For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm
economist.com
economist.com
For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.g. UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) and are already profiting for this. I personally switched to a remote-only job and got the biggest raise of my career, with a salary that no local company can match unless we are talking C-level manager position.
My current salary which is close to 6 figures for a tech lead job would be an instant disqualification in probably every local company. To be honest, a few years back it would be a dream for me, unless i had to relocate somewhere. But now and for the next few years, i really cannot see how i can work onsite again in my country.
There's a lot of offers in the 120-150 PLN/h (26-33 EUR or 31-38 USD) range; not long ago I had three offers from the top of this range to choose from, and I eventually stayed at my current place since they equalled this rate.
And yes this is wage per hour, because self-employment/B2B is highly popular in IT, for financial and fiscal reasons. After all the deductions, you'd pocket roughly 70% of it.
Once you factor the living cost in: eg. "you would need around 2,827.20€ in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 5,670.18€ in London (assuming you rent in both cities)" (according to Numbeo), it becomes pretty clear how living and working in Poland can be an attractive deal.
> You would need around 3,309.51$ (12,912.27zł) in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,500.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).
The next step will be that these newly minted freelancers will realize they can charge more and raise their rates. Lower CoL is a huge advantage here - you can wait for months for the right gig to come along while your competitor in NYC can't. In the end, I think the rates in the WE and the US will drop all around the board while simultaneously rising in cheaper areas until an equilibrium is reached.
Economists call that a comparative advantage and a net win.
If you’re claiming an equilibrium point will be reached, then I think the equilibrium point will be $40/hr for Senior, $30/hr for Mid, $20/hr for Junior.
I guess that local extremes for wages in areas with high living costs like in silicon valley will drop when it's possible to work remotely. But I don't see why rates would drop across the board as long as demand stays high.
Sharing a common language is not a problem at all, nor is sharing (or meeting) in the same time zone.
I'd point the exact opposite regarding timezones, in fact. Not sharing a time zone means you can post a question to get yourself unblocked at the end of the day, and you'll already have the answer waiting for you once you log back next morning.
The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamification to make the employee spend more time in the office.
The managerial gang gamified CS careers with silly interviews and performance reviews. They gamified apps and information dispersal. Entire democracies were at stake and nothing changed.
WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”. Every engineer knows that 90% of these people are like language models regurgitating what they’ve heard. They can’t do that effectively via video.
To me this is the most blatant admission of their inability to measure developer productivity.
I'm not so sure about that. My company recently announced that our offices wouldn't be reopening until at least November, and there was a lot of quite angry pushback from people who are desperate to get back.
BTW team doesn't have to chose between two strict options (WFH or office 5 days a week). Another options could be hybrid office work or allowing _individual_ team members to chose how they work and mandate all meetings to accommodate online participants.
Not really. You negotiate with a boss who has to consider how your deal will affect other's deals. The deal environment changed so the deals they need to make are going to change.
Everyone voting on the same deal that is compatible with all roles in a group and strikes everyone as fair to them is just a less ideal negotiation that will make arbitrary decisions when the group changes. (I.e. the manager wants everyone in office so they hire a lot of interns and juniors who vote that way for the local help they need.)
I'm in a team that has multiple "remote" people since before pandemic. We all can't suddenly show up to single office because we are on three different continents, so, obviously, there is not much risk of our deal changing to something more strict.
> Everyone voting on the same deal that is compatible with all roles in a group and strikes everyone as fair to them is just a less ideal negotiation that will make arbitrary decisions when the group changes. (I.e. the manager wants everyone in office so they hire a lot of interns and juniors who vote that way for the local help they need.)
I assume that company with such malicious management wouldn't conduct the vote in the first place.
When I was in a similar position, I regularly worked in groups who gave me every indication the majority would vote to relocate all positions to in-office in California. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be hopping groups after each vote while the team was telling me how wonderful the west coast is. It was better that my role was negotiated and a group could deal with it or suffer consequences of looking for an all California team.
It seems to me like you are trying to fix a problem that doesn't affect either you or me, and I am saying I don't like the consequences to me of your fix.
I would wager most if not all tech execs today have never experienced a walkout, a strike, or a simultaneous mass exodus of any sort before. I'm not saying that will happen, but it's more likely today than any time I can remember.
They also have golden parachutes generously granted by the shareholders, so if the company implodes, no real skin off their back.
There are surveys at Facebook, Google, etc. The vast majority of people do not want full remote only. Most of them prefer a hybrid approach.
There are many smaller companies who can't afford having these kind of managers and work culture - else they'd have a hard time hiring and retaining developers.
Obviously it's just anecdotal data, and I'm in Europe. So take this with a grain of salt, but I'd say:
* There has undoubtedly been a big rise in remote positions, but not a huge one. Many of these seem to come from companies willing to hire people living in other cities/countries, given how they write the ads.
* A lot do mention that they are most certainly going back to the office soon or soon-ish, or that they have already started going back at least partially.
* Many have taken the option of partial remote. Most of these have stricter "2 days per week" or "Mondays on-site, rest of the week at home" rules, but some are still experimenting and are more flexible.
* Very few offer the option for the employee to choose, whatever their decision is.
The point was how jobs in general are becoming or not becoming remote. If I limit my search to remote jobs, then sure, all I will see is remote jobs everywhere.
What are the practicalities in terms of employment law, taxation etc.
I understand that every situation is unique and am looking for personal experiences/anecdotes rather than generalisations.
They are good for the company because they streamline hiring people in other countries and they are good for the employee because they provide all employnent requirements by law in their country.
Am I right thinking they're more of a temp-vendor-contractor variety than a full-time employee?
I setup a 20 people office here in Mexico for a startup. All being paid by PEO for 3 years. We got stock options and all the benefits (even more due to Mexican labour law).
Also, consider something else. Many companies, even if they are outside the EU, may already have an EU-based subsidiary. Once they have that, contracting in all the EU will go through that and simplify things a lot since it will effectively be a contract within the EU again. This is the case for a couple of friends I know.
I can't tell you anything for the case where the employee is the one outside the EU, sorry.
Much to my surprise, this was actually pretty well thought out. This new way, would give people the flexibility to choose wether they work from the office or work from home, or even combine both. (They also offered the flexibility to pick your own schedule) Obviously this is all based on the team that you're in. I opted to work from home 5 days per week (since it really made no difference to me anyway), instantly got approved, and received a US$750 one-time payment to buy some home equipment.
I feel like this was a great way to handle it, give people the choice what they want to do. Some jobs require being in the office, so those people only got 1 or 2 days working from home. Also everyone who was approved for working from home (even just one day), received that one-time payment of US$750.
If I were to guess it's maybe all of those things except the PC / laptop because chances are the company would issue that separately with a $750 budget.
My sample size is only 3 based on people I know who have similar deals:
- One of them got $2,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but no company computer was included.
- Another got $1,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but the company issued a laptop separately (~$2k).
- The last one can request any computer related items within reason as long as it's not abused.
I'd be curious to see what others have gotten for home office supplies. There's other ancillary things too like internet and phone bills. Companies that go all-in with remote workers often partially help pay those bills too.
So that money is mainly used for a chair and desk, or really anything else you want. Even if you don’t use it, it’s just another extra $750.
I found it more than enough, bought a cheap desk in IKEA, and a $300 office chair.
Also, it takes awhile for the DNA of company to become WFH. Just sending office drones home rarely works. Ideally it would start out WFH.
Likely these big time ceos that talk about going back to the office understand all this and would prefer not to kill their company by completely changing how work is done. No doubt the pandemic was largely a set back in terms of innovation and real (ie, money making) productivity.
That said, starting up new teams as purely WFH with new hires and WFH culture is a good way to stick their toes in the water.
Don't expect immediate success, however, unless you have some senior / veteran WFH managers with a track record of excellence.
It's really a different biz. Even trickier, the products you build will likely reflect the organization and therefore seem alien compared to what you're used to.
But it's all good! Everyone is remote (one way or another) these days, so why not have a workforce that reflects that? And, after all, the probability of finding the smartest people in your timezone(+/-) within X miles of your office isn't that great, even in SV / Seattle.
What? I mean it is way easier to sideline in a WFH environment. Just send a mail, DM or do a call. WFH does not solve sidelining if that is a problem.
Where WFH is superior is a much broader labor pool to pull upon as well as reducing the astronomical amounts of time wastage than can occur in commuting.
Also, WFH really benefits companies building distributed projects. I always find it hilarious how people who do this in office don't actually use their own products.
Using my company's simulator, the pay cut seems to be at most 15% of the base salary and most likely less than that. In my case, considering cost of living, it would certainly be most advantageous to work remotely. I would save more money and live in a much nicer place.
In any case, no matter what they say, the ability to WFH, either completely or partially, it's one of the very few good things that the pandemic brought. We need to protect this advancement in spite of the efforts of CEOs wondering why they bought monstrous campuses and how they are going to explain the sunk cost to the shareholders (hints: it's their problem, not ours).
Also, unless they joined within the last year, the current employees signed contracts obliging them to come to work 5 days a week. If they wish to permanently move to working from home in their pajamas for 5 days a week instead, the company is basically saying "Sure, but that will be a 15% paycut because we feel that makes you less valuable to us". You're welcome to disagree with the company's view, but it's not particularly "unfair" to me.
Likewise, if I'm looking at an offer for $350k total compensation from Company X, and $300k from Company Y because they think my time is less valuable when it's remote, I'll probably go with the higher pay
Indian engineers who could do a $300k job in the SF Bay Area aren't going to just hang out in India making $3k a year for long.. sooner or later they'll get a lot more of that value they're generating. "This lazy fucking American who fixes the bugs my tests find is making 100x as much money as me??"
They pay you less, because presumably by going remote you're changing the market in which you're based and your value in this new market is lower. They had to pay you, say, $200k before because otherwise they would never hire anyone if the other companies offered 200k. If you move remote, and your local companies/other remote options only pay 100k, they would be stupid to keep paying 200k. They can pay you 150k instead and still keep you. What are you going to do? Rage quit and join the 100k company in protest? Most people are not going to do that.
