Evolving Reddit’s Workforce
redditblog.com
redditblog.com
....To help drive the idea home (pun intended), we’ve reimagined our approach to compensation in the US. To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US. It means that our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live. We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live. Internationally, we have had one pay range per country, and now the US will be consistent with this approach.....
Honestly it's a win-win-win - a win for the company that has far larger talent pool, win for the employee who gets paid more and can move to a more desirable, low cost-of-living location, and win for the "left-behind" areas of the country where many rich techies will move to.
This will reduce class divisions and equalize our communities without any coercion and continue to allow highly-skilled labor to extract maximum income from capital. I very much like this shift towards remote work - it is the silver lining to come out of the pandemic.
Without being overworked, can a remote manager manage more people than an on-site manager? I don't know any remote managers
Are you sure you've diagnosed this correctly? The managers I know are ready to get back to the office for the exact opposite reason - managing remotely is much harder and more time-consuming.
I wouldn't call myself a source of advice on remote work necessarily because I kind of fell into remote work by accident pre-COVID, and COVID has really solidified the situation. But it also seems like remote work is going to be on the rise outside of the context of COVID. I live in a city with very little tech industry and so I only rarely here from recruiters, and those that do contact me are usually talking about relo to a different city. Just over the last two months or so I've started hearing from recruiters at nearly the level I did when I lived in San Francisco - and they're mostly not talking relo.
because this isn't how market economics work. You're not payed for being a rockstar, you're payed for the least amount of money you're willing to work for. Indian rockstar coders may be as productive as American ones, the difference is their cost of living is lower, so they're willing to do the same work for less money. Same reason your barista in SF makes more money than the same barista in Podunk Idaho despite serving just as much coffee.
Likely those high cost of living places will quickly drop in cost as most people spread out.
It would be interesting if a bunch of people leaving the Bay Area ended up congregating in certain low-COL communities. I wouldn't be surprised if a sort of rural gentrification occurs in the handful of Midwestern towns that have gigabit fiber. Would those areas remain low COL? Would the existing inhabitants become a sort of underclass?
You'd see something like that, but keep in mind that outside of dense urban cores, you mostly don't have the same constraints on available real estate that drive existing residents out by rising prices (and the SF Bay Area's lack of housing inventory is largely self-inflicted, unlike, say, Manhattan).
So, yes, some competition from well-heeled newcomers will drive prices up a bit (encouraging new construction), but without a constraint on housing inventory that drives the newcomers to compete with each other, what you get is just a bit of urbanization, rather than gentrification per-se.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
For example, when many people have children, it locks them in to their current job, at least for a while. They have to depend on the parental leave, they need stability and insurance coverage while dealing with a newborn, and their time is taken up with new responsibilities so severely that there’s no way to study, practice and prepare for intense interviews.
If market compensation was truly based on some notion of all the external factors that make a person willing to accept a certain amount of pay, then you should see people getting pay cuts when they have children. But you don’t. In fact, having children is historically correlated with raises, one theory being that it communicates fealty to your employer that you are accepting a life responsibility that yokes you to that employer more strongly - but this affect varies across different cultures and different types of companies.
The same is true for working remotely. There is no “market rate” for a person already working for you aside from what you already pay them. There is no comparable substitute person in the new geographic market that you can swap in for them. They already work for you.
Any salary arbitrage by location would already have to have been priced in when you hired that person in the first place. Them moving to a new location doesn’t suddenly mean they are fungible with a new local substitute - and in fact it’s quite the opposite.
It has increased some costs, but nothing like Bay Area peninsula for example. You just don’t get the critical mass and no building like that in SD or any other place I’ve seen, save for Manhattan.
Outside of those, almost every community is eager to bring in high paying jobs.
That's pretty different from new high paying jobs becoming available to the local job market.
For one thing it means local engineering talent doesn't have to move away to have a career.
Also seen by some as the value of their houses rising, which they might welcome; and this only happens if there's some demand from other workers to work remotely from their area, which brings money into the area's service sectors. This could breathe new life into many parts of the country that are currently without any particular reason to go on existing.
