but when you click on the "Source" for that it is an article about Shopify...

Classic mistake, even worse for me IRL, I worked at both of these companies simultaneously! But, both are indeed going remote.

FFWD 6 mo and it'd make more sense to publish a "List of companies NOT going full remote after Covid"

My current employer would lose a lot of employees if they did that. People are already super stoked for when they can finally stop doing this remote work thing and be back at the office full-time. Not all, but a lot. They'll also lose people if they go back to "remote cannot work, you cannot do part-time remote", so they'll have the option to do a little bit of remote work, but set up in a way that makes it unviable in practice (e.g. meetings spread out over the whole week and held in a way that makes remote participation impossible)

Sorry guys, it was a busy day and just realized this kinda picked up, cloudflare workers reached their limit and I am now looking into a solution.

In the meantime, it can be accessed via https://www.notion.so/cd2571b6bd0b434f8bf2042d5fa0d6ea

I'm not sure it's correct to say "remote first" for Facebook. IIRC, they're just giving the option for trusted employees, not hiring straight out of college for remote.

That's very fair, I will fix some of the copy to be more accurate.

And we are back, sorry I didn't expected to reach Cloudflare Workers free plan limit that fast.

What solution did you come up with? Or did you just convert to a paid plan?

I just ended up paying $5/mo to have 10M worker requests per month. Not too bad.

Is anyone holding down multiple remote jobs at the same time?

As long as you are productive, how would the employers know?

I don't know nothing about US law, but in Europe it's very common that in your second job legally you can work only part-time, so it's 60h weeks beetween jobs at most.

Can we get an email signup for updates?

Not yet sorry, pretty busy doing other stuff but if this becomes helpful and interesting to people I will look into adding this feature! Thanks for the recommendation

Posted this three hours beforehand with the same format (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23265445). Would've been nice to see an attributable comment, but at least some people will make use of the information.

Error in the list: it should be Shopify not Spotify.

fixed, sorry about that.

How the location of living is verified?

Facebook is not going to be full report

I can second this. Had a recruiter reach out, asked if they were going to support mostly remote, the answer was no.

Yea the article said they’re going toward more remote work, not fully remote

a sortable column with number of employees would be useful as the list grows

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