From an employee perspective I understand how there would be room and desire to receive more money. However, I have a difficult time understanding why a company would want to pay more. Perhaps I’m a sucker, but in our engineering economics course we went over costs associated with projects. Typically when hiring on new employees to projects you want them to provide a return on the salary.
If the salary is increased to then absorb the profit the company makes on that employee, then there is no point of hiring the employee because the company isn’t getting anything from them anymore.
If a product line ends up breaking even, then companies look to see what can be done to reduce costs or increase prices. Why would employees be any different? What am I missing in these arguments?
2. I think you’re making the mistake of only measuring the things youth at are easiest to measure. If a company can bring “non-adversarial working agreement” to the bargaining table, that’s worth something to most people. In other words, a company which offers you frequent good raises without you having to fight for them is actually offering you good money PLUS giving you back all the time and effort you used to spend fighting political battles inside the company and keeping active on LinkedIn. Also as a result, you’re going to stay working there longer. Which also means they can amortize the cost of your ramp-up over a longer period of time. And look at that: the non-adversarial wages just “paid for themselves” from the company’s point of view.
But really: no employee wants their employer to be their adversary. And employers likewise gain from stable relationships with their employees, and even more so by crafting an environment that lets the employee focus on work instead of other concerns (like money or “fairness” or politics).
That was $1750 of $8000 which is more than 20%. My lifestyle changed way too much for the better. Once the CEO decided to get back to the office I searched for a new (remote) job and not only did I find it. They even gave me a raise
A pay cut is absolutely ridiculous, you can’t defend that. And 15%? That’s fucking outrageous. You need unions.
The pay cut will not apply to people working remotely in an expensive city (at least it doesn't in my company)
I think that's because many people think (rightly so, IMHO) that this is just exploitation by companies that sense they can squeeze a bit more out of employees because employees will likely accept (partly for the reason you mention).
I wish my employer would give me the option of remote, even if it did come with a paycut.
There is a reason why companies like Google are doubling down in Silicon Valley real estate. They believe that the best, most innovative type of work are the results of organic discussions and unscheduled, unplanned, casual human interactions. So many cool ideas and new projects were the results of a casual lunch discussion even just random hallway chats. You can't duplicate that with Slack messages or scheduled Zoom meetings. The reason for that isn't because of process or infrastructure deficiency with remote working, it has to do with simple human nature.
Even as recently as this summer I've personally seen entire teams get sidelined for important projects because their engineering leadership didn't bother to physically attend an optionally in-person offsite. Guess what, all the most important conversations took place after the Zoom camera was shut off. An entire major initiative came into idea during a casual walk to grab coffee.
As long as companies are run by human there will be politics, off the record discussions, darkroom decisions, favoritism, subjective impressions, subconscious biases, and "out of sight, out of mind" selective memories.
Again, that's just human nature. A C suite executive at a top tier tech company is driven by the same human nature as a caveman. You can't engineer human nature away with process and you sure as hell can't undo them with technology.
Obviously you don't have to care about any of that and there is nothing wrong to focus on other things in life other than work (and many people should), but the inevitable end result will be there will be two categories of workers, even within the same company, if they allow optional remote work.
All the best, shiniest projects will be local right under exec’s noses. The "A-team" will be kept close, or just as likely, the ones who stay close/in office will be recognized as the "A-team". I believe there will be a lot of jobs that will be fully remote at first, then companies will lower comp for those jobs and start giving them less sexy/boring/keep the lights on type of work, and then eventually they will be outsourced out or automated away, yes, even for highly paid FAANG software engineers.
Edit: Some people have brought up the unique benefits of Slack messages like them being async, and by definition clearer and with better record keeping, etc. By people going back to the office 1 or 2 days a week we aren't going to be dumping Slack or Zoom. They will still serve as nice complements.
Edit: Haha I really ruffed some feathers here. I get it, many on HN believe anyone who derive value from in-person interaction are sub-par employees who aren't actually productive. I also do believe that you can have life-long relationships with people without ever hearing their voices or seeing their faces. But I'd just like to remind people that HN is a relative unique group of individuals (even among engineers) that probably prefers dealing with code than dealing with fellow human beings. But the very fact that all of our communication based technology has been progressing to mimic in-person meetings as much as possible (text -> voice -> video -> telepresence -> VR?) says a lot on this subject.
If all day long Zoom calls and Slack messages could have led to spontaneous discussions/new initiatives like that they already would have, but they didn't, I saw more sparks flying in one afternoon of social event than 3 months of planned video calls.
I firmly believe if Silicon Valley goes fully remote, then it will no longer stay the innovation engine of the entire tech industry. Startups in China will eat us alive. You simply can't replicate the energy of Haidian District or Shenzhen with group messages.
I've seen more sparks fly from random discussions on Slack then I've ever seen in person. The ability to toss out random thoughts/idea at any time, and have others discuss/expand on them at their leisure is... powerful.
Different modes of communication have different tradeoffs. There's nothing magical about in-person communication.
Other the fact that the brains of our entire specie has evolved for millions of years for this exact type of communication, there isn't anything magical, I guess...
The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled, even if technology can now match in latency.
Good luck replicating body language, eye contacts, subtle facial cues etc with Slack messages.
Not really, if you are not interested in communicating emotions or not interested in playing politics as part of the said communication..
In fact, in technical discussion, not conveying too much emotion is a great advantage..
But I'd just like to remind you that even the most hardcore engineering company cannot possibly having only technical discussions.
This really reminds me that how often HN miss the forest for the tree.
Your point is not very clear, sorry.
It seems that you have an emotional reaction to this topic, which seems to muddle your argument. May be take sometime to reflect and get back with more clarity?
I honestly don't know how is my point not clear. Being able to have both face to face communication and technology based remote communication is better than being limited to the latter alone. I thought that was a pretty straight forward point.
I was simply reminding you that whatever advantage Slack/Email has over in-person communication for technical discussions, they lose that advantage for non-technical discussions, which are just as quintessential for an organization.
Here on the internet, we settle for letting you watch downvotes trickle in over time.
A great many people identify themselves as introverts or antisocial, and would feel much better being excluded from all these neuron triggers.
> The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled
Yes, but that bandwidth is not all used productively but wasted on irrelevant bits which do not matter and likely distract from the topic. Implying that more bandwidth helps is suggesting that a book can only be a tiny bit as effective as a video...
> Good luck replicating body language, eye contacts, subtle facial cues etc with Slack messages.
I wouldn't try. Such things are usually unnecessary to the task at hand, and often detrimental. I'm not going to replicate the odor of what my co-workers ate for lunch either, nor other clues about their general hygiene, nor would I want to even if it was easy to do.
Have you considered the mere possibility that many people's work have different types of tasks than yours?
It's so hard not to make stereotypical jokes about engineers when reading comments like this XD
Text is able to convey information that is not entirely technical as well... This seems to be something people miss.
Have you ever read a novel?
And body language, eye contacts etc. are not necessarily useful for professional communication, these might as well be distracting and distorting a rational discussion.
Yes, That is powerful. And I utterly fail to understand how some people appear to NOT see this.
OP for one appear to argue that people are expected to talk about work when they are having lunch ffs! I mean, it is OK if you want to talk about work, but you cannot realistically expect others to share your enthusiasm as well, or may be they do share your enthusiasm, but might want to talk about other things when they eat...
So the answer might be to bring the company culture online, to encourage discussions in #general #other slacks channels. The number of ideas sparking from a forum like hackernews is many orders of magnitude higher than what it was before the internet. There's no reason it should be different when it comes to conversations between employees.
From experience spanning 30 years, good initiatives rarely start from spontaneous discussion. In fact most of the ones from that class of communication turn into dead ends or wandering off the path into the woods and burning money and time.
In fact I’d argue most of them come from thorough understanding of a problem and the requirements around it and a hell of a lot of work and research.
We’re not all startups and we’re not all trying to construct new problems to be solved.
This paragraph kind of falls under "Never attribute to malice what is readily explained by stupidity."
Those organic conversations may not happen in Slack but they can happen online. Most people don't actively foster them and many people may not know how.
Not knowing how isn't proof it can't be done. Lots of things are currently happening in the world that were just science fiction not that long ago.
Human interaction skills falls into the category of things that knowledge doesn't even remotely guarantee outcome.
You can teach a group of socially awkward and introvert people an entire 4 years course of how to be a charismatic socialite and most of them still won't become one.
> Lots of things are currently happening in the world that were just science fiction not that long ago.
And lots of things are still happening in the exact same way it has happened for thousands of years. Technology can very often amplify human instincts, but it will very rarely undo them.
That’s why I’m not missing out on the A-team bullshit by working remotely, I wasn’t the type to land it when I was in the office. I ate lunch at my desk and got the fuck out when I was done for the day. I’m not wired for all of that.
My entire argument is that for most people, they will unlikely be having their cake and eat it too. But if you never cared for eating cake, then all the powers to you.
I think you stated your point well and I can't disagree with it at all. Something about this subject just gets me spun up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdhEIy-1CG8
(Very vulgar language in the video, but it makes the point well.)
How? Genuinely want to know
I was under the impression that comps have the practice of giving work to people that might produce good results with that kind of work, and trust me, people who might produce good results will want the freedom WFH makes possible.
But on the other hand, people who have to depend on politics and ass kissing to keep their job and get promoted, will absolutely want to be around and near managers as much as possible, so that they can maximise their ass kissing, so your A-team, will soon end up exclusively with that kind..
Just because companies were only giving WFH opportunity to high performers doesn't mean all high performers prefer WFH opportunities.
Have you considered the possibility that some people actually are more productive when they have some physical interaction with their coworkers once in a while? In fact I'd argue that's most people.
Even for the best employee who do the most amazing kind of work, being in person and take advantage of politics and "ass kissing" would only help, not hurt. For two employees who accomplish the exact same amount of work, the one who has better person skills and being able to take advantage of that will go further in career.
>But on the other hand, people who have to depend on politics and ass kissing to keep their job and get promoted
It seems like you are under this very strong impression of people who derive value for in-person work only do so because they are sub-par employees.
