Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees
cnbc.com
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This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.
Curious, what are the outcomes?
Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-...
But you can begin to see some limits of remote work. Obviously military units shouldn't be training remotely. The bonding is too important.
Another factor that I didn't consider is that there was basically nothing to do but work in many places - most things fun were either banned/shut down, or unattractive because they came with the implied threat of catching COVID. This includes vacation. I bet once recovery sets in, a lot of saved-up vacation time gets used at once, especially in countries and companies where significant amounts of vacation can be banked.
The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.
I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives.
The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working.
I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.
A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones.
I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.
The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
+1 this sentence; personally, I'm not interested in the fully distributed model espoused by some evangelists. I still desire physical proximity, with just-enough/just-in-time physical interactions as determined by myself (and relevant coworkers). I would love working for a business that offers something like an internal WeWork - reservable low-density dedicated workspaces, near social venues and transportation.
Of course thats just a generalization.
This is going to be the big struggle for teams who formed in person but are now hiring remote.
I joined my current company about six months prior to the pandemic and had ample time to get to know my colleagues face-to-face, making the transition to remote working very pleasant. I'm not sure if the experience has been the same for people we've onboarded remotely; they're productive but I'm unsure if it'll be easy for them to build up the same kinds of relationships.
You also tend to get into situations where there's a social divide between a subset of the team who have constantly worked together synchronously in the past and new starters who only appear in 2D on Zoom. This may not be a problem for some people, but it's a concern for someone like me who gets a lot of their daily social interactions via work.
One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year. Obviously not everyone can every join all of them, but I'd imagine most still would do 2. Ideally the families should also be invited.
I am sure it would still come out cheaper than maintaining office space and build stronger relationships than the mere coffee break talk.
COVID style isolated WFH ruined WFH for me and contributed to burnout.
But that's likely still cheaper than office space. That ranges anywhere from $20-$70+ per square foot depending on city and how nice it is. So even a tiny desk space is 500-2k a month.
Personally, 2 weeks is the minimum in my book for any kind of substantial time difference (4+ hours) and substantial flight time (8+ hours each way). I’m sure others feel even more aggressively than I do. I cannot imagine how people with kids would feel. The food and bacteria issues also just make things really challenging for many people.
There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun. Thus, you don’t really get to enjoy the spectacles as much because you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working. I’ve been in exotic destinations before and had work stuff come up. It is not fun anymore. Terrible if anything. Rather be home than be in amazing place but unable to enjoy it.
Food and bacteria – well, that's true. Although not everyone is affected and these come mostly from poor hygiene of either cooks/staff or the employees themselves. You make sure you choose a trusted and tested locations and educate your employees over tap water usage. I guess not much more can be done.
> There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun.
I think it's a matter of the vision. I absolutely would have made it to be more fun than work. First of all, in my example those would be frequent, so there would be less or no FOMO and not everyone would go to each of them. Which means you could definitely delegate the line support to those absent. If you ended up getting called in for help after all, that's just life. But, that's also unlikely to happen each time you getaway.
> you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working
Well, no. I understand it may have been like this in your case, but it shouldn't be. I see those getaways more as a concentrated leisure/team-building activities you otherwise do throughout the year in the office and still get paid for. Except here you have an added benefit of actually being able to hold some really cool, out of the "cubicle-box" brainstormings/hackatons. Plus all the team building games, parties, etc. – again, all those things you'd normally do in the office to actually bond with people.
$2k for one week of travel expenses was based on 5 nights of hotel at $150/night ($750), 5 days of rental car at $200, gas for the car at $40, roundtrip flight at $500, travel to/from home airport at $60, parking at home airport at $50, and 6 days of meals @ $55/day ($330). Grand total $1930 plus taxes and tips.
When my company rented out the convention space in the Hard Rock Hotel plus rooms for 50-100ish employees, the room rates were still $150+/night. Granted that was the same week as CES, but I don't think hotel costs scale down that much unless one is willing to sacrifice location or something else.
The other things should be scalable a bit with tradeoffs. That said, I wouldn't be too keen on going on a week long work trip where I can't leave the hotel, must eat every meal at the hotel with my colleagues, and don't have any way to get around. To me, that means a successful event would have to budget for people expensing at least some of their own meals and for people expensing at least a few taxis/ubers.
Again, my experience with big company gatherings is tied to CES which is its own beast, but in the case of CES my company pretty much left everyone up to their own devices in terms of getting to/from the hotel and for most meals. Hotel rooms were also individually expensed (but out of a reserved block of rooms). My company was obsessive about expenses and the cost of CES, so I imagine if there were a cheaper way to do it, we would have been doing it that way instead.
People are social and, in my experience, remote interactions work better when people have previously connected in-person.
This proposal is so far outside what I’d consider ok that I’m not even sure whether I’ve understood correctly?
If employees are going away together somewhere for a couple weeks, four times a year, then they’re spending 2 whole months away from home, living in another location (maybe a hotel?) And the suggestion that they take their family along? What happens to the partner’s work? The kids’ school and their friends? Your social life?
And this is just scratching the surface of the practical considerations - totally setting aside the dystopian aspect of spending so much of your own time with your co-workers.
Even with your extra proviso that not everyone would need to join, if a company had this one aspect of their work-practice, then I’d avoid them at all costs
None. I started 3 different consulting jobs during the pandemic and always felt very productive and very connected to my colleagues, even though I never met them.
Of course ymmv but blunt "None" isn't right.
I’m old, so don’t look at me, but when you look at the cohort of folk who are dealing with wfh successfully and productively, it’s, in my direct observation, younger folk.
