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> It is a huge bet that productivity in the long run is equal to or greater than the savings in rent.

And also, that not every potential employee who can add value to the organization wants to relocate to the same place. I think that’s a more important bet in the long run.

> Oh, and if you give your employees a bunch of money to fit out their home offices and start paying for their internet at home and give them money for lunches and whatnot,

Isn’t this called “salary”? I don’t expect my employer to cook and feed me lunch and I don’t really need a special lunch stipend either.

> Isn’t this called “salary”? I don’t expect my employer to cook and feed me lunch

You might not, but many tech companies in SF do exactly that, and it is a legitimate part of your compensation.

The cost of my lunch is a trivial fraction of my family's grocery bill though. Are remote workers going to ask for a clothing stipend in lieu of company-branded T-shirts as well?

It's definitely thousands of dollars to go eat lunch in SF, a year. Plus companies often serve breakfast/dinner. And, in the case of my last company (Dropbox), the food was absurdly good. I considered my Dropbox food to be like 50k in value to me.

The lunch is comp for having to be on-site.

Sure, but there's a lot more than just the savings on the office space. What about savings on employee sick leave? At my last company there was always an 'office plague' at least once a year, around winter. What about employees no longer commuting? What about being able to hire talent when they don't want to move to wherever you're located - how much will that save you on recruiting? There are so many other wins. And losses.

I don't see any companies planning to definitely do this forever but the reality is that this situation is probably going to persist for at least 12 months and at that point it's better to just treat it as a permanent transition from the employees' perspective.

However even with Facebook you can see they're making a lot of decisions that would make the decision easy to reverse. They're still paying rent on all their existing buildings, they're still encouraging people to live in tech hubs via higher salaries.

Shopify is planning to do this on a permanent basis.

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1263483496087064579

Planning is never on a permanent basis. That’s what “plan” means.

Narrator's voice: "No. It doesn't."

It's not just about saving money on rent. You reduce your labor needs a ton. (Bye, bye, HR). And you also expand your hiring pool (Bye, bye, high salaries).

The full WFH also means your talent pool to hire from is more global, and, on average, cheaper

Isn’t there a global talent pool already? All these companies already have had international offices for a while

They are still filing for visas, why didn’t they just hire the employees in their own country

“why didn’t they just hire the employees in their own country”

- now much more of that will come. Obviously not an on/off switch.

But what was stopping them from doing that before?

Why do you need to institute any new WFH policies as applicable at the domestic level to do this? They’ve already been doing this presumably to the extent they wanted.

The main potential savings is not from avoiding office leases, it's from hiring engineers for 1/3 of the cost or less from places like Europe, India, and Brazil.

What stops them from doing that already?

Facebook has offices in Brazil: https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/saopaulo/?p[offic...

Why didn’t they close down the Palo Alto office already?

Brazil is a big country, not everyone lives in São Paulo. Why would they close Palo Alto in any case? they want to add to the talent pool, not exchange it. Also, not everywhere you see offices they have engineering teams. The same narrow-minded policies of having teams co-located prevents them from hiring engineers there even if they have offices there.

As a data point, I turned down an offer for FB Palo Alto, one of the main reasons being having to relocate from Toronto. They have offices in Toronto, but no engineering.

Bottom line, they might have some presence in some major cities, but if they're serious about remote work the talent pool definitely grows significantly.

Yes, remote work has always been a thing. The claim is that COVID will accelerate the trend toward a global and remote workforce.

Companies have been forced into large-scale WFH experiments. If the experiments show that productivity is totally fine without open office plans and in-person collaboration over lunch break, then they will inevitably ask why they shouldn't save a ton of money by hiring a greater proportion of engineers outside of the Bay Area.

Large software companies already do this and have offices internationally.

Time zone sensitivity is a very real thing for companies who hire remotely, so I don’t think this is necessarily going to change. Much of the “<current employee> can now work remotely” is likely predicated on the fact that those employees are in the same time zone.

Effective time zone is somewhat more personal, though. As a night owl, working with local early risers sucks a lot.

Why do you need to institute any new WFH policies as applicable at the domestic level to do this? They’ve already been doing this presumably to the extent they wanted.