I find this statement so out of reality. Because often what happens is that this "best employee" gets side tracked by someone who is not actually productive, but just good at playing politics.
So our hypothetical "best employee" will have to play politics in addition to be productive to have a fighting chance. Or they can just downgrade themselves to be less productive and be more political..
Either way, the company losses the actual productivity of the said employee...
>It seems like you are under this very strong impression of people who derive value for in-person work only do so because they are sub-par employees.
I don't think I said that. I said "in-person" work will be essential for the job security of people who survive soley on politics. I don't think the converse, that anyone who wants to work with people is sub-par, is true.
There is so much to measure how much an engineer contributes other than how many lines they churn out or how many PRs they merge. Things like training, mentorship, organizational level influences are critical to a company’s success.
In fact, companies values a lot of those soft impact so much more than raw productivity.
All this romantic "oh I have to look you in the eyes" sentiment will disappear when push comes to shove, that it when you see your best people leave for competitors that allow remote work...
> but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water...
That's just simply not true. Plenty of companies have been allowing remote work since way before the Pandemics and no, they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".
The best people care most about the project they work on and the people they work with and also the compensation, only a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1 criteria when push comes to shove.
In fact, I know a ton of brilliant and driven people planning to leave remote-only companies because they prefer a different work environment. All the internal polls from everywhere I've seen states that vast majority of employees do not want full remote.
Very curious that you have loaded it with the assumption that "remote" implies being a "code monkey".
>they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".
Sure no one is saying it ll happen overnight. Curious reasoning again, by the way.
>a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1
Very curious again, because even in HN there were a lot of stories where people are willing to even resign, to keep the freedom that they discovered with not having to work in strict constraints.
What do you mean by "even HN"? HN is extremely biased toward super introverted anti-social people who prefer working alone and not have human interaction. Using HN as a data point is about as biased as it gets on this topic.
Think logically for a moment, if the majority of people have "working remote" as their number 1 priority regardless of nature of work or compensation, then places like Silicon Valley wouldn't have existed in the first place. The good engineers would all have left and taken a lower paid remote contracting job working from home (and some indeed have in the past).
At the end of the day we do have internal survey data from FB and Google and other companies, vast majority of them do not want full remote work.
I only meant that "some forum that we both are reading"
>The good engineers would all have left and taken a lower paid remote contracting job working from home..
Not many comparable remote positions were available, and not may even probably didn't consider the possibility, because it was so taboo.
This is how bad stuff that existed so long in a society eventually change. 9-5 work in an office is an evil that should not have existed where it could be avoided.
> vast majority of them do not want full remote work.
Great, good for them. But that is not stopping a lot of others from doing so.
I’d wager that a vast majority of programming being done is internal LOB CRUD apps. Sure, management will gush over how “innovative” those CRUD apps are, but most programming jobs is just finding out where data resides, where it’s going and what Bootstrap template to show it in. No need for creative ballpit meetings for that.
Corollary: if you want to make money, you should seek to be in areas other than where the vast majority of programming is being done.
With that in mind, I wonder why people can't succeed in the same way while WFH, and I conclude it is other people which wreck it.
I'm prepping a side project for launch at the moment, and if I ever hire, it will be for a company whose internal communications are all text based. I strongly suspect this will prevent me from ever relying on old world extroverts whose MO amounts to nepotism.
As a person who lives in a geologically stable region I have to chuckle because it is entirely possible that this comment will age as terribly as that 'which country is best equipped to deal with a pandemic (2019) post that we saw recently.
I don't deny the part of your comment about in person interactions being the foundation of creative output but all that is overridden by the notion that this must take place in Silicon Valley.
With rising sea levels and the fault lines in the region I'm aghast that so many of America's eggs are in one precarious basket. Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all based in this region, it just seems so utterly short-sighted.
What the hell is America going to do if there is a cataclysmic event that takes out this region?
No you are missing the point. I never said it has to be in Silicon Valley. It's already happening in many places in the world. Google has offices in Silicon Valley and many other parts of the world, and the value the bring is the same: bring people who work together physically together.
Why are these large companies choosing to concentrate their work force in a geologically precarious location when their employees are telling them that they would rather work in a distributed fashion?
It all just seem so short-sighted to me.
The east coast isn't much better off either. If a tsunami hits the Pacific, there are enough hills and mountains between the coast and say, Palo Alto or Mountain View, that not that much will happen. Half of SF is probably safe from tsunamis too just because of the high hills. Corporate offices are probably built earthquake-proof already. Houses, not so much, but hey, the corporations will be around.
The east coast, not so much. Boston and NYC are flat, at sea level, and would be gone if an asteroid were to crash into the Atlantic. Nuclear power stations in Newark would become the next Fukushima disaster.
Most ancient cities were not built on the coast, for good reasons. It seems to be a relatively recent fad around the world. Take China for example, because it's an ancient civilization. Shanghai and Shenzhen, are on the coast, but are cities built extremely recently. The historical population capitals of China (Beijing, Nanjing, Xi'an, etc.) were never on the coast.
Likewise, Rome, Madrid, Cairo, Paris, London, Kyoto -- none of these cities are on the coast.
The USA, on the other hand, is a relatively new kid on the block in the grand scheme of civilization, has yet to learn, and put all of its eggs on the coast. :-/ That's the bigger problem IMO.
Note, we’re not sure anyone died from radiation from Fukushima. We can be certain more people died from the evacuation though.
Earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people... Building codes in California are strict for just this reason. Most people will get through with minor injuries, and some inconveniences from utility and transit outages. The Bay Area will likely fare better than Los Angeles, which is likely to lose access to its water supplies..
As for flooding, check the history of Sacramento. Over a few years they systematically raised the street level and most of the buildings in the city. Now it's one of the highest areas and least affected by floods in the region. Why this tact wasn't taken in New Orleans after Katrina is beyond me.
CA has been preparing for a large earthquake since the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge quakes. Building codes here are pretty strict; anything built or retrofitted since about 1980 should do fine. Lots of money has been spent retrofitting older soft-story apartments, and infrastructure has been shored up since Loma Prieta. Cities are starting to discourage and then ban natural gas in new construction to reduce the risk of fire; when they can't, gas lines are being upgraded to make them more robust. Most families keep an earthquake kit of canned food, campstoves, and potable water. Google at least runs annual drills that simulate all of their Bay Area offices being taken offline (and their employees presumed dead) to ensure business continuity; it'd surprise me if other Silicon Valley companies don't.
This is when the two recent M6.8 earthquakes [1][2] killed about 60 people each, and a worst-case scenario [3] predicts about 800 dead. Significantly more people have died from COVID.
The natural disasters you really have to worry about are black swans that you'd never expect, like frost in Houston or heat waves in Seattle. If the Bay Area got a blizzard it'd be a disaster, but we've basically got earthquakes covered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake
[3] https://www.usgs.gov/media/videos/haywired-scenario-movie
When was the last time you've used a big corp product that sounded like a water-cooler idea? Serendipitous innovation myth doesn't apply for these huge, hard-to-steer, profit-to-assets maximizing, financialized mega corps anymore. Nor creating 10 different messaging apps or torturing decade old products with growth hacking is innovation, it is cancerous growth born out of promotion-hacking. Water cooler schmoozing helps more with building the clout for that promotion than enhancing the productivity of the world.
They will make you work from office because they can, because that is easier on the managers and execs. They are doubling down on real estate because they have sunken costs, execs themselves probably have serious personal real estate positions and companies have a sizable chunk of h1b-captive employees that has to stick around anyway.
If anything, WFH had a positive impact on cutting through the bullshit. When speaking has more friction, the actual work has to do the talking, and that is a positive thing. You don't have to deeply enact a state of belief in other people's self-importance, as you get to say "oh fuck off" out loud when the meeting is off.
Going to the office is like going to the church of whatever objective function a company holds dear. You're surrounded by it for hours, and can't blaspheme around true believers and kool aid drinkers around that water cooler. At home, you're homed in a space that reminds who you are, your ultimate sovereignty and all the objective functions of your life, work being but one.
I think there are 1980's style regimented companies such as GE, Bayer and IBM that like to monitor their employees. There is a wide range of company cultures, what I call office-barracks; a soulless, unending array of employees with 8 digit ID numbers. Some even get corner offices. And then there are companies where people get together in physical space and kick ass.
I think you're not addressing the latter.
I'm pretty sure a company like Google that has no problem killing unsuccessful products after multi-billion dollar investments, knows how not to fall for the sunken cost fallacy.
> execs themselves probably have serious personal real estate positions and
As opposed to move to a different state, buy a house 3x the size for the same money, and save 10% on state income tax? Hmm....
>companies have a sizable chunk of h1b-captive employees that has to stick around anyway.
The very fact companies sponsors H1b instead of having them working remotely from China or India is precisely because they believe in the value of everyone physically together.
You're making the assumption that people behave rationally.
In actuality, rationality takes effort and as such, is rarely used.
We are irrational beings who are capable of rational thought, that doesn't mean that we always do.
Additionally, as you go up the hierarchy, people disagree with you less and less, which means that you start thinking that your ideas are better than they are.
Like, I fundamentally believe that pushing employees back to the office is not going to work out well for many companies, but they'll do it for emotional reasons rather than rational.
(And I say this as someone who misses the office).
What? No, my original post was completely about how people don't act rationally, and that's why WFH will not be as amazing despite it can be more product in many cases.
Deadweight products vs appreciable assets are not the same thing. Not only they would have to justify throwing away their future returns on appreciation, if the word got out that any of the FAANG is liquidating tiniest bit of their real estate a panic pricing could erase a lot more. This is much harder to reconcile with fiduciary duty than “well, that deadweight product was costing us money with little in return so we’ll kill it”.
> When was the last time you've used a big corp product that sounded like a water-cooler idea?
Just because something doesn't work doesn't mean MBAs don't keep insisting that it does.
I personally love WFH but people that deny the benefits of in-person work are deluded or intentionally playing it down.
It's going to kill the spirit of the place. It's going to come with challenges of how to enable productive conversations. Maybe people will get together physically on occasion. But I don't know if the genie of personal mobility can be put back into the bottle and right now there seems to be a lot of employee reshuffling based on work arrangement preferences.