None is perhaps true for more people than you think.
The ones who are struggling are the people who don’t “do chat” (ie the “oh no! I despise slack” group and the “let’s have a call to discuss that” group) and managers.
...and to be fair, it’s a lot harder to be a manager remotely; I can’t deny that.
...but people can build meaningful relationships online; it’s just different, and that’s hard for older people, in general.
I have not been able to get any such spontaneity during remote work with my group or division at a large tech company with mostly young coworkers. I haven't been able to figure out why.
> the “oh no! I despise slack” group
Chat can be super useful, but can also create a nasty interruption culture. I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.
It pains me to see the number of people who reply quickly to chat messages all day in order to show they're 'working' rather than doing their jobs.
How is does chat creates an interruption culture compared to people literally standing in your shoulder and directly interrupting you? At least with chat I can decide to ignore the notifications until I’m finished with my current task.
If people exercise good judgement on ignoring notifications, it's less rough, though the tooling is really poor for using chat for async tracking, organization, triaging, and replies, even compared to emails or tickets.
I despise slack more than probably most anyone. I've been working remote more often than not since the early 90s though, so remote is very natural. Non-stop interruptions will kill you though, regardless of job location, so close that slack tab.
> I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.
It's called email.. in the case of slack, just let it send notifications to email. That's how I monitor slack, I'll check my email when I have free time between concentration sessions.
During 2020 I interviewed people, hired and onboarded a new person, ended up interviewing for another company myself, joined them, have interviewed and hired new people at the new gig. Never met anyone in person. No issues at all.
Been doing similar conditions for much longer than a year though. Over ten years ago I was leading a team of 20+, everyone distributed across the globe, nobody in the same timezone as me.
Many people, if not most, have more potential to connect better when more senses are engaged and more experiences are shared. These relationships sustain over time, with some degradation of course.
I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.
Anyway, as much as I love remote, in person has its benefits.. like being able to strangle someone when needed.
For all we know, their password might be something like "remote_worker"!
Bad latency, pixelated screensharing, frequent issues with sound and video. On top of that hardware problems with bad microphone setups, cross talk, etc.
I hope that at some point someone is going to show up and take this seriously. Treat it like a medical service, or a least close to. But I'm not holding my breath. I believe it was least year that I read that John Carmack had measured the latency of his cell phone and found it to in the vicinity of 700 ms.
As a developer, WFH actually facilitates things like pair programming and peer review. Especially for introverts like myself, it is much easier to do a screenshare of your IDE and review code in a group than try to sit next to each other or review code on a big screen in a meeting room. This has become a thing for us now (let's jump on a zoom and i'll show you quickly), for anything that's too complex to slack.
The ability to easily screen share and record sessions as needed means I can get the big picture in the initial live session and review the details later via recording as needed (especially those nitpicky code details nobody remembers the first time around).
I will miss this when we have to go back to the office.
And fwiw, I think I fall within this line of thinking - for me going to the office would be productive if it were at its absolute most once per week.
At office you can work together with same peoples over years but not get any real clue about who they are truly, because lot of politics, pretending and fears included in office life. On remote work peoples usually more open, honest and direct, in most cases it easiest for them to share stuff that they have passion about or describe real issues in life (But I think that also not true if your work required to do lot of short projects with different peoples).
Also, if you already work with someone for a long time remotely it always nice to meet him in real life and get to know little more.
A) Have a totally different work experience than 99.99% of folks out there
B) Might have different personality type than a huge chunk of people out there (hard to quantify, a guesstimate of mine would be at least 60%)
Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.
IME these relationships are a function of how much time you spend talking with people and not of physical proximity. At my last job the person I was closest too was on another continent. We worked quite closely so I spent way more time talking with them then some people that sat a few feet away from me. We knew each others lunch and break schedules better than the people we ate lunch with.
There is a tendency to talk more with people next to you and only zoom someone for direct work discussion, but in both scenarios there's room to force some socialization. In our line of work we even have tools like pair programming to enforce these relationships.
This isn't quite about relationships because I knew the people involved before; it's more about not having information that you tend to get just from being around the office. I'm not saying this is an argument for going back into the office so much as being mindful about communication.
I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.
Once you have the job, you're a black box that takes inputs and spits out work outputs in return for a monthly payment, and the company doesn't need to care where you actually are doing the work, as long as the black box works to specs (the JD).
What’s to keep you from getting a job that’s ostensibly in Washington state and then moving to California? I believe that’s called, “tax evasion.”
On your end, you (the individual) are required to file an income tax return with the state you reside in. If you lie and say you are unemployed that's very obviously fraud.
Whether the company you work for is willing to deal with any extra tax paperwork that might be required if you relocate is of course an open question.
You might be surprised
> What happens 3 years later..
Find a new remote job? There were remote jobs before the pandemic; can't imagine they would all dry up.
The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.
It's really hard to generally evaluate employees on productivity - especially in CS - and so our compromise is that we all lie a bit and say "We're paying you for 40 hours a week" and we reply "Yes - my compensation is tied purely to the fact that I am here for forty hours".
I think it's a much longer road to better employee respect.
And I have, though it's always tempered by two things, namely, A. If the job routinely requires > 40 hours a week, then the job is poorly defined and we need to modify expectations, and B. That if I'm working to the job and not the hours, it doesn't matter if I only put in 30 hours one week, if the work is being done (and, likewise, if THAT is routine, the job is also poorly defined, and I need to ask for more things to do).
do you punch a timecard or do you get the same check every month or whatever your pay period is?
I think this is European approach, trying to eliminate the luck factor out of ones success.