I could see smaller townships deliberately incentivizing remote workers and designing things around them as a primary source of monetary influx.
>why would someone earning 150k in sf should earn the same in Deroit?
Just replace Detroit with [Some other place] and replace SF with Detroit
I don't know a single compagny that pay the same wage worldwide.
e: removed the fluff, see child post
You mean, you're from England. The other parts of the UK set their own taxes.
https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/scottish-i...
That's not the case. Scotland is the only constituent country of the UK where powers to set income tax have been devolved. Income tax in Wales and Northern Ireland is still controlled by Westminster.
Whether you work for Google from SF or Chicago makes no difference to the company as long as you are doing the same work. I'd argue that someone working for Google in the UK should also be paid the same.
Tax rates are very different in the UK and SF or Chicago. Level of social services provided to people is very different, nearly everything is different. I am not saying whether person should or should not be paid the same, but rather pointing out the fact that things are different between UK and SF/Chicago. Most of Google Engineers in the UK pay 40-45% income tax https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
Basecamp.
According to the current status quo it is OK to discriminate remote workers, but that is not an inherent property of the system, just an implementation detail. People are pro/con whether they think they are benefiting from the current state of things.
If the same person relocates to Bermuda why is Reddit not giving them the same money they would give in the top tier US cities? Even better, Reddit will save even more money on them because they wont have to pay payroll taxes.
Or if an employee moves to Mexico City, or even Canada, why would their pay be adjusted down?
You're not paid based on the value you create. You're paid as little as a company can get away with paying you.
This is already in progress and we'll get there before you know it.
I am worried about the precedent this sets and the long term consequences. I can certainly imagine a scenario that plays out like the following:
Step 1 - Eliminate geographic considerations for salary.
Step 2 - Scale all salaries to expensive markets.
Step 3 - Slowly allow salaries to stagnate until employees in expensive markets are no longer receiving fair pay.
Step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave for other jobs.
Step 5 - Allow steps 3 and 4 to repeat themselves as many times as you like.
Step 6 - Company has now decreased employee salaries and physical expenses like office space.
Step 7 - Profit.
Step 7 - Watch your lovely forum turn to shit
Step 8 - Fail and declare bankruptcy/get sold to Yahoo
Seriously, what are you expecting workers to do exactly?
The only difference is the benefits of non-remote tech-hub work that have been driving the high wages in tech - concentration of talent, face-to-face communication/team-building, advanced urban infrastructure - are now gone. So tech workers will have the same amount of company choice, but can no longer benefit from tech hubs; tell me why companies are going to continue paying the same high wages again?
Concretely, if your work adds $300k/year to company revenue, it will at most pay you that much.
Of course, it prefers to pay you less, and to get close to that number it's best to be part of a big enough labor market that you can get job offers from several employers.
Here's the thing: In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.
What I just described is "supply and demand", with a bit of detail.
The bigger the labour pool, the worse deal you are going to get. You're now competing against the guy in Nowhere Town, this guy can do your job and he's willing to do it for less because he's never experienced an expensive reale estate market.
I run a small consulting practice. We are highly skilled and very experienced. We can often charge much less than our competitors because we don't have the overheads our competitors do. A 1 million dollar deal for my practice is worth a lot more than a 1 million dollar deal for Accenture. We can go down to 700,000 and still have over 90% profitability, Accenture will walk away at that price point because it's not worth their time.
If this was true, big cities would pay the lowest wages, while remote rural places would be where to go for really high pay.
I think the main thing missing from your model is that the employer pool is also growing.
The main thing missing here is that this is the tech industry where there was previously no demand in rural places, which makes the low supply in rural places irrelevant. Before the aggressive lockdowns across the country, tech companies didn't care about rural areas because the increased labor pool wasn't worth the compounding gains you get from a concentration of talent, face-to-face communication, and advanced urban infrastructure. Now they literally can't have that, they will give you a worse deal because they have access to a larger labor pool.
