It feels lonelier at the top with everyone working from home
ft.com
ft.com
This one is a gem.
Banking work culture is alien to me. Whoever figured out that you can get legions of people to debase themselves to each other for the promise of a ledger entry and some toys was brilliant. It's still funny, even if such a malign intelligence would be a threat to our species, but I have to admire the craftiness and give the devil his due.
LMAO
A lot of time I feel the need to talk about work but there is no one to talk to. It's hard to ping a colleague for some chit-chat.
I chat about kids, hobbies, side-projects, etc. with coworkers on a daily basis via Slack. I really stepped this up during the lockdowns specifically to help maintain sanity. One coworker was in Canada with her son while her husband was trapped in the US and they could not see each other due to travel restrictions. I checked in on her regularly and she seemed to really appreciate it.
This has lead to one former coworker and me starting our own small business and significantly increasing our income. As well as other friendships where we do things like vacation together even though we don't see each other on a regular basis.
You're absolutely right, though: the office is a fantastic place to get a regular social fix. I absolutely understand where you're coming from, because social experiences are as important as food and water to humans, but here's the thing:
The concept of an office wasn't created to solve human socialization.
Why not try and solve the socialization problem, and ignore the notion of an office? Set up a lunch group with your street, see if you can create a coworking space in your apartment/condo building, rent a coworking space close to home, or something else. As a socialization solution, offices are a comfortable rut/local minimum.
You can absolutely have your e-commute, as well as your social experience. The problem is that we've been doing offices for so long, that we kinda forget that we need to rethink/replace what they were doing.
Try it. Some may not be interested but others will be. With a dozen engineers at your work, at least one will feel in a similar way to you, so you can help each other.
Or look for a smaller coworking space in your area, even if it's for one day a week. They're fun social places. (At least the small local ones are - not the big vc funded work spaces)
Haha brilliant :-). Love seeing this in Financial Times
This is interesting. I wonder if companies will start to try and tier wages according to where the possible new hire resides.
I think based on your home address but not sure.
I don't want to debate whether this is the best approach in terms of treating employees fairly, but it certainly seems to have it's advantages for the company - they get to save money by hiring people in places with a lower compensation rate.
I haven’t heard people in favor of geography-agnostic salaries address this concern, which seems legitimate from the company’s perspective. I suppose there are tradeoffs either way.
> the incentives would lead these places to be dramatically over-represented relative to higher cost of living places.
vs. the not-at-all-lopsided and equally-represented status quo, where everyone lived in the same high-cost-of-living city?
Imagine a company offering a simple 100k geography-agnostic salary for an engineer. They’ll get some junior-to-mid-level candidates applying from lower cost of living places in the US, sure, and they’ll also get a lot of excellent senior applicants from India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. If they hire based only on merit, they likely won’t be hiring from the US at all.
What’s the concern here, exactly? If you’re hiring into a remote team, and you locate an employee who possesses the requisite qualifications, integrates well into the team, fits the culture, is available during the hours required, proves themselves trustworthy, etc., — just hire them. If your business is doing well, the extra calculation on whether we can pay this hire less because of where they live seems disingenuous; chances are, the savings convert into bonus money for someone in upper management regardless.
(If you’re strapped for cash—bootstrapping or not willing to trade control for investor money—chances are you’re already not offering competitive rates to residents of costly areas anyway.)
My guess is that the companies that see it as a problem either (1) don’t have a strong remote culture, or (2) are trying to compensate for suboptimal hiring practices (e.g., candidates from more affluent areas tend to possess some qualities the company wants but can’t select for directly).
This has not been my experience working at the Director level. Maybe it's the lack of C in my title, but in my experience it's much more likely I find a way to save a few 100k, pats on the back are given, maybe a call out in a board meeting, then that money promptly gets allocated to another teams budget, and I'm unable to obtain raises or bonuses for the people who made it happen.
“Oh your company is in Backcountry Town, Flyover State? Well we will pay 20% less for your widgets then.”
Inflexible entities either find someone willing to pay up or they have to find something else to do.
The first is that being in-person is valuable to many companies, enough so they're willing to pay a significant premium for it. If you're remote, then you get less.
The second is that it's all about negotiation. Companies by and large have the upper hand here, and would pay much lower wages if they could. FAANGs do not pay 2-300k salaries for fun, but because of the local competition.
Software developers are finally getting a taste of what the average citizen has to deal with compensation-wise, no wonder people are reacting badly.
Employee wages are roughly bounded below by the cost to keep them alive, and roughly bounded above by the profit they produce. As for leveling the playing field between labor employers, there are known strategies for pooling labor's leverage. The gap is in convincing labor that those strategies are a net positive from them. For people who think that when they are hired that they are going into negotiations on equal footing, this is easier said than done.
They don't think they can, they know they can. So of course they will.
And from the employee side it's not a bad deal either so many people are happy to take it. Sure I wouldn't love a 20% pay cut, but if I can get a 50% reduction in cost of living by taking a 20% pay cut, that's a large raise effectively.
And the other way around too. I think it's satire but nope.
To repeat another commenter, I have also noticed increased difficulty in spotting satire when browsing the web. I guess this is one consequence of the C19 crisis.
A little bit out of topic but just to share: 2020 taught me that the people I love(d) the most could fall prey to disinformation. 2021 is teaching me even worse: I am slowly coming to the realization that people very dear to me have totalitarian values.
I am often apppalled at the ability of executives to completely flounder their one responsibility. Crying in a blog and oversharing does not develop my confidence in this persons leadership, but I suppose crypto trading might have already been a red flag to warn of the nature of this article.
No "satire" disclaimer?
Oh I get it: he misses feeling all powerful in front of submissive employees.
For one CEO like him, there are 99 CEOs nicer I will gladly rather work for.
That's an interesting planet. Here on earth 99% CEOs seems to be power hungry sociopaths.
> The imaginary all-staff memo of a highly paid CEO driven to distraction by his empty office
In any case, your conclusion is correct, in the fashion that a judgement on the ethics of Scrooge McDuck is correct.
Pecking order, and the desire for social status and power over others, drives so much of human behavior, especially in companies but also in schools, prisons, churches, hospitals and all other human organizations and social groups.
In companies, much of this has depended on in-person interaction. For a spacious walled office to be a sign of high social status, it must be visible and everyone else must be stuck in open plan misery. Asserting and enhancing a manager's social status (for example by humiliating underlings) is much more effective when done publicly and in person.