I go into a minor state of social anxiety and just struggle to get anything done for a good 10 minutes before a meeting. Mainly because there's far more of a "I'm interrupting this person" feeling when I can't see their screen.
Being constantly on camera without being recorded is already super demanding.
I don’t doubt that this helps you, but it’s not without a cost to those on the other end.
(And if you don't get a satisfactory response, get another job where there are helpful senior staff).
Having been in both sides of this I try to be helpful when people need my help (unless I'm doing something very urgent, naturally). But yes.
Many engineering organizations don't have full documentation on institutional knowledge, and many things travel by word of mouth.
Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.
I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing.
When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother.
I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.
After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC.
It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in.
Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh.
I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom.
#1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen.
#2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.
I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
Of course managers want to "wfh" taking calls by their pool and outdoor bar
About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides.
My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen.
I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk.
I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.
I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned.
And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
"And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites."
I'm an old git now and have space but back in the day I ... didn't. I'm not trying to say I understand your particular situation but I do sympathise and I hope it doesn't sound trite.
I wish you all the best and that's why I'm responding to a comment made two days ago.
Take care.
I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.
Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to.
I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point
Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.
All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it.
Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?"
Then, everyone will get to work from home.
Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office.
Keep coughing.
Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..
I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office.
I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity.
I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.
Are people.. better humans when spending more time in solitude & less around others where cognitively-draining politics is inevitable?
Parent of three, going on four. Get me out of here!
I'm in SF, but my manager has been in NY for the last 3 years. Being managed from a different office seems to be common in large companies.
I was remote but many offices had a butts-in-seats policy because of unapologetically old-school top management. Fortunately there were quite a few middle managers who were able to creatively route around this inefficiency.
Just let there be a relatively permanent core and the rest of us can just shop on the open market for advancement.
You're assuming a bunch of stuff here. There's something to be said for:
1. Having known people pre-covid, and so having a predefined "connection" with them. 2. The kinds of work that would or would not be more susceptible to personal bias. Web development, for example, is more impervious than people-management.
Ultimately what you're talking about is bias, and bias is shit and should be minimised. Remote working shouldn't be compromised as a result of people not being able to be impartial in their work.
I guess we will find out in the next couple years who just has a terrible _opinion_ and who is 'the rest of us.' You may not like how that turns out.
I hate the office but I will be back in as many days as possible as soon as possible. I am not going to be part of an out-group to an in-group that contains the people who decide promotions.
I have no doubt the people who come back to the office the quickest and the most often will get better raises over the next few years on average vs THOSE remote people.
The dynamics here are pretty much face up.
Roughly, "senior" at a lot of places.
What happens if you don't?
If, after a few years, you still need to be told what to do in order to be productive day-to-day, you’re simply not developing, and unless you figure out what’s going on you’re probably going to struggle to build a successful career.
For my own team, the bar I set for giving higher assessment ratings was how well you could make and keep commitments to the team. If, after working in the code base with the group of people for a year or so, you couldn’t independently come up with useful things to commit to doing and couldn’t deliver in the timeframes you said you could, I would start asking you whether you are really happy and motivated doing what you’re doing with your career. For the few times I had to do that, the member of my team ended up admitting to themselves that they were making a mistake trying to do this type of work, and they moved on to something else where they were more happy and successful.
For some Facebook employees, definitely. Personally, I think I'll be finding a job elsewhere now.
Once a few colleagues are remote, all collaboration has to assume remote as the default. Even if I'm in the office I'm still stuck with remote collaboration, but I still have a commute.
The upsides for me of being in the office massively outweigh the downsides, but only if my colleagues are there too.
In practice I feel like you could just aim to have some teams be mostly people who like office and other teams be mostly remote. Would be awkward hiring wise though to send someone to a different team just on there office vs remote view.
To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.
If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.
Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.
I think it is totally fine for an employee to make the decision to work from home and obtain greater freedom at the cost of worse promotion outcomes.
The problem is that if employers say “hey you can work from home, but you are less likely to get promoted than your peers working in the office” they open themselves to discrimination lawsuits. What if there is a strong correlation between those who choose to work from home and a specific demographic? Well it turns out that women may be much more likely to WFH given the choice. Does this mean that the WFH policy is sexist given that women are much more likely to WFH and WFH employees have worse career outcomes?
I believe that this isn’t discrimination by the company because non-women who WFH have similar career outlooks to women who WFH, but there may be a case there and nobody wants to put that case to the test. Instead we get these WFH policies which bring everyone down — to accommodate those who made a choice to sacrifice their career prospects by working from home.
Disclaimer: I love working from home
Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/dont-let-employees-pick-their-wfh-da...
The linked study (in my comment) says otherwise. WFH employees were better performers on average. This means that WFH employees — when normalized for performance — had much worse promotion rates that their office peers.
Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
That doesn’t fix the issue. Even if everything is declared “hybrid” there is still going to be an “in” group of people working in the office most days and an “out” group of people working from home most days.
> Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
Having objective performance evaluations which are agnostic to WFH would be ideal but I am not sure if they are realistic. You are working against human nature and tribalism: it is much easier to have favourable opinions of those you interact with regularly. Not to mention that very few work places actually have objective measurements of employee performance, it is mostly all optics and how well the employee sells themselves.
If the office mic in the room only picks up one person, the remote person will be left out; the 2 in office will feel disdain for the remote miscommunication.
I mean, that's kind of horrific, but it's the sort of thing people are thinking of.
The other mechanism is, even if people are in offices, construct teams so everyone is in a different one, and so everything is remote even if you are in an office.
It's horrific, but I expect this to be "accepted" behavior once we return to office.
