The Joel test for remote work
andreschweighofer.com
andreschweighofer.com
I generally agree with all the points (minus the obvious caveats), but I'd prefer if we'd push back against the whole "happy work family" mantra. Some of us don't mind being seen as "just that guy doing the job from a distance", but do mind other people trying to make us more than that. For me, part of remote work is to get away from continuous pushing towards more socialization. Whenever someone says 'encourage', it often seems to loop around to a negative if you don't want to participate.
(And of course the converse is true as well. If the company is remote-first and doesn't believe in employees getting together physically that will be a showstopper for some.)
Fake smiles and say fake things. Everyone has to type the same "kudos" message for every accomplishment or they're not showing teamwork. The team I was on where everyone had to snap audibly in applause for anyone else "sharing." The pressure to drink together because that's what shows friendship in a frat. Etc. So much garbage!
But I subscribe to what OP said. I don’t want to be forced to socialize at some work event. I’m happy to socialize with everyone during work in that context. We can chit chat. We can have a water cooler conversation. We can talk about personal lives and families. And I’ll happily and genuinely engage.
But I don’t want any forced activities, get togethers or Xmas parties.
Since it’s so much work to get everyone together, might as well make a week out of it. So that’s 3 working days plus the 2 travel days. It’s not unlikely one of those working days is going to be a ‘fun’ event day to make it all ‘worth it’ for people to travel- meaning just 2 productive working days.
So a week of working 24 hour days (if I’m not at home with my family then it’s work), for perhaps 2 or 3 productive days. Considering I’m not traveling an entire day, I’m looking at at 96 hour week for maybe 16-24 hours worth of productive time.
I get that we are not robots and being on a team is a very social activity- but I am entirely against traveling. We’ve had some really fun remote game-days during work hours and setting aside time to chat with team members is fun too. Please don’t make me travel and waste all the time away from my family and loved ones.
I agree wholeheartedly. The company is not my family. It must pay me to be there.
I also think "team-building" is ridiculous. If people need to interact more, to socialize, that should be built into the work. Engineering is a group activity. Treating social aspects of it as side-effects is just broken.
Does any company actually do this? I don’t feel like this is economically feasible. What rate do you pay? The California rate or the Romania rate? If pay the Romania rate then no one from California will work for you. If you pay the California rate then you will be putting way more money into salaries then needed, which could drown your company in hard times. Splitting the difference doesn’t actually solve anything.
I can see in the long run equal pay becoming a reality, especially within a country (same pay for California or Nebraska) because movement is so easy. But it will be long time before cost of living between the poorest matches that of the richest.
I think for example Igalia pay literally every person the exact same figure, no matter their experience or location.
I think we have begun to see this with people hired in India: if you pay "Indian rate" then you get the bottom of the barrel. If you want very good developers in India you need to pay above "Indian rate".
The market for very good developers is no longer local.
On the other hand, companies are quite terrible at determining and utilizing actual value. So I do think there’s a lot of really good developers that aren’t making “above average” rates for whatever reason. heck, see all the engineers that go off and start companies that they then sell back to the behemoths for several multiples more - they take a pay cut in the short term because they believe they’re being undervalued wherever they are.
If the salary is the same, but an employee in one country has 5 weeks vacation (legally required), but another has 2 weeks, is that equal pay for equal work?
What about when one country says that, if an employee quits (not terminated), the employer must continue paying them for another 3 months anyways? Is this the same carrying cost as employment in a state with at-will employment?
Another somewhat related topic is that if you employ a single employee in some states, your company may have to pay additional taxes because you now have a “presence” in that state. Do you pay them the same, even though their “carrying cost” could be prohibitive for the business?
This is not an endorsement of any particular approach, just surfacing that things are not as cut-and-dry as they are presented.
To be sure, that means you probably don't pay especially competitively in the highest cost of living states--but frankly, that's probably already the case with many companies that don't have significant offices there.
The point is merely that “it’s complicated” (as I comment at the end), not “this is a blocker”.