As for that mythical hallway chat that sparks a brilliant insight at the root of a massively disruptive business win, in my experience, it's that — a myth. I feel like I've personally had much more insightful casual conversations and professional relationship building via interest-dedicated chatrooms and regular video calls in the past year than in the past decade of striking conversations around the coffee machine.
Of course you can. You just have to allow it.
Here's where "human nature" bites most management in the ass. What casual lunch discussion, random hallway chats, water cooler talks and after-hours beer have all in common is, people involved are slacking off. Those are the brief moments where employees are not being judged for not being glued to their screens. They're not being judged for interrupting other people, perhaps from unrelated departments.
A remote environment doesn't provide such opportunities for unofficially approved, cross-team slacking off. So you have to compensate. Give people greater visibility into who's doing who, and give explicit permission to engage in casual chats. Reduce pressure, particularly around deadlines. Give people their slack back.
I find it ironic that companies want everyone to do spontaneous R&D work, but they rely on it happening spontaneously due to inefficiencies of office environment. Want people to do R&D work? Treat them as R&D employees. Start paying them for doing random crap on company time and resources, no strings attached. Then you'll have innovation.
> I find it ironic that companies want everyone to do spontaneous R&D work, but they rely on it happening spontaneously due to inefficiencies of office environment.
I don’t think those conversations and lunches are slacking off. Connecting with people goes a long way towards my own mental health, building relationships, learning about other projects and initiatives, and earning trust. If your employer defines that as slacking off, it’s maybe time for a new company.
My company has an expectation that I deliver X, help Y program move forward, mentor and teach, and generally disambiguate and solve hard problems.
Slacking off is if I repeatedly fail to perform those roles, and it’s only slacking off even then if it’s carelessness on my part.
But yes, you can view this as mental hygiene or morale management. Point is, being in the office gives plenty of opportunities to talk with random people about random things, with no strings attached. Most of hallway/watercooler talk isn't "learning about other projects and initiatives" - it's just random non-work-related talk, which absolutely helps build trust and new relationships, but isn't the "serendipity" the management is expecting. But you can't have one without the other - all those sparks of innovation happen when you let people just relax a bit, and talk about whatever they feel like.
My point thus being: it's not impossible to have this in remote setting. But because most companies are relying on "serendipity" as side effect of office inefficiencies that are missing in remote work, you have to explicitly add them back. Or, you can accept that you want actual R&D work to happen. Surprise surprise, R&D work involves... giving people a lot of leeway and little day-to-day pressure. I.e. slack.
“Lowly IC” - I don’t think you and I are on the same page, so let me stop you right there. None of the companies I’ve worked at treated people as being “lowly” or ICs as being lowly or inferior.
I don’t work in an organization where my manager tries to micromanage me. Nor does anyone here micromanage even the most junior employees.
People are responsible for meeting goals, driving initiatives forward, and delivering value. As long as you’re doing that, we don’t really care if you spend half your day on Twitter or watching Netflix — so long as you’re not actively distracting people. And by distracting, I mean intentionally interfering where it’s unwelcome by the other person.
Your argument seems to be that managers are trying to squeeze the most value by forcing people to be heads down working.
Maybe that formula works at Burger King or where you’re working with your hands - every second or minute lost might mean you produce less “widgets”.
This isn’t true in technology jobs, and if that’s how your organization is run, I recommend you start applying elsewhere.
This is all tangential to the main topic - some of the best innovative conversations do happen in hallway chats, over lunch, or while people are sitting near each other at their desks. And I recognize you disagree with that but to be clear, the culture you describe isn’t remotely close to my experience. We’re comparing apples and oranges - our experiences are not comparable at all.
It’s superstition.
I think this is really important and it's often overlooked by a lot of companies. It's also one major component of what keeps me being a freelance worker.
Most of my decent ideas come while I'm walking around, maybe 3 miles away from my workstation and I also learn a ton of job related things while not directly working "on the job" with random self guided R&D and other activities that I like doing around tech (writing blog posts, podcast host, etc.).
But most companies don't see it that way. IMO it's unreasonable to expect a salary worker to put in 9 hour days (no paid lunch), be on-call 365/24/7 for emergencies (also not compensated for) and then be expected to do continuous learning and other "this is work related but not directly related to work" activities after hours without compensation. This is exactly how you end up with burnt out employees even if the person enjoys tech. The critical component is the no strings attached. R&D needs to be no strings attached otherwise it feels forced or you're fighting the system by having to cram it in after hours since you can't do it on company time but then you're also left feeling like you're being taken advantage of because it's not compensated for.
The fact that even in this day and age, we still hold major online videogame tournaments in person shows you how important meatspace is. The International, the videogame tournament with the largest prize pool, was canceled last year when the entire game (Dota 2) was an online game. When it's held each year the tickets are always sold out and the arena is always full. You can watch everything online but it never stopped a fully packed arena.
So yeah, my point of face-to-face socialization will never be fully replaced actually gets even stronger support when you bring up videogames.
This is likely because the prize money is significantly funded by the tickets sold to the “meatspace”.
Absolutely not. The prize money was exclusively funded by the sales of in-game battlepass, which is purely digital.
I think about these issues a lot because I run my own consultancy - I'm currently hiring freelancers 100% remotely, but as the moment to hire my first few full-time employees looms, I'm having to think very deeply about my hiring model.
I've had very positive experiences with remote work thus far, but none of the work has required outstanding creativity, it's mostly been execution. I will however need a full-time designer and a technical project manager as "captains" who pull their weight creatively and in terms of leadership, and I don't know if going 100% remote would work in this scenario.
There is another area in which I feel in-person meetings are better, and that is business development. I find I'm much more effective carrying out commercial activities - whether it's a speculative prospect meeting or a business pitch - in person that via video call.
On the other hand there are plenty of counter-examples of organizations that carry out creative, high-performance work at a decent scale: Basecamp, GitLab, Buffer, etc. I suspect we haven't seen yet a 100% remote company deliver results at hyper-scale and from scratch because the trend is novel. But large corporations - tech, banks, etc. - have had exceptional results in the last year while working remotely which suggests that it's possible to at least continue ongoing work at a very high level.
Regarding traditionally people-oriented activities, we've also seen in the last year people who have adopted remote workflows for areas like business development or fund-raising. I remember an article a few weeks back interviewing VCs and founders who claimed they were much more efficient at closing deals remotely, given the productivity gains of not having to be on the road as often.
So at the very least there is good evidence that, up to a certain scale and timeframe, 100% remote work can produce really good results.
Whether in-person work is more likely to produce ground-breaking, truly disruptive, innovations, as you claim, remains to be seen. The fact that, as of today, the vast majority of disruptive innovations have come from in-person environments does not prove that producing them remotely is not possible. And I understand why a company like Apple would not take the risk in this regard, but again, this does not prove anything.
I think the question will only be answered in time.
Taiwan's on a soft lockdown right now, and through g0v we've had a couple online hackathons via gather.town that went swell in my opinion, with lots of discussions and cool ideas popping around. And, a vibrant and highly active community across a huge volume of projects is maintained on the g0v slack. Off the top of my head, through online conversation only, the idea of scraping all Taiwanese hospital websites for vaccination registration information, through implementation of said app, was completed successfully. We also have the advantage of instantaneous response at nearly full capacity. That is to say, we don't need to wait until we can all get together physically to begin brainstorming and solution implementation around a given issue, such as when our COVID breakout happened and a lot of solutions arose quickly, such as translations of information, easy ways for businesses to register and print out QR code posters for our contact tracing system, and the sharing of COVID data.
I wonder if that's because there's no physical interaction whatsoever. I admit that when teams are mixed physical/non-physical, there can be information shared between physical people that the non-physical miss out on, but as others are saying, while that might seem faster, I'm not sure the added sloppiness is necessarily an advantage. In any case it seems like a very difficult thing to measure, especially when right now companies are trying to measure their productivity changes due to shifts to remote during an immensely psychologically traumatic time for everyone on earth.
Elsewhere I'm seeing further naturalist fallacy arguments, like we've "evolved" this way. I think that's a good counter to the "rugged individualistic" types that think humans would be better off living alone in the woods with a crate of beer and a shotgun or whatever, but in the far more complex social web of civilization, where you can still have social interaction but modulated to your needs, I don't think we can say "in person is better because we didn't have computers for the first 200,000 years of humanity. I'm sure one can see what else I can apply here: we also didn't have, I dunno, vaccines? Actually, better yet: we didn't have spoken language for a very, very long time, and we interacted "just fine" without it insomuch as our entire ancestral history for a couple hundred million years survived to the point where homo sapiens could finally branch off and eventually figure out complex language. Same goes for writing. So, that's kind of the problem with naturalist arguments.
Despite their successes, I'll bet a decent amount of money that after Covid is over, many hackathons will resume to be in-person events.
In fact, think of this the other way, would people in Taiwan be happy if they hear they will be locked down forever? Of course not right? So people obviously derive some value from human interaction. And that value, as little as it is for some people, will very often translate over to working relationship.
>we didn't have spoken language for a very, very long time, and we interacted "just fine" without it insomuch as our entire ancestral history for a couple hundred million years survived to the point where homo sapiens could finally branch off and eventually figure out complex language. Same goes for writing. So, that's kind of the problem with naturalist arguments.
A simple counter-argument to all your examples: when something new comes along, they rarely fully replace what's there before, but merely augmented it or expanding the horizon. We didn't replace gestures and body languages with spoken language, and we didn't replace spoken language with written text. Technology will no doubt expand our interaction paradigm with new methods, but it won't fully eliminate the benefit of old ones.
Of course this is true, but that isn't evidence that hackathons are inherently more productive if they're in person. In some ways, they're less productive in person. Digital hackathons allow for quick live-translation between English and Mandarin, for example. Communication is easier for many people during a digital hackathon. It also levels the playing field for people with various physical or cognitive disabilities.
> n fact, think of this the other way, would people in Taiwan be happy if they hear they will be locked down forever? Of course not right? So people obviously derive some value from human interaction.