My perspective on that is that, at my workplace, the L4 lockdown in NZ was actually a significant improvement, which might sound counter-intuitive. That's because there was an implicit decision-making process where people local to your floor/building/city tended to talk together and remotes were second class. Once we were all on an equal footing - forced to be explicit in who we bought into Zoom/Teams/etc sessions - we got improved and more thoughtful interaction.
Since we've left L4/L3 we've managed to preserve that culture, even with people dropping into a cadence of a few days in the office and a few days remote, because it's normalised the idea that every conversation has a remote component. That's persisted for a good 9 months, so we'll see how it persists.
I'm sorry what? How/why are they doing that? Huh? I'm lost
Is this permanent? My employer is reopening, but I'm expecting it'll be awhile before amenities like free meals and snacks get back to normal. There may be more health restrictions initially.
I work in a applied ML and really, the technical aspects of the jobs are the 'easiest', ie. most well defined. In most cases focus + time will be sufficient for me to produce technical work. However, the real challenges lie at the intersections of models, infra, code, product and users. The goal is rarely is to build the best solution, it's to build the right solution.
Solutions to these can only be found by collaborating with people who own each specific part. Intense whiteboarding, pair programming, brainstorming, etc were the most interesting parts of my job. All of them have been reduced to a shadow of what they were during remote work.
Also, if I'm going to spend 50% of all my waking hours with a group of people, then I better like spending time with them. Being cooped up in a room my myself all day isn't fun at all. (and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it)
My coworkers are my good friends and if they weren't then I'd go somewhere else. (not drinking the Koolaid. I have no allegiance to corporate, just my nuclear peer group)
A 'flexible or remote-optional team' is a lie. Remote and in-person are diametrically opposed office cultures. Both require very different cultural traits to flourish. Ones that try to stay on the fence will inevitably converge into one of the two or end up as a complete disaster. ( coordinated 3 days at work, 2 days at home etc can work...but that's just at-office culture with benefits)
> My coworkers are my good friends
I think you need to make friends outside work. Live a little.
> and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it
I literally addressed this. I stay in a group home and have a large community outside work. I don't want to wait for 6pm everyday to access people I like.
If anything, try making friends with people you spend time with for 50% of your waking hours. Live a little
If most of your team is not working remotely - let's be honest - it'll be hard for a remote worker to not feel disconnected with the rest of the team.
It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they didn't reduce my salary when I moved from an expensive city to a cheap mountain town, I just didn't get raises for a few years because my comp ratio was too high. I don't understand why people would rail against this kind of policy. It certainly didn't motivate me to move back to an expensive city.
I'm not sure how well this would work out for those geo-arbitrage digital nomads, but I don't think that companies should be particularly accommodating that corner case.
This is irrelevant, though. You aren't paid based on your output, you're paid based on how much you cost.
Think of how much you pay for water. In place A, you might pay $0.02 per gallon of water. You move to place B, and they only charge $0.01 gallon of water. Are you going to keep paying $0.02/gallon? The value that the water provides to you hasn't changed, but why would you keep paying $0.02 when you could get it for $0.01?
In FB's view, you aren't any different. Even if you provide the same value, there's no reason to keep paying you $300k when they could pay you (or someone who replaces you) $150k.
I think companies will only get away with this as long as the supply of remote work is low. Once you start to see hard-to-recruit people leaving for higher paying remote work at another company rates will go right back up. Geo-Arbitraging digital nomads are only a corner case because most people don't realize it's an option. Once it becomes the norm then what?
The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.
People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.
It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.
Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.
People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.
tl;dr: because they can. You’re not paid based on how much value you provide - you’re paid the smallest amount possible to stop you from quitting.
Yes? Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?
Look, I'm all for less exploitation of workers, but I don't see how it's suddenly outrageous for American workers to experience employer relationships the same way those in India, Australia, or Vietnam do.
If an employer is defining it according to your needs, that's a sign you have relatively low status. It's not a sign that the employer is correct.
This is partly why remote has huge potential benefits for employers. Committed remote means huge savings on office space. But it also lowers the chances of collective political activity, including unionisation.
I know of several expats that do exactly this, working remotely for US based companies.
Your value-added just represents a ceiling on how much its rational to pay you in some sort of vague career-adjusted terms; the vast majority of people don't even have jobs where that can be measured. Even those where it looks simple (say, sales) are actually much harder than you'd think.
I don't understand why you would accept this if you don't have to?
When we went remote, nothing changed other than people no longer had to commute. The feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly and consistently positive. Nobody wants to go back full time - ever. The most they’ll concede is a day or two per week, but I strongly suspect reality will be less than that.
So for 10 years I lived in NYC and--don't get me wrong--there are lots of things I liked about NYC but I'm so over the summers and the winters. Also bear in mind that I think NYC is infinitely better for most people to live in than the Bay Area.
But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
Add to that that for the same price as my 50 year old 1 bedroom in NYC I now live in a 3 bedroom duplex apartment. I spend a ton of time outside and this has greatly increased my mood and wellbeing.
There are things I definitely miss: camaraderie with my coworkers, free food and the like but honestly I'm just over going into the office. I'm not sure I'll ever do that again.
The ability to live anywhere in the country just opens up so many possibilities.
It's worth noting that this doesn't enable a true digital nomad lifestyle if that's what you want. That's because you still need to be employed somewhere and you and the company are subject to the employment rules (and taxes) in that locale. Maybe that will change in the future.
But it does mean dealing with your own taxes, charging a higher rate to compensate for those taxes and other bills, etc. however, I’ve found that I can charge higher and the company can still save money simply because they don’t have to pay for things they would normally pay a permanent employee.