It's kind of absurd to suggest that increasing the labor pool alone will lead to higher wages. It's strictly worse for city dwellers who already benefited from an increasing employer pool, which is now offset by an increasing labor pool.
I think you’ve made a bigger over sight here though:
> In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.
What you would expect from this is a new equilibrium prices that is a) lower than the current highest paid region, and b) higher than the current lowest paid region. Which is a situation that doesn’t benefit anybody currently working in the large metros.
A worse (but likely inevitable) outcome would be if wages started trending towards a price somewhere in between San Francisco and Manila.
Now that supply is spreading across the country because remote work is easier, but that doesn't change the number of developers that these companies are competing for. I doubt that the supply/demand curves will move much at all.
This is a wild statement and I would guess it is coming from someone who hasn't spent much time professionally outside of tech hubs. There are tech jobs and competent developers everywhere. They just exist in a higher concentration in tech hubs.
There's many great developers outside of SV but they're typically doing boring Windows-centric finance or engineering support work.
Even ignoring the silly claim at the end, what you say isn't logical. New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.
This statement supports my point. A large proportion of devs currently live in a tech hub. They moved there because there was opportunity. Telling all the developers that the opportunity will come to them does not magically change the number of developers. So if demand for developers hasn't changed, and the supply hasn't changed, why would salaries change?
The only way the number of available devs changes is if some new untapped supply exists outside of the tech hubs. My argument is that it does not, the majority of devs that could already moved to a tech hub or figured something out.
Maybe as a rough generality. 1/3 of the developers I know were born in SV.
It’s probably not hard to guess the confounding variable.
SV is a 2m+ area filled with local schools, where many of the parents are developers and highly supportive of the education to be a developer. For someone to say “no developers are born in SV” is bewildering.
Sure, the companies tried the standard approach of just secretly agreeing not to compete with each other for talent, but the DoJ didn't care for that, and so they just do the other thing: pay as much money as is necessary to get the folks they want.
Apple makes about $435,000 in profit (not revenue) per employee, including non-technical employees. If they think that they need to pay staggering salaries to programmers to keep a good thing going, they will absolutely do it. Would they like to pay their programmers a third of what they're paying now? Totally. Would such a salary be fair? Totally. But those programmers would just call a Google or Facebook recruiter and be out the door the next day.
There is a reason why software is %20 of the economy and most economic growth in the USA now and why engineers are paid a lot and I believe they are correlated.
I always wondered why the FAANG companies don't move their main campuses to somewhere with a lower CoL (call it CoL') so they only need to pay $(CoL' + X' + Y) to keep the employee. Paying X' (where X' probably less than X) because they're no longer in local competition with the other companies. I wonder how long it would take to recoup the cost of moving the company in savings on compensation. There are countless places which have better quality of life than the Bay Area, while also having lower CoL. I chose to move to the Bay Area because Y was greater than what I could get anywhere else.
Or in the UK train drivers ;-)
Is the food at an expensive restaurant better? - sometimes but that is not always why it is expensive.
They can solve that by paying accordingly more for their top technical positions to make those jobs competitive in expensive markets.
[I'm not arguing in favour of this, btw. - just pointing out it's an easy problem to solve]
The number of companies this would be a problem for is tiny.
It will perhaps lead to an equilibrium where salaries are consistent across the US. I'm more curious about the effect it will have on the economy.
But, now I wonder why is the boundary the US? Why not pay the same in Canada or Europe or Asia too? Are they any less valuable?
Radically different legal system.
Starts to matter in a hurry as soon as an employee runs off with your IP to start a competitor.
1. Scale all salaries to expensive markets
2. Stagnate vs inflation, until salaries track mid-market cities (Denver, Austin) instead of San Francisco / NYC. A bout of high national inflation would make this easier.
3. This works well, but only for a while. To be easily productive remotely you should be a Sr Engineer. Juniors will have a harder time. So will managers. Companies focus (even more!) on only hiring experienced devs. Increased competition drives more work outside of the USA.
