Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What's going to be more interesting is what this does to the market rate for labor compensation between these two pools. Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent (in the city) or increased time (commuting). Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal.
If the advantage of face to face is actually significant, then we'll see the remote firms slowly die off. If it's not, then they're going to be here permanently. Or they might just take over.
I’m sure this varies by company.
It is technically trivial. Building business software is fundamentally a communication/knowledge problem with technical aspects.
I've worked in remote-only environments, and (effectively) local-only, both of which worked pretty well. Local-first/remote-rarely hasn't worked.
I've not worked in anything close to 50-50, though, so perhaps that has a better shot at succeeding.
Maybe that's the crux of it. I've never worked in an environment where things like that amounted to much. If one of those meetings started to become important, it would always end up with "let's find a meeting room and include Charlie and Susan and get this hashed out."
I'd go so far as to say that if that's the way a team is primarily communicating, there is something structurally wrong.
I could be wrong but your statement of "if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" will hold true for for the global workforce as well, and I am not just talking the traditional off shore to India or china, but it could be that EU companies find cheaper information workers in US Mid West, or US Companies finding cheaper employees in EU, or Australia , etc
The high salaries of NY, LA, Silicon Valley, etc I think will be the first losses in this battle, many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that.
It will be interesting but the employees pushing for full time remote should be advised to be careful what they wish for, as they just might get it and not like the consequences
But at the same time, that makes the company vulnerable to the employee seek another company that will allow the remote work with a better compensation. Unless the ceos get together and conspire to suppress wages like they have done in the past, it is really uncertain how the workforce landscape will shape itself in the near future.
I think this leads to stronger evidence for property tax as the primary form of taxation. If you're paid in crypto and not paying property tax on that PO box that like 18 other people use for separate companies (address as a service or AAAS lol) the company won't know, the state government won't know either. Even if you're paid in cash it's hard to really track down.
So we will continue to wind up with different types of tax havens throughout the world. The long-term ramifications IMO are that nice places to live are going to charge very high property taxes and very high costs for obtaining citizenship, and you'll pay that for safety and security and for things that you enjoy (maybe it's walkable, maybe there are lots of parks, maybe the security is strong, maybe everybody looks like you or something).
I'm not arguing the ethics of this or anything, I'm not sure where I stand or what makes sense - just an observation.
Do you not expect governments to use their powers to issue subpoenas to banks or get location history from mobile networks or license plate readers to figure out this fraud if their tax revenues suffer?
A few years ago, Connecticut had Newegg send them a list of all purchases shipped to the state, and then mailed everyone a tax bill with penalties for failing to pay use tax. The onus was on the recipients to prove they already paid the use tax.
Well let's not be so hasty to call this fraud. I don't know the legal details but lots of individuals and corporations do things for financial/tax reasons that undermine the spirit of law and we don't call it fraud. Also things can change. I think there is a more broad discussion to have here on taxes and such. Like why am I paying more in taxes than Buffet (contrived example)? Isn't that fraud?
But I think the underlying thing to noodle on is what if a lot of people do it and just ignore the government? Or how will the government know if you're paid in BTC from an overseas company? That's where I think property taxes (and probably sales taxes) come into play because the police or tax authority can show up at the door and seize the property.
And in the case of San Francisco PO box let's say I buy a 2 bedroom house and then it costs whatever and I say ok I rent it out to 15 people with 15 bunk beds and rent it out for whatever + something so I profit (hell maybe it's even a co-op) and then you just tell your company that's your address and where you reside but you drive around in a van full-time or just 1 month in SF, spend 8 months in Oklahoma and 3 months in New York or whatever.
From SF/CA perspective you are living and paying taxes there, but the point is that your company pays you the higher wage while not living there (and taxes are deducted and soforth) but you're saving by getting the higher wage without the cost of living (again this would be a financial calculation to see if it's worth it and all that so I don't want to argue details at the moment b/c idk). In a sense you're tricking your company because they have this policy of "if this is where you live and pay taxes then here's your paycheck" but the actual living part doesn't need to be done where you "live".
Another example is living in Texas or Florida where there's no income tax. Set up a PO box, say that's your address, and there ya go. (Over-simplifying it a bit).
No doubt in my mind that schemes like this are occuring. Question is what happens when everybody does it? And what does the world look like when every person has access to the equivalent of a tax haven and is instead choosing where to live based on other factors?
A couple things:
> why can't we just regulate #of people in a house.
