Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
news.airbnb.com
news.airbnb.com
Airbnb employees can live and work anywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199833
I think this is a genius growth play for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Next, they should lobby to get US and EU to make short-term "tourism + wfh" visas more accessible so that this becomes even more popular. I think everyone wins here.
Yes. Like the story of Ford doubling the wages it paid to factory workers in 1920s. So that those workers could afford a car, and the whole economy eventually followed suit.
You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
You'd be hard pressed to provide a search pattern in any search engine that would provide a top 5 result that isn't about Ford wage raises in 1914 being about anything else than worker retention.
> You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
Nor did you provide any substantial point. What is it with double standards today? My point was that you are spreading falsehoods.
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min...
Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.
But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
To the other comments, it is an expense-less raise.
To the California tax base, it is yet another wakeup call.
I've worked in NY offices and got paid in UK (admittedly a while ago and for less than 90 days) - but can't see why working in an Airbnb would be different.
Has anyone experience of this recently?
As far as their tax authorities are concerned, yeah, you normally have 90 days or so where they don’t care about your income, but immigration? Almost never. Most digital nomads just get away with it because it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things that customs and immigration authorities have to care about - witness the Thai visa tours etc.
I'm a musician and have toured Western Europe a couple of times (and know a lot of others who have). Apart from the UK noone I know ever gets working visas, and this is never a problem crossing borders honestly saying to immigration that we're there on tour in a van full of music equipment and merchandise.
There are separate arrangements for touring groups. However, if you're not from the EU then good luck. You'll notice that there are huge complications after brexit. That said, likely nobody will check, care or notice.
Maybe it's a "noone cares" thing, but this includes some American friends who were caught with weed in their tour van at the Norwegian border and still didn't have any visa issues (and somehow still managed to get into the country!)
Even if noone cared, relying on the apathy of others seems like a poor part of a business model. Unfortunately, they do seem to care at the US-Canadian border entering the US. There have been a few Canadian professional wrestlers, like Mike Bailey and Super Smash Bros., who were barred entry to the US entirely for 5 yrs because they were caught trying to work in the US without a visa.
More on the topic of musicians: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/us-border-canadian...
I think this is all silly, of course, especially because American acts have seemingly no trouble working in Canada. I shouldn't take for granted when I saw the Canadian band badbadnotgood in the US last month...
Yes, but that is a case where they're getting paid in the US to work.
The one conference horror story I recall from a few years back was someone was going to speak at some small UK(?) conference and they were getting an honorarium or something like that. And they told immigration and I think were denied entry for that reason. But I've spoken at dozens of events for free and it's never been an issue.
PS: Even if company is multinational corporation.
A few decades ago, there was a group of wealthy countries, a group of poor countries, and a large gap between them. Back then it made sense to see them as 2 separate groups, first world and third. Right now however, they're no longer separate groups - there's a continuous spectrum. A growing number of countries have been crawling out of poverty.
Some countries are rich, some are poor, and some are in between. They're no longer separate groups.
(This of course does not mean that there isn't a poverty problem in the world. Just that "third world" no longer accurately describes the situation.)
To clarify, I misremembered Factfulness. The book actually talks about "developed" versus "developing". In my memory I jumbled that up with "third world".
Second world -- Warsaw Pact member states
Third world -- all other states
So eventually "third world" came to just mean "poor countries". After all, there has now been as much time, post WWII, without the cold war, as there was with one!
That’s not how the term is used.
After the collapse of the USSR "Third World" became primarily associated with impoverished nations.
Somewhere like Brazil/Paraguay/Mexico/Philippines/Iraq no one is gonna ask you if you worked remotely while on your way out. No one. Half the time they don't even bother to ask what you're doing while entering, they just stamp your passport and you're on your way. Japan may be different, but there is no way they're gonna deport you on your way out.
I think they do this for the quite clever reason that then if you work they can get you for lying to an official rather just for working.
All European cointries have records of your entry/leaving, and if you overstay you will likely end up with a lifetime travel ban. The only exception would be like a medical emergency.
Any references to this happening all the time?
Because to me it seems like border patrol doesn't have the authority to check your bank account or demand that you "show significant savings".
Sure they can refuse to let you in but does it really happen all the time?
The UK requires some visitors to show bank statements when applying for a visa.
This account is opened remotely from the students' home country in a German bank, before the visa applicstion. And savings cannot be withdrawn for a period of time.
I had an acquaintance that studied in Germany that had a visa problem for withdrawing more money than allowed from his "Blocked bank account".
https://www.fintiba.com/moving-to-germany/studying/requireme...
After all that, when you arrive at the border, they ask questions and US border guards in particular may ask for access to your phone and laptop.
So it does happen all the time, it's just thay typically rich tourists from America are subject to less scruitiny than folks from poorer or politically messier places
Will your policies allow you to give permission for something illegal?
Why would the liability be solely with the person? Especially if that company has a representation in the other country I highly doubt this.
In e.g. NL the company has to "take care" of the employee. A company cannot just ignore such a question, or take it as "not my problem".
I know a lot of countries turn a blind eye to enforcing immigration and labor laws. Thailand being one of them.
Even Pieter Levels works out of Thailand and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a Thai work permit.
What's the difference if I do some work in the evening at home or during my holiday in e.g. Greece?
The only added cost in given country is energy. Problems start to appear if I get sick, but that should be on myself - and in most cases (for EU citizen) it is most appropriate to return home to cure/hospitalize (unless it is something needing immediate help).
What with labor laws? Should you follow the laws from the country from where you work or where the company is located? Companies would just get a post box in the country with the weakest labour laws.
The simplest solution stays that the laws where you physically are apply.
The US substantial presence test is actually something like 31 days in the current year, and ~180 calculated as a weighted sum of presence over all visits in the preceeding few years. That's just to determine if you should pay tax, and note that vacations to the US contribute. Whether you can legally work in the US is another matter. I had to get a a J1 visa for a two week stay in the US because I was being paid remotely by a US organisation. So in this case I was working but paying taxes elsewhere.
Most Europeans have access to things like cross border permits e.g. Switzerland/Germany and within the EU freedom of movement means it doesn't really matter much. You just register with the City Hall or wherever in your target country.
It comes down to how honest you are. Lots of digital nomads illegally claim they're on holiday, and who's checking? I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to pay a fee for a temporary work permit though.
This should be revisited. Also I think this is a good example of the need to have expiration dates on new laws and regulations. This should be something that expires and has to be changed to reflect how people live today.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Remote working
Visitors are permitted to undertake activities relating to their employment overseas remotely whilst they are in the UK, such as responding to emails or answering phone calls. However, you should check that the applicant’s main purpose of coming to the UK is to undertake a permitted activity, rather than specifically to work remotely from the UK. Where the applicant indicates that they intend to spend a large proportion of their time in the UK and will be doing some remote working, you should ensure that they are genuinely employed overseas and are not seeking to work in the UK.
PS: Actual rules are here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules but the general intent seems to be if your there to do something very temporary like compete in a sports tournament or do something for someone outside the UK that requires you to briefly visit the UK it’s fine.