4. With lots of remote opportunity, there's even more mobility for individual employees. One company is functionally like any other... all of them take place out of the same room in your house, and only differ by who is on the video chat this week. The "shared culture", both company culture (we're all in this mission together!) and regional culture (east coast / west coast) starts to fade. Fading culture amplifies communication overhead, which slows velocity. A very few companies will overcome this with incredible levels of intentionality, but most will fail to do so.
5. To try to solve the culture problem, companies open smaller landing-zone offices in a couple of hub locations. Remote folks fly in once in a while to get excited and pick up a free tshirt. These smaller hub areas become a good place to onboard Jr employees (making hiring easier), and provide a nice environment for executives to meet with customers.
6. Living physically close to the hub office provides greater executive visibility, and greater promotability for folks who care about that. This reinforces the HCOL compensation premium for leadership only. Jr folks (generally young) are happy to scrape by in the city as always because "dating is the killer app for cities." But they move out as they gain seniority / age / start a family, depressing housing costs for ~10-15 years until population growth catches up again.
7. Startups are primarily founded 2 ways: Senior/stable founders launch distributed companies with their former co-workers around the country. Nobody wants to move. Juniors/new grads launch out of the city of their university, with people they met in school.
8. Weirdly, this means that it becomes somewhat efficient for super-tiny startups to locate just outside of major cities, because if you only have a few people it's probably cheaper to live there than buying tons of plane tickets to visit VCs in those areas. Have to raise that next round! But as soon as the company hits mid-size they are quick to move out to cheaper areas.
9. Given all the above, we'll see an averaging of salaries for all areas, with the exception of executive leadership. Vibrant HCOL downtowns will fade and hollow out, suburban hub offices will be more common. Cities with strong tech universities will do best, as always, since they provide the flow of new-grad startups and academic partnerships.
Alternative step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave that market for a cheaper market but keep their job.
I have a feeling that a lot of people in their 30's and 40's no longer really care to live in expensive markets, but traditionally felt it was hard to move and accept much lower wages. Decoupling the job from the location frees a lot of people to move that wanted to.
I suppose the answer is: There's little friction to move inside the US, but a lot of friction (well, a ton right now, but even pre COVID, there was still a lot) to move outside the US and keep working for a US company. Not to mention time zone issues.
I probably answered my own question, though I am curious what their rational is.
That bit about time zones, though, is interesting to me. In my experience working with a team on both coasts, one side's gotta give. Generally, it's the side with fewer people, but one side ends up syncing up their work schedule to either be early or later. Tough to avoid.
Yes please, times 1000.
But without that, at least the telecoms should probably be reliable.
I'm just saying that as work from home becomes more common, it's only a matter of time before corporate starts measuring "output" now that they can't check up on you whenever. For programmers at least it's not so bad. For everybody else lower than management, I can only see people feeling unfairly shackled.
Internet connectivity is MUCH better than you're thinking. 3G and 4G in every town big enough to have a gas station.
The wired internet was so fast in Nairobi and Cape Town I legitimately thought something was wrong. After living in the US, Canada and Australia I've never used internet even half that fast, it was mind bending.
It's much, MUCH more developed than you're thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people in a very beautiful and modern city.
A lot has changed in 12 years
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/24/chile-protests-constitu...
As a foreigner myself I'd love all companies be open to hiring non-americans, but going from working within the employment laws of one jurisdiction to 150+ countries is not necessarily a good use of resources for a company.
It's a bit of a mess, but you can see most of these inside the "Location" dropdown on their jobs page: https://www.redditinc.com/careers#job-info
The good news is that some countries won't bother taxing you if you're working for a US company remotely - they're just happy to have expats spending in the local economy.
I work for an engineering company in Switzerland, and half my team are German citizens who (pre-covid) made a daily commute all while enjoying the lower cost of living in Germany.
