The Future of Work at Cloudflare | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Work at Cloudflare

blog.cloudflare.com

40 pointsU1F98428 comments

"One we're working on is what we're calling Orange Card. We hope to turn every team member's ID into a charge card. The card will only activate after someone badges in for the day and will only work to purchase food at restaurants that are within a 10-minute walk from the office with pre-tax dollars."

Sooo, you get a slight discount on your lunch if you come into work, and you have to do it in a certain predefined radius. This is definitely the kind of plan a middle manager with not much to do during the day would come up with.

Not sure I’d describe eastdakota as a middle manager but I guess he does have the board above him.

The article didn't say it was his idea, but one 'carrot' that the company came up with. Tbh, it's a pretty weak one, and I think the pandemic has proven with FAANGs that people will trade autonomy and WFH over free (or cheap) food. It's a misalignment of what people actually want from their jobs, and what manager's think will 'click' with people.

It's casual work fridays with a different coat of paint.

More like “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays”.

Does everyone want to wear Hawaiian shirts at all?

Does everyone want to be forced to buy a Hawaiian shirt so that they can comply with the requirement?

For me, every day is Hawaiian Shirt Friday. I love wearing them. But I also know the difference between a proper Aloha Shirt and what most everyone else in the world calls a “Hawaiian Shirt”.

So, what works for me wouldn’t necessarily work for anyone else in the company, and almost certainly would not work as a company-wide mandate.

I appreciate the idea and that they’re trying to do something positive, but I really do want to stick with remote-only work from now on.

Even if it were his idea, it is still "the kind of plan a middle manager with not much to do during the day would come up with"; that the CEO came up with it converts the statement into a judgement of said CEO, it doesn't make the plan better.

I think it's easy to point out flaws in an imperfect solution, but it's also admirable that they're making efforts others aren't towards what they believe to be an improvement in work conditions. For that, they should be commended. Nothing is perfect, and they could do nothing.

This sounds needlessly overcomplicated.

I suspect it’s appearing that way in order to be in compliance with IRS rules to allow the food to be purchased with pre-tax dollars. The tighter they can associate it with work and convenience of the employer/in support of a company policy, the more likely they can get it to pass scrutiny.

However, if the program is designed to encourage me to come to the office, it’s dead on arrival. Giving me a discount of my marginal tax rate on prepared food doesn’t make for a cheaper lunch than what I can make at home. Restricting it to a 10-minute walk doesn’t give me more variety than I can arrange at home. In all cases, I’m better off WFH; this just makes the loss smaller (at substantial implementation complexity).

Yup.

This sounds like it’s in response to the criticism many tech companies have received for providing on-site meals for employees, instead of spending money at local restaurants.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/technology/san-francisco-...

I came up with it. And it'll be 30–50% off, depending on the tax rate in the jurisdiction.

If I were a Cloudflare employee, I’d be pretty insulted by this to be honest. Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?

(A little late, but had to reply...)

I am a Cloudflare employee. I was once a Google employee, so I'm quite familiar with the free food thing. I like the Cloudflare plan.

> Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?

We all accepted offers with the understanding that our salaries did not include free food. When comparing said offers against other companies that offer free food, we took that into account. The cost of the food is therefore already factored into the salaries we accepted.

I would rather be paid more and make my own choice where to eat, than be paid less and have the company decide what to feed me.

But the Google model has historically had the advantage that they paid for food with pre-tax dollars, so they could offer better food cheaper than the employee could have bought for themselves. Cloudflare's plan fixes that distortion.

The cost of food just seems negligible, and at the point where you’re putting all of this infrastructure investment into it, and offering the discount, why not just pay for it?

You mean, pay for the food that employees go out and buy with this card? Well, what's to stop someone from having a $1000 lunch at Saison every day? (It's right across the street from the Cloudflare SF office!)

You'd obviously have to put a cap on the amount people spend. But then people feel like they have to spend that much or they are missing out. This quickly leads to the obvious question: Why don't you just give us the money and let us decide how to spend it? Again, I'd rather just have the money added to my salary than have to deal with spending caps.

Every tech company I've ever heard of that offers free food does it by having the company acquire the food directly and provide it to the employees on-site. But doing that is a whole logistical thing you have to commit to, and has plenty of down sides.

> Based on our internal surveys, about 10% of our team wants to come in every day.

How many don’t want to come in to the office at all, or less than once a week?

>We want to make the environment such that 100% of our team wants to come in at least some days.