Even in the US salaries are different based upon where you live - SFO or NYC vs. Kansas.
I can't entirely agree with this.
Yes, it's easier to move if your job is completely remote. But for many people, the most significant barriers are not financial problems but mental ones.
Even though I'm single, I have few friends near my house and am satisfied with my current living environment. It's a bit scary to move to somewhere I don't know. And if I lived with a family, it would be much harder.
That's why the house prices are skyrocketing even though more people have started working entirely remotely. The majority of remote workers are still living in a big town and don't plan to move to the countryside in the near future.
Not that I really disagree. Especially if you're settled in there are a lot of frictions to moving--more or less depending on circumstances. Absent a need to move for a job or whatever, you're talking at least a lot of time and at least some amount of money. So if you're "OK" where you are, the default is certainly to stay put.
I don't disagree with the premise prior to this, but I do think a lot of people overestimate how many permanent remote workers there are, and by extension, how big their influence on the housing market is.
This doesn't follow. You can still be profitable by hiring people who add value, and paying them a consistent percentage for that value, regardless of location. Assuming of course that everyone is working remotely regardless of location, and time zones are a non-issue. (remote vs. local could have legitimate salary impacts, as well as time zone availability, due to potential increased burden on the business).
If your business's profit is based on the ability to exploit reduced living costs, then your business is at least partially focused on trading in salary differences (arbitrage?). That has it's own problems (like splitting your focus), but is probably OK as long as the margin you're making from it is lucrative. As this margin decreases you're spending more and more time trading in salaries and less time focus on your product. That's perfectly fine business wise as long as you're still making a profit, although at some point you may turn into an agency / recruiter (pivot?!?).
If however, your business's profit is based purely on providing a valuable product, you still benefit from a much wider pool of talent (thus reducing overall salaries due to supply) even without exploiting living costs. You can ignore location (assuming again time zone isn't an issue) and pay based on percentage of value. Plus you can still focus primarily on your product, instead of becoming a salary trader!
Except... there's a market. People want to be paid based on a market clearing rate, not on your appraisal of value. And what is value anyway? If a company is in build mode and not generating any value is nobody paid anything?
If a company is in build mode, there are other creative ways to compensate (stock, etc.) or you convince investors of future value so you can afford to build it (investors) by paying market rate. An investor who just gave you millions of dollars to build something, probably doesn't want to hear about how you're going to cut costs by hiring overseas talent.
If the only way you can succeed is by exploiting location based salaries, then your business isn't just competing in it's product market, but also competing with every other business that is trying to exploit location based salaries (and there's a lot).
People need to eat, lol.
I'm saying is that focusing your energies on trying to get location based cheap labour might not be the best use of your time. How am I arguing that people should starve?
What I'm hearing is a bit contrived:
1. You only have enough cashflow to pay exploitative location based salaries. 2. You need talent (can't do it yourself). 3. You can't convince anyone to invest in it. 4. You can't attract talent with a low pay + ownership / stock deal.
Good luck I guess?
I’ve literally no understanding of how you arrived at this list of things you’ve heard.
Paying everyone the floor rate is one approach, lol.
That demand reads like a double-standard to me: people from the western world are happy to buy clothes, hardware, or food from foreign countries with low labour cost. They do that to cut down their own expenses, because the same goods would be much more expensive when produced domestically. This is the exact same mechanism at play, just with reversed roles. In one case it’s considered okay, in the other unfair. It only depends on which side of the table you sit at.
It’s even worse at established tech giants like FAANG, where everyone working at anywhere other than SF would optimally declare fully remote for the free salary increase
They're mostly not. It's really not a race to the top. If you can get a job with FB and get a Bay Area salary from them, most companies will effectively tell you to go for it. (So they are competing in a sense. But many are opting out.)
And just to make that clear: I don’t know or assume how the author goes about that, I’m just pointing that out as a general pattern.
Of course, it's hard to generalise about situations where specifics are key.