* I know it is not that, but it feels like that. Also thankfully not tied to the officially reported inflation rate in Turkey
For every Swiss Franc that strengthened 15% against the dollar in 10 years there's an Argentine Peso that because 45 times weaker in that time period.
The only governments that have clued into this are the member states of the EU, and even then, some of them are starting to forget this point.
I live in a country with a land border to Africa, free immigration won't be fun for me, nor is it for the EU.
Furthermore, the EU doesn't have Free immigration. EU freedom of movement is only extended to member state citizens; and the Schengen area only dissolves "internal" border infrastructure. Both of those schemes are predicated on the existence of "external" borders which are not opened. If you don't already live in the EU, you're subject to the same types of visa categories and quotas you'd get if you were trying to immigrate to the US.
The reason why it seems like the EU has Free immigration is because there was a refugee crisis a few years back. This is, again, not Free immigration - it's just a particular visa category everyone agreed to for various historical fuck-Hitler reasons. You still have to actually prove to an immigration judge that you have a case of being a political refugee, which is far harder than most people think. Meanwhile, economic migrants still have to go through the process of getting work visas for particular approved professions, sitting on quotas, and so on and so forth. So you get none of the benefit of a Free immigration system but all of the downsides of political, economic, and racial ressentiment, etc.
It has many cons for employees, but 'at will' employment presents benefits to employers that can be reflected in salary, since if that employee is no longer needed or the salary is no longer viable for the business case, the employee can be let go easily.
If you're employing people in countries where you have to spend months of negotiation, legals, or may even be unable to lay someone off at all, you're not going to be paying as much, since you need to cover contingencies. If US people move to such countries, they can also be covered by such laws, or may also be subjected to double taxation which will affect their pay too.
I know people in Europe who've been "employed" by US companies as contractors to avoid having these local legal obligations, and that would certainly open up the option of global pay levels, but I know there are legal and regulatory issues around this approach too.
The next item on the list would be other things that vary within the US, such as the enforceability of non-compete clauses. Reddit can’t change the law for each state, but they can agree to not add those clauses for any US employee. How they would be held accountable is not a question I know how to answer beyond the realm of public opinion/memory.
Again, I congratulate Reddit for the steps they took so far.
Is nobody else worried that policies like this are going to end up penalizing workers who genuinely prefer living in an urban, high-COL area? I'm not sitting here in Brooklyn eagerly awaiting a chance to move to a cheap giant home in the suburbs - I genuinely like walkable communities, and moved to one, and found a job there which paid me enough to justify the high COL.
This feels like a regression-to-the-mean sort of move, where the net effect over time will be all tech salaries becoming reduced as the labor pool spreads to cheaper areas and the national average market rates become depressed. It'll be great for those who genuinely like living in small towns in the midwest, they'll probably still be doing well relative to the local average. It'll be horrible for those who genuinely like living in expensive coastal areas - the pressure to move to a cheaper place will be enormous.
(And thats not to say anything about my belief that a lot of low-COL areas afford to be cheap by providing poor social services, which feels like we're diminishing the ability of high-COL areas to apply social pressure to elevate the standard of living of other states and regions...)
Am I thinking about this the wrong way, or are high-COL urban workers going to take a hit here?
The end result (as I'm imagining it) would be that these new national-average tech salaries can still provide a very comfortable living in low-COL areas, but are no longer comfortable in high-COL areas.
Realize with areas like SV you're also competing because of desirability not related to job market. If you want to live in certain parts of CA it's going to cost more.
If what you are worried about does happen I suspect it would take on the order of a decade to show up. But regardless of timespan, I must say I don't care. Your post is just crocodile tears.
Reality will probably be somewhere in the middle.
During "White Flight" New York lost a substantial, but not enormous number of people, but still the effects on the city budget caused quality of life to plummet, as crime spiraled and infrastructure crumbled.
I was reminded of this after reading this recent New York Times article about the current massive budget shortfall as the tax base flees the city:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/nyregion/nyc-budget-coron...