Well, tell that to the families of service workers who can't afford rent. What's the right number of people per address? Etc.
> The onus was on the recipients to prove they already paid the use tax."
Sure but if you live somewhere else you can just decline. What will Connecticut do when 50,000 people living all over the world just don't pay the tax? What will the U.S. do if there are millions? It seems like it's hard enough to go after corporations and they have big legal entities and property in the U.S. to seize and litigate over. Hell, maybe you get enough people doing it and law firms start representing people with medium net worths and so now every time you go after someone it costs so much money you go bankrupt over the tax. The problem for the governments is ability to enforce, which is why I think long-term everything rests on enforcement of property taxes. And you'll pay property tax because you want roads, police, etc. and if you don't pay the tax then they can block you from your property. Probably in-person sales taxes as well because you can also enforce those decently enough.
The scenario is like a lion trying to crush ants. It's probably not effective.
Also please don't take this as an anti-anything statement. I'm just trying to think through and predict future outcomes and just have some fun with scenarios :) I pay all of my taxes, and probably pay too much even...
I am going to refer to it as fraud, because that is the usual way the word is used in the context of the legal consequences one opens themselves up to making intentionally false claims about your residence in order to evade taxes. The law does not require anyone to pay taxes on unrealized gains of stocks, so no, it is not fraud if Buffett does not pay tax on unrealized gains of stocks.
>A couple things: > why can't we just regulate #of people in a house.
I never wrote this, so I am not sure who you are responding to.
>It seems like it's hard enough to go after corporations
It is not hard if they are evading taxes by committing clear fraud with no plausible deniability, such as claiming they were physically in one place when in reality they were in another place. The news articles you see are for cases where there is a lot of gray area in the law.
>The problem for the governments is ability to enforce
It is called freezing bank accounts. It is where much of the power of the US comes from, and many times why opposing entities who do not trust each other choose to do business in the US.
> The law does not require anyone to pay taxes on unrealized gains of stocks, so no, it is not fraud if Buffett does not pay tax on unrealized gains of stocks.
You're not violating the technical aspect of the law anymore than Buffet would be. Can you tell me the proper amount of time someone must live somewhere in order for them to truly live there? Pass a law? Those won't work. Already people are doing this - what do you think people who are living in vans do? They claim residence somewhere, maybe their parent's house and then they just live in the van or maybe they have some other place they stay. People do this with Florida to evade New York City taxes, etc.
> I never wrote this, so I am not sure who you are responding to.
Just pre-empting a response. Long story short the first answer many have is legislation but it is too burdensome to address any actual issues.
> It is not hard if they are evading taxes by committing clear fraud with no plausible deniability, such as claiming they were physically in one place when in reality they were in another place. The news articles you see are for cases where there is a lot of gray area in the law.
I think you're operating in the current model but not thinking about what can and is likely to happen in the future. The U.S. already can't go after many people who are outright breaking the law. Once this reaches a critical mass it's basically like trying to stop people from pirating songs. It's just not going to work. The lion and ant thing is really great here to help visualize.
Also, who is to say where you really live? Ok maybe you do live with 14 other people in bunkbeds in San Francisco. Is (insert company) going to fly/drive/walk someone out there and show up and check on you? It's impossible to enforce. So you can definitely draw a Bay Area salary and effectively live somewhere else. You can even do it in other countries. Plenty of digital nomads. Have you ever heard of one being prosecuted?
> It is called freezing bank accounts. It is where much of the power of the US comes from, and many times why opposing entities who do not trust each other choose to do business in the US.
The dysfunction and instability of the stability of the U.S. democracy is eroding power like this, for better or worse. You can't freeze a Bitcoin address, etc.
Communication may not be geographically limited anymore, but there are still barriers to overcome.
I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.
There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.
The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services.
I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office.
I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen.
Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.
It was “Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in,”
Companies requiring employees to be in the city 9-6 aren’t off-shoring and probably aren’t out-sourcing that work.
It doesn't matter that in this comment, the particular context was ostensibly 'move to the city to work in the office then get paid more'.
It's irrelevant - excessive demands in whatever form will be acquiesced by hiring better talent, elsewhere.
American workers making any kinds of special demands are going to get outsourced.
The tone of the article (and others is): "American Workers Leverage Over Big Corps" just like in this article: "Wall Street Grudgingly etc.". We saw the same with Apple yesterday.
In reality, the articles should be: "American Corps. looking overseas to diversity talent". Because that's what's about to happen. Anyone who thinks that these companies have any loyalty to their local nations, founding staff or culture, (and this applies broadly to the modern world) is mistaken.