That's doesn't seem like an exception? That sounds like saying "hey, I'm going to fly to the UK and work remotely from there" is against the law.
What that paragraph says to me is "If someone comes to the UK as a visitor, and happens to do some work - responding to email and/or answering phone calls" that's ok. But actually work full time in the UK remotely, is not legal.
Anecdotal example; when I was young and naive (well, more naive than now), I went to Canada (Vancouver) to help some guys out with some software. I read up on it a bit, but not enough (naive!) so at the border I told that I was going to do a bit of sight seeing and a bit of 'work'. Wrong word; was immediately taken apart and spent 1 hour explaining that no, no not work, just a bit of light consultancy; no programming, no actual managing people etc and no money changing hands (this was all true, I just shouldn't have used the word 'work'). They let me enter and there were no further issues, but I guess most people would just say 'vacation!' even though this was allowed; it can/does add stress and you might be unlucky and be sent back.
The person I was responding to asked:
>> But isn’t it illegal to work on a tourist visa anyway?
It’s clear there are many ways it’s legal to be working in the UK on a Visiter visa. That doesn’t mean it’s ok to go if your only reason to be in the Uk is to be a remote worker for 90 days.
This is a terrible idea. Here in the US the ever more hyper-partisan political environment makes it hard to do _anything_, even once. The idea that our Congress critters are going to re-pass all legislation for everything every (say) 5 years is ridiculous.
Those of us who like knowing that our food is safe to eat, our cars aren't firebomb death traps waiting to explode, that planes won't fall out of the sky onto our houses that aren't going to spontaneously collapse / flood from shitty plumbing / burn down from an electrical fire will disagree that all legislation should be repealed (either directly or via repeal-by-expiration), but please - let's be honest about what the effects of an 'expiration date' on legislation would actually accomplish.
If you're an in-office employee, your responsibilities are (a) show up at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.
If you're defined as a fully remote employee, your responsibilities are (a) be online and available at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.
Besides that you're just an amorphous black box, a person that has been placed in the cloud, much like a website placed on Cloudflare, where the input is money and the output is work. They don't need to know where you are, and I'd say they shouldn't even have a right to know -- that would be quite stalkerish, IMO. All that's really important is that this black box gets tasks done.
So it's not that they have a right to know where you are, it's that if they do notice and not act on it that's a legal risk to them as well since they're enabling it. (IANAL but this feels common sense.)
Pay your taxes, but if you say 153 days in Thailand or wherever you can get a long enough tourist visa, and use a VPN to the US and get your work done, I'm not sure why anyone would, should, or even has a right to care.
Countries with tourist visa stay limits are usually just to make sure you have the funds to leave. In general, if you come back the next day on another flight, with the intention of continuing to stay and spend money, they'll generally have no problem with it.
Couldn't one just structure it as a consultancy? I mean, if I hire a consultant to do something for me, I could just pay them through PayPal or Venmo or even Ethereum and wouldn't need to know where their office is. Onus is on them to be legally able to work and pay their taxes.
Surely it's not illegal to be homeless with a lot of money and skills.
(a) Let's say you spend 1 week in each state for 50 weeks of the year. Where do you file your taxes?
(b) Let's say you spend 1 week in each of 50 countries and work for AirBNB. You have no house, and no lease on a residence. Let's say it's mutual, e.g. you want to do this, and from their perspective, it's helping them because you're dogfooding their product. How do you deal with the legal side of it?
Having no address makes the government's brain explode.
My understanding is that it's not illegal but it basically makes it impossible to get government-issued ID, file taxes (which are legally required), open a bank account, get a credit card, etc.
So as a practical matter you probably get some traveling mailbox type service--in a state with no income tax presumably.
wrt b.
You're already a citizen somewhere. You'll still need an address there. See above. Then it's up to you and, perhaps to some degree, your employer to get appropriate visas. That said, for one week stays, an Airbnb stay during which you work an unknown amount of time remotely as opposed to being a tourist seems pretty doable so long as you keep a low profile and the company is cool with it.
This situation we currently essentially globally have, at least in the west, is quite an abusive system that is really just the bait and switch type pivot off what most people know as slavery, into a differently structured model of the same fundamental thing, one which really just spreads the total amount of enslavement across more people rather than getting rid of it altogether.
The parasitism of the ruling class that is far more obvious through slavery, is far harder to recognize in todays world because rather than taking, for argument’s sake, ~70% of 10% of people’s labor to support and enrich the ruling class; the shift/pivot off the slavery model was to introduce taking ~40% of the labor from 90% of the population and therefore enrich and empower the ruling parasitic class even more.
It’s precisely why a certain segment of the ruling class were all for “ending slavery”, because they knew “ending it”, i.e. spreading it over most people, would be far more lucrative and profitable. Life tip: Always be extremely leery of what the ruling class is promoting, and even more so re-examine things if they start supporting what you support.
The point is, we need to all start coming to a realization that the income tax and the whole tax system of fractional slavery enforcement needs to end. I do not claim to know the right answer, but I and any other rational and sane person know that this bait and switch slavery that exists needs to stop. What else do you call it, e.g. when hedge fund managers make billions per year and pay next to zero taxes, but some middle class person has huge sums of the value of their labor taken/ stolen to supply the hedge fund manager’s lifestyle?
Some have proposed things like the Fairfax.org, essentially a consumption tax through sales tax that captures taxes on illegal/harmful activities and ill begotten wealth, e.g., drug dealers buying their flashy things, while at the same time also taxing polluting activities in a direct correlation, e.g., buying new shiny-object over keeping something maintained and repaired. This would be a radical and arguably positive impact for all of humanity … except the parasitic ruling class which very much likes and has been working hard to expand its parasitism. See currency inflation at the press of a button for reference, which defrauds workers and savers through the worst tax, fraud.
I definitely wouldn't say that criticising big inefficient government is a leftist talking point at all.
If you want a perspective on how bad slavery was, search for this: Hardcore History Ep68 - Human Resources
Also, I knew immediately you were some libertarian/right, red pill person because I see this kind of talk all the time from old friends. Ya ya, the ruling class is so bad. Why are you preaching your gospel on HN? Do you want some ruling class VC money for your startup or not?
I'm not sure how this would make hedge fund managers who's net worth and amount invested might go up billions in a year but don't get paid or spend that amount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax#Distribution_of_tax_bu...
Something other than slavery, which is humans literally owned and treated as property. Maybe what it actually is, a skewed taxation system.
You can become those things if you manage to navigate a social and possibly economic process and succeed in entering those positions. By using your own definition, a slave wasn't a slave because people like William Ellison [0] who were once slaves went on to become a slaveholder. A slave can become a slaveholder -- that doesn't cancel out them taking part in a system of slavery.
>there is no “ruling class”.