I also don't think this is unreasonable. we're not entitled to live in the most expensive corners of the world just because we want to. currently engineers in high-COL areas get paid a premium because the company sees value in having offices there and having most people work in the office. once that perceived value-add no longer exists, what entitles you to get paid much more to enable your lifestyle than joe schmoe in iowa who does the same work? if this feels unfair, it sorta calls into question whether it's fair for SWEs to get paid so much more than other professions in the first place.
I previously worked for an all-remote team that, over time, shifted from mostly within the US to HQ'd within the US on paper, but with just a few employees left in the country. When I left to take a local job, the guy who replaced me in Latin America was every bit as talented an engineer and tech leader, but for less than a third of the cost to the company compared to what I was making in NYC.
I get the feeling a lot of people are looking at this as their first step towards more tech jobs in cheap parts of the US, but the reality will probably end up as more tech jobs offered to people from much cheaper parts of the developing world - also a great thing... but with potential impact to those of us in the country if wages move faster than COL does.
My justification for finding my walkable community in one of the only places it exists in the US was always high wages, but if that changes, there's little reason to not pursue parts of western europe with a much better social climate and lower wages - but also lower wages. Who knows what will happen post-pandemic though, and how much of this will stick outside of a few SV companies.
See also
https://iism.org/article/why-are-ceos-failing-software-engin...
But what is your solution to this? If companies can make this work, why should they ignore the huge talent pools that exist in the middle of the country? That said, I think there will always be employers who prefer to have most everyone sitting in the office.
The alternative is Mary Tyler Moore’s salary being lower than her male counterpart because he has a family to support / a higher cost of living.
I'm aware of several teams that have done this with success in the past. Everybody, no matter their region of choice, gets compensation enough to enable an appropriately comfortable standard of living desired based on the actual costs of living where they choose. This is what we're talking about when we advocate for adjusting salaries for COL. It creates incentive for your employees to live where they actually want to live, work, and be happy - rather than wherever they feel like they can extract the most cash value from the company.
So the equivalent “comfortable standard of living” they’re used to in Manhattan would require a $5 million annual salary.
Subsidizing high-CoL people who get the advantages of being in a city is not fair at all. It’s only tolerated because high-CoL cities tend to be where the talent is most concentrated so you have to compete for them.
For example, Google will not pay Zurich engineers Bay Area equivalent salaries despite there being similar CoLs.
Would you think it’s fair if you lived in the same city but your company paid more money to people with more expensive houses?
That said, I really don't think remote work will be permanent. Once the Pandemic is over, people will relish going into the office. Most people WANT to work at an office, regardless of the commute. It runs between 60-75% of all people want to work from an office, and it is more efficient.
It also all depends on the office setup and where people reside. If someone has a casual bike ride to an office they probably don't mind the commute, v.s. if someone has to take an hour + BART ride without seating, packed like sardines and some homeless junkie smoking crack, they probably feel differently.
The idea of an employer daring to adjust my pay because they think I should get a roomie (or make any other decisions about my cost of living) is crazy.
Over the years various employers have entered into negotiations, mid employment, to change the terms of my contract. More often than not it’s been a good opportunity for both parties to seize the opportunity for some fresh air — new job for me somewhere else, new chump for them!
It might even be that if a bunch of people who value things like walkable communities move to a place and get involved, they could even make one. It's just crazy enough to work.
Check out https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/
Keep in mind that even cities that have lower scores overall often have some very walkable neighborhoods. For example, Los Angeles has an overall walk score of 68, but has several neighborhoods that score 90 and above.
If you're working remotely, why should your employer pay you more just because you prefer more expensive cities? Should you also get a pay raise for preferring more expensive cars, or having expensive hobbies?
It would be great to have more good salaries and good jobs available nationally.
The same could be true if someone has a family member incarcerated at a certain prison and needs to live close by for visits or to help with legal procedures.
Cities like New York (and SF, London, Berlin, etc, etc) still have a bright future and are still going to attract large companies - and most of those companies are likely to remain predominantly office based for the foreseeable future.