It is not about your opinion, you are quite simply not responding to the posted comment. Because charitable reading of your comment required it, I have read the original comment that you claim to speak of again.
That comment says:
- Remote work can be done for a lower salary, because you can live anywhere
- If you demand that I come to the office, you should pay for the difference
You have responded to these points by saying that if you want more money, cheaper workers can be found "elsewhere" (i.e. abroad, so remote). This is not topical, because you address a claim that was never made.
I've been hearing that since 2006. Yet American programmers still exist and still command a relatively high wage.
But once they have the PM, designers, architect and devs. 'on staff' and all 'over there' - then you are the 'not connected' contractor.
Moreover 'they' are getting better across the board.
Japan made crap until they made the best cars in the world.
China made crap but now they have the top 5G gear and all of the patents, and would wipe out a big chunk of Western companies were it not for 'security' and other issues.
Americans are fairly instantly replaceable with Canadians, Aussies, Brits, and almost as easily replaceable with French, Italian and Germans etc.
'Remote Work' is like an 'unlimited, free H1B' program.
Many jobs are safe, but many are not.
As someone who manages people in many different countries from the US I can definitively say this is not true. You have to comply with local labor laws wherever you hire your employees. For example, many countries like Poland, England, and France require very longer notice periods and changes in job responsibilities can be a sticky legal issue. HR has to be equipped to handle all of these nuances.
If every third-world country follows the South Korea / Japan playbook, the world economy would absolutely explode with growth, and US workers would certainly benefit from this.
Outsourcing has been around for decades now and the overwhelming evidence is that it only gets you so far. “You get what you pay for.”
Sure there’s probably some offshore/nearshore firms that hire great developers but the lions share of them are low-skilled, associate-level developers that are usually paraded around as senior/architects. I say this as someone whose worked in a large consulting firm and had to work with numerous offshore/nearshore teams.
There’s a reason London and New York work well together. Time zones and language. And a relatively short plane hop.
Your one anecdote is pretty meaningless, you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.
It failed, and it failed miserably, and my former employer learnt a very expensive lesson. My colleagues in other investment banks reported similar stories in the 00s. That's far more than one data point.
Investment banks are not like other companies. They particularly enjoy writing their own code and systems, so when they tried to outsource and discovered that they weren't correct, or on time, they brought it all back in house.
> you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.
That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue? Does Wipro, for example, publish its revenue figures for its IT outsourcing arm, and break that down further with key indicators? I can say with some confidence, that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, won't be the "drivers" of that revenue, and that's what the original article in this thread was talking about.
> That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue?
All the big IT Outsourcing companies are listed on the Indian stock exchanges, you can go to their sites and read the annual reports to see what is driving that revenue. Majority of their revenue comes from the US. Also check the share price of those companies for the last 20 years, where your bank failed, other succeeded in outsourcing their operations.
All the big IT outsourcing companies are publicly listed, you can go to their website and check their annual reports to see how their revenue is going up for. You can see the number of employees keeps going up, the number of clients keeps going up. All these figures are available for 20 years now.
I think the bank can and does hire them already. In big tech companies, a lot of employees come from developing countries and they're paid the same market rate as anyone else (and companies pay for their relocation).
The 'True Shift To Remote' is a big game changer because institutionally, people at the office had a kind of existential value proposition: "We are Here!" - but that prop is distinctly diminished if they don't think they have to be.
BigCorps are making the shift.
It will be interesting to see it play out.
> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
> In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.
I have some sorry news for non-Americans who think most of the high-paying American jobs (especially at banks) have anything to do with being smart or working hard or getting paid half as much.
Those personal, face-to-face relationships referred to matter a lot. As humans, they will always matter.
The main way that remote will impact workers is by allowing people (mostly Americans or folks who could live/work here via a visa) who would already be naturally good fits for the job to live and work in a different place, but probably close enough to travel to meetings and clients as necessary (with a lot of necessary).
Back office work may be sent abroad or (more likely) contracted out, but the core of the businesses that involve trust and/or personal relationships will be collocated for many many decades to come.
I've worked with remote developers from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in US companies, and talent in those areas can command SV-level compensation.
Truth is, if you can compete with domestic US talent, you can command US-level compensation, either through immigration or the "outsourcing" you're trying to spook people with.
If the work being done doesn't require talent that commands US-level compensation, then that work was already outsourced 20 to 30+ years ago.