Maybe you are are just ignorant to the fact that so many companies default to actually paying remote employees double, and even more, if their location is in the right spot in the USA... for the SAME years of experience, job, and work. I personally know people who pay rent in a 1:1 in New York just for the salary, but actually live and work from South America.
Thanks for telling me what I would think, but honestly it would be no different for any of those professions. If you're still doing exactly the same job 9 years later, the real problem is elsewhere.
And CoL-adjusted salaries kind of make sense and have always seemed fair to me when I've been offered one. If people are scamming the system, that would be something for the company to worry about, no?
I guess a better question would be: what would be fairer?
> it would be no different for any of those professions
Do you want a surgeon with 12 years of experience or 3?
The issue at hand, unequal pay, has nothing to with experience in the first place, so making up an imaginary scenario where the experienced employee is a slacker is a strawman fallacy anyway. The point is that if someone from a low pay area moves 50 miles in one direction they could suddenly be worth 2-3x as much to the company?
Additionally, most tech companies don't actually pay based on cost of living, they pay based off of cost of the local competition. There are generally* 3 pay tiers in the United States; Hawaii is a Tier 3 state (lowest pay) despite being one of the most expensive places to live. The most expensive zip code in the USA is in Florida, but again: it's a Tier 3.
Anything above the cost of living is money the employee can choose to spend on quality-of-life improvements that are generally the same price no matter where in the USA you live (think investments, tuition, cars, boats, shopping, etc). The Tier 1 employee gets more money for those fixed-price items than the Tier 3.
I'm just saying it doesn't make sense; it's an artificial constraint made even worse when companies exploit the timezones of an employee because they desire a globally diverse workforce.
* Note: I only have experience with two businesses that collect salaries from mid to large (100+ employees) business subscribers in exchange for information about what others in their sector pay their own employees on average. It's a legal form of wage fixing.
I'm sorry you think this is a strawman, but I'm just addressing the scenario you originally posed.
I still can't see what you think would be fairer - the labour market is always going to be subject to demand and supply dynamics. I believe a fair minimum wage should be established (and seriously enforced) for every job, but if employers want to pay above that to attract what they perceive is a better quality of applicant I don't have a problem.
Where it gets admittedly weird is comparing two otherwise equal employees, fully remote - why the company cares where they live is a mystery for them to answer, but considering that wages aren't really a zero sum game, isn't this a case of some employees earning more as much as it is of some earning less (being that all these jobs are above minimum wage, so the question of what a SWE, for example is "worth" is even more at the mercy of the market)?
People who are capable of working remotely from low CoL areas/countries are, in contrast, more empowered. Generally better educated, often English-speaking, sometimes fairly well-connected. And it's just as easy to work for <CoL-Adjusting company #1> as it is to work for <CoL-uncaring company #1>.
We're seeing a lot of people who thoroughly enjoyed full-remote work during COVID make it a dealbreaker to work remotely now. Those people often don't even consider on-site positions. This whole CoL-adjusted thing will depend on whether a good % of those people will consider CoL-adjustments a dealbreaker or not. I suspect some might, but not enough that it'll change the balance sheet, and so we'll see larger companies who can "afford" the bureaucracy of CoL-adjustment do it, whereas other companies will use CoL-neutrality as (one of the) carrots to attract talent from CoL-adjusters.
Imagine if all tech companies went fully remote and kept paying about the same salary level as they do now. Employees moving to lower income regions would no doubt upheaval the local economy (e.g., housing).
But then again, this would probably regulate itself in the longer run.
Finally, why would only remote companies be upheld to this standard?
Why? If I want an expensive car or a large house, should my salary also include that? It's also a lifestyle choice.
IMO, paying people differently (especially in the same country) just creates an incentive for people to spend more money.
If I reduced my “quality of life” by eating out less and saving money, my company’s not going to pay me any less. Why should they start paying me less if I reduce my QoL by moving to somewhere I’d enjoy living in less that’s cheaper.
What I see in my experience is that most fully remote companies only want to pay you the local rate - which doesn't make a lot of sense. Some are willing to pay more, and only a few advertise paying equally regardless of location.
