Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

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The first guy in the article is a dev. There's never been a better time to find work as a dev. Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before. On top of it all, if your firm wants people back in the office soon, now is the time to do loads of remote interviews so that you can keep being remote.

I was interviewing recently and almost everyone is at least partly remote, with a huge number of 100% remote. Even people that I know don't like the idea are bending and giving two or three days remote.

On the restaurant-type work, I'd say a bunch of people have been given a breather from the treadmill, and they're using it to look around. I see this as mostly positive, but it does suggest that a lot of people are completely swamped, working all the time, spending everything. The little bit of credit they got from the pandemic payment has unlocked a great reckoning with the labor market. Previously if you didn't like your job, you were screwed. Somehow find time to interview/upskill, or somehow jump the gap with your savings.

> Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before.

I may be naive, but I guess this office-work-exodus would result to improvements in office spaces in general to attract devs (or other employees in tech). This would also make it easier for people who are looking to move to the US to find office jobs, since the competition is less fierce. Am I off mark here and too naive?

It seems like every year there’s a new study showing how cubicle farms are bad for productivity and health. Everyone hates them.

Same thing for long commutes, they’re terrible.

But still companies keep building new cubicle farms in downtown cores. Maybe office workers are just done with this stupid shit.

I would love to be in a cubicle farm rather than the school-cafeteria-inspired open office dystopia.

Cubes done right are fine. I had "office cubes" with 6ft tall walls and ~40sq ft of space, and they were awesome. Plenty of space to stretch out, room for a bookshelf and a chair for visitors, a computer desk and a writing desk.

Noise could be a little much, but people were generally polite and quiet.

My next job was literally a desk in the middle of the floor. All the prime employees had desks that went along the edge of the wall, forming a horseshoe and, when they ran out of room, they started putting desks in the center. So i was basically working on a stage in front of 40 people. It was awful, but I never slacked off! (well, i went for walks a lot)

I miss office cubes. Last 2 jobs where in an open office. Also while I haven't disliked my bosses, the last 3 I've been seated less than 15 feet from them. Covid work from home was a pretty nice break, and we're going hybrid from now on.

Downtown cores have the highest population density, and thus the lowest average commute for a typical set of workers distributed around a metro area.

The largest groups that live in my metros downtown core are, swaths of poor people who's crime ridden neighborhoods have yet to gentrify, the insanely wealthy who gentrified the best of the dilapidated old homes, and young hipsters who live in condos.

For the most part (in my area), the only reason companies have moved downtown is because the city has given them sweetheart deals to be there. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of workers commute into the downtown area, because it's not a desirable place to live.

I think this is vastly dependent on the state and the "downtown." Where I live, Boston, it's mostly the upper classes that live in and around the city. All the poor people have been nearly priced out to the suburbs or even other states (New Hampshire or Rhode Island).

Of course there are wealthy cities and suburbs, but if you want a walkable commute within reason, <15 minutes, you pay a premium.

Now imagine if your downtown core was "anywhere with an internet connection"[1], and your commute time was "sub 500ms".

[1] including Africa, the open ocean, space, Papua New Guinea, a jail cell....

I hated the cubicle until I worked in an open office. I would be quite happy with a cubicle now.

I like working in an office, I just don't like that it takes me 40 minutes to get there. In a better world I could live _in_ that downtown core, a short walk or bike ride away from work.

Most people would be happier in offices with a door. Managers have decided that THEIR work is the only work that requires privacy and quiet.

Employees often equate their own job satisfaction by the differences between how their managers treat themselves versus how they treat the people under them. When you have your own office with a door and a white board and have a company card to expense your meals while your devs are working with their headphones on because of the noise level in their cubicles, you're going to have a problem.

What’d be really interesting is if some companies start paying a premium for employees to be onsite. That might be something I’d bite on

I have no issue with that tbh as long as conditions are bearable (team room, flexible timing etc). I do prefer a good office+colleagues over a good home office tbh.

That premium for me is going to be higher than they imagine.

Among my coworkers I have an average commute time, and I loose 10-12 hours a week driving to and from work. I figure if I was being paid at my normal rate they'd need to pay me between 25-45%[1] more money just to come in.

