Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA.

Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

Depends on the state, but seems like if you're single, the individual plans in most states are around $3-500 per month with a ~$6k out of pocket max. This means annually:

-$4,800 in premiums -$11k maximum health costs

Check out college/grad school. You can do a couple classes and get excellent coverage for cheap.

When I did it it worked out to paying $3k for an MS, but I bet you could look harder and get the degree and a discount over just buying a high quality plan.

When I contracted in 2018, I paid $650-700/month for a pretty good "silver" insurance plan covering my wife (34 then) and I (39 then). Definitely varies by state and availability of insurers. But it was by choice... 1099 rate easily covered all taxes and insurance with room to spare and allowed be to set up a solo LLC and dump a buttload of pre-tax money into a 401(k)... About $53k in one year.

Taking time off was hard for me mentally with that high rate, knowing how much gross income I'd give up to take a week off for a trip.

Or, you know, vote in a government that will do single payer insurance.

In another comment I mentioned the USPTO's part-time program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24729649

I can say unequivocally that at the USPTO as a patent examiner you would not be expected to squeeze 5 days of work into however many days you work per week. You work a certain number of "production" hours and you are expected to get a certain amount of "count" per production hour. So, as the number of production hours you have decreases, your count expectations decrease proportionally as well.

People in tech do seem to value time which may explain why they are disproportionately drawn to the "Financial Independence, Retire Early" (FIRE) movement. The tech industry continues to be much more supportive of 80 hour weeks until you strike it rich and "retire" early, than it is of steady part-time work over many decades of steady-state work-life balance. But the motivation may be the same for many.

I would like to also echo this sentiment. I took a job that lets me work with a much more flexible schedule. I changed from doing straight dev work to software dev support for an API SaaS company to facilitate that.

I like software development, but I don't think I'm cut out for it in a SV work hard/play hard sense because I like to tinker too much. That's just not a good fit for deadlines, production environments, etc.

It's given me a lot less stress professionally which has allowed me to work on personal projects (software and otherwise).

In the past few months - Started learning about worm composting and I've been raising e. fetida worms to compost trash. - Started reorganizing my homelab and messing with all my server equipment - Learning about different machining techniques - Working on my cars more, and I hope to take on an EV conversion of an old car soon.

> It always seemed weird to me that people make such high salaries in tech but just don't value time as the main commodity of our lives.

It's not about valuing it, the problem is that finding jobs which allow part-time work is just about impossible. I'd give anything for a job where I can work 40% time for 40% salary, but those don't exist.

My wife has managed to arrange 80% time for 80% pay at the G of FAANG for a couple years, but the company absolutely hates the arrangement and tries every opportunity to sabotage it so it's not that great. Also, management demands 40 hours of work for that 80% pay with the explanation that full-time employees are expected to work for a lot more than 40 hours.

That's partly because high-paying salaries can be a stepwise function with respect to one's time. If you make $500K a year, it does not mean you can make $300K a year by working three days a week. I'm sure many people are capable of pulling that off, but I guess more can't. Software engineering work in corporate requires certain level of continuity. You may be called upon for a meeting. You may need to jump into a conference call for a system outage. You may need to do an in-depth research to debunk your co-worker's design. You may be able to pace yourself, but your teams won't be able to wait, which disproportionally diminish your value. Again, we can argue how to practice essentialism, but the reality is that many people can't or are not capable of doing so. Otherwise, we wouldn't have books about essentialism.

I've done a lot of IC dev work in my career of 20+ years, and I've moved cities often, so I had to frequently "start over" with reputation and networking.

What I found to work best was that any time I entered a new market, I would find a local contractor organization (that already has a lot of contacts), and do short-term high-skill jobs for them for 3-6 months (for example, spending two weeks at a bank helping optimize one of their new internal services). Contractor organizations tend to work more with mid tier developers, but they get frequent requests for high skill jobs that they don't have the people resources for. This allowed me to build up a group of very happy local references which can then be leveraged for longer, better pay contracts.

Once I had some references and a budding reputation, I'd go to networking events 2-3 times a week and talk to as many people as possible about the kind of work they do and I do. It's not uncommon to have two or three potential contract leads out of every event. After doing that for a month or two, my availability and rep would spread by word-of-mouth, and people would start contacting me directly for work, and I could be more selective about the jobs.

That gender gap sounds rather concerning

That sounds awesome.

Does the reduction have to be in blocks of days? or can you just work, say, 5 hours a day instead of 8 ?