A couple weeks ago when I entered the US I was forcibly shackled and cuffed without being even 'arrested' nor formally charged with a crime and held for 16 hours while taken to hospitals against my will on the most flimsiest accusation of being suspected as a "drug mule." Do you really think a common armed citizen could have held me like that against my will without repercussion? There is most definitely a 'ruling class' who can get away with things others can't. The border patrol in fact is 'allowed' to violate the constitution within 100 miles of the 'border' (which debatably is either actual border or even just international airports) and stop people without probable cause of having committed a crime.
Perhaps 'debt bondage' is a better word to describe what the government imposes on its citizens (especially noted in the high percentage of black men thrown in debtor's jail for merely owing money a la child support enforcement). Debt bondage is considered a form of slavery by some, although distinct and perhaps less egregious from chattel slavery.
A consumption tax will do nothing to reduce the power of the "ruling class" since their consumption is a much smaller fraction of their income compared to the working man.
The current status is one with progressive tax rates where people with higher incomes pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is still not enough due to loopholes, etc.
The person I replied to complains about "ruling class" and proposes (presumably as a way to mitigate the ruling class' accumulation of wealth) tax on consumption.
Since the fraction of income used for consumption decreases with income, a consumption tax corresponds to a regressive income tax (higher income -> lower tax rate). This is much worse, penalizes the poorest and leads to much worse wealth inequality than the existing system.
I don’t pay consumption taxes in the U.K. on food, rent or public transport, that’s the majority of expenses.
My neighbour does pay them on eating out at a restaurant, a kitchen refurbishment, and a new mercedes
You can go live in a society with few taxes if you want, look at moving to the Bahamas for example. Have fun.
This isn't as easy as it seems, even inside the EU. There are talks going on about laws regarding what constitutes "local hiring".
Basically, the issue is that some companies hire people from Eastern Europe, and pay them EE salaries there. But those people are then physically working from Western Europe, where they are "visiting workers" (don't know the exact term). This allows the companies to, among others, 1. pay lower salaries than the local going rate and 2. avoid paying payroll taxes locally.
I don't know how this works when applied to freelancing or remote working, but, as others have said, it's probably best to ask a lawyer or two.
After some time you're considered a resident so it doesn't make a difference compared to a local hire ?
The thing with these employees was that they never became local hires. So they would get their salary through their home country branch, with taxes paid over there, etc. The whole point is that these companies were trying to dance around the limits of employment law. What they were doing was technically legal, hence the will of the government to change the law.
[1] https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/poland/individual/residence [2] https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/portugal/individual/residence
The "default" rules for tax residency are superseded by a convention between the two countries, and there are a bunch of them, with many countries, on the site of the French government. There are specific conventions with Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, for example, that apply only to people living close to the border and working in the other country. If you take the train from Paris to work in Geneva, it doesn't apply.
Basically, it can be debated. It says that if you have a "permanent home" in both countries, you're a resident of the country "with which you have the most attachments". So for the hypothetical Polish worker who's "detached" in France, it could be argued that the "attachment" is to Poland, because their family is likely there, among other things. In the case of a freelance moving from country to country, who is likely unattached, this can probably be easily argued (though I'm not a lawyer).
Concerning remote-working freelance: For "independent workers", you're taxed in the country where you do business, except if you have a "fixed base" in the other country, from which you conduct your business. In that case, you're taxed in the country where the base is, but only for the part of income that is attributable to the work done from that base.
Source, in French: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/media/10_conv...
Conventions directory: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/les-conventions-internationales
the term is 'posted workers'
That's not legal. To work in the EU you need a work visa. Though they ignore the business trips. What's legal and what's checked are different things.
E.g. new foreign colleagues need to get a tax id in The Netherlands before they do any work. Doesn't matter if they came from the US.
Of course, there are a lot of unenforced laws on the books, but I'm a little skeptical that the millions and millions of people who travel cross-border on business trips every year are all mostly breaking immigration laws.
To be fair, my experiences are all on relatively short trips--a few weeks at most and usually less. Perhaps there would be more issues if I were staying 90 days and was open about workationing the whole time.
Attending conferences is usually ok, but it's a complicated topic because it depends on the traveller's passport, the visited country and how strict rules are enforced.
As a foreign national, for example a U.S. B1 visa allows attending conferences and close business deals. But it doesn't explicitly allow working remotely for a non-US company.
In any case, in most countries whether explicit or implicit that distinction is probably the right one. Of course, no one is going to care or know if you check some emails and do some work--just like no one cared if you made some phone calls and did some work years ago.
But, in most places, you probably shouldn't show up and say you'll be spending the next 90 days working remotely.
Just that normally no-one ever checks or cares.
It could be a problem if you later try to become a resident in the same country though.
I hope you're being sarcastic here, no?
Once again this has been reviewed by laywers at different companies who have deemed this risk to be acceptable.
There might be countries that will arrest you if you read your corporate mail while on holidays, however, these generally not on the green list of safe countries to travel too.
Acceptable to the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's acceptable to you, especially if penalties would primarily fall on you for illegally claiming the wrong immigration status.
Allowing unrestricted access to your country by remote workers will have economic impact.
There are several ways tax codes can categorize income:
- the country the person was hired in (e.g. US)
- the country for whom the work is complete for (say if US employee delivered code for a Canadian office)
- the country the company who hired the person is located in
- the country the company paying the employee is located in
- the country the person was originally hired in (same as #2)
- the country where the work is actually done
A lot of countries just look at the last one. Doesn't matter if you were hired in the US, paid in the US dollars and US taxes are taken from your pay check. If you complete your work in country X, country X wants their taxes according to their laws.
There is a separate aspect for the company. You as an employee might comply with all tax regulations - hired in the US, US taxes deducted, but you file your taxes in a separate country and pay taxes owed.
But your employer may be out of compliance as well - they may need to be registered in the that country, have obligations for employer tax and social security payments, etc.
It's mostly their own obligations companies are worried about. If the employee pisses off and breaks tax law in another country, well that's on them.
But when it's a big or noticeable deal, then things come into play. US baseball players have to file Canadian taxes when they play in Canada, and if an exposition game occurs in Japan or London, taxes are filed there, too.
If you're not trying to evade taxes, and aren't making much anyway, most places don't actually do anything, but if they decided they wanted to they could.
Skirting gray areas is fine - working while on a 3 week vacation is likely not worth chasing down.
Staying in a country for 4 months knowing that after 3 months you should pay taxes, but just pretending you're a tourist? That's pretty clearly trying to evade taxes.
I hope this is sarcasm. A VPN is a technical detail that would never stand up, legally. The only situation where I can see a VPN being useful is within your own company: if they don't want you working remotely a VPN might help cover up the fact that you are. But aside from that it won't help you.
Where are you working if you are flying above various states and countries while VPNd?
A better analogy would be if you worked remotely from a boat on the high seas on your own boat.
Most employers won't allow what you're doing.
There's no EU-wide 183 day rule for social contributions. If you stay more than 3 months in a country you need to be registered as a posted worker, and there are some legal implications.
Would you mind sharing in which area) industry one can get such a good deal in Germany? All i found was 40h/week, some with overtime.