Citation needed. My experience working with both proves the exact opposite. I think the Human Development Index of a person is more important in a knowledge economy than whether they're willing to work for 23 hours a day for 24 cents. And the first world countries absolutely dominate the world in this regard.
When I moved from the third to the first world, I was shocked by the high standard of personal "development" - for lack of a better term - of the average person, or even people lower down on the social ladder.
One of these is not like the others
I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around.
That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator. The median employee that chooses to live in X may be more productive that the median employee that chooses to live in Y. But that's yet to be seen
Even in California, SF has different payroll taxes and regulation than other cities in the area. Massachusetts requires employers to open a unemployment account in state. If the employee moves to a state the employer doesn’t have a employees previously, you need to register in the state and it might mean you have to now pay sales taxes on revenue in the state.
So unless you become an independent contractor and deal with this things yourself, the employer needs to know where you live most of the tax year.
My point was that main reason companies need to know where the employee is compliance, employment law, taxes and potentially IP protection. While the employer wouldn't care about the location because of pay scale, they still need to know for other reasons.
Until we can all live in some United Kingdom of the Internet, the unfortunate fact is that local laws apply to companies and employees when the employee resides in the jurisdiction.
If you're willing to pay more for identical work because your employee chose to live somewhere more expensive, you're encouraging your employees to live in the most expensive places.
On the other hand, if you offer a fair wage for the work done regardless of location, your employees get better value by living somewhere inexpensive, which lowers the required compensation for the same employee.
I think Facebook is simply creating more problems for themselves by bothering with this.
As I keep asking when this comes up, if this is true then why are salaries for FAANG engineers so much lower in London? London, as you may know is 100% not cheap, and yet salaries there for FAANG tech people are approximately 50% of those in SF/US.
It's much easier to move from an expensive city to an inexpensive city than vice versa since your savings will go much further in the inexpensive city.
(1) Bob is optimizing long-term savings, and Joe is optimizing purchasing power for nearby activities like bars and restaurants. After subtracting other comparable expenses, any salary surplus strategy which is a "perfect" cross-city CoL adjustment for Bob will when applied to Joe cause him to prefer a cheaper CoL location because his dollars will go further. Supposing the employer doesn't have power to discriminate based on such preferences, no fair CoL adjustment is perfect for both individuals.
(2) Bob is still optimizing long-term savings. MegaCorp chose a "perfect" CoL adjustment based on Bob's preferred standard of living, but the multiplicative nature of price increases in a high CoL city means that Bob can save a ton of money with a mild decrease in his standard of living. He's incentivized to live somewhere more expensive because doing so will maximize his potential savings with minimal impact elsewhere in his life. If the employer isn't discriminating based on what's paid for rent and other expenses, the CoL adjustment is gameable.
I think the salary adjustments aren't so extreme that you're actually indifferent from living in an expensive place. Also, most employees aren't unattached 20 year olds. I choose to live in a high cost area because my family is here and this is where I grew up.
> On the other hand, if you offer a fair wage for the work done regardless of location, your employees get better value by living somewhere inexpensive, which lowers the required compensation for the same employee.
Would you be okay if the 'fair wage' was based on a global developer workforce? For instance, median programmer salary for the UK is ~$41k while the US is $74k, not to mention salaries in developing countries. Everyone assumes that fair consistent salaries will just take inflated San Fransisco levels and apply them globally when in reality, its more likely that we readjust all salaries based on lowest cost of living.
This was always the policy, they paid wages based on the market. They did, however, pay identically in all of their US offices (prior to Covid) which is perhaps why people are surprised about this (entirely normal and expected) practice.
Given that I don't live in the US, I don't like this policy, but it's been around forever basically, at all large tech companies.
Because, I mean, waterfront property has a premium everywhere, and even in the same exact "starter home" location I'm sure you could teardown and fit a $3M home. Those choices aren't determined by the metro area.
Top tier candidates aren't stupid, and ones that would willingly subject themselves to that are probably just looking for a year or two stint to bolster their resumes. Either that or they aren't as smart as they make themselves out to be.
Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over how work is done and how it is compensated, but I believe market forces will kill efforts like ZIP code based compensation.
In reality, if you're top tier talent, you can command top tier compensation no matter what your ZIP code is. Facebook's strategy relies on every other company colluding with them to suppress compensation based on locality.
I think you're right, but I don't think the end game is that everyone gets FAANG-level salaries everywhere.