Yes, I never challenged the idea that people derive value from human interaction. This doesn't mean that physical space interaction in the context of hackathons or work are more effective or productive. In fact, it again could be an argument against increased productivity, as I for example found the constant office chatter and distractions of the coffee machine very fun, but I admit that I get far more work done at home without those distractions, though I do have less fun here at home. Sometimes. Other times I spend my lunch break motorcycling, and those days I find working from home is a far more fun option ;)
> A simple counter-argument to all your examples: when something new comes along, they rarely fully replace what's there before, but merely augmented it or expanding the horizon.
Correct, and yet the false paradigm the OP seemed to me to be creating is that fully digital organizations are less effective than physical space ones. On the one hand, there's no reason an organization can't simply do both, and on the other, so what if slow augmentation was a method? Fully implemented language is more effective than no language, or primitive languages, so I'm not sure the nature of language's evolution is relevant here. I think we're stretching the metaphor here, though.
It is worth wondering, along those lines, whether at-home work could be identical to at-work work if we all had fully immersive VR digital workplaces. At that point, surely there's no difference? So thinking along those lines I think it's worth sussing out what exactly we like, or believe is more efficient, about in-person work.
But human beings aren’t robots, and we value a ton of things other than pure efficiency and productivity.
And I’m the OP here, fwiw, I think the hybrid approach where people go to office 1-2 times a week will be the most universally accepted.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-prog...
But since the article is paywalled... maybe it's protecting HN :)
Again I think for the most part the moderators are doing an amazing work but there is definitely a risk of just becoming another frontpage of the internet instead of sticking to the original ethos of submissions about 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity'.
From my perspective the baseline is pretty stable but the fluctuation around it has a fairly large amplitude. That makes for phases when certain types of story are more or less represented than others. If there were significantly more worldnews stories now than in years past, I'd be surprised. That's certainly not our intention.
However I realise it may not always be so easy. So:
- I'm self employed. Foreign companies aren't going to set up a branch office just to employ me. Purchasing my services however is easy.
- I've niched down to a business vertical, and I'm starting to niche down more technically as well. No more "I'm a full stack developer with a track record of delivering results across multiple industries".
- I write software for the agricultural sector. It's not an industry that tends to cluster as much in big cities. A lot of companies are based in regional areas, and it's not realistic for them to source all the talent they need locally. People are open to networking online.
It's not a raging success yet but it's a lot better than working in an office everyday in the city was for me.
YMMV if you live in a US tech hub.
Could you go into more detail? Enterprise software, embedded software, industrial PLC's? Agro is one industry that I would expect quite difficult to work remotely since there is usually some form of physical system that you deploy on a farm. I would be really curious to know more about your gig?
There's a lot of IOT systems that capture data from farms & food. Fruit ripeness, water levels, livestock location, livestock weights. So plenty of frontend work required.
Being self employed makes it easier for companies abroad to hire you - international invoicing is orders of magnitude easier than international hiring and usually comes from a different budget post.
Choosing a business vertical and running with it is the secret sauce to getting ahead. I’ve focused on insurance and pensions and being able to speak the same lingo as the business people on day one has been a game changer.
Fuckin' A
I’m certain that either wages will be depressed for remote workers, the jobs will be sent offshore, or companies will recall everyone but there’s a window to be taken advantage of right now. I’ll certainly point my kid toward a less volatile industry at any rate.
Am I wrong about this? We seem to not have to pay anything up front, but at the cost of a life long rat race.
If you want to talk flexibility, some of these doctors show up to the office like three times a week in the long run.
I know many many medical school graduates who eventually settled for careers in hospital administration because they could not even get a PGY-1 year anywhere. There's not enough supply of the required training. If you went to school in the Caribbean your odds are especially hopeless.
The average age of trade workers is over 50. Carpentry is in extreme demand but the pay hasn't caught up yet -- eventually it will.
Demand already far exceeds supply.
Edit: I like how I gave a perfectly truthful answer to the question and I'm being downvoted to oblivion. A lot of contempt for tradespeople, I guess. I went to high school with people who became electricians and they were all debt-free millionaires with their own businesses (usually several) by 40.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There are also many specialties available in plumbing and electrical that demand top dollar. The average electrician where I'm at in the US working for themselves is making $80-150 an hour (market depending) without any specialties involved.
Commercial properties also have roofs that need replacing and residential & commercial construction often don't boom at the same time. More importantly, storms are always a thing and one of the most common places trees go is into buildings & from the top.
I have never met a roofer that wasn't insanely overbooked.
I’m a fan of trades over office jobs. They’re paid fairly, you either have a union or at least paid for your hours you actually work. And I’ve always dreamed about overtime pay. Instead I’m pitted against overseas labor which instead of fighting, I’d prefer to unionize with them against our employer. Anyone that hires overseas deserves it. Certainly didn’t care about jobs here so we shouldn’t care about their well-being either.
I looked into a few jobs earlier in the year, and spoke with a few recruiters. Despite the initial remote-friendly job description, it ended up being full time or more, with 1 day work from home a week.
I look forward to when remote working is common, with internal processes and culture adapted to suit multiple modes of working.
Companies can advertise "onsite" all they want, but from all the stories I've heard about how hard it is to find good developers, and how developers are leaving their work-from-home jobs as soon as they're told to come into the office, you have to draw the conclusion that it's a buyer's market and employers are either going to have to fold to devs, or have their vacant roles stay open for longer than usual.
I've been turned down when offering remote jobs to devs who found something more attractive, it happens and the market is a two way negotiation.
Now I just pick up the phone "not interested unless it's 100% WFH"...Doesn't seem to have slowed down the recruiting calls.
Every recruiter that calls me, I'll only pass onto friends if it's remote because I know nobody will even consider onsite. There's a hidden filter effect happening right now that's not being considered.
I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that)
It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out.
Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.
And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.
In my experience, most decent employers have a stipend for co-working anyway.
I can easily get up at 6 go workout for 1-1.5h then drive to work when the morning rush is gone.
I'm saving at least $400/mo just on parking and gas right now.
Even if my employer wouldn't reimburse anything (never asked), I'd eat the $80/mo to save myself 2-3 hours a day commuting.
This is the case for a large proportion of people in the South East of the UK.
> I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that)
> It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out.
> Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.
> And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.
These are the typical reasons I see for going to the office and they all boils down to you not wanting to make your own food, not having the self discipline to work out at home, and getting started in the morning.
I mean, it's fine, but I think it's helpful if we realize what going to the office is just making some people like yourself more comfortable, and others less comfortable.
Because to me, that commute is killing me, and getting interrupted in the office is wiping out any energy I have at all to commit to working. At home I have food I selected myself to eat and I have a nice twin monitor setup with a comfortable chair and silence to focus. My workout routine is body weight exercises right before lunch, and I have time to relax and have a shower as well since there is no pressure.
I have also noticed that my own productivity has skyrocketed now that im working from home and dont have the regular office distractions. I can put on music that i like myself, sit in silence while drinking coffee and think about what im currently doing and how to solve a current issue.
However! It should be noted that i do miss the office from time to time, i havent been there in 1,5 years now. And will probably visit a couple times a month in the future when things start to clear up. But i will never go back to full-time-office-work.
P.S. it should be noted that i do have a dedicated "office" room in my house which is a luxury not many have. This helps alot with working from home. Had i had to do this from my living room or my kitchen i would have not survived this mentally.
There is still a benefit to it if you are in a project where you need to have in-depth, technical discussions. But the social benefits of being at work, and the 'chance encounters' which would help starting new projects or to bounce ideas of someone are largely gone.
I am curious to see how companies will handle this. Our boss wanted to have feedback from the team on how to handle this in the future and suggested to introduce a weekly 'work on site' day (and make all other days optional), which I think is a decent idea which we should try.
Not being around colleagues affects more than just self-discipline, you lose the random encounters with colleagues that often leads to new ideas and collaborations.
These differences are real. And even if productivity is not affected, the new ideas that normally sparked from random interactions are diminished.
I mean, the attack is so deeply personal yet you don’t know anything about OC’s circumstances. Maybe OC knows how to cook a little but he really sucks at it? Or he’s just not interested? Or he doesn’t have as much free space at home as you do? There are so many possibilities and you’re very quick to blame it on discipline, lol.
LOL
Also, if the subsidized commute costs 3 euros a day it is also not trivial to spend 14 euros for lunch.
I just can't believe it. World is going to hell and were like crying babies that can't prepare a meal by themselves.
Compared to the 30+ places reachable by foot within 45min lunch break at the office (and having real people to talk with while eating), WHF has really destroyed my lunch breaks.
I know how to prepare meals, in fact we make over 90% of our dinners ourselves from ingredients. Having something else for lunch is for me an important escape from our own cooking, for both the effort and the taste. Not that it's bad, just that it also gets repetitive. We also have the small child aspect to consider for the stuff we make at home, he's a bit picky (e.g. only eats fish in a soup or fishfingers) so we can't quite do the variety we'd like.
There's nothing wrong with a quick salad or sandwich occasionally, but that gets boring too. Same for yesterday's leftovers, we usually make our dinners for two evenings, if I eat also the same stuff for lunch in between that's a bit too much.
Edit: Now I'm curious, is wanting to eat lunch out really such a weird thing it could be nothing else than a troll?
I used to eat lunch at the canteen fairly often out occasionally have leftovers. Since covid I'm at home and normally make a sandwich or salad with whatever is in the fridge.
I did once work in a place where all of the tech team would bring lunchboxes or microwave meals (ugh). Normally the percentage is much lower, I'd say maybe 20%. Of course it depends on what options are available.
If the canteen is the only option around and it serves crap, it'll get fixed pretty soon, because the bosses eat there too.
Having a dedicated working space is not trivial; and it's not just isolating the space, there is all the "office management" part, having well fitted furnitures, lighting, drinks, noise management etc. Basically what was someone else's job is now each employee's responsibility. I'm fine with it, but it should be noted.
Physical fitness was already in that realm I think, though we were forced to have at least some exercise to move to the office. My hardest impact on that respect is that my calm neighborhood is less fancy than where the downtown office was, and it's less fun to just go walk for 20 ~ 30 mins and stop by nice coffee shops or museums. I could move to a more crowded place, but it's just a different tradeoff. Buying a better bike was the best investment on that front.