[1]- Used to be that workers weren't exempt from overtime pay. At time and a half, 12 extra hours over 40 would be the equivalent of 18 hours. That is 45% of a normal 40 hour work week. (10 hours at non-overtime pay is 25% of the work week)

First part wrong. Doesn't make any sense to try to improve an office to attract devs when so many devs are leaving the office. Office space improvements would be expensive right now due to various factors: labor shortage, materials inflation, etc. Plus the cheaper move is to snap up fancier existing office spaces since offices are in lower demand now, thus the price of existing ones will have decreased.

Second part you have a point. This is the best time to move to the US on an H1B. If you're an int'l student, this is the time to look for that office job that will hold you till a green card.

> Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before.

I'm in the UK and not seeing any of this.

I'm in the UK too. But also remote means you can get a job "based" anywhere. Check out some US firms for instance, many are hiring and are happy with euro time zones.

Is that your experience with US companies hiring at the moment?

I never considered this type of roles before because it was sort of a given in my head that they would want US based candidates for taxation reasons.

Have you seen a big change regarding this, from US based companies?

The US companies are hiring, just like everybody else.

Multi-nationals now seem to post most jobs as “remote” which means global. A smaller number is “US-remote”. Usually this is not for tax reasons but for business or security reasons if dealing with the US government.

Hiring remotely is easy for these companies as they usually have a subsidiary already in country. But even if not, there are now agencies that take care if things like taxation etc. I believe remote.com might be the one most known but it is certainly not the only one.

Yeah they'll just pay your private company, and you sort out your own taxes.

I found there's loads and loads of US firms that are happy to take Europe based candidates.

Very much reflects my experience. I am with a US tech now and they are very conducive to hiring Brits. They know on the whole we hold a lot of quality engineers, there are no language barriers , very little cultural differences at all.

Look for US based companies that hire globally.

I work at CrowdStrike. Fully remote. Amazing compensation, team, work.

We're hiring too :)

Y’all have Brexit to thank for that. All my clients relocated any technical work they had in the UK to Poland or the baltics.

It's a bit of coup out to jump on the British where somehow everything negative that happens is due to Brexit.

As counter anecdata, I am in the Netherlands and I am (now, as much as before) receiving calls for job opportunities from UK based recruiters. They are for the majority concentrated around London, Oxbridge, Bristol, Manchester. Depending on where GP is based in the UK, the landscape and opportunities can be quite different.

Irrespective of the politics and bitter emotions, London's VC funding scene is arguably the closest we have in Europe to SV/Seattle/NY and it will continue to play a role in making the UK relevant in the tech scene.

The person you replied to wrote that all their clients "relocated any technical work they had in the UK to Poland or the Baltics". That's not politics and bitter emotions, that's sharing their own anecdotal data.

Of course, one could criticize generalizing based on that one data point, but that's a different thing altogether.

The comment you are commenting on literally(yes really) starts with blaming Brexit.

How you can deny that is politics and bitter emotions is literally beyond me.

Saying that Brexit is the cause of something based on one's experience with clients, expressed in a way that suggests that it did not positively or negatively affect themselves in any way, does not strike me as particularly bitter, but suit yourself.

It is phrased as 'it is your own fault' ( Y'all have to thank ). How is that not bitter.

First, nothing about "y'all have to thank" suggests that they consider the person they are responding to responsible for Brexit, which is a requirement for it to imply that they are putting some sort of blame on the person (or the collective group they represent).

But let's for the sake of it accept that "it's your own fault" is what was meant by it anyway. That still doesn't imply bitterness.

If parents explains to their child not to run with scissors because they might hurt themselves, the child does so anyway and ends up hurting themselves, and one of the parents says in-between consoling their child "but do you see how you only have yourself to blame for it, if you decided to do this anyway after we warned you this would happen?", then that might not be the most considerate timing for sharing a harsh truth, but there's nothing bitter about the statement.

That sounds incredibly naive.

Why remove large groups of skilled engineers in your businesses domain and have to retrain again, because of a political change. I can understand a company with a manufacturing base doing this (due to import / export regulations changing), but this makes no sense in software.

There's never been a better time to find work as a dev.

There's a lot of jobs, but there's also a lot of work to do for every application. Applying takes effort.

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