When companies realize that they can hire people for a fraction of SF Bay Area salaries while still paying them 20-30% more than their local salaries, the overall compensation structure will slide downward toward that number.
Then the next step is when they realize they can hire foreign people in similar timezones at another lower step on the compensation ladder (while still paying more than their local jobs would offer). The compensation then slides further down toward this average.
> In reality, if you're top tier talent, you can command top tier compensation no matter what your ZIP code is.
Works in theory, not as much in practice. There's still value to having people collaborate in person (I say this as someone who has primarily worked remote long before COVID). Companies paying top dollar have a lot of leverage to get employees to move and work in-person still.
Half of Bay Area FAANG salaries is still more than a huge swathe of localities in the country - let alone the continent, where you'd likely plumb a quarter or an eighth and still be above local averages.
An instructive example would be India: TC for senior engineers at Google, Amazon, Uber, etc is already north of $150k there. Note that this is _already higher_ than the median tech salary _in the US_. Meanwhile there are still places in India paying new grads $10k.
You see something similar in Ukraine, where 40-50k was a reasonable rate for senior engineers, and then Lyft enters the market and starts giving seniors 6-figures.
I think the answer, as always, is that there are just not enough sufficiently talented & qualified engineers, even taking into account the global talent pool, to balance the rapidly increasing demand for those engineers. If it was just one or two companies paying this level of outsized compensation I'd be skeptical of the long-term trend, but it's not - this is pretty much all modern tech companies, because the unit economics of software businesses make good developers extremely valuable.
I was curious what the story looked like for South America, and, hey, turns out these tech companies already pay 6-figures there too. Heck, Coinbase is offering _mid-level_ engineers in Brazil 6-figures for remote roles.
Keep in mind these companies are really trying to get the 1% of developers in that market. Anything below the 95th percentile is unemployable. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/
[1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/india-s-ta...
[2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/95-engin...
That's the official HR policy.
In real life... key contributors are magically exempted. If you aren't making SV rates no matter where, that's a career red-flag.
The corollary of what you said is to pay remote employees with the same title less, which they won't all accept... especially the ones living in the same geo area due to the fact that they were commuting before the pandemic or are still occasionally commuting in and haven't moved to a lower COL area yet.
It seems a lot of people disagree with you:
> In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baseline.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flatten...
I'm one of them. If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less.
Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?
Life is full of objectively bad things that nevertheless have a silver lining. It's good to look on the bright side when faced with problems you can not change, but it's important not to be fooled into thinking that these things aren't problems, especially when they are within your power to fix. That's how people wind up justifying all sorts of terrible situations like abusive relationships and terrible jobs.
I love using a bike to get around and do all of my daily activities. But I hate just riding around in circles for no purpose other than exercise or getting out of the house.
My wage is related to the work I do. How I choose to spend my money is a personal decision.
So to summarize, your compensation could decrease because there are now a lot more people competing for your job. Or it could increase because there are a lot more companies competing for your services.
Put another way, I see my salary as the sum of the cost of the work that I do PLUS the costs associated with me getting the job done. Working from home is simply more economical (and my work/life balance is significantly improved).
If you poll employees about literally any topic where one answer benefits them and the other answer doesn't, people are going to respond with a preference for the answer that benefits them.
But in the real world, they still have to go out and find that better job that pays more and doesn't factor their location into cost of living. They're out there, but there far more rare than these articles suggest.
This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market, with the tacit assumption that the total revenue generated by your employment will exceed the total cost of your salary & other costs over the course of your career.
Location based adjustments are replacing this misunderstanding with a different misunderstanding which is roughly "The market rate for the position is determined by where *the employee* lives, not by the many others elsewhere that would be qualified by the job"
Of course, given your preferences, it doesn't sound like they would have to pay you more to come in the office vs. working at home as long as they pay you what you think you are worth. That is, whether the job is remote or not doesn't affect your pay requirements. If enough people feel the same, then there won't be a pay discrepancy between remote and in-office jobs.
There is something called Win-Win situation. Now you may call it management mumbo-jumbo. But what I see happening is if I save, say 15 hours of weekly commute and getting ready for work etc, I would be willing to take a cut that would seem reasonable based on my money/leisure need. If I keep looking at company's benefit and not mine (or maybe I have none) then of course pay cut seems insulting.
This leads to the phenomenon of cities, where a million shmucks try to do the same thing at the same times and drive up their own real estate prices in the process.
