Just 2% of workers at VMware showed up for the first day of in-person work
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I suspect it'll be a bit different when schools resume in the fall, but even then I doubt people will want to go back full time.
Maybe they don’t already own a home in the Bay Area?
The article mentions a 10% cut at a company where the average senior engineer makes $450k a year according to levels.fyi.
In most of the country, you’re living very, very well on $405k a year. In the Bay Area, you’ll make a 11% more and be house poor or spend your life in traffic. For most people, that’s a bad deal.
I’d put it this way: if a recruiter called me and suggested I quit my job and move back to the Bay Area for an 11% pay increase, I would be laughing as I hung up the phone.
If you take a pay cut for relocating to a lower CoL area, you are being stolen from.
Then the notion that anyone is being stolen from is just completely ridiculous.
Look at an international circus contract, for example (I was in one). A group of performers from different countries performing in the same place get paid different amounts for doing the same exact role in the show (up to 2.5X difference, by the way) just because the company can get away with it. It's about the cost of the best alternative (for the worker), not about some intrinsic worth of the work.
They pay the minimum they feel is required to retain you and prevent you from going to a competitor. And if that amount exceeds the cost to hire someone who can do your job as good as you, they want you gone. That’s it.
They know that working remotely from a place with a lower cost of living is a perk. They know even if you take a pay cut, you’ll come out ahead. They know the minimum they need to pay you to retain you has gone down.
As for whether you should subsidise someone, if it makes you more money overall then of course you should. Regardless of what luxuries they have.
We should have open pay scales by position with well-defined criteria for bonus / raises. Negotiation should have little to do with it, ideally.
Pure value rarely has to do with your salary; it's more about supply/demand. If we doubled the supply of people doing your exact job right now, your ability to negotiate (and your salary) would probably drop, even though you are delivering the same "value" to the company (unless value encompasses supply & demand).
(As I've mentioned above, I've seen pay differences in circus of 2.5X for performers with different passports doing pretty much the same exact job in the same exact show - the value they were delivering was the same, the only difference was country of origin). So pay is also about cost of best alternative.
The difference in income taxes is paid (or saved) by the employee.
Food, gas, plumbing, etc are also cheaper.
For me at least the added COL is more than offset by the higher pay.
Edit: This is more a pre-Covid comment. No idea the math for remote post-Covid.
1 - volunteer (for those dying to come back)
2 - request (we'd really like you to come back now)
3 - require (come back or you're fired) 1. How do you form connections if you do 10p% WFH? many of my friends and casual acquaintance are from meeting people in pantry area. Or meeting someone who is with someone I know. That's not possible now. I am an introvert so pre pandemic itself it was difficult for me.
2. Company doesn't pay for buying furniture or electricity used at my house. I am depreciating my house without any benefit. Company ain't paying enough to offset internet charges
3. I miss going out. But that's a pandemic thing
4. Do you think office politics will reduce if we WFH? I mean it's difficult to be managers pet when everyone is wfh
As an environmentalist I like that my travel has reduced and carbon footprint has decreased. So that's a plus. I've also planted around 20 plants this year. Benefit of WFH
And company doesn't pay for anything depreciating at my house except laptop
How does that even out?
On the contrary it 'odds out'. Everything odds out.
I can only see incremental wear and tear on, say, furniture mattering if you are jumping on the couch while you code. Maybe a 33% wear on your kitchen from eating lunch at home too. The house falls down from the weather at the same rate if you are there or not.
What is depreciating about your house from WFH at an marginal and alarming speed?
Companies do dodgy shit to evade income tax, one of which is spend unnecessary amounts internally to make it an expense
And they are liable for less tax.
I had to buy new furniture or use existing furniture.
Indian celebrities buy Ferrarris and mark it as depreciating asset by doing some tax magic to save taxes.
And here I am using all my personal shit for work and getting nothing in return
Not to mention company saves tons on rent, electricity and internet. And yet few firms have policies to reimburse employees.
When I work from office, I'm sitting on my dinner table and chair for less than 1hr per day. Now I sit on it for 8-9hrs. And I already had to refit that chair once. Maybe the fitting guy hadn't fit it well.
There is a huge demand for IT people.
And we all learn and know we can do it remotely as we are doing for almost 2 years.
I do get some people Want to go to the Office.
But the majority of tech scene is Introvert.
We are not going back.
We have better machines, espresso, coffee food and gym at our own house.