It's understandable because it just doesn't make much economical sense.
Obviously, I'd switch jobs any day for another 30-40% pay increase, and I'm curious how the last approach is going to get adopted by fully remote companies.
As (fully) remote jobs become more prevalent, that also pushes up local rates, though, and local jobs usually offer some better benefits because you're not a contractor. It's an interesting market!
Heck imagine a company founded in the UK committing to this. How would they deal with providing health insurance to their first employee in the US? Not offer it to US based employees?
I’m working at Google and moving back to Spain where I’m from where I will see my salary reduced by 50%. I love my team and my work but this is precisely the reason that will make me quit in favor of an American company that doesn’t adjust salary to region.
Plenty of non-FAANG American companies that would pay what I was being paid while based in Germany.
I strongly suspect I am not the only one.
Truth be told if Google started a proper office in Spain they’d be able to find plenty of good candidates at the reduced 50% salary. Google is still paying way above local market rate.
In my case the reason why I wouldn’t stay is the psychological factor of seeing my salary cut in half and feeling the need to optimize what I earn. I already have a friend here working remotely for what I saw described here on HN once as a second tier American tech company and with less experience he’s making more than I will make once I move. I have researched what other companies pay and I could definitely get my German salary back.
I’m not saying I deserve those salaries or that Google is not being fair. But just as a multi-billion dollar company is optimizing their bottom line with the salaries they pay, I’m also obliged to do the same.
I was just discussing with someone the other day how exciting it is to be involved in this (historically) brand new model of organising around work, discovering and navigating all the advantages and challenges it presents.
Like perhaps the actual Joel test I think this list is broadly directionally right, if I would say a little naive (or more generously, low in nuance) in the extremes where the interesting details and subtleties always are - but I love that the author has had a good run at making this, a decent list, and the first person I've seen attempt to do so. I look forward to us as an industry iterating forwards from here on what the best practices are and seeing how the fully remote model evolves over the next decade or so. Exciting times!
we have tools that easily enable this in a remote work environment. I’d suggest that this be re-tooled to be something more like “does the company optimize for focus time/flow time during the workday”
Asynchronous by default means everyone is free to work when they are most productive and capable, and it really doesn't matter so long as the work gets done on time.
Funnily enough, remote work for everyone has meant some remote positions have actually gotten worse, as the line between remote lifestyle worker and regulr employee working from home has been blurred.
> Else you end up waiting an inordinate amount of time getting simple answers to simple questions
Well, this is the problem. Expecting an immediate response kills deep focus. You should have to wait for a response, for anything that isn't an emergency. Then the question becomes, what's an appropriate amount of time to wait for a response? And how can you a) measure the number of async conversations where ping pong resulted in conversations taking much more time than expected, and b) come up with blameless / systematic responses (e.g. internal wiki maintenance) to reduce that measure over time?
This is a ridiculous assertion.
"Hey, I think we should change feature Y to do X instead, but this will have an affect on your feature. Can you absorb this into your workstream? Btw I'm writing this code right now and want to push a PR today"
... wait 5 hours because asynchronous ...
"Mmm, maybe. Could we make this slight tweak that will still get you what you want but be easier on me?"
... wait 24 hours because now it's sleeping time ..
etc.
Real-time conversations are extremely valuable. Let's not pretend like they're not.
> Real-time conversations are extremely valuable.
Of course they are. It's the ability to have a real-time conversation on demand, with no consideration for the counter-party's focus, that is ruinous.
I like this rephrase too. I've recently joined a new team, and having several synced meetings helped me onboard quickly.
I hate if we need to have meetings or synced work often in the future. I don't want to be interrupted when I focus, so I like communication should be asynchronous by default.
Still, depending on the situation of team members and the project phase, synchronous communication is sometimes much more productive than completely asynchronous work. Functional teams should be able to choose better communication each time. (I know some people like synced communication too much, and it's often more problem, though...)