But, it does come with a risk of losing your job more easily.
It’s a bit big to share here and it’s late but I’ll get back on this
This isn't that hard to circumvent with a mailing address. The real blocker has been pre-covid management not being comfortable with 100% remote.
Ps - great baldurs gate 2 ref in your username :)
I once saw a sailboat named "Minsc", that had a dingy hanging off the stern named "Boo" but it was gone before I could snap a picture. Probably off to do butt kicking.
Leaving aside timezones, which you could adjust to if you wanted to, the real issue is that your employers can’t be sure it’s complying with Thai, Croatian, and Costa Rica law and doesn’t want to be the effort in to figure out how to be sure.
This makes Florida your domicile, so no state income taxes (but, of course, you're paying Federal taxes regardless of where you reside in the world). The mail processor in question caters specifically to cruisers/yachties and RVers. Give the address to work and family, no one knows you're living the digital nomad life unless you share. Get a Schwab or Fidelity checking account for fee free ATM withdrawals globally, and a credit card with no foreign transaction fee.
I see how one could, in theory, easily get away with a fake residency while remote working, but sharing the same address with many others and posting about it online seems like asking for trouble.
It gets really weird if multiple states attempt to "claim" you - I believe there was a supreme court case regarding state income tax in such a scenario.
It's also why I've never taken a single document or line of source code from any company I've worked at.
That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical. The city comes alive in such a unique way, people are outside relaxing in the parks, having backyard and rooftop parties, heading out to the beach on the weekends. There are a bunch of great weekend trips to be had a few hours away by train in Long Island or Connecticut or upstate NY. You can join an after work rec league with friends. There's concerts in the park once or twice a week, and free movie showings on the waterfront. The bars and restaurants are more lively.
One of the best parts of NYC in general is just how much there is to do if you like getting out and being social, and in the summer it's just turned up to the max.
Most apartments don't come with AC, but as long as you can afford $300 for a good floor unit to put in front of the window you can keep your home temperature very comfortable.
Summers in NYC can be quite mild. If memory serves 2016-2019 were all quite mild with only very brief hellish patches. Some earlier summers though were... horrible.
For me, the magical time in NYC is spring and fall, specifically May and September-October. Those are my favourite times in the city. The days are still relatively long. The weather is nice and mild.
But there is something about the oppressive heat radiating off the sidewalk and the buildings and the air is humid and completely still that is just completely draining to me, in the height of a bad summer.
I lived in NYC for 10 years and I hated the summer daily commute because all that aliveness led to hangovers and me sweating all that magicalness out daily on my walk and wait on the platform.
You aren't wrong that NYC is great in the summer but it's also a special kind of hell with heat and humidity. Both can be true.
But at least in hindsight the good outweighs the bad :)
Also how can we talk NYC summers without mentioning the unique combination of dried dog piss on sidewalks and decaying garbage. This varies by neighborhood, but if you have a lot of high rises you know what I'm talking about.
> That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
This, to me, is a perfect illustration of why the future of work is neither everyone staying remote nor everyone returning to the office. Some individuals thrive in close, convivial environments, others thrive when given the space that only comes with remote working; still others are at their best with a balance of the two.
Acknowledging and embracing this social diversity will be key to employers attracting and retaining the best talent in the post-pandemic world.
It’s very hard to maintain the discipline of holding online meetings and documenting all important decisions when enough people are colocated. Face to face bandwidth is so much higher that it’s easy to forget there are a lot of people without that exposure.
Remote work allows us to live where we want/need and remain productive members of society. I've been working remotely for 20 years, living in wonderful cities the whole time, and I'm not going back any time soon (ideally, ever).
What part of Florida? It generally starts hitting 90 in May most of the state and stays there into November.
I've lived in NYC and yes, January-March can be tough and a few weeks in September are awful but Florida is just oppressively hot for six+ months of the year. The worst part is it doesn't cool down at night so you don't even get early morning or late night comfortable outside time
I've thought about why this is. Not commuting I think is a big part of it. So the weather doesn't have to bother me if I don't want it to. Like I literally don't have to go anywhere.
I think the trade winds are a big factor too. Hot, humid and still is a special kind of hell.
Another is expectations. Like if you live in Miami you just assume it's going to be relatively warm (even hot) and humid. It's not a surprise.
Lastly, I have more space here and more facilities where I live. I can go for a swim easily even if I don't want to go to the beach.
I have been to Tampa in June/July years ago and that was hell. My circumstances were different and I'm sure my attitude was too. It actually turned me off Florida for years. Up until last year actually.
Funny story: when deciding where to work remotely last year I was strongly considering Dallas (maybe Austin) and decided on a whim to go to Miami instead. I said if I don't like it I'll just go to Texas. I haven't left. Funnily enough, in that time Texas had the big arctic storm and a foot of snow in Austin. I think I made the right choice.
> It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F.
And this is simply untrue (according to Weather.com and Weather Underground). I mention this because there's this big push (I'm sure you've noticed) among tech/VCs/Miami govt to paint a very rosy picture of Miami as an alternative to Silicon Valley.
Every day this week is expected to be 86-89. And to folks not from Florida ... that's HOT in Florida. I've lived in NYC, I've lived in Austin, I've lived in "Hotlanta" ... there's nothing like a Florida hot. And unless you're right on the water, it feels ... like much more.
The last week in January this year had 4 days above 80. The last week in February every single day was over 80 and two days over 85. In 2018 my NYC-based company decided to come to Orlando in the last week of February. Five of the seven days were OVER 90!