Now we are "saving the climate" not doing commute. It works both ways /s
For example, a Toto washlet. I visited Japan in Feb 2020 and purchased a bidet promptly afterwards, along with starting WFH at the onset of the lockdowns. After more than a year, it's hard to imagine going back. :-)
Surely enough, one of the first few things to become scarce after the toilet paper was the washlets.
Strange that our "carbon free" companies are getting crazy about coming back and even more crazy now because nobody wants to go back to the cage.
Sorry but no.
I want to live where I want to live and I will work same or more efficient than I did before WFH.
No that cold free sandwich will not do it
I’m not sure why the /s as this is a legitimate argument in favor of WFH.
It is objectively better for the environment and reduces climate-impact so governments and corporations who have been green-washing should be embracing the new reality.
Instead we get unsubstantiated claims of better water-cooler conversations driving innovation and other baseless claims.
- 100% of gold is strip mined literally raping the planet and leaving the mined earth completely unusable, while polluting water supplies.
- The primary alternative to Bitcoin is the US Petrodollar system which relies on proof of violence backed by the most powerful military industrial complex in the history of the world to ‘liberate’ oil-rich nations who dare trade oil for anything other than USD. (See Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc.)
- Gladly ignore things like Blood diamonds, the environmental and social costs of mining Lithium and other rare earth elements used to build the so-called green economy.
- Bitcoin uses mostly clean energy and increasingly so over time thanks to incentives while Gold, Platinum, Copper, etc are never held to the same ESG standards.
- Bitcoin gets demonized for its energy consumption while using half the energy of YouTube, an ad-infested spyware-ridden cat video site and less energy than the world’s hair-dryers /s
Edit: downvotes but no comments, sad.
As Peter Thiel asks: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Bitcoin's adoption is about 0.5% right now. By the time most people will agree with you it will have to be over 50% (about 7 doublings, which is 7 years), and Bitcoin won't be as great investment anymore as it is now.
Totally agree with it 100% btw.
ESG is just corporate/banker control disguised as rainbows and sunshine.
Gotta love the doublespeak Orwellian world we're in.
While your rant was a bit off topic, it would still be fun to see the arguments. But no, you'll just be down voted.
I suspect that there's significant variation here: widespread WFH means fewer people driving ~1.5 hours a day to their office park jobs, but it also means fewer people taking public transit to urban centers. The former is an ecological disaster; the latter is probably slightly better than the same number of people air conditioning, etc. their independent houses and apartments.
queue articles on nytimes on pay discrimination for those who WFH.
We all know the best way to get raises is to switch companies.
No switching means you will get maybe 5-8%
From the original WSJ source [1]: “Analysis by England’s public-health agency suggests vaccines provide significant protection against Delta after two doses, reducing the risk of symptomatic illness by about 80% and the risk of hospitalization by around 96%. That is only slightly weaker than the protection vaccines confer against Alpha, also known as B.1.1.7.“
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-warns-of-new-versions-of-...
Fully vaccinated Delta-variant carriers are infecting other fully vaccinated persons.
Wasn't this the whole point of vaccination: to allow virus circulation among vaccinated population without negative effects?
If we're going to "optimize" life for as "little risk as possible," then optimizing for the wrong things is inevitable. I can see WfH if commute times, costs-of-living, and 99% of coworkers are assholes, but then there's social interaction, facetime, and how are people going to get promoted if their effort goes unnoticed.
I say this because it leads me to view the situation less as a threat to my personal safety, and more like a mass Darwin Award candidate, or nature’s version of a voter registration purge.
I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we can vaccinate young children against COVID.
I see what you did here. Lockdown psychosis is not a joke.
I guess we’re just waiting for a 2nd wave in the US.
Yes, we haven’t had mass deaths and hospitalizations. I’m very thankful I’ve been here instead of the US, or many other places. But dont pretend it’s some utopia that’s escaped the troubles of the last year.
In December when you you had a handful of deaths, we had one every three seconds. Every hour. Every day. For over a month.
People go shopping with cough and fever. People gather with family and friends without any consideration whatsoever about the consequences.
I had someone come to my house one day after two of his co-workers tested positive for covid. Zero considerations.
It's an epidemic of stupidity here. You have absolutely no idea what it's like here.
I wouldn’t expect so. You have 2/3 the population of California and almost the size of the USA (although populated all along the coasts).
I also don’t agree with dude it’s some Covid utopia. But, just density-wise it was never going to be very bad there.
My workplace did that and everyone agreed they would rather work at home than wear a mask all day.
Once that’s gone? Plenty of people want to come back - part time at least.