Is it really way harder to get dressed at the end of the day instead of the start? Is it that much cognitive pressure to feed yourself? Working in the office has its benefits, but working from home is not a crushing experience for a programmer compared to most workers.
The only thing different about being a remote worker is that what's on your computer screen is on average less engaging than a video game.
I personally worked remote numerous times before the pandemic (self-employed contractor but very often onsite) and made arrangements that WFH is a pleasant experience. That also included getting a coworking desk for limited periods of time, because socializing with other people is an important part of your wellbeing. The benefit of a coworking desk is, that if you go out for lunch with your collegues, you don't talk about work during lunch.
Every house has a bathroom. Now imagine we lived in a world were the norm was to shower at the office. Then suddenly a bunch of people starts to question whether we really should shower at the office or if we could do it at home. There would be tons of people saying 'But I don't have a bathroom, I have to shower in the sink, that's stupid and impractical!'. Well, that's exactly the situation we're in right now. Most people don't have a spare room for working at home in good condition, because buildings and cities weren't built to accommodate WFH.
And thats a perfectly valid choice that you should be allowed to make. If you want to work at an office, you would make sure during the hiring phase that your employer agrees and provides that office to you. If the employer says that you HAVE to work from home, that is a factor that you should consider when accepting the job offer.
Commit to a workout routine, commit to getting food or learning to cook to save money, commit to some mindful exercises to have more focus
Edit: okay fine the stoners just want to stay WFH and blaze up during the day
You can do that. I can just go back to office.
> being home and having no external pressure to keep working
> it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out
> I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria
> still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff
The paradox in this situation, is that some employers are considering cutting the pay [0] of people who have the self-discipline, drive and focus to not need the artificial crutch of going into an arbitrary office-space to find the motivation to do their work.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/12/google-st...
the problem is that remote is seen as a benefit (which it is), and so naturally must be priced as part of the salary.
The fact that being remote requires some discipline, and this discipline makes for a better employee doesn't play into it - because a employer would already expect such discipline, whether it actually exists or not.
Capitalism in a nutshell. :) Don't have to compete for your labor as aggressively because there are more candidates available for a lower wage.
Until companies are fully socialist entities (I think the Starship Enterprise will come first), you're gonna keep seeing whatever saves the company the most money (or whatever goes straight to the execs pockets at least).
> Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.
Just use money saved on the commute and spend it at the local restaurant or order a catering.
Is other people taking longer breaks affecting your productivity? If so, have you brought this up to them? Otherwise it shouldn't matter to you.
Personally I find remote a bliss, and I'm one of those. Almost every day I take 1 or 1:30 hours to cook some homemade meal and eat with my wife. When I feel extremely sleepy or tired in the early afternoon, I can take a quick nap and go back to work fresh and full of energy. I also take a break for exercising before my meetings in the late afternoon.
To a casual observer it might look like I'm taking breaks and working less, but actually I end up doing overtime many days. I just found a flexible schedule that works for me. Butting into other people's schedules is not so different from micromanagement.
I am not american, so working overtime for no reason is not the norm. In fact most of the team are contractors who can not work overtime even if they wanted to.
You shouldn't take my post as personal attack
I rather like worrying about food. I made myself jerk chicken and rice for lunch yesterday by taking ten minutes out to pop the chicken in the oven and then an hour out for lunch to do the rest.
During the chicken prep time I thought through a problem and solved it in half the time while the chicken was in.
This is a much better way to live than being time sliced into a corporate convenient canteen.
> I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office
Just because you don't have any self discipline or work ethics doesn't mean everyone else has the same problem.
Just because you have no control in your life and need the structure of an office work day to get stuff done both at work and privately doesn't mean this is normal, or that it's a good - or even any kind - of argument to force everyone into the office.
I don’t see how the comment actively argues for forcing everyone into the office. Sure there’s a point about taking pauses, but that’s it.
i personally want local offices so i can have somewhere that isnt home to work without a commute. like a library for work. id hope i get to finally integrate into the local community a little better then too.
Stopped reading here. There's no point since you are arguing imaginary things.
That is a valid point, since different people work better in different settings. I am personally in the opposite group.
> I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that)
Overall, i get way more done at home, because of my 4 monitor setup, privacy, peace and the ability to take walks to clear my head and breathe some fresh air while i consider how to solve technical problems. I cannot do that at an office setting and my mental health has improved bunches. Also, no commute has done wonders for my sleep schedule and productivity. I no longer waste 10% of my life in public transportation.
> It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out.
My physical fitness has gotten way better since i started working remotely - i've lost about 12 kg in 2 months, since now i exercise for 1-2 hours every single day in the countryside. No anxiety about how i look while working out. No shame about not living up to anyone's expectations. Just me, nature and listening to a podcast while i jog for 5 km and do sit ups, push ups, pull ups and whatever else i want.
> Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria.
I think that people should always make their own food, since it's both economically more responsible and on average also more healthy. I now enjoy a primarily veggie based diet and communities like /r/MealPrep have been fun to explore! Plus, my cooking skills have gotten way better.
> And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.
I get to chat more with my friends remotely on my down time. I no longer worry about how i look. I no longer have to worry about someone dropping by and just making me lose the mental model of the code that i have in my head. Meetings are properly scheduled ahead of time. Noone makes assumptions about me based on my gender, age, looks or anything else.
Frankly, it's great. It won't be that way for extroverted people, or those that prefer in person collaboration for any reason. It also won't be that way for people who live in the city, at least sometimes. But, living in the countryside, it's absolutely great! Also, no overpriced real estate or rent to take care of.
Haha. Not sure which country you're from, but this definitely sounds like a first world problem.
Your statement tells me that you could afford to only eat food others prepared for you in the past. (Not sure if that was a free office cafeteria)
For many that is expensive and could even be an unhealthy way of life.
I've never really thought of going into an office because pre-prepared food is easier to get. That's a new one.
office: go to an office, sit in a chair 8h a day with barely any breaks.
home: get up any time you want, walk around, lay in bed, go outside buy something, no one looking or making comments.
productivity:
office: too many people moving around and talking, use headphones to isolate yourself
home: no one around you, play music in the background, relax
food:
I think it very much depends on the company you working for. Many companies don't offer lunch, and you're going outside. What's the difference from doing it from home?
Agree with the low productivity and social, but that's temporary because covid. You're forced to stay home and unable to have any fun and social times.
Open plan office are an absolute productivity killer for me, as they are noisy and distracting and really the worst environment possible for development! Working from home there are no distractions, so I'm able to concentrate far longer. For me it's pointless to commute three hours a day just to sit in an office and not speak to anyone, when I could use that time for other things (plus saving £3,500 a year on travel).
As someone who trains at the gym two hours a day most days, working from home allows me to train more and eat better. It absolutely great being able to cook and eat proper food in my own kitchen!
[1] https://iblaine.github.io/assets/images/projects/graph-remot...
- the count of any word probably increases over time. Need proportion instead. But maybe I misunderstood your graph
- “the job is currently remote but you will be expected to work from our office in X in the near future”
[1] https://github.com/iblaine/hn-whoshiring-analysis/blob/main/...
Those who are stuck in their old job don't tend to have a lot of flexibility to negotiate these changes other than quitting and finding a new job, which nowadays is predominantly remote because that's what IT pros want.
From what I see in France, there's a ton of competition in "consulting". Not freelance, mind, but body shops renting out developers. The end clients have a tendency to think of those devs as completely interchangeable (that's the main reason they give when asked why they don't hire directly).
I have a hard time seeing how telling them to pound sand can have a serious effect, especially since your employer (entity signing your paycheck) is not the same as the entity for whom you actually work. So aggravating a few too many clients might start having adverse effects with your actual employer.
There's also probably some nuance between the US job market and French job market of which I have no business speaking to.
My overall point is, that in the US at least, for middle of the bell curve type talent to solve middle of the bell curve type problems, there is far less talent than there is problems.
I think that's actually the case in France, too. But there's also a fairly widespread mentality among employees to try not to rock the boat. Many people are afraid of being laid off and having to go through the recruitment grinder, which for most consulting firms isn't pretty.
However, regarding the "staff aug", I've been working for a client whose IT department has more contractors than FTE, and a bunch of the contractors have been there for a very long time (>5 years). I think there are only two FTEs who have been there longer than any current outsider.
This sounds extreme, but isn't isolated. I used to work for a "consulting shop" and many people there had been with the same client for very long periods.
It sounds like you need a different kind of job to have a way forward.
What's more surprising to me, though, is that there actually are many companies that will go this route. They're paying basically twice the salary of any given person. I know many people try to avoid increasing payroll, which is often the reason given, but you'd think after a few years, when you know the employee does the job well enough, you might want to save some change.
It just gets easier and easier. Especially if you work with tech that's in high demand.
I love to travel, have a small corner at a cafe where no one knows me, put on headphones and work. In the last 14 years I have moved 12 times. It says something about me I had not realized for a while.
I build my own small routines, like walking, cleaning the house, cooking, daily grocery. Currently I live in a small Himalayan village and I am starting to build engineering for a super early stage US based startup. Met the founder through On Deck. I love my routine, and I love staying outside socially busy places. I have anxiety issues.
Living in a village, people assume I must be a less productive person. My US founder worked with me for a couple weeks and decided it is in best interest if I lead all engineering. She/he is ex Uber, really high caliber person. There are people like me, I have met them, I know them. They all want to live away from busy places and do not like offices.
I’d be interested in another chart considering all postings, not just ones that mention “remote” or “onsite”. I expect the trend would still be visible, but not quite so significant.
Would be good to have a company where we can still socialise with colleague like half a week, then I would just travel around while working. Flexibility all the way!
When I started working I remember being told I was now entering the "real world". Well, after several years of being in the "real world" I now know that it's crap. Returning to work from home reminded me what it's like to actually be productive.