I'm asking since the companies in Austria with IG Metal equivalent are terrible in those regards: poor pay for SW devs as their main money making products are some automotive/mechanical widgets instead of SW, boomer management insists on commuting to the office to some remote village because if the guys in the machine shop need to be in the office to do their work then so should the devs and everyone else, outdated SW, tooling and dev practices, poor equipment (some cheapo underpowered Dell/HP/Lenovo bogged down by corporate spyware that the pensioners in IT insists everyone must have, including SW devs).
Kinda confusing to me, since you said you're getting nearly swiss money and it's not what I imagine at IG Metal companies :)
From my personal experience a lot of companies in Switzerland are more conservative
If you're doing ordinary work I think that violates the terms of the B-1/B-2 visa - even if under 90 days.
If you go to meet team members in your NY office, interview some new staff, and look for a new building to move the office to, that’s all fine.
If you happen to do some unrelated sysadmin work on your servers in london while you’re there, that’s probably fine too, as your primary reason to visit is quite clearly fine.
If you went for a holiday for 2 weeks(on a B2 or esta) and happened to answer a phone call from work that’s fine.
If you went on holiday for 2 weeks and spent 10 days working remotely that’s probably not fine. If you went on a family holiday for 4 weeks but did a few days work remotely that’s might be ok. If you did it several times a year though it probably wouldn’t be.
There’s no hard and fast rule in law, and doubly so in immigration where the power to allow you in sits with the guy at the airport.
https://legalservicesincorporated.com/immigration/what-activ... has a good overview.
I'm going to put it here as this is what an immigration person put it to me, just ask yourself "where are my feet?" That is the country/entity you should be paying your taxes to by default unless there is an explicit reciprocity agreement that may apply to you. So, if you're traveling Europe as an American while working remotely, you are violating tax law in every single country. From the law's point of view, there is no difference than as if you had contracted out your work to someone in each one of those countries. Don't worry, no one is going to come after you for those 10 hours but just know you are intentionally (or grossly negligent) making use of the inaction of enforcement.
[1] - https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Other than the current scale of activity, the law has no "never foresaw technolo..." excuse for failing to cover such things. Centuries ago, it was perfectly normal for authors, composers, painters, etc. to travel to and work in other countries - "for their health" as they worked on their next masterpiece, or for inspiration, or to give paid lectures, or to perform or conduct music, or to paint portraits of locals, or several of those things.
It'd be rather interesting if a lawyer or few (who were fond of dusty tomes) did some real research on how those activities were handled back in the day, the old case law, etc.
The modern, computerized version of this is faster, cooler, and sexier - but (IANAL) I see little basis for saying that there's a legal difference in kind.
Upon reflection, I should not have said "an open question". Rather, I should have said that many feel that the spirit and intent of the law should be revisited. For many, the feet test is about resources utilization. Using electricity, internet, housing, etc. In the author example, the author is clearly making a choice to live at that hotel. Back when the law was written, I think this would have covered most cases. However, now, the modal case are "digital nomads" where the normal thing is to not spend more than 1 week - 1 month in a single place. Oftentimes, the destination doesn't matter, but the journey. In the extreme, imagine spending 2 days in every country in the world, in perpetual motion. This has always been a possibility and the law covers this case (as we both know) but I think people are beginning to question if it makes sense given the new distribution brought by the internet. To come back to the sysadmin example, the point was that the sysadmin is utilizing the same global resources except for maybe an additional epsilon as they move around to the different localities. Many feel that the locality does not provide anything in return for the right to tax the income.
If you're a well-established author of (say) steamy romances, writing yet another steamy romance - then the value is created (work is done) when you write the book.
If you're a nobody, dreaming of success as an author - then the work is done when you somehow convince a publisher to take a risk and buy your manuscript.
(And in between those cases it would get messy:)
It would be interesting to watch California try to claim income tax on book royalties that were first started in CA but then the author moves elsewhere.
Everyone except the cities that have already lost a quantity of apartments and offices that have been repurposed as AirBnBs...
Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.
Hosts now have to be officially registered with the city. AirBnB lost something like 90% of their hosts overnight!
Well... a moderate amount of tourism is fine, even beneficial; but excessive tourism in any given location becomes a blight. Airbnb has contributed to that, by facilitating short-term profits for "hosts" and the company and ignoring the negative impact.
In some places this is incredibly visible (think Las Vegas Strip vs Las Vegas) but you can also see it in many famous tourist destinations.
Of course, large cities like Tokyo are quite resistant to tourism, just because of how big they are - certain areas and attractions may be tourist heavy but the city is still Tokyo.
With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved here from a different city has been forced to live for months in an AirBnB because there are no long term rentals in the city (ah!).
Since every wall-confined space can be an AirBnB, every wall-confined space becomes one. The lack of regulation makes a real difference, compared to shop and hotels.
If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give you $10k. Gotta be anglophone, though and none of this long-term rent controlled shit because no one wants to get locked into that. My French is atrocious and my German worse and I can’t speak anything else.
EDIT: Fine, fuck it, give me a year to learn the Spanish and up the bet to $100k and I’ll do it. I find very often that things that are impossible for others are easy for me. But list your conditions up front here. I think I could manage anyhow.
It's not the primary source of the housing problem, but it definitey contributes to it.
or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore)
also, I believe most EU countries have some form of renter protection laws.
>There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.
Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.
weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident.
So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would.
Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.
I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.
And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb).
I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).
This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.
The problem here in Atlanta is so bad that the core city has now banned airbnb without an explicit permit. We are hoping that gets adopted across the metro area.
The problem obviously exists beyond AirBnB, but AirBnB massively escalated the problem.
It really is so problematic that cities like Berlin, Amsterdam (and I believe Venice) and many more crack down on AirBnBs. Hard. You are allowed to rent out the apartment where you live, but for limited time and with high fines or even extradiction on renting out beyond the limits (e.g. 90 days per year). You are certainly no longer allowed to have AirBnBs for the sole purpose of renting out to AirBnb.
Edit: and in e.g. Berlin, AirBnB does not hand over the data of their users/renters (which Is good, I presume). So they have people scanning the renting-websites, visting homes and even posting outside to find evidence something is rented out beyond the allowed duration.
That's a ridiculous requirement. Owning real estate for the sole purpose of renting has been an income source for ever. Just because Airbnb exploded this practice in popularity doesn't give governments the right to say what purpose owners can use their property for. If Airbnb is causing issues, then address those specifically, not ban the practice of owning property exclusively used for renting.
Even laissez faire countries like America use things like 'zoning' and 'setbacks' to control what you're allowed to do on your own property.
Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.
Seems more that you want government to facilitate running a business where it's not in the interest of that government, nor in the interest of the locals. Airbnb's aren't beneficial, plus they aren't checked as properly as a hotel.
Usually it isn't banned, what they're after is that it is limited (days/year), plus the AirBnB income is properly taxed.
So bad, that you often cannot even have a neighborhood café, corner pub, or local shop in modern suburbs. So bad, that you need to take the car to do shopping. For someone from western Europe, this is mind blowing insane: you need to take the car to buy your milk!