There's obviously some creative license even hyperbole here. The point is that in the tropics (which I'd count Miami as in), the weather (in the dry season at least) is very stable. Just looking at the forecast for the next 10 days, literally every day it's a low of mid 70s and a high of upper 80s. Some of those days have a chance of thunderstorms.
In January through march it did dip down as low as the 50s on one occasion but generally speaking it was mid-70s almost every day.
Also, Orlando is a different beast to Miami.
It's really hard for me to overstate how outside-unfriendly Florida is.
You're comparing FL winters to NYC summers? I'm not sure exactly where you are in FL, but... in most of the state, it gets as hot or hotter than NYC in the summer!
For the record, I'm in the Miami area. I think it's a little cooler here than some places more inland and upstate. Or maybe I'm imagining things. But what a difference the trade winds make (to me at least).
Like I said, it's June and I'm still not using the AC. I just open up my house and enjoy the breeze. Some people, particularly up north, like the have their AC on 60 and wear layers indoors. For me that's a meat locker. I'm all about it being 75F with a breeze inside.
That said, I actually love Florida’s climate. The problem with Florida for me is the lack of outdoor activities, especially in the summer except for the beach and boat.
I personally prefer the bay areas hiking, access to park, playgrounds etc, but if you prefer beach, Florida is amazing and you adjust quickly to shorts 320 days a year.
Not saying those things are in NYC, there's many other great cities, but I definitely wouldn't pick a place just for the weather.
I've spent time in the mid-Atlantic region and time in South Florida. Miami in July is the closest thing to hell on Earth. But I'd rather deal with that and live in a beautiful climate year-round than deal with north eastern winters.
Thank goodness the West Coast exists to relieve us of that dreadful dilemma!
In NYC, you’re almost certainly in an older, smaller building and likely have lousy HVAC. The subway is great, but in many stations you learn to love the unique aroma of garbage juice mixed with hot piss that tends to be a thing.
A NYC subway car without AC when it's 87 degrees outside is worse than 100° in Florida; Florida is a lot more effective AC, pools/lanais, open spaces.
Does that really exist in 2021? (Or even 2001?) I doubt the driver's union would allow it. It would be unsafe.
In a Florida summer, the outdoors is a swamp, but you don't have to spend much time there. The whole place is built for cars; you can (if you wish) go straight from building A, to your car, to building B. Presuming underground parking, you might never even touch non-air-conditioned air.
In an NYC summer, meanwhile, in many buildings, the indoors is the swamp. (And often their attached yards / alleyways as well, if they're enclosed around by tall buildings.)
In NYC it may be a little cooler, but your exposure to the elements is constant. You walk to the train, lunch, coffee, dinner, groceries, etc out on the sweaty sidewalk.
When it's 90F, the train station might be 100F and train at best 80F though often much higher.
You can live in a $2-3 million apartment yet have a lobby not be air conditioned, nor the hallways or elevator. No one has pools. You can go down to the park by the rivers, but you aren't going in for a swim. All the concrete & asphalt absorb and radiate the heat.
I'd go down to FL in summer since if it's going to be 90F+ and humid, I'd rather be able to jump in the ocean or a pool.
I make good money but if I ran at 100% capacity, I'd run out of things to do. Unfortunately at this point, there aren't a ton of opportunities to lead larger teams at larger organizations so I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just pick up a second job doing what I'm doing now.
Effort and execution-wise, I can't imagine it being a problem. If it were, I'm pretty sure I could outsource certain tasks to overcome those hurdles.
The part I'm not so sure about is maintaining visibility and how on earth you could coordinate meetings to avoid being double-booked while still maintaining at least the appearance of availability. I guess the difficult part with what I do is the fact that I do need to communicate with a fair number of people within the organization.
He essentially lives in a hacker commune, has been pulling in a half million a year, and plans to retire in his mid 30's and live off of the interest.
I envy his resolve, but it's certainly not the life for me.
That's the rub with job as well, management simply can't follow their own return-to-office policy uniformly without bleeding talent, which is clearly going to lead to a lot of disgruntled coworkers. It's frustrating too because we have both productive and unproductive employees advocating for remote.
Well, someone needs to deal with the repercussions of employers' multiyear leases and investments in real estate. You are a team player, aren't you?
Living in pacific time zone and dealing with Europe, East Coast and Asia just suuuuuuuuuuuuucks.
At my previous company we also had people on the west coast and east coast.
The main thing: be flexible and reasonable. Does standup have to happen at 8AM? Will the world end of it's at noon? Probably not.
This is an all around good thing.
Swooping through the office for meetings is discouraged. What a challenge for management!
As soon as my stocks vest I will join a new company and move further from the city, closer to the beach.
However, my firm especially is really taking advantage of it. They are getting far more work out of us while acting like they are doing us a favor by not dragging us back yet.
Meeting load is up 25-50%, but story points per sprint are still way up. Major strategic projects are progressing, profit is high and customer feedback is positive. Firm is in crazy growth mode.
People aren't really using their "unlimited" vacation time.
Managers feel welcome to send emails/slacks out of hours and not even ack responses during business hours. Getting hold of them during 9a-6p can take hours, and if you want to have a quick chat put something on their calendar .. good luck finding a slot any sooner than 2 days out.
None of this is sustainable after even a hybrid return to the office, and its accompanying time sucks of commuting/lunch pickup/childcare arrangements and people actually having social lives and things to do after work again.
Use your 1:1 time to set reachable hour expectations with your manager.
Switch your "quick chats" to Slack messages and /reminds to get your answers in timely fashion.