Concentration is so important. Not even just for programming. I was speaking to a guy who runs a mobile clutch repair business. He does one clutch a day on people's driveways. He works about 5-6 hours a day, including travel time (so really only 3-4 hours on the job). If you go to a regular garage they'll tell you how big of a job a clutch is and they'll sometimes take multiple days to complete the work. It's because they aren't concentrating. They are chatting with each other, being pulled this way and that into helping with other tasks etc. This is exactly what being in the office was like. For years I was never able to get into the zone.
I used to eat almost all my meals at work. Meals were subsidized by my company, and they were a lot healthier than restaurant food or takeout. That's several thousand dollars per year of compensation that I'm not getting anymore, not to mention time I didn't use to spend on cooking. Not to mention compensation for gym membership and fitness classes that I'm not getting anymore.
The work gym has closed, and I don't have space to set up a decent home gym. After all, I now have to use up space on a home office!
Working from home for me has meant losing space in my home, losing free healthy meals daily, and losing my shape. I admire y'all who can stay buff with one left kettlebell and practice breast stroke on the carpet, but I can't, and even if I could, this is a lot worse than what I used to enjoy.
Companies like FAANG wants to run adult daycares where all the employee needs are taken care of. At some point in life, employees will have to face these issues when they no longer have a job/retired/have kids. This forced WHF has shown people there is life outside of work and work is a way to earn money to keep life flourishing with things that people want to do not the goal in it self. Its like removing VR goggles from someone after long play - a different perspective is forced on everyone.
I found working in an open office to be incredibly distracting and the productivity uplift in working in a private home office was significant. I would be more willing to work in an office again if I could be given either a personal office or one shared only with a small number of colleagues.
Rather than argue the pros and cons, I'm more interested in seeing how distributed organizations will evolve. Slack and Zoom are getting the job done, but they are wearying. Organizations that aren't deliberate in designing their collaboration process will probably spin their wheels a lot.
Software development does have more focussed tools for collaboration, like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Basecamp, Trello, StackOverflow, Figma and so on. So what are remote-first companies doing to improve productivity and minimize coordination overhead? Is it about finding the right modes of communication? Is it about distributing work differently? Is it building shared context to make communication more efficient?
I'm aware of (at least some of) the things that companies like GitLab and Automattic have written about their practices. Who else is thinking and writing about this?
I've only read a bit of it, but what leaps out at me is that it's clearly written prepandemic. It assumes its audience only knows in-person work, and remote work is this weird radical thing that only a few companies do. Understandable, as that was true 18 months ago, but wow have things changed!
Oddly, I bet it'll be hard or impossible for Zapier to write an updated edition, as they don't know what the pandemic has been like for the rest of us. Heck, I bet the experience of pandemic remote work varies widely.
I'm sure it's an xkcd/meme Venn diagram, but in broad strokes, that's my impression of how the cards have fallen in the UK from speaking to friends and colleagues.
There's further overlap with age, too. As home ownership increases with age. So it's the 20-30s want to be back in the office, and the 30+ don't. Again, broad strokes, but that's what I understand from friends, family, even sites like this.
Having said that, without endless meetings and distractions, working from home can definitely be a lot more productive ... it's just that after a while (a year or so) I start to feel hollowed out without human company.
The org already had video conferencing between larger meeting rooms but few people could use it efficiently and there were no support staff on hand.
I moved to Tasmania to work remotely. Weekends are alot more interesting compared to Sydney and that helps with recharging. I've been able to afford a 3 bedroom house for the same as I was paying for a 2 bedroom apartment back in Sydney, with its own dedicated office.
Most of the time I deal with PHP/Perl and maintaining news sites. Also, AWS EC2, NGINX, Jenkins, and other issues.
People have been given a taste of remote working, and now certain companies are trying to get us back into the office. I can see how that'd spark discussion.
What does average Joe get by opposing it? A pat on the head when this is all done? There is collective leverage here, use it to get more for everyone.
Make sure the background of your space is neat, neutral, and not distracting, or use a zoom background.
Do you have any friends who can run a mock interview over Zoom for you and provide feedback?
Potentially yet another "win" for the companies: some of the unnecessary engineering manager jobs will be eliminated. My impression is that in fully remote companies the opportunities to prove your importance when there's little to none, are limited. The occasional video call situation as opposed to always-in-the-office one means everyone becomes more efficient in communicating things.
Not an insurmountable problem but I find myself protesting about this regularly.
I just thought there's another interesting upside for workers: you are now more flexible in changing jobs since obviously you are no longer tied to the location. So eventually you might find an employer who is more WFH friendly and manages the communication better. And that should put pressure on your existing employer too!
- Clicking on an ad likely sends ad-spending to Google/Amazon/FB/Twitter
- Using the web will increase cloud-costs, money goes to AWS
- buying stuff online likely hapens on Amazon, maybe ebay, maybe etsy
- buying stuff online likely makes your local merchants pay transaction fees to Amazon, PayPal, Visa or Mastercard
In that case "Local economy" means more money goes to tech-hubs. Your rural plumber, baker, brewer, dentist etc. will be skimmed more not less.
With JS disabled, I can read it perfectly well (Firefox, Privacy Badger, and NoScript, from the U.S.A.).
Maybe HN should start banning paywall links. It greatly degrades the experience of HN if you can't access half the stuff on the front page by just clicking on it.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's tons of explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I constantly see those positions filled with people who may be great engineers but are trash managers, though. Companies can still get by, but they often don't even realize how much better they'd be if they prioritized management skill instead of mere years of experience (I'm looking at you, Google, I've never seen such a high percentage of completely clueless people managers anywhere else).
Oddly enough, these managers don't know much technically and are blatantly toxic, as they drive people in mass, they just move up the ladder and promote their alike peers for another round of madness.
I would love to live in these unicorn companies where everyone is marvelous, but I have never seen one in 20 different clients in Europe, from the small startup to largest 10 companies in the world, including NGOs (among the worst place to work).
So one may have a great manager but you are 6months away from yet another reorganization that would kill any teams.
That depends on where you live. If you live a population center that currently has very high wages then yes. Otherwise you've just potentially gotten access to much higher paying jobs than you would've had access to before.
So what we should see is a geographical evening of wages. Which I can only really see as a good thing.
Make it clear that you won’t accept a pay cut for the same work output. And keep negotiating your full rate for any new position you take, and this won’t affect you at all.
Personally, I always bill out at my Bay Area rate regardless of where I’m physically located (and I’ve been located in some pretty strange places). It has never been an issue.
Therefore the salary should stay the same wherever I am located.
If we do what the egocentric people here want "pay me 250k a year because that's what I'm worth" then only USA based companies would do software and everyone else in the world would be growing tomatoes (as they seem to think).
How would a company in India compete with that?
If you are earning a silicon valley salary and pretend to move anywhere in the world and keep your salary because "that's what I'm worth" I have two news for you: 1) it won't happen, companies are not stupid. 2) you have a big ego problem.
So yes, it's true that your cost of living in rural Italy is less than it would be were you to move to an apartment in Palo Alto, and that there will remain a surplus after you have accounted for those expenses. But I'd prefer a world where that surplus was captured by you rather than J. Random Software Company.
After all, you're the one who has to tolerate all those walkable streets and good cheap wine day in, day out, to live there. Gotta balance that somehow...
> companies would find equally qualified people for less money
That's where you're mistaken. The software industry has spent the entire time between 1994 and today hiring every one of those people all over the world. There are only so many of them left who haven't figured out their true value. You certainly aren't going to build a Facebook off of the remaining people who are willing to work for $10/hr. Anybody who is any good will demand a market rate. And that market rate is set in the Bay.
Or try applying that at a micro level, and renegotiate your salary every time you move in a city because your rent has changed, or you finished paying your mortgage.
Your living costs shouldn't matter to your company or people who own you money in general.
No, the point is that, obviously, company do try not to pay more than they have to. They know that if you live in a cheap location where there may not be too many opportunities you will likely accept a lower salary so that's exactly what they do. It's a cost cutting exercise.
Obviously the counter point is that if everyone WFH then why would they bother paying SV salaries in SV or anywhere else? Just drop salaries across the board and cut SV people.
What irks me is the ego, people thinking they're really worth a fortune....companies where (and are) fighting for talent, true...but now that remote is unifying the market salaries will raise where they were too low and high salaries will go down where they were too high. We're just hearing the denial phase of the high salaries people.
There's no "we" here. I live in Moscow, Russia, and I just got a remote job from an American company that pays 4 times more than my last one did, but still less than FAANG level. There are a LOT of developers all around the world that would be glad to "let them" pay less that what they used to when they were hiring only locally. Because for us it would still be a lot.
I don't think that American developers understand it yet, but remote work, in terms of it's influence of supply and demand of labour is not a good thing for you guys.
- Remote work is not the end of the world. Most software teams found a way to function during the pandemic. That's a lesson both companies and developers learned.
- The relevance of on site, in person meetings is still important but not required 100% of the time. Being flexible here enables casting a wider net when hiring. Especially with specialist skills, this is important as convincing people to move to where your office is is hard. People now regard on site, in person meetings as quality time. It's something you put in your calendar because it doesn't happen every day and needs coordinating.
- Freelancers can work remotely or on site. However, you pay more for on site as it involves travel and inconveniencing them. The flip side is that if you go with remote freelancers, you are not restricted to your local area and you can engage specialists wherever they are. This was already a thing before covid. All my projects in the last five years we had at least some remote workers and I've been remote myself most of the last eight years.
- Having remote people in daily standups (in so far people still bother with those) on a video call has been the default for quite a while in all the places I've worked on site. This being awkward and annoying has made standups less popular over the last five years. We do weekly company wide video calls and lots of video only meetings (1 on 1, or small groups). It's rare for any of that to involve meeting rooms, projection screens, etc. The only proper standups I've attended were while doing the occasional onsite freelancing project. The last of those was a few years ago.