Contrast this with moving to a holiday home or holiday destination, probably with a vastly lower cost of living, or going away for a "weekend" but during odd days and missing all the traffic. Sounds amazing to me.
The problem is there are likely very competent engineers living in low cost of living areas who would gladly bid lower than your high "city salary" to maintain their preferred way of life.
Given two comparable candidates, the company will go with the one with the lower salary demands.
And there always have been. There’s always been a pool of labor either in the Midwest or Ukraine that companies could call on. Maybe trying to hire top talent while playing arbitrage on salaries either isn’t that easy, or isn’t worth the (relatively) small amount saved?
There might be faster career progression for in office people though, and that will be a harder and longer thing to quantify.
Interesting.
But it won't happen.
Or... you're not suggesting Indian engineers are worse, are you? Because that would be kinda racist.
On the other hand, someone living anywhere in India on the same salary (per contract) as someone living anywhere in the US is earning a higher net paycheque because CoL in India is lower.
Oh my! What should we do to resolve this?
So this being the case. Why does the Indian still earn less than the Silicon Valley peep?
Let's suppose such Indian engineer who lives in India and has the exact same skills as a Google California engineer (including English fluency) exists.
Why does he earn less than the Californian one? Because his Indian colleagues are not as good as him?
On the flipside, I'm sure you'd agree there are incompetent Californians, yet they earn more than highly skilled Indians.
Tell me how exactly that isn't racist.
My observations are that people that could afford to migrated to a lot of the same areas
I think there is a market need for it. Something as simple as going to a local event after work with some of the people you enjoy being around (not company mandated nor suggested) requires nearly zero planning compared to trying to coordinate coming out from home
My hunch is that there is an audience for it
I bet local businesses (bars, lounges, similar things) would even give discounts to attract that kind of crowd again. The after work and well compensated crowd that acts spontaneously.
Its funny to even mention it, but people with bad commutes wont even apply or pretend they dont have a bad commute, and people with a reason to be home (that many other companies now cater to) also wont show up.
I still think there is enough talent.
Historically, both employers and employees have incongruent and hazy understanding and a polite agreement as to how this kind of time gets accounted for (how much it is and who is accountable/responsible for it), especially in salaried positions/knowledge workers. That's probably going to change. If anything, the work-from-wherever trend will help people get a better understanding of and draw the line between work-time and personal-time, productive time and non-productive time, total compensation, and what, exactly, they are being compensated for, and how this time is grokked and tracked.
If that means that you want to only apply for remote positions, that’s certainly your choice; I don’t blame you in the least for it, but expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you chose to live seems unlikely to happen, to put it mildly.
None of that is remotely* a concern of my company, though…
* pun was accidental, but pleasing enough to leave it in there.
The closest homes to work are $1.15MM and $1.5MM. I’m not sure if the CEO is paid enough in cash to qualify for one of these homes on salary alone.
Obviously yes? You realize that most people mortgage their homes? A 1.5M, 30 year mortgage at today's rates (3.1%) translates to $76,863/year which seems pretty doable for a CEO (unless you're the garage startup type).
I don't have a clear cut way to interpret this interaction either in the past or going forward (everyone's motivations are different). But now physical location factors into the calculation on both sides differently than it did in the past. In the past "travel time to sit at a desk in a specific location" was always completely assumed to be a burden incurred solely by the employee (it had been the government who made allowances for pre-tax commuter costs in some cases). That is no longer the case.
When it comes down to it, getting paid for 8 hours of company time but 2 of them being travel time and 6 being productive is getting paid 33% more. The negotiation may be less directly about money: rather than "I want more money for that 40 hours" it could be "I'll work 32 hours for that money"
1. most employers will pay the same regardless of where I live, and my job security will be the same as before.
2. most employers will pay a bit less if I work remotely, but that's worth it to me since I can pay less for rent and have a higher quality of life. And yes, my job security will be the same as before.
It shocks me that people are not considering the following scenario:
3. most employers will realize that a person living 100 miles away represents the same value to my company as one that lives 5,000 miles away. The latter, of course, is far cheaper, more motivated, and far less likely to cause any problems since they also have far fewer protections. And no, they are not any less talented.
So far, the pandemic has been all about the workforce side of the story. We're about to find out what the employer side of the story looks like. I personally don't mind a future where everyone in this world get equal access to job opportunities, but I don't think that most people advocating for remote work are quite as aware of the long-term ramifications on the US workforce.
It hasn't happened.
Why? Probably because knowledge work is not at all zero sum. It grows with knowledge workers. So India's knowledge workers got jobs on top of existing ones.