But in Germany at least, vacation days are a matter of law. The number of days per year is part of the contract, and there is a strict minimum of 24 days (at least in Bavaria). It is as far as I know not legal to prevent people from exhausting their allocated vacation days within the full year, a couple of years ago a court decided that employers have to remind employees when they risk expiring their vacation days after a year.
So I guess anyone who has "unlimited" vacation time does not actually have unlimited vacation time, but the opposite: The legal minimum of mandated vacation time, with the option to get additional time on top if the employer agrees. Effectively, any person who even just has one day more than the legal minimum, but fixed, has more right to take time off than someone with "unlimited" vacation!
Unlimited is where you suddenly can hit 5+ weeks if you get the right manager. But - again - depends on your manager and your relationship with them.
I’ve personally never had much of an issue taking 5+ weeks every year at my places of employment but I use whatever position I have to the best of my abilities. (And sometimes I get 6+ weeks in a year, very uncommon)
What I have found is that "unlimited" actually works the opposite as it's more of a thing you have to ask for. With an amount spelled out it feels more like a fixed allocation you are entitled to and that you are deducting from. If you have the wrong manager (and good luck sniffing this out in interviews), it turns into a competition of who can use the least.
In many companies you are even required to take at least two vacations of at least one week each in any given year: the whole point of the vacation is to prevent you burning out.
Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a clear description and goal before setting them up.
I still get the odd day where my afternoon is completely booked, but I now have about 30 hours of uninterrupted work where I can program, trouble shoot, analyse data or pair program with junior people.
I believe we have to be constantly watchful "meeting creep" and always question stuff such as ritual meetings. If an IC is swamped by meetings, things are very wrong indeed.
And about the communication after work hours, unless it's an outage, I reply when I get back at work and so does everyone in my team. Maybe having this arrangement with your boss and setting boundaries is a good idea? You can't forbid them from communicating asynchronously whenever they want, but they need to respect that you won't reply to them right away.
Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have!
Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.
After all, their service is about connecting people online. Zuckerberg definitely has that in his mind.
Hardware is totally different though
This is some what Ive heard based on the teams in IS&T, and the fact that most of the most technically challenging software products, like the SDKs, OS, system apps effectively seem to have a 1 year release cycle.
Then again the place I work isn’t considered impressive in software at all so…
Are relationships in the workplace necessary? In my experience they only move us further away from meritocracy.
> "Zuckerberg said employees who want to work in an office will be asked to come in at least half the time."
I agree - part time remote work will be bad for micromanagers.
Middle management is not always useful, they mostly have the role of herding dogs, but if the work is not dumb and soul-crushing I don't think most people need to be herded.
(and I am talking as someone who built companies and led teams)
But that's an other story.
Of course, summer interns are a slightly odd population as the choice they're making is probably between doing their internship remotely from their bedroom at their parents house or spending ten weeks in the big city so there is that.
I have never interned. Maybe you expect that. I usually get thrown into the deepend of some codebase and asked to figure it out. My advise would be to get use to it and get good at it.
I don't _think_ I get high from controlling an office environment (not sure what that means) but I sure miss white boards and in-person collaboration.
If they're more efficient, then it just sucks for you.
If they're not more efficient, then there's a business case for bringing the worker bees back to the hive.
Umm, what? Having been a manager and an IC I don't see a white board as a crutch at all, I see it as a highly effective tool for a specific set of problems.
I definitely prefer working at home when I'm heads down, I know what the problem is and I just need to crank out a solution. When I'm designing the solution to a problem with a group of people, or heck even just trying to fully clarify the problem, having an in-person session is just much more productive and efficient. What's more, having now done lots of remote design/problem solving sessions, both as the leader of the meeting and the participant, I find them always less effective in every way when there are at least 3 people in the meeting.
I guess my ideal would be 2 or 3 days remote and the rest in office.
There really is no remote alternative that isn't super expensive or lacks the responsiveness of in-person.
Actually, I don't have anyone who is physically in California (I am the only one on my team who is physically there).
EDIT: list of WFH benefits (not complete): no commute (this is huge for some), ICs tend to do more focused work, ability to hire talent globally, giving option to people to live where they want to live (vs work), less seasonal colds, etc.
Maybe, just maybe the issue is that middle managers have actual, legitimate reasons that WFH isn't a universally good thing. Contrary to what you may think, not every worker in tech is a high-performing star that produces flawless code if you just leave them alone in their home office. A lot of employees are lazy and will take advantage of the reduced oversight to slack off, a lot of employees are people who need constant hands-on mentoring or direction, and a lot of employees are just simply more productive when there's someone to impress nearby.
So while I respect that you might be the perfect worker bee who does whatever work is assigned with no oversight or hand-holding required, most employees are not that, and in-person oversight/mentoring (and if in-person oversight can't happen, get ready for increase monitoring on your work laptop usage) legitimately is necessary.
Most of my job is not coding. My job isn't assembly line work. It is solving problems in coordination with my peers, which yields small amounts of code and configuration.
If I had straight-ahead clear as day coding to do, and I was motivated -- then, yes, being at home in my own environment in the quiet would be great. But that's not my job, nor the job of many other people.
Working from home is not for everyone. I'm looking forward to returning.
If the task hasn't been done on time, it might be because the task underestimated the difficulty, or that the person had other tasks which interrupted this one. If the person tried their best and they are competent, the output doesn't matter so much since likely it would have taken an equal amount of time for anyone else to get it done. You can't ask people to do more than they are capable of.
When everyone is honest and trying their best there are no problems but its pretty hard to work out when they aren't.
But... maybe that is the point.. there should be a way to get those who can do WFH to keep doing it.
Maybe it makes them try harder to appear busy with real work when people are around to hover over their cubes, but I'm unconvinced that you can really wring blood from a stone.