I mean sure, they are both lists of ten questions for assessing a job’s suitability, but is “Joel test” common enough (first I’ve heard of it but :shrug:) that’s it’s more a noun for the list than being seen as having to do with Joel?
> You have two people doing the same job but if you live in Romania and your colleague lives in the US at
a company that pays both equally
> Then after your career you’ll go and retire in Spain. Guess who’ll afford a better lifestyle?
That's right - You, the Romanian citizen.
Since your cost of living is 42.4% cheaper than your US colleague, you'll have much more disposable income to invest over the course of your career.
Let's say you both make an after-tax income of $60,000 USD. If your colleague pays $40,000 a year for rent/food/transportation/clothing/staples and another $5,000 for (optional) non-essentials, then they'll have $15,000 to invest.
You will spend roughly $23,000 on the same essentials and another $3,000 on non-essentials, leaving you $34,000 to invest annually.
If you both invest in the S&P500, and it continues to return around 10% annually, then you both move to Spain to retire after 30 number of years, you'll have just over $5.5 million USD compared to your US colleague's ~ $2.5million.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states... - Although the basic principle holds as long as there's any cost of living difference. Also doesn't include tax or healthcare.
> But that’s treating you, a human being, like an asset.
Funny how that objectifies people if you approach it from the market side, but if you start from the human being side, it turns out equal payment doesn't always make sense.
How? Take a human being. One with abilities and needs - family, health, freedom, etc. They offer their abilities to you, the employer, because they need the ability to fulfill their needs. But the amount of resources to get there depend on their physical location: more expensive countries demand more money to fulfill the same needs. Therefore, paying the same would favor the needs of some over others.
If you consider that most humans have some need for fairness and justice, you can't pay equal rates for the same effort. Best you can do is equitable.
It's not the same as paying local market rates, but it precludes paying equally as a solution to objectification.
IMVHO remote work, where possible (around 30% of jobs in the western world probably), should still be inside country borders in the same way multi-national company subdivide themselves by country because local laws can be too incompatible to manage a unique entity. Similarly for salary: in theory we must get paid for what we do so regardless of where we are in, but in practice cost of living must be taken into account because the same amount of money in math terms have not the same value everywhere and taking cost of living into account is simply too complex to be solved. The world is not a global world where anywhere we are things are equal, there are of course similarities, in the end humans are similar, but definitely not enough.
"local" remote work is perfectly doable with little travel and common profit, world-scale remote work is potentially doable but not in the present world, also fully remote work is hardly possible IMO/IME...
My honest opinion is that there is no "test" possible anyway, just negotiation not really different than any "non remote" job.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
This is probably illegal in many countries. I assume in many places you can't just give extra vacation and use that instead of giving holidays.
Just because it's equal doesn't mean it's good.
I don't need the same healthcare insurance in the UK as in the US.
And I don't need or can't use the same public transport benefits living in Cheshire as I would in London.
Has anyone got any examples?
This seems like Pandora's box of compensation (at least for U.S. based tech workers).
Is it not at least possible, that, if this were adopted by all tech cos, the average wage would pull wages downward?
Yes, we do hardware work in our basements. </s>
Ironically, I actually did hardware work in my basement during the lockdown.
No. There will always be some boomer who refuses to use Slack messages and needs handholding on Zoom video for the most minor discussions. Character traits include emotional manipulation, not invented here syndrome, poor time management.
They've been struggling to deploy a simple microservice for multiple financial quarters but will snap and call you slow when their code review process stalls.
It's not easy to teach the concept of decoupling as a problem solving strategy. They've suffered the yoke of enterprise programming for so long, that they feel naked without iron chafing at the neck.
I've see 18y olds calling their colleagues on Zoom multiple times per day without the slightest attempt to send a slack message.
And I've seen 60y olds that defaulted to asynchronous written communication.
I don't think it's necessarily an age thing, more of a work methodology thing. Same as how some people cannot work remotely at all and will be miserable and unproductive doing so, where others thrive on remote and can't see themselves at the office. We should control for all of that in companies, and try to match people of the same persuasion. It may lead to far less attrition.