Assuming the same happens now for rural America then it might be a net positive and might even revive some of the dying regions.
> It hasn't happened.
We think it hasn't happened. And yet, the likelihood of talking to a CX rep from a Fortune 500 company who is based in the US is very low. Did that somehow help the US-based CX reps?
Perhaps you're thinking that it will be different with knowledge workers. Consider the well-publicized fact that a lot of Boeing software is written in India. How many other corporations are following suit behind the scenes?
I actually wrote more about it in my blog post, "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
To me, it feels like we have people in the industry with wildly different preferences in regards to working, preferences that are oftentimes at odds. For a long time, the trend of working at the office has been set by the folk that are more comfortable with this mode of work and that has been considered "normal", however in the past few years many have also gotten a taste for the remote work alternative.
Personally, i wouldn't want to go back to the office, resigning and looking for a remote opportunity (or even starting my own company) being preferable to that. For other folks, the opposite is probably true. Neither is wrong, it's just that they're at odds - some people would feel as uncomfortable with remote work and async communication, as i would with in person work. The long term consequences of this remain to be seen, however.
I also observe that they are also the ones hanging out outside the office, so I would guess this is part of it too. Seniors tend to compartmentalize "work friends" vs friend-friends.
Now that I feel like I have enough experience to find a new job, I will be looking for a workplace with a strong emphasis on in-person work & collaboration.
Ultimately I think people will work more in offices again for this reason and for the reason that even the company I work for, which has always been remote first has a large group of people who live in the same city, they meet in person more often and seem to call much more of the shots and receive promotions more than others.
In addition to the mentorship issue, think about promotions. Especially to more senior levels. The people in the office or with pre-existing relationships will be the ones getting promoted and will be the power brokers. If you are someone who doesn't think that will be true, then (IMO) you are confusing how you wish the world to be for how the world is.
I believe that most of these supposedly intractable problems can be solved with a Discord/Matrix/IRC whatever and just enforcing policies about communication. Have a bi-weekly required five minute voice chat and at least one hour of time per day where people need to have the chat open. If juniors are not asking questions or seniors are not replying within X hours or whatever follow-up sessions from the five minute intro discussions is appropriate, then they get warned, and if the lack of communication effort continues, fired. And you make that policy clear.
You can also look into various types of 'multiplayer' virtual presence. Several different browser based or 2d or 3d (even VR) options for this.
I feel like people just stop trying to communicate more than a weekly meeting or something a lot of times when they are remote. That in no way proves that different types of communication or mentorship or whatever require face-to-face. People just need to show up online to communicate.
Edit: also a remote culture of hopping onto a one-on-one voice, vid, and/or screenshare helps too.
We're already starting to feel the effects of the reduced talent pipeline especially as we get deeper into the Great Resignation.
For many early-career engineers living away from families in cities like SF, Seattle etc have better office spaces than personal living spaces - better buildings, better air conditioning, better TV, better restrooms, better kitchens, better stocked fridges etc. This factor does not apply as much to later-career employees who live in the suburbs.
I don't want to work from home.
I don't want to interact with others through a screen. Zoom calls are like torture to me.
I don't want to spend all of my time in the same place.
I want to go to work on the Tube, have lunch and go to the pub with my colleagues, and then go home.
I think video work is another thing we'll just regret in 10 years time, like how social media and the Internet fucked up communities. A sugar high for some, and then a crash.
For me, the biggest thing is that I feel bad when I'm not fully productive at home. Half hour lunch break feels long, and I end up feeling guilty if I don't get enough done. When I'm in the office? Hell yeah I'm taking an hour lunch, possibly longer with some coworkers. We'll have random concersations and shoot the shit about life, work, etc.
I am much happier in the office. I hate remote. It's okay that some folks like it, more power to them. But I want to be in the office with coworkers who have to as well.
Work for me is not an extension of my social life, it is how I provide for my family and support my social life outside of work.
We’ve waited for ages for WFH to be normalized and I hope that this trend continues.
That says it doesn't make economic sense to bring people back to the office.
The executives pushing for that may be the ones on the way out.
When J Powell eventually turns off the money printer, the market is going to pull back, the banks are going to go through leaner times, and the old-school executives in charge of them are going to be in a much stronger position to argue for employees to come back to the office, regardless of the merits.
[1] https://wolfstreet.com/2021/08/24/end-of-the-era-of-voraciou...