There would definitely have to be coordination at the organizational level. Say, no meetings on Mondays and Friday and individuals can choose to work individually or not on those days. But that starts to get inefficient for the people who do want to work and it reduces the flexibility of those who want to work part-time.

And TBH, if I were to work fewer hours in a year, I'd probably prefer to have bigger chunks of time off, i.e. more vacation time, than having every weekend be 3 or 4 days--much less have shorter work days.

You’re describing my situation. I have no dedicated room for my home office, just table with my own decent monitor and company’s decent workstation plus some hardware from the office. My place looks ugly with all that equipment, but it’s still better than punching a card daily in the office. Moving to a cheaper area is too good to be true.

There are winners and losers every time there's large change.

Those people slogging out 1.5hr commutes from the outer suburbs are the winners because remote work even with a "you must be in the office 1 day a week" policy makes their land more attractive. The people who mortgaged themselves up to their eyeballs to get in on those good inner suburb commutes and schools are the losers because suddenly outer suburb housing is a more viable alternative to what they own. The people living in illegal 300sf studio departments in people's basements are neither since they weren't all in on any particular side. They can rent somewhere further out and cheaper with space for an office without too much friction.

Back in the early 90s a lot of cities were dumps compared to today. The people who bought there and held on for 20-30yr won because a lot of cities gentrified.

I completely disagree, and I am in that situation. I feel like working from home 3-4 days a week, and then in the office 1-2 days a week is the best of everything:

1. I have much more freedom to choose where I live because my commute is much less of an issue if I'm only doing it once or twice a week.

2. I feel like I get the best of all worlds: I get great "focus time" when I'm working from home, but I am still able to have more personal relationships from meeting people in person at the office.

3. Our company I think has done a great job segregating heads-down work time from specific days where we have more meetings or more collaboration.

I have a feeling a lot of people come at this from the perspective of small companies. In the case of large/global businesses, you may have teams that are largely co-located but you're probably on calls in the course of a given day with people on different continents. One of the main teams I work with, even if everyone were in the offices where they are technically located (or were) that would be two different although relatively nearby offices and another 6 time zones away.

Exactly this. Multinational companies are relaizing that they've already incurred the cost of distributed teams and that since there's really no difference between your manager being in Munich, Germany and Munich, North Dakota they may as well cut costs by allowing the latter case.

You missed my point. I didn't say remote doesn't work, I said remote will disadvantage remote employees if not done right.

If you still have to come in multiple days per week you now still need to live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office and preferably have a decent home office. Less of an issue if the office is in a suburban office park. More so if it's downtown in a city.

If it's one day per week, it's probably more tractable because you can probably put up with a pretty long commute if need be if it's just once a week.

So the details matter.

> merit is only one of many reasons that promotions happen. And often not the primary reason.

Related thread from 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618707

Not sure about other peoples experiences but all the best and smoothest projects of my career were done with groups who had good social cohesion, got on with each other, supported each other and most importantly socialized with each other.

There is close to zero opportunity for free creative brainstorming in the workplace and all the true innovation we made came out of discussions outside of work at the pub.

Definitely know there's benefits for working at home, especially for the first few years of your kids lives. But career wise if you reduce your presence to a name in a slack sidebar and an occasional face on a videocall, don't be shocked if you're treated like a name in a sidebar because just like any relationships in life presence makes a difference.

The latter seems unlikely to me. If we stigmatized or outlawed geopay, the net effect would be rising wages across the board because companies would not want to be locked out of hiring good people in HCOL areas. That or the cities would empty out and the relative income needed to live well would flatten. Either way, a win for society.

Sounds like a good incentive to just pay SF wages to everyone which any company currently in SF clearly can do.

Those that aren't in SF already can't afford SF talent so it makes little difference.

It's not like there's some glut of companies out there paying Chicago wages to most employees except for their 1 or 2 in SF who get a HCOL bonus. And to the extent that there are companies doing that, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for society if they stopped.

The ultimate outcome, no matter what companies do, is that tech workers just won't live in big cities any longer.

If remote work is an option, then paying high rents just doesn't make sense.

Moreover, as this trend continues, the ultimate outcome is not US workers moving to low-cost locations, it is foreign workers supplanting US workers in extremely low cost locations.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will start to equalize with other places in the country like Chicago, won't it?