If my current company insisted I come back to the office, I’d quit in a heartbeat, and I love my job. I think it’s be hard to make me want to come in “some days”, if “some days” is more than twice a month. I can’t be productive at an office, and I can’t connect as well with people. My home office is the perfect place for productivity, and I find nearly everything about sitting in an office, especially an open floor plan office, commuting, traffic, public transit, all of it, somewhere on the spectrum of detestable. I feel there’s a serious disconnect between a lot of these CEOs and their employees. The CEOs believe in something, and they want all of the employees to align with their beliefs. The reality is that most of us in the tech community seem to prefer remote work, and the reality is that most of us don’t really want to socialize with our coworkers all day and have “hallway conversations”. A lot of us are introverts and find it taxing and forced and awkward.

The pandemic is showed me how great work can be, when given autonomy and flexibility. I’m happier, I spend more time with my family, and I’m more effective at work. The second an employer forced me to come into the office regularly, or makes me feel like a second class citizen for working remotely even, I’ll quit and go somewhere that values me more.

>>We want to make the environment such that 100% of our team wants to come in at least some days.

> If my current company insisted I come back to the office, I’d quit in a heartbeat, and I love my job.

The line you quote is explicitly not insisting, so your whole rant seems moot? Cloudflare is trying its best to create an office environment that you want to visit sometimes, but if you really really don't want to, then you don't have to, so why are you so upset about it?

I imagine I’d eventually feel like an outcast for being the only one.

There are lots of people at Cloudflare who live nowhere near an office and will remain 100% remote even after the offices reopen.

Then it seems to me that if Cloudflare successfully gets those who do live near an office to come to the office at least some of the time, there will be two classes of employee. Why not fully embrace the changed environment, close the offices (saving some money), and go distributed all the way? Then the employees who are currently near a former office but haven't put down roots there would also be free to move away if they like, and those who weren't near an office will be on a truly level playing field.

Your question contains the implicit assumption that all employees would rather be remote, but that's not true. Many employees, myself included, actually want to work from an office. Why should the remote-only crowd get their preference at our expense? In an all-remote model, those of us with kids at home and no good place to work will become the "second-class" employees.

The blog post discusses at great lengths the challenges of a hybrid model and some things Cloudflare is doing to address them. For example:

> One of the few rules that we plan on starting with is that in meetings if any person is remote then everyone in the meeting is remote.

I definitely understand that many employees would rather work in an office, and I think it’s fair to say they should be provided. But whether they live near an office or not, remote should always be an option. Some people like myself are absolutely unable to be productive in an office, and have a good space to work at home, and think time spent commuting is a waste of my life. If it’s truly a hybrid model than great.

I like this. But I'll play the Devil's Advocate for a moment. Not to dismiss these milestones but to further consider alternatives.

"The Covid Event" was a one-off...

- How long will these improvements last?

- What was the culture like previously that prevented these things (e.g., meeting participation) in the past?

- Has the underlying culture changed or has the broader context temporarily (?) forced these changes?

- What has suffered or not improved? Certainly, it can't be all great news.

- If the market is becoming more employee-centric how does CF intend to compete for talent?

- Aside from a (one year) sales bump, what other metrics are there that are people - employees and customers - driven?

- How does this compare to other companies? Are there others who have not benefitted from The Covid Event? What can we learn from this delta?

Interesting times. Change is opportunity. So much more to learn. So much to prepare for going forward.

> "we are now open to hiring for nearly all of our roles in any location where we have a legal entity setup that allows us to hire"

I understand that to employ someone remote you need to have a legal entity in the jurisdiction of that person, it makes sense. But it seems this would be a major obstacle against reaping the full benefits of an all out remote strategy. Knowing the resourcefulness of corporations, my guess there are ways to minimize this restriction, either already present or in the pipeline.

Does anyone have an overview of what such remedies might be?

Companies like Remote.com

Gusto, Rippling, Deel etc. provide PEO services now, which are basically corporations that will "hire" the remote employee for you and deal with benefits and such, and you pay them through that corporation. Seems to be the easiest way to deal with this.

PEOs are an incredibly imperfect solution. Makes giving equity much more difficult and, in some cases, impossible. And benefits like healthcare and ESPPs also get very difficult. You end up with a set of "second-class" employees. We do it when we have to, but it's a lot better to setup a full legal entity. The challenge is that makes you first hire in a country often cost at least tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees. And, in the worst cases, can be millions.

This sounds smart: “One of the few rules that we plan on starting with is that in meetings if any person is remote then everyone in the meeting is remote.”

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