China's "lying flat" movement is already starting to take a hold in the West, and I think as the reality of climate catastrophe and other systemic breakdowns continue to remain visible in the post-pandemic world, there will be an increasingly large number of people that have absolutely zero interest in "career advance".
I wouldn't be surprised if everything you say happens for the subset that is still clinging to the fantasy that career can create meaning. However I think this group will represent an increasingly small number of workers, especially in the new generation arriving to the work for now.
Edit: And I’m not insinuating people would instead give something like crypto real value. More along the lines that as these economic systems fall apart, the abstractions they were built upon will mean less and less until a house is a house and farmland is farmland and no amount of tokens or gold will buy that from somebody else.
Google would like a word.
Happy hacking!
>For Ms. Batchelor, Jefferies’s new policy means coming in to the office three days a week. Although she plans to travel to meetings when necessary, Ms. Batchelor said she was grateful to spend more time with her children and cut back on her long commute. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said.
Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.
It sounds innocent at first because you're not creating false data directly, but you are falsifying the representation of the data which is just as bad if not worse.
In my experience working with highly motivated, highly paid people they often aren't particularly self-aware or introspective. In their mind it's not a tradeoff; they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers. They genuinely don't understand that things could be different.
This is why so many businesses are struggling with remote working. They honestly don't get that people can work differently.
It was, for the woman in the article. But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.
This is a common experience: we all take things for granted or assume that things have to be done a certain way, simply because that's the way we've been doing it for so long.
Changing career later in life is a risky thing to do, especially if you don't have much in the way of transferable skills. Wanting to avoid poverty isn't quite the same as a "desire to earn high wages". People might know they'd happy on low- or mid-level wages but fearful of ending up with no wages. That's a reasonable concern.
Of course if one has so messed up life priorities that job and life satisfaction coming from it is their #1 concern, way above raising their own kids, then its another of those sad stories later.
People are fearful of many things, usually not in very rational or smart way. One thing about being a proper adult (and a good parent) is to understand which fears are real and address them, and which are just some self-illusions because folks can't get their mind straight and sort out themselves and their lives (for the lack of better words).
High wages are definitely a factor but being competitive and feeling energized by trades paying off count as well. It's a combination of high reward, betting excitement, and the pleasure of crushing your competition in a context where score is easily kept (in dollars).
If those are the things you enjoy, it's difficult to find all that in other industries.
Also, "say yes to and do everything your boss/the police says to you" was ingrained into children for centuries.
The cost of that obedience propaganda, however, never showed up until modern day cutthroat capitalism.
Early in my career I met a manager type guy in his late 30s that prided himself of only having taken a week of vacation in 4 years and was fully convinced that those kind of things are a pre-requisite of success for everyone. He got a lot more relaxed about life a couple years later after divorce and bankruptcy, having to start many things from scratch.
So I do buy that people can have a revelation about changing lifestyle, even if initially it was a conscious decision to prioritize career over family.
They definitely select the most eye-catching/rolling quotes out of an interview, been there, done that, been astonished at the way the article turned out.
That said, however, this is NOT unusual. When I worked at IBM in Manhattan, my manager lived in Poughipse, and woke up at 4:30 every morning to catch the train, slept on the way in, and was in the office before I was, and I lived about 40 blocks away. And he most definitely did NOT make the big banking salary and bonuses.
A lot of people want the suburban quality of life for their kids, and were willing to sacrifice a lot for that. Now, seeing that it is unnecessary, they are pushing back. Which is a damn good thing.
Even very smart people do this kind of thing — I'm thinking of someone I knew who has a math Ph.D. but chronically misjudged their bank account — because they aren't approaching it as a rigorous analytical problem but are just running along on habit, what their peers are doing, and often the stories they tell about how it'll get better once they're further along in their career. If you've been telling yourself that the long hours will get better once you have experience, then that promotion, then at the next job, … it's not hard to just keep doing what you've been doing, especially if you're well paid enough to say it's worth it because you'll retire early.
I believe her. Life doesn't have an open enrollment period every year where you're presented multiple career and lifestyle options, and asked to choose one. Instead, one generally converges into a local optimum and breaking out can involve significant energy and risk.
From the perspective of remote work, the pandemic helped a lot of people break out of their local optimum.
1.) The tradeoff now is different. It changed.
2.) People used to long commute say pretty much same things when they change job. I realized how much easier my life is when working from home during covid too. I can completely relate to "now realizing how much better it is when I save full hour a day and plus can organize my own day as I wish".