But short-term rentals are basically identical with hotels which are commercial properties and have substantially different requirements - the people staying there will not frequent supermarkets, etc as much as they will restaurants, etc. They will not be sending their children to the local school, and so on.
Mixed use property can be (and should be!) encouraged, but it does have externalities that have to be handled and accounted for.
of course the government is gonna govern.
quoting you here
"governments told what purpose owners can use their property for, for ever"
That’s true.
The power of government to govern does not originate with AirBnB, but predates it considerably.
The particular use of the power may be responsive to situations created by AirBnB, though.
The original idea of AirBnB was to easily rent your couch or guest room for a few nights and I think regulations should be made to keep it this way.
Building them if there is an actual housing shortage? Sure! Building them so people from the silicon valley can be digital nomads? Hell no.
Also, building apartments has a huge environmental impact? Ok?.... So does rural sprawl? So does... everything? There is nothing inherently more damaging about those.
Beauty of a city? Cities are cities because of apartments. And you want.. fewer of them? Perhaps you would enjoy the suburbs more?
Very few staff tend to take 90 days in one chunk. It is often used for 4-6 weeks to either visit family, or have a working holiday in a tropical holiday location. Timezones can be an issue for some job roles, however, you can ask staff to mostly keep working according their original timezone if there is a time critical element to their job role. However, in most cases it is actually great to have someone working either earlier or later than the rest of your staff. It reduces the window for out of hours support.
except for the cities flooded by tech workers that do not belong to the community.
Like it's happening to Barcelona.
You can't imagine how much better Rome has been in these last two years without Americans coming to colonize our historical districts.
It's not entirely Americans fault, they do not belong here, don't know the language, the traditions, but they gather together all in the same place and suddenly it's not Rome anymore and obviously prices skyrocket up to the point that locals can't afford to live there anymore, after generations many have been forced to leave their family houses.
No, they don't.
Ask someone from Rome, Barcelona, Madrid even Warsaw, if they are happy of this airbnb-ization of their cities. [1]
Anyway, cities are for citizens, not for freeloaders. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/airbnb...
[2] The word city and the related civilization come from the Latin root civitas, originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member'
Anyway, it's not about where people come from, but how.
Italians didn't go to NY through Airbnb, profiting of their much higher salaries.
They went there to work and lived at "the bottom of the ladder" level (my grand-grand father is one of them, he left Italy soon after the first World war).
NY is also the most no-one-true-identity city I've ever lived in.
First time I wenr there more than 20 years ago my biggest cultural shock was going to visit the Brooklyn zoo, catching a bus and being the only white person on the bus (well almost, I look more like a Northern African, but still).
But I'm sure many in NY too aren't happy of the process that's going on.
I myself lived in Madrid for 5-6 years, and what seemed to drive the cost of living up weren't the people owning one or two rental apartments, but corporations and banks buying entire buildings up. At least in Spain, there has been a connection between banks not making large chunks of their real estate stock available, and investment funds buying on the scarcity.
> Anyway, cities are for citizens, not for freeloaders.
This feels like a bit narrow sighted.
While these workers you are talking about don't pay income taxes in these cities, they do pay other taxes (utilities, consumer products, etc.), and other than public infrastructure, they usually do not have free access to most services without paying (education, most healthcare).
So who's "freeloading" here? I would admit that they pay less taxes, but that doesn't mean that they pay zero taxes.
And another question arises. I myself am a Spaniard residing in the US. Would I be considered a "freeloader" if I go back to Spain and work for my employer in the US for a month or two? Do nationals get that consideration?
but most rich tech workers, especially from US, especially from SV, are not.
It's time to accept it.
We don't want them.
Not at this rate, not at these (their) conditions.
They only bring problems.
One thing is immigrants coming to work, another thing entirely is people that go somewhere because "it's cheap" or "it's beautiful" but work and pay taxes elsewhere.
They also have the habit of paying more than the average prices, so housing becomes more expensive, activities have to pay higher rents to survive or adapt to the kind of entertainment that the "new people" like, which is more often than not not what they wanted to do, people that used to live near their workplace had to move elsewhere because they could not afford to live in the district anymore, they end up closing shops and move their activities elsewhere (people like to have a life, besides work and commute) disrupting the life of many other that used to go there. So when these people start buying drugs, dealers compete for their money and criminality rate increase.
Last but not least, not being part of the community makes them detached.
This[1] had never happened before Americans invaded Trastevere.
Of course this is in general, individually people are perfectly fine, but this trend is killing the fabric of cities with centuries of history, for nothing.
Cosmpolitan it's not synonym for "colony".
[1] https://www.thelocal.it/20220210/us-tourists-serving-life-fo...
Of course it's not, but characterizing tech workers in foreign cities as "colonizing" makes little sense, even if the various problems you're pointing to can be laid entirely at their feet (which, without knowing enough about Rome to have a high degree of confidence, I would suspect is inaccurate, you could just as easily be describing general gentrification which has good and bad components).
All in all this attitude seems to me to be more or less typical NIMBY-ism, just with a focus on tech workers likely due to your purview (we're on hackernews after all). And to be sure NIMBY-ism is not usually without good reason, it's absolutely a worthwhile and reasonable goal to preserve culture you hold as valuable, and indeed in the case of Rome there is some very special culture there worth preserving. But it should be noted that change is inevitable, and cultural isolation is not a reasonable way to accomplish this goal conducive to the kind of world we want to have (or I should say I want to have, highly mobile and integrated so your origins have little bearing on your potential trajectories, much more unified than it is today as a species rather than provincial squabbling).
Rather we want solutions wherein people can move freely and be accepted wherever they go, while also preserving cultures and spreading economic benefits in a more efficient way. For instance better taxation so nomads pay taxes where they are not where they're from.
Cosmopolitanism is historically largely a consequence of colonialism, and the draw of labor (both cheap mass and elite skilled) from the peripheries to the core.
That's only because your community refuses to tax the visitors.
> They also have the habit of paying more than the average prices
then they are in fact paying taxes (or paying locals -- skipping the government middle-person) to the community.
> This[1] had never happened before Americans invaded Trastevere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/travel/taking-a-bite-out-...
"Earlier this year, a report by the president of Rome’s Appeals Court, Giorgio Santacroce, found that criminal organizations essentially have divided up the capital into areas under their control."
https://abcnews.go.com/International/trial-opens-2016-death-...
> Trial opens in 2016 death of US student Beau Solomon found dead in Rome > An Italian homeless man is accused of killing the 19-year-old student.
> Prior to his death, Solomon was allegedly robbed and assaulted, just hours after arriving in Rome for a study-abroad semester.
no, that's because they come here with a tourist permit and hide from authorities.
And if some problem arise, they go crying to their embassy.
> then they are in fact paying taxes (or paying locals -- skipping the government middle-person) to the community.
you mean they are skipping the community by paying some greedy multi-building-owner-speculator or mega-supermarket-chain and not giving back to the community in the form of taxes that pay for: hospitals, schools, police, roads, road cleaning, etc. etc.