There is nothing physical that makes it more expensive to build dense, walkable communities. On the contrary: Shorter distances mean less roads, less pipes, and apartment buildings (and smaller apartments) mean less heating costs. It should be cheaper, from the material point of view.
The problem is political: People already living in walkable communities tend to vote for keeping newcomers out of moving into their walkable communities, vote against building more homes in their communities or expanding the walkable communities at their edges. This shortsighted selfishness, pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you-attitude of people already living and voting in walkable communities is doing the penalizing. And potential newcomers don't have the right to vote in the local elections of the walkable communities they are only aspiring to move in to.
My suggestion: join your local YIMBY group and work toward making cost of living more affordable in your area.
I think it is a little silly that companies pay someone more just because they like living in a city. I admit that I have a strong preference for rural areas, but I don't expect an employer to pay me more (or less) because of that. I am constantly surprised that more companies don't setup in lower COL areas, but I guess that much of the in-person talent desires that enough to make it work.
Most people agree that it is good to treat people equally regardless of their background, and this policy seems to promote that.
As it is, you could already work full time remote and get much higher salary than those companies that adjusted for COL and publicly advertised their pay scales(Gitlab, Stack Overflow, etc). If you were interested in money, and willing to get after it, those salaries were laughably low for someone with the talent and history to back it up.
So now what? The same as always, get paid what you can get paid? If you want X money go get X money. If you can't, maybe you don't have what it takes to live in a high COL city(is that so different from now)? Perhaps the COL will come down to reflect a reduced demand for those particular urban centers. Or to reflect ability to pay high rents and prices?
IMHO the potential downsides are more social; risk of increased social/economical stratification. Maybe the cities end up even more packed with a certain "type" that can pull the big money while everyone else is servicing them on scraps. IDK.
If I were being hired remotely by Reddit I would be pretty wary of a sea change the moment it becomes possible to work in an office again.
Knowing what’s valuable and what’s not is a function of being an employee. Designers and engineers should know where value exists.
If they need a PM to shift them away from valueless work, then I highly question their efficacy as an engineer. I also highly question that organization’s management structure and communication.
Having said that, both Google and Amazon has excellent PMs and there are teams that require PMs to be in the loop for a feature launch but it is not universal.
When Tencent, Sequoia and Andreesen Horowitz are in the same room, its a startup, specifically a tech startup.
They could be selling hairgel with only a landing page for you to put your email address and it would be a tech startup. They'll make sure it is considered as much.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-...
As much as I'm supportive of having flexible working and with that flexible office space, I really don't like the idea of non-fixed desks/hotdesking. Ergonomics and having a correct desk setup up for your needs is incredibly important and something we don't value as much as we should.
I'm 50/50 on whether I'd like to go to back to the office in the future (not having to take the tube in London is massive plus) but if I do I'd want my own desk setup, monitors set up at my required height and a comfortable chair. Hopefully that's not much too much to ask?
Someone who gets me! Hotdesks sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice definitely are not. What happens if you show up late and somebody has your seat, do you boot them out? I'd just rather have a fixed desk, thank you very much.
Everyone else just uses what's available. It's kinda like when you were in college. Even though there were no assigned seats, most everyone sat in the same seat each class, after the first few.
You can only change "Opt out of the redesign" setting on the new site though, which is super annoying, and a pretty big signal https://new.reddit.com/settings/
Works fine for me. But I also run it in a dedicated full-fat profile I use only for Reddit, because I'm paranoid.
And the opt-out button is missing on mobile. I think something changed a month or two back, that preference used to work.
Using Reddit as a source of information via Google search either:
1. Has half the screen blocked or you have to dismiss modals to use the app 2. Breaks your search flow by switching to the Reddit app
I also found the global moderation surprisingly efficient. I got a few official replies about actions on content I reported. They seem interested in banning really bad users.
They also try really hard to replace private messages with the chat box, which seemingly doesn't work in third party apps. They added badges, friends and other game elements.
Reddit is trying to become a product for advertisers. It's pretty obvious to me.
