Remote working: Is Big Tech going off work from home?
bbc.com
bbc.com
In the fight for talent, however, it is not clear that they have the upper hand, because, I, for one, will be more that willing to offer your employee the ability to work from home. I will ask that the team work out an appropriate culture, which probably includes coming to the office at least once a week -- but certainly not on the other hand four days a week.
And I work for a bigco, so either you are going to have to throw even more money at them to show up to your dumb box everyday, or I will win. :)
What a stupid way to ruin most of the remote upside - not having to live in a particular shitty metro.
That's essentially what this article is saying: The big tech companies are requiring employees to live within commuting distance of offices and to come in for some portion of their time. The question now is where the line is drawn on how often they can work from home.
The companies aren't saying that everyone has to be in office. Most of these quotes suggest that companies will continue to support remote opportunities for some, but not all, of the workforce.
Surely there have to be more people like me that enjoy the bigco work but want to live in more human friendly places where we have an actual shot at establishing roots and living real lives.
And I will note that the greater Bay Area just got a lot bigger if its only once a week.
I know someone who had to drive 3 hours for a weekly customer meeting. They started to resent every person they saw those days.
Some of the best managers I've ever interacted with managed remote ICs or were remote themselves. Their communication skills were excellent. The average manager I've worked with has poor communication skills (sure, lots of meetings though) and won't adapt well.
Curious: has any major tech company yet publicly provided numbers showing WFH negatively impacts productivity or profitability?
Well you need to actually do work to be productive remotely. Upper management doesn't really do anything.
I can't see how the must-be-in-office companies think they win this in the long term.
All the companies that want to poach from FAANG will offer remote work
Some people will always pick remote jobs over all else, but the high compensation of FAANG is a huge hurdle to overcome for most employees.
Companies willing to pay FAANG competitive compensation and let people work fully remote are few and far between.
Most companies that start hiring remote quickly discover that they can save on compensation by hiring from locations where people don't have FAANG as an option.
I've worked at companies that offered private offices, work from home, great health insurance, flexible schedules, catered lunch every day, and all of the usual perks. We'd still lose out on hires to companies offering a couple thousand more than we did.
Come decision time, few people are actually willing to take the lower number. People willing to compromise compensation for other benefits are out there, but they're more rare than you might think.
I've got to say though even if people are obsessed with the bottom line when it comes to picking a job, I've got to think stuff like WFH also impacts retention in some way. For me I'm physically healthier under WFH which means just my ability to keep a job skews me towards WFH jobs even before we consider preference.
I went into this thinking Netflix was wrong and that most employees valued the big picture more than total comp.
For the most part, the hiring market proved me wrong and Netflix right. :)
Working from home is just a small step after that.
The pandemic has shown us that we definitely can work from home - but on the other hand it also sucks to only see your teammates exclusively on zoom.
I think there is room to find a more rational engineering culture that balances the time and carbon from your commute with the fact that we are all human and need some face to face.
I mean my biggest pet peeve is just drawing a simple diagram. No drawing tools seem to be as good as a good old fashioned white board.
This is especially true when trying to make a system diagram on the fly or come back to a previous discussion...
I know someone who had to drive 3 hours for a weekly customer meeting. They started to resent every person they saw those days.
Doesn't bother me
I'm confident that if CBDs essentially die because of remote working it will be a financial apocalypse. There is so much wealth tied up in inflated inner city property that if it is suddenly not in demand anymore there will be a huge correction that is going to hurt a lot.
I know members of c-level meet with politicians and even leaders at the likes of Google. Are these conversations happening? I don't know, but I would not be surprised.
A self organizing team is a managers nightmare. They end up transitioning to a QC role which is 1000% better use of their time
I often feel like people started swinging the pendulum away from manager-as-micromanaging-supervisor, and just letting it keep swinging to managers-are-pointless, and failed to notice when it swung past the useful managers-as-support-staff equilibrium point between those extremes.
Remote work is here to stay.
Personally, my team would be half day a week encouraged (the same day for everyone), all else optional.
What I'm curious about though is what level this sort might happen at. Maybe it doesn't need to be at the company level. Maybe it can be at the level of an "office" (in abstract terms), which I think is what Stripe seems to be trying to do with their "remote headquarters", or maybe it could be whole product orgs choose one or the other. Or maybe it works at even more granularity, down to the individual team level.
I'm not sure how it will work, but something the pandemic has taught me is that there are a lot of people who love the office, and a lot of people who love being remote. I think figuring out some way to give both kinds of people what they want, somehow, is going to be the way to go.
Trading one benefit for a different benefit is a pretty normal thing to do. If you can offer "work remotely", why would you need to offer "we have a quirky office"?
> Furthermore if they didn’t press it, there would probably be an even greater collapse to the real estate market.
...so what? Why would the companies care? To the extent they rent offices, that's just a huge, unalloyed benefit. To the extent they own extra offices and rent them out to other companies, sure, that's bad for the landlord, but that business model crucially depends on a bunch of other companies renting.
“Collapse” I’d agree is too strong of a word, but there is clearly distress in some RE asset classes.
Company B: pays for team Meetups once a quarter or half a year. Workers take slightly lower pay because they can live anywhere.
Company B has way more bang for the buck on average.
I love how these executives are all of a sudden so worried about my career trajectory. Maybe you should assume I’ve thought about this trade-off and decided that I’m fine with no promotions if it meant I can work remotely.
EDIT: It just seems so suspicious that a whole bunch of things they never cared about in the past are now oh-so-important. Like those now-critical serendipitous hallway conversations. In the past, we’d be chastised for spending too much time at the water cooler, but now they are a vital reason to return to the office!
It’s almost like in the absence of measurable evidence they are scrambling to find something, anything, to justify their already-made decision after-the-fact.
aka: We are going to take YOUR job since you apparently can't adapt.
Can always job hop for promotions, no need for your manager to be involved
Speaking for myself, my job has become increasingly less local the further up I've moved, specifically because my influence is broader and requires touchpoints across the org regardless of geography.
Now as a staff manager? Yeah, remote 1:1s and coaching is inferior to in person, at least IME. But that's about the only part of my job I would prefer to do in person. And its just that, a preference, as witnessed by the fact that I continue to do it even though I work from home full time right now and haven't seen my direct reports in person in over a year.