You know, everything is public here, taxes pay for it, no matter if you're rich or poor, you get the same medical care here.
That's why we don't want them.
They completely disregard what's important for us, which is giving back to the people, not to the rich.
I've seen many of these people complaining that in the city center there are homeless living close to the historical monuments, while we people living in those neighborhoods have know them forever, they are part of the community, we give them food, shelter, blanket for the winter, call an ambulance if they are sick or it rained too much and they don't know where to spend the night.
That's the difference and what people like you don't and won't ever understand.
We are different from you, but you're coming to our house, so you are the ones that should adapt, not us!
> "Earlier this year, a report by the president of Rome’s Appeals Court, Giorgio Santacroce, found that criminal organizations essentially have divided up the capital into areas under their control."
Lol, you don't even know what you're talking about! [1]
He's been acquitted for that murder.
And you are comparing an homeless with mental health problems with 2 rich American students on holiday who *stabbed to death an Italian POLICE OFFICER WHILE BUYING COCAINE ON THE SREETS* ...
That says a lot about what you think about Americans, LOL.
Now compare it this, "Italian student was stabbed to death Thursday evening not far from the campus of the elite New York university, the dean said Friday."[2] ot to this "Twenty people were killed when a United States Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler aircraft, flying too low and against regulations, in order for the pilots to "have fun" and "take videos of the scenery", cut a cable supporting a cable car of an aerial lift" [3]
In the meantime, in NY there have been 485 homicides in 2021, in the whole Italy, 59 million of people, "only" 276.
We don't want that violent behaviour here.
Get over it.
[1] https://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2020/12/02/hom...
[2] https://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2021/12/03/col...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
Even a hundred years ago traveling somewhere brought you to a very different world, now it's hard to tell the difference between some cities since they're all covered in McDonald's and Starbucks anyway.
And it's not just the companies, either.
Part of the problem is our American way-of-life covers everything in a think blanket; you can easily move to anywhere in the world and remain an American as long as you want, the pressures that would bring you more in-line with those who live there are almost entirely gone.
There's nothing bad with Americans coming here, I love them, but there's a particular kind of people that don't integrate and think that having much more money than the average puts them in charge.
I've made some example about tech workers from USA because they are the larger and richer group I know of and it's crystal clear that most of them aren't here to make the city better or become citizens.
Also they are the ones who send their kids to "study abroad", but here you can drink when you are 16 or older, you can imagine what happens when you put young people with a lot of money in their pickets in a place where the rules of their country do not apply and the police is friendly (meaning they usually do not carry guns with them and don't arrest you for being drunk).
But it's not only them, of course and I'm sorry if I made it look like that.
One theory I have (and it may be wrong): is that part of the rise we've seen in housing prices is due to WFH and AirBnB.
Lots of people I've worked with who were WFH in the pandemic would spend a week (or a month) in a rental while they work, here and there. And during that time, their house/apartment would be empty.
Imagine everyone does that for (say) 3 weeks a year. That's a 6% increase in "housing usage". A 6% shock to the housing market is significant when supplies can't react quickly to the rise in demand.
People love to hate on zoning but there are reasons for it, even if the way it's done isn't perfect by a long shot.
The airline industry surely will. The environment likely won't. (But who cares about a few polar bears if you can just work from Shanghai for a few weeks, right? /s)
Also why are you optimizing for lower rents (as long as they are not AirBNB short term rentals)? What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property? Or the people that are coming to stay short term?
Because basic shelter is WAY lower on the hierarchy of needs than rental income, and shelter is not a need that the US is adequately meeting even for its middle class.
Zoning laws already create market distortions. A zoning law that prevents building denser residential property is no more or less distortionary than a policy that prohibits short-term rentals.
Also, reducing the future expected value of property does not discourage builders; they only care about the sale price today (or, today + build time).
> That would be like banning expensive restaurants because they're running up rent on inexpensive restaurants and soup kitchens.
Restaurants are also far higher on the hierarchy of needs than shelter.
We do distort the market in favor of soup kitchens -- they have substantial tax benefits and in many places they can operate out of differently zoned property.
If you believe that housing is a basic right and everyone should be housed, then relying on supply and demand is not going to work. There's nothing inherent about a market that would house everyone, if anything, a market would reach an equilibrium where supply meets demand at some point where some people are not able to afford the supply and suppliers do not have an incentive/are unable to meet the price point of the remaining demand.
Now we're "subverting" zoning laws by allowing people to work from rural areas or wherever. People can then use market pressures to live wherever is cheapest and has the amenities they want! That will decrease demand for hot cities and should make it easier to live in them.
Of course, that is presuming that our current demand craze has anything to do with residency at all, and isn't being driven by corporations like Blackstone buying up properties as investments, and Russian/Chinese oligarchs buying properties as wealth shelters. Funny how the Canadian market has suddenly chilled a little since the government banned foreign buyers. Must be a coincidence.
Comparing this to redlining is absurd.
What's optimal time of stay? Maybe ban students or renters as well. Might stay longer than 2 nights but certainly they dont have a "stake in the surrounding community". Might as well ban hotels while you're at it.
Again, trying to engineer who lives in your community is wrong IMO
If my neighbor makes too much noise, I can go talk to them and we will have an understanding. If an airbnb makes too much noise, I can tell the current residents to quiet down but there will be new ones in a few days. The residents don't stand to face any meaningful consequences for being a disturbance to the neighbors, and the owner of the house likely doesn't live in the community either so if I talk to them, there's no incentive for them to try and reduce the disturbances. Airbnbs around my house are known for this being a big problem. This is the reason that zoning laws put hotels in commercial space instead of residential.
I am not trying to "engineer who lives in my community", I am trying to engineer a community.
No one is talking about "rights", "control", "redlining", or dehumanization.
All they are doing is observing that people like to live next to human beings they can form longer-term relationships with. This is the fundamental fabric of human society and there is nothing wrong with people desiring that. That doesn't necessarily mean they have any "right" to "control" or "engineer" it. But people who want to have deeper ties to a community (which has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success) have every reason to try to influence their neighborhood to enable that.
> All they are doing is observing that people like to live next to human beings they can form longer-term relationships with.
Maybe we should ban renters as well. Higher home ownership rates has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success. So why not nudge out renters? Curious where you draw the line and why.
If you were to demolish your house and build a 3-story building in its place with a number of identical units within it and then ran it as a hotel, you would be in violation of zoning laws and would be required to stop. Would the enforcement of that law be an infringement on your rights? Should this behavior be allowed? If not, what is the fundamental difference between doing this and running an airbnb with a rotating door of extremely short-term visitors?
> Maybe we should ban renters as well. Higher home ownership rates has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success. So why not nudge out renters?
Don't blame the renters. Blame the landlords that hoard homes and make it impossible for renters to afford to make the transition to home ownership.
"Random" people should be able to buy property and use it in the same way that existing owners can.