Maybe around the edges the "personal touch" is enough to inspire (or frighten) an employee in a way that remote communication does not allow, but I've not seen many poor performers actually improve unless they were already personally motivated to do better themselves.
Engineers are some of the worst middle-managers you can encounter. Never work for an engineer middle-manager if you can avoid it unless you're an engineer yourself. They tend to come with huge egos and entitlement due to their degree and don't have the people skills to allow them to manage or run a team successfully. They only care about themselves and wearing their ring to make sure all of you know they have one.
I realize a lot of the HN audience are engineers. I don't care. Just because you're an engineer doesn't make you a project manager or even good at managing a project or a team of non-engineers. This is a self-delusion that many of them have.
I have been a middle manager, and can say pretty confidently that it is a very difficult and a very shitty job. This is one reason that it tends to pay quite well is that there are fewer people who want to go into it (as opposed to, say, high level IC).
A middle manager gets to make very few decisions but gets to be the messenger for the majority of them.
Middle managers are famous for feeding off of email directives, I guess. Not control over the office environment to which they may not be local.
Explicitly forbidding another full time employment, full rights on all intellectual property, non-competing agreements etc. Also explicitly expecting to work ie 40 hours.
I would take this with grain of salt the size of Jupiter, since such behavior would quickly show on any employment feedback source that any proper company hiring should check beforehand. Being blacklisted forever for well-paying companies will bite back very quickly too.
In most of the Europe, I believe this would be illegal simply due to amount of work expected - there are hard limits on that.
If true regardless, it might not be the smartest idea to brag online about committing multiple frauds, which casts another doubt about the whole story.
Personally, I haven't had an employment contract for over 6 years now, and in fact to stay in the clear one should ensure they have at least two simultaneous clients - though most ignore that, at least in Poland.
If it is serious, he/she should have keep it private. That's why we can't have nice things.
Let's say someone gets 5x the person next to them done. Very few companies will pay them 5x. Maybe double...
But if they can manage their time well enough to get X done in some fraction of the time, they could realistically do two or three full time jobs worth of "normal" work, and increase their pay - and income security - over having just one job. This doesn't work when you have to be in person all day, but remote?
We've already got a wage spread that more than covers 5x with most folks fresh out of college looking at 50k/annual if they're outside of SV and some devs within SV making 500k or more.
It really depends if you view employment as "they are paying you for 40 hours per week" or "they are paying you for a specified output, good for you if you can get it done faster!"
[1] https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...
But a 5xer will quickly promoted to principal level (L6) within a decade of entering their industry if they hop around a couple of times.
L6s usually make 2.5x of what their peers make. So the conventional process really isn't that bad.
___________
Honestly, if you can consistently produce 5x and provide good estimates, then you should be consultant / contract hire for mid-tier companies. You will make a lot more money and have a lot more agency over your own life.
Finding clients is a hustle, but so is holding 3 jobs at the same time. So, pick your poison.
The way I see it is that I can come in to a fresh role on that 2.5x peer rate by performing a solid interview at architect/principal level. I then do this for multiple roles concurrently then I'm on 7.5x my peers. Which is actually a pretty good estimate to what I know I'm making in relation to others. I also find the principal/architect roles are sometimes less hands on and you're being paid for knowledge and advice, so it actually makes it less of a burden to product high output.
And hey! Maybe one of your coworkers will see this post!
I'm in the opposite situation, I quit my only job because I couldn't stand wasting my time and I'll just keep on running my business (less money but freedom and time to make more and grow).
Out of curiosity and if you're happy to share, are you still running your own company while "working" these jobs?
No, I sold my company in 2019 and exited last summer. It took up far too much time to pull off anything like this. The new venture is purely in fundraising and research mode until I stop this little experiment.
Just buy my course to see how I made millions in my pajamas! Also if you get three friends to sign up, you get in free!
Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
This line convinced me you know what you're talking about :).
In Germany it definitely would not, at least not without it being specifically allowed by your contract.
But maybe in the US, as long as you didn’t have a conflict of interest?
Would the amount of total time worked matter? Would doing it in multiple states simultaneously matter?
Of course you can try to get that clause removed during contract negotiation, but I doubt many people would be successful on that negotiation (you might have better luck to exclude some of your open source contributions).
"A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company."
My experience, working for a number of silicon valley companies, has been the exact opposite. There is a clause that says (in legalese) "we don't own stuff you do on your own time with your own equipment if it isn't related to what you do at work"
It is my understanding that California public policy actually requires companies to put this disclaimer in work contracts.
The problem is really that multiple parties may be able to claim the rights to all of your output while you were on their payroll, which is obviously messy from a legal standpoint.
You only need like 3 to hit $1.5m and that’s far more manageable.
Also, I doubt anyone doing this kind of work will get get a second FANG work after failing the first.
If not, start looking. There are thousands of good-paying jobs out there. We're in a significant labor shortage for engineers and many companies are upping the stakes through stronger compensation and fully-remote-forever work environments. Take advantage of the situation.
https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1402876173680472065?s=...
This seems way better for me to set my own funds straight than chasing investors for my product ideas. I do not think I can pull off the work needed though...
I think you could easily do two or three jobs at once and accumulate overlapping stock grants quite easily. That overlap eventually gets your yearly to a serious amount.
I guess it's never too late
I basically eliminated my mortgage by selling and moving. My salary can go way down without affecting my living standards.
But not sure when it will actually happen.
Can they? Sure. Have they indicated as such? No.
its based on cost of acquisition of labor in the region, not cost of living as you can see from hawaii