Perhaps the real message here is that SV companies are realizing this is a perfect way to get out of paying $300-500K salaries for jobs that are more like $150K anywhere else in the US. It's kind of like the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago, except instead of getting 3-5 developers for the price of 1 by going to Europe or Asia, SV companies can get 3-5 developers for the price of 1 that are still US-based and only a couple of timezones away.

As someone who doesn't live in California but still near a big city in an area that is still "expensive" (but nowhere near SV prices) relative to smaller towns and rural areas, I can't figure out if this remote shift is a good thing or bad thing for me yet. I fear that my suburban house will be worth less going forward because proximity to a major city may be way less valuable now if so many fewer people ever physically go into work anymore.

> you should be paid according to the value you create for the company, and nothing else

But, you need to subtract your pay from the value you create. If you create $1MM value but cost $500K, and someone in the Midwest can create that same $1MM value for only $150K, it's pretty obvious what most companies will choose.

FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less. This massive WFH experiment that we've all been in seems to have demonstrated to some of them that physical location doesn't really matter as much as they thought. The next logical step is that paying inflated rates to hire someone in a particular physical location doesn't make sense, if you're just going to have them work remote anyway.

WFH may just be the pin that burst the SV tech wage bubble.

The only way to counter that is through collective bargaining, which many people on this site seem to view as beneath them. “Geopay” really isn’t any different from how Google/Apple/etc colluded in the past to suppress developer wages.

At low paying jobs sure but when you're talking about $100k+ tech employees it does not cost 50% of base compensation for the physical workspace.

> Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs.

That estimate is high by about an order of magnitude. To get a sense of the cost ceiling per person, look at the least cost-effective way to rent a monthly desk which is to do it as an individual in a co-working space.

Here's one price list for coworking space in Campbell (Silicon Valley) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iljwYScQ4d5F4rUcQN-9XH0D8E2...

An open office desk is $325/month, up to a dedicated cubicle for $725/month.

So for a junior engineer at $150K salary, that's between 2.6% to 5.8% of their base comp in office space cost.

Now, of course, a company renting tens of thousands of square feet at a time gets better rates due to scale, so the percentage is less than those examples.

Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results?

Also, do you think someone dishonest enough to take advantage of a remote position to spend their time working on their own startup would be a great asset on-site?

I'm not saying remote work is for everyone, far from it, but there is a difference between comparing someone that is not as productive when WFH, and someone who milks the practice illegally.

The quality of management will be the same regardless of if the employee is working from the office or at home. The person who was allowed to "milk the system" in the office, surely, will be allowed to do the same when they are working from home. It seems unreasonable to me an employee's manager would change their behavior based on where the employee happened to be working.

I don't believe Marissa Meier demonstrated that managers significantly improved when their employees were required to work full time in the office. I think that would be the interesting measure here: do managers really perform better when their direct reports are in the office?

> or some take advantage of the privilege of self management and milk the system.

People milk the system in the office too. It's human nature to expend as little energy as possible for maximum rewards.

Companies have been milking workers as well. It's not surprising it comes back to them.

what's the Marissa Meier thing?

No such thing as pay out.

There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right.

I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions.

Anyway... WFH and outsourcing did have a small boom and bust. On WFH, Marissa Meyer pulled the plug and the WFH reversed. "IT Outsourcing" was imminent circa 2000, but a lot of companies had to reverse out of this strategy.

It may be that these were right-but-early. WFH & outsourcing are now ready.

I also think they are hard to seperate. Once WFH becomes a norm, the labour market is internationalised by default. Not just tech jobs. If you can work from Montana, you can work from Sophia.

This is already how organizations work and have always worked.

The more ambitious, sociopathic and lucky ones rise up the ladder.

The people who don’t care that much about work remain ICs and enjoy the rest of their life outside work. There’s a great blog post about this on Ribbon farm.

I'd expect to see this too, but I think anyone planning to do these tactics is walking an extremely thin line between "gaming the system" and fraud. Not to be Debbie Downer, but if someone is thinking about getting a PO box in SF and funneling all their work connections through a silicon valley VPN, they should think about how it will look in front of a judge when their company goes after them.

Often you need more than manager approval. At Google, you need VP approval for permanent remote work (hopefully for now - we will see if things change).

The thing is that many companies are likely open to WFH now and then for appropriate roles and others are open to WFH-mostly. So it may be a difference between WFH one day a week and WFH nine days every fortnight.

I've also mostly been at organizations where it was never a problem. I believe traditionally FANG have been resistant even to the part-time remote model.