Who is talking about preserving a neighborhood's "character"? We're talking about preserving the concept of a residential area as opposed to abundance of homes being used as commercial hotel-like spaces.
> "Random" people should be able to buy property and use it in the same way that existing owners can.
Sorry, but is it not clear that this is my point?
Short Term rentals of homes or condo units can erode a sense of community in an area where that's a common behavior. AirBnB renters aren't going to be around long so they have no incentive to be respectful to common areas, or respectful of noise levels or whatever else.
Imagine buying a condo and all of the units around you are AirBnBs, or otherwise short term rentals. I think you would want to eventually get to know your neighbors a bit, but in this case they are constantly cycling in and out instead.
I think weakening communities is something we're already seeing a lot of. Maybe it's a problem, maybe not, but I think AirBnB could potentially be contributing to this and it is worth considering the impact that might have.
All of my recent research into condos showed any building where this could be an issue has explicit prohibition on short term rentals as part of the HOA. The more egregious HOAs even have prohibition on long-term rentals without a permit which can be denied by the HOA.
The idea is to imagine what that would be like. The reality is so obviously undesirable that HOAs outright prohibit it.
According to a recent bit of data from AirBnB, approx. 65% of hosts on AirBnB own two or more short-term rentals [1]. Such ownership has strongly impacted our housing market, albeit it is not the only factor, but still a major contributor to the erosion of our housing market.
Many of the anecdotal complaints I have heard are things like:
1. Obnoxiously loud and large parties/gatherings at inconsiderate times of day.
2. Unfamiliar cars and strangers in your community e.g. if the house next to yours is listed on AirBnB who knows what type of people are staying next to you -- they could be upstanding citizens or violent/non-violent thieves scouting out your neighborhood. People renting the unit are not always the only ones to stay there, and who are the police going to question when they have no idea who was there or when they up and left to return back home?
3. Vandalism and/or littering of surrounding properties.
4. Lack of community like the OP posted above.
It also appears as of recently, that AirBnB's are being targeted for crime [2]. If one chooses to burglarize an AirBnB in my city, you have a pretty high chance of preying upon an n > 1 group of unsuspecting, young, unarmed women in an unfamiliar city who are more than likely not in the rental most of the time i.e. the perfect target for thieves.
There are allegations that thieves are working with Uber/Lyft drivers to find out which addresses are AirBnBs or not and which ones the renters are currently away from. Such actions are absolutely horrible, but honestly rather clever. Think of it this way -- it's easy as being a driver for Uber/Lyft, picking the group of renters up, text your buddy the address, and boom -- a thief's dream come true. Neighbors won't call the cops because so many people are in/out of the rentals, they can't keep track of what is normal or suspicious activity.
[1] http://insideairbnb.com/nashville/
[2] https://fox17.com/news/local/nashville-bachelorette-party-bu...
Short term rentals aren't a bad thing in of itself, but the purpose of zoning is that different locations serve different needs better. When you live in a neighborhood you expect there to be elementary schools near your house, and that there's quiet hours so that you can sleep during the night. ect.
Hotels and by extension air bnb's disrupt this balance. If the five condo towers surrounding the school suddenly become short term rentals overnight, either the school needs to move or kids have to travel farther. And no amount of police presence is going to make tourists not party during 1 am. You tell one group to stop, well the next is coming in 3 days.
And it goes the other way too. Having night life congregated together makes it easier for public services to their job. You can have more paramedics prepared for overdoses - enhanced police presence because drunk people are stupid, ect.
Even if air bnb's aren't a net negative on the economy, skirting of local regulations have qualitative effects on the the city that shouldn't be discounted.
Can't you do that on a normal tourist visa? As long as you're not getting paid by a US company or to a US bank account, you're not employed in the US, so as long as your company allows you to be remote, I don't see an issue with it.
I think this would help with keeping rent down! /s
It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.
So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
> So your choice is WFH micromanaging or keeping that seat in the cube warm.
Can't WFH work without micromanagement?
At least I can say that I never felt more free than during the work from home phase in the pandemic.
I have a dream that one day we will shit hard on that sort of stuff instead of validating it. See also "alpha male".
(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work
(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work
(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)
(5) No social circle anywhere
This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.
Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.
The third I married.
God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.
I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.
It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.
It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.
(1) Healthiest - Doing my morning work at a place where I know a few other coders who like to chat but don't bug me
(2) Less healthy - Same thing, but in the afternoon with beer.
Lol, in my experience mixing groups of friends has rarely been a good idea.
seems like it would lead to dating and that could be problematic for various well known reasons.
The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.
Work is not a place to make friends.
But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.
Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.
It is beyond insulting.
Nobody has ever proved any benefits to open plan offices. Their pathologies however are well documented e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.
Dreams? You are stuck in some weird emotional place.
And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.
In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.
I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.
The idea is to have a building/location with actual private offices after all.
“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”
This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.
Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.
Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.
Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.
Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.
- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)
- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.
Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.
There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.
Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!
As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.
That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)
And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.
I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.
The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.
Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.
Where are the external monitors? The laptop chargers? The plants? The photos of family? The screens in meeting rooms? The whiteboards?
They're missing all of those, there's a guy trying to work on a laptop while in a hammock?
I'll stick with my home office, thanks.
[1] https://officesnapshots.com/2019/01/29/airbnb-headquarters-s...
This is a hugely stupid move that companies made.
It was done because the benefits are tangible and immediate, and the costs are soft and indirect. CFO wins over HR.
People should recognize what a big deal this is.
I won't do it either.
I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.
My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.
We used to just find vacation rentals. One of the key tricks I used when AirBnb came out was figuring out who the owner was and contacting them directly with a cash offer for 3 months rent with ~25% (sometimes 50%) knocked off if I pay in USD up front. So I'd say most of the places I lived from 2009 on (about 20 places?) I found on AirBnb, thanks guys, and then paid cash to the owner. Only once or twice, for a couple days at most, have I ever actually used AirBnb to run a transaction for me.
Not for nothing, I now live in a house I own in Portland with an AirBnb right next to me whose owners are off living in some other AirBnb out of the country, and I'm pissed as fuck that I'm living next to what's turned into a goddamn motel. But it's wonderful that the AirBnb staff now get the same in-system privileges that unionized airline employees have had for decades. It would be better if it wasn't literally gutting every city from Amsterdam to Bangkok in the process and turning them into hipster slums.
1 - I'm proud of having cheated Airbnb out of their commission when helping me find housing so I could live like a hipster
2 - I hate living next to Airbnb hipsters
Needless to say: not a lot of coherent thought in that comment...
It ain't cheating Airbnb if the landlord is happy to cut out the middleman. And when I stay in a place I learn the language and live there and try to integrate into society. I'm not there to party for a weekend. What I'm referring to with the hollowing out of city centers like Lisbon, Prague, Amsterdam... people like me renting there for 3-6 months are not a threat to people who live and work there, because I'm negotiating close-to standard price for a furnished apartment (and the owner knows that the stability of being paid up front makes up for the extra they might make if their Airbnb were booked every day). So no, I wouldn't be treating the place as a tourist destination or undermining the locals, or partying and reducing their quality of life in their own places next door.
One of the most successful pushes against Airbnb taking over whole neighborhoods has been in cities which set a floor on the minimum number of nights. This at least changes the economic calculus enough to persuade landlords to consider long term local renters a little bit more.
I've been a nomad for over a dozen years and usually find ways to rent medium-term, ex. 6-12 months (and in some cases, long-term). I do as you do, and integrate into society, speak the local language, etc. But even so, I am participating in taking local housing from locals because in some cases I know I'm paying an increased rate (vs local rate), or I'm using what otherwise would be used as an Airbnb for living.
I spent 5 yrs in Lisbon, while renting at local rates, as the city went from ungentrified to gentrified, so I considered it my home and loved the city. But I sat there and watched as it was ruined by tourism and the hoards of short-term visitors. That quality of life I loved so much was destroyed in front of my eyes. I even went back a few years later to try living there again and it was even worse than when I left. All I mean to say is that there is no winning as a nomad, either I'm greatly affected by short-term housing, tourism and gentrification or I'm helping it along.
Bottom line: I don't think it's necessarily destructive for people to go live in a foreign place, get to know the culture and try it out for the mid- to long-term. But I think that's in a wholly different category from tourists who use airbnb in lieu of hotels. And the tourist contingent is orders of magnitude larger and more disruptive to cities than long-term nomads who tend to spread out.
Just for instance; when we lived in Saigon, we lived way out in District 5. In Bangkok we lived in On Nut, at that time the end of the sky train. In both places we were the only farang we would normally see unless we went to the tourist areas for some reason. And in Europe, we lived mainly in villages of a few thousand people, not in cities. When staying somewhere for a few nights or even a few weeks, we stayed in hotels, not airbnb (I'm personally not comfortable with staying in airbnb's short-term because I don't like being in someone's private space, don't trust the quality, don't want to deal with individual landlords' rules and quirks, am wary of hidden cameras, etc., but that's just me).
There's no winning as a nomad, it's true. But I think most of us are keenly aware that we don't want to contribute to the destruction of the places we visit and live, and in fact tend not to cluster in the touristic town centers where housing is already scarce.
They certainly do. Airbnb host here. Most of my tenants stay from 6-18 months.
AirBnb is basically another mean of accruing wealth in the hands of landowners, while people who don't own anything are now in an even harder situation, so I'm happy someone is stealing something from AirBnb, they negatively "disrupted" the lives of milions in order to create their market.
If you only have positive opinions about AirBnb, congratulations, you live in a bubble.
[edit] What I mean is, I don't see it as really accruing value for landowners either. I see a lot of short-sighted landowners making money from a system that is going to drive them to ruin in the long term when there is no functional city left in the place they own their property... ultimately the only people who profit from flipping the geography of a city into a hotel are airbnb investors and absentee landlords in the short run.
It's still somewhat possible here; for example, last month, a friend who's a 42 year old bartender and just had a baby finally bought a house only about 30 blocks east (east is cheaper); if he'd had enough money for a down payment 5 years ago we would be living on the same block. I make about twice as much as he does. I want him to be living on my block. That's the kind of city that I want to live in, that's why people want to live in Portland in the first place. That's why I decided to buy my house here.
Airbnb is extremely corrosive to a "working city" environment where people of different social / income classes are able to live and work in the same neighborhoods, because it encourages petit homeowners like me to take a paycheck to abandon our properties so the hoteliers extract rent. Yet it's exactly the mixture of working class life which made Airbnb's most attractive tourist cities like Madrid and Lisbon, Portland and Amsterdam so popular with tourists.
IMHO Airbnb is a blight for landlords and renters and there's a very good argument to be made that no property outside a city-bonded hotel should be rented for less than 3-6 months. I said this about taxis not being driven by civilians back when I was a cab driver and Uber showed up, so, I can see I'm on the wrong side of history...
Property values don't matter when I get a return of 2-4x my mortage by using AirBnB.
The income you are able to generate through AirBnB is very enticing.
Wait, in whose pockets did tourists's money end up before Airbnb? In the pockets of non-landowners? No, in the pockets of hoteliers, so still landowners.
Airbnb took a chunk of hoteliers' market (so good, right?) but also created a new market. A new market in which people who previously couldn't rent (because not enough capital to be a hotelier) can now do it and thus new market for tourists who previously couldn't travel (because less competition and possibilities).
[edit] I should just add that I'm as embarrassed to make noise or screw with anyone's living space as a homeowner as I was as a tenant. I could make $400/nt renting my own house on Airbnb and go live in Morocco or Chile and just live off the fat of the land (read: being an American with access to credit). I frankly would never do it. I'd rent it to long-term tenants, or I'd sell it, before I'd subject my neighbors on the other side to what the airbnb jerks have subjected me to. And as a tenant, even with a piano that's calling me to play at 2am, I'm not going to wake anyone up.
Tangential, but I have lived for 10 years in the same apartment and I have never interacted with my neighbours. Not even once.
I know some AirBnBs are used as party destinations, and that's different -- but it's a problem with those hosts, not with the platform. AirBnB make it pretty easy to telegraph that your property is completely unsuitable for loud gatherings, and anyone who puts a piano in a short-term rental is an idiot.
3-6 months isn't so important, but it's about where things start to be serious. Water pipes leak. Refrigerators break. You get to know people.
I find the claim that you can't respect someone else's property just because you rent it through an intermediary... strange.
Whenever I'm in an AirBnB, I'm well aware that this is someone else's stuff and that (at least) common decency requires me to treat it with care and respect.
You’re getting people who are in a leisure situation basically 100% of the time. Your normal neighbors aren’t like this.
Even just the transitions are disruptive. Picture a European couple unable to figure out how to open the door with 4 suitcases completely blocking the entrance to your building and making it impossible to go in and out every single time you come home, for one highly specific example plucked from the real world.
If I'm going to live with a neighbor for ten years, in addition to purely friendly reasons, I'm going to say hi to her and get to know her. Whereas at a hotel I'm overnighting at, if I'm not in a chatty mood, I don't see the reason to oblige a neighbor's request for a 20 minute chat.
At 3-6 months, not often. At 1-7 days, quite often, which may give the feel of it being a hotel.
Another huge thing is people learn to live with consistent annoyances; if your neighbor runs a leaf blower at 8 AM every Saturday, you may hate it but you learn to live around it. If instead, he were to run a leaf blower randomly at different times it would get really annoying.
It's not the 3-6 months thing that's difference. It's that you signed up to live in an apartment with neighbors and instead you find yourself in an unstaffed hotel where there is no one on site to manage unruly guests violating lease agreements. And all they'll do if you call them (Vacasa at least) is to text the people causing the problem.
Honestly, my family and I use airbnb pretty frequently, and I would like to think that we're considerate guests... but, maybe there's something we're missing? What makes the guests next-door to you bad ones (or great ones) ?
The only thing there is that it's a risk, e.g. what if they thrash the