Especially now, it is looking like we're in this situation for at least another year; it makes sense for companies to make longer-term changes.
I was fortunate to start working for a 100% remote company 2.5 years ago; it is nice to see that I'll have more options for future employment if I ever need to seek it.
Essentially, the website is an ad funnel.
They've added bells and whistles that attract the type of audience that watch videos, buy add ons, and click on ads.
Reddit is turning into exactly the vehicle they want. It's going to be worth so much more money now.
Not much can be done about it.
Obviously it's a moneymaker. The goodwill and the brand make money. The low-tech anti-modern anti-business aesthetic makes money. There's a reason this forum is a subdomain of a venture capital firm. I agree that they shouldn't (and probably won't) change in Reddit's direction but only because they don't need to. Why bother with ads when your entire culture is in essence an ad funnel?
This is exactly how it should be, kudos to Reddit. Major tech companies taking advantage of employees relocating to lower-CoL areas completely ignores that the value they bring to the company doesn't change at all.
We at Pex went through this kind of transitions few years back, although we are basing our compensation on LA for USA and CA and on Vienna for Europe.
We made this decision with the understanding that we can't compete for talent in the most expensive places of either continent but we are still left with great amount of people.
It worked well for us. Not only while hiring candidates, but more importantly allowing our employees to move closer to their families or finding places to live that better match their lifestyle. We generally notices overall increase in happiness across the company while people are not restricted to single area. Also the financial pressure dropped significantly which means people stay with us longer even if they are offered better paid jobs (at least in the cash portion).
Well yeah weren't they all remote a few years back before Reddit forced them to move to SF or something?
They didn't mention office perks such as food, I presume that's going out of the window as well.
It's a rare opportunity for companies to back down on office costs and they are all to happy to take it.
I seem to remember a lot of blog posts lamenting this at the time
Every company that does this puts upward pressure on wages throughout the company.
The scenario where every company goes remote simultaneously is what we are witnessing play out. That means workers in every major city will have a 1000 different businesses to offer their skills to. The businesses that offer ‘local salary’ cuts will be on the lower end of people’s interest.
This still might be very bad for innovation (missing a critical mass of a range of experts accidentally trying new things in SV), but it may be very good for increasing wages in non costal cities (and the knock on effects that positively has on the communities there).
I could never see a $1200 2-bed in SF ever coving the costs of construction.
There is nothing magical about the bay compared to Indianapolis that means I can’t find a 2 br apartment anywhere on the outskirts of even San Jose for a similar price. The only difference is the overbearing NIMBY crowd protecting their own investments in their homes.
Yes, building materials are more and labor is probably double (I have friends who just did renovations in SF).
So sure, $3,500 is way too much for a 2-bed, but no, even if you built a ton of new housing you’re not getting a 2-bed for $1,200 in SF.
Now the $200k in valley, doesn’t provide as much value as $125k in OHio.
That’s one example. I’m sure there is some examples that support both ideas, but there are some that support Paying the same developer less In LCOL areas
I've never though it made much sense to tie compensation so tightly to geography. If I'm providing enough value for you to pay me $X, and I move somewhere cheaper but provide the same value, you'll either pay me $X or I'll find someone else that will. If you think you can find a suitable replacement for cheaper, you should be doing that anyway.
Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.
>Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.
I tend to agree with this, but I think there is also a dichotomy of destination cities (where people with lots of money move to because it's nice, not necessarily because they will make more money there) vs. non-destination cities which can distort prices absent of wages. See: Vancouver, parts of LA, parts of the NY area, Miami, etc.
Right. I'm really looking to be able to drive a Tesla and vacation several times a year on remote tropical islands. Should my company pay me more for that choice?
So only left-leaning people living in big American urban centers?
Since it's been like that for so long, I have to assume it's deliberate. Some executive at Reddit decided they were going to try to break things to force people into the app.
Considering how Orwellian they are with content curation and moderation, particularly with anything that has even a whiff of politics, I see that as a good thing.