- Development processes are adapting. Post-its are no longer part of meetings because remote participants can't read those. All that stuff has long transitioned to issue trackers. Either it's tracked there or it didn't happen. With standups gone as well, that's two nails into the waterfall masquerading as agile style of Scrum that was the sad reality across our industry until Covid. Likewise bull shit bingo with Fibbonacci cards (aka estimation meetings) is no longer a thing. Nor are retrospectives with rooms full of upset people screaming at each other (we've all been there). Scrum was heavily dependent on on-site meetings and juggling lots of bits of paper. The remote/digital forms of all this exists of course but was always a bit awkward. Remotely doing these meetings just leads to remote people muting themselves, turning off their video, and reading HN or doing whatever while people go through the moves of doing everything "by the book". Scrum is just not optimal with remote people involved. What is increasingly replacing scrum is more Kanban like in nature and decouples planning and release (i.e. continuous deployments) heart beats. We plan in sprints but develop and release every day and use asynchronous tools to coordinate. Remote optimized forms of Agile processes look very different than Scrum and a lot more like what big OSS projects have been practicing for decades where scrum was never a thing.
- Having remote people is convenient for both companies in highly competitive markets (e.g. the Valley) where talent is scarce and charging very premium rates and companies in remote/rural areas where talent is locally non existent and convincing people to move to you is nearly impossible. These companies now have access to a global pool of workers willing to work remotely. Better still, you pay for the skills and not their on site presence. They might prefer on site but it's simply not an option for many companies. Now that companies have learned they can work with remote people, many of them grudgingly do.
Not my arguments, just what I've seen written...
As I understand it, the rationale behind offering pay-cuts to full time wfh employees is that the pay cut is relative to the employee's lower cost of living. The employer sees an opportunity to avoid including the cost-of-living salary-uplift that is required to attract people to San Francisco etc.
The rationale that Google is citing is that they pay based on location. They say remote workers will make the same as office workers in the same city, which sounds reasonable.
The negotiating power of a company, which is practically a group of people, is much higher than that of employees, which are just 1 person. A big company loses what? 0.00001% of its revenue if it doesn't hire the right person for a specific position? An employee loses 100% of their revenue if they don't get hired or get fired.
So companies can pretty much do what they want (up to a point where they cause uproar and those individuals to bunch up into a group fighting the company).
If you're a skilled developer, I urge you to exercise your negotiation power. You have much more than you think.
The problem is, most people aren't willing to walk from job offers. Walk. There are more.
skilled developers are much more common than people think. We get the impression of rarity precisely because we limit the search pool to local areas where very often many top companies are competing for the same talent pool.
But at the end of the day there are a ton of super smart developers in EU, China, India, Japan, South America or even lower to mid COL areas in the U.S. who are more than happy to take 50% of Silicon Valley pay and just do as well of a job.
At the very end of the day vast majority of software engineering is far from rocket science, and you don't need someone who can re-invent MapReduce out of thin air just to refactor that clusterfuck of Redux code.
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-so...
* ~900 million people for where they use companies (and probably in the low tens of million of possible employees)
* probably ~2 billion people for where they use contracts (and probably some more low tens of millions of possible employees)
Those are <<huge>> pools of people.
This might not mean much for someone who made their career in SV, but certainly means a lot to an Indian, Russian or Brazilian developer.
If this bubble bursts then yeah painful changes will likely come.
Recent numbers at my place of work (looking for a couple of senior hires):
3 months, 200 applicants, 35 full-day technical interviews, 2 offers. 1 accepted. The guy who rejected had a competing offer.
I'm poking around currently, and there's definitely an appetite for companies to get strong candidates in for interview. However, I keep these numbers in mind. The odds are against us.
1. Your line of development is popular (I wish PL/I developers good luck with their job searches!)
2. That you're geographically located in a "hot" location and you can easily relocate (which is frequently not the case, due to family concerns or other concerns) <<or>> you like remote work and are good at it.
3. That you can easily handle interview stress (a ton of people can't) and that you're good at interviewing (which you can improve at, but you need to spend time, plus see: stress).
I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
In any case, the balance is tilted a lot more towards big companies.
I think companies often undervalue the cost of annoying employees in random trivial ways, creating the nudge that causes them to shop around for another job. This is not a trivial annoyance and I understand that the tech job market is extremely hot at the moment so causing people to apply to other jobs and find companies willing to increase their pay by a lot does not sound like a smart business decision.
But maybe I’m wrong or Google have some great internal productivity data that makes this incentivising all worth it to them.
Obviously there is a larger supply of workers in a time zone than a metro area, but there is a larger demand for them too. And a workers can reasonably threaten to move to the part of the US where they would be paid the most.
Software engineer pay is quite different, between, say, London and Paris, or between Switzerland and any place in Europe... And it has more to do with talent competition than cost of living. France or Germany aren't inexpensive places to live in but there isn't as much software talent competition, so pay is still lower there from what I can tell.
You're right that a bigger pool doesn't necessarily mean more competition or lower wages, just a trend towards equalization: some people's pay could move up from access to a pool with higher competition for talent. But the pay for the people whose location puts them already at the top of the pay ladder has only one way to go relative to others who will WFH in the same timezone.
This statement is easily falsifiable.
Salaries for anything are much higher in Switzerland.
I doubt there's more "janitor talent competition" in Switzerland than in France, yet Swiss janitors are paid more :-)
I guess what I'm saying is that businesses as a whole tend to hire people at the lowest possible costs given to them by the job market, not based on what they want the worker's disposable income to be after costs are deducted.
Costs of living do affect the offer side of the market - the willingness of people to take various jobs at various salaries.
What I'm observing in software engineering is places with smaller differences in cost of living than in pay levels, which I'd attribute to talent competition...
One argument for this to be the case is that an employee could reasonably threaten to move to Silicon Valley for higher pay (at another company.)
In reality the supply and demand of employees of particular type determines the "negotiating power", and this can change over time.
So the company can drag even a lawsuit across many, many years, practically guaranteeing big companies are bullet proof.
If people prefer remote work and that also saves them time and money then they will probably be willing to accept a lower salary than they will for the same job on-site.
IMHO that's the logic of companies that are suggesting pay cuts for employees that won't come back to the office.
You’ll make comparatively less working remotely because the pool of workers willing to work remote are higher in supply. Office jobs will be forced to offer higher wages because their supply of candidates has shrunk.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/08/11/remo...
On top of the fact that most people are less productive working from home. Everyone here seems to think that they are the work from home king who does 10x work when not at the office citing distractions (as if people aren't IM-ing you just as often), lack of commute (this doesn't actually count to your work hours anyway), less breaks (expect just like how you didn't remember what you forgot, you only remember the times when you worked whole day in the flow and didn't take breaks and forget the days when you mostly you browsed HackerNews and took that 45 minute coffee break and picked up your kid from the school and still quit at the normal office time)
You don't break your bodies every day, you're not forced to spend all day moving wood and metal, filling bags full of garbage, hauling shit that weighs 50+ lbs all day every day.
You just gotta sit and think and come up with solutions to problems.
Having done both, I'd fucking far rather receive large amounts of money to sit in front of a computer all day than break myself for $20-$30 an hour.
If there's one thing I have to say about computer programmers and their entitlement.
Suck it up, take a pay cut and take your free time, you're already overpaid for shit that's not going to kill you and now you get the option to sit at home and work for slightly less money, still more than someone who kills themself every day for a pay cheque.
I’m not making any particular argument here, just adding color to your fair points. My dad worked labor his whole working life until it broke his body at about 50 (now on disability). Now I’m working in part to send him money every month, but also building toward my own early semi-retirement. I’m happy I got into programming, but I’ll be happier to have my thoughts back.
> I have to say about computer programmers and their entitlement
> you're already overpaid for shit that's not going to kill you
Why overpaid? Programmers create huge amount of value and they are paid accordingly.
Assuming that:
a) A market such as the dev labor market is fairly efficient, and increasingly so
b) Agents on both the supply and demand sides transact freely and uncoerced
c) Individual feelings regarding the value of the work being carried out are meaningless
There is no thing such as "overpaid".
On the employees side it could be something like a politicians relatives getting high paying job because otherwise the politician will cause problems for the company.
Edit: I don't know if I misread your comment or you edited it, but it I think these coercions are covered by it.
If anything, price information is not 100% transparent and that tends to benefit employers, but that exerts downward pressure on the wage rather than the opposite.
Honestly, I get how the sentiment of "suck it up, you are privileged" is sometimes annoying.
Yes, there are workarounds on how to mitigate some effects but in general, the human body was designed (by environment for millions of years) to move all day long, often with a weight.
Software developers are not overpaid. Many are still relatively underpaid relative to the value they provide.
I suppose whether I'm worth the money and whether I deserve the money are separate questions. Hopefully the answer to the former is yes, but I don't think I'm any more deserving of money than I was in my 20s, when I got paid a small fraction of what I make now.
How about instead of complaining about the color of the grass in others yards, we advocate for a living for all, and dare I suggest it, a thriving wage for the skilled, risky, or difficult jobs; irregarddles of whether they're performed at a desk or with a sweat. Alternatively/additionally, we should address the corruption and cost overruns present in many industries today (looking at you health insurance racket) that also reduce the relative purchasing power of any given wage.
"On his first day in Japan, Cook met with the 84-year-old Masako Wakamiya, the world's oldest app developer who released her first iPhone app in 2017, and 13-year-old Jun Takano, who's believed to be the youngest in her profession."
https://observer.com/2019/12/apple-ceo-tim-cook-visit-japan-...
You cannot equate being a tradesman to a software engineer:
Being a software engineer requires highly intense focus for hours on end, unpacking and repacking equations in different languages, which you must continuously teach yourself while using them to build things.
Also, here's no reason you cannot become one.
Unless of course, you're not willing to do what it takes. And guess what amigo: It takes time, effort, and the ability to simply sit and focus at a desk for 4-8 hours per day and teach yourself several related languages, and client (browser) & server (such as 100% free, open source, Linux) configuration methodologies.
Can you do that?
So don't blame anyone but yourself for your choice not to go to google right now and search for "Roadmap to becoming Full Stack Web App Developer" or "Roadmap to becoming a Mobile App Developer".
Leadership bonuses are just not cutting it this year... amirite?
If anyone who was offended by my attitude and comment reads this I apologize. Anyone who works hard for someone else should be valued, whether you work with your mind or body.
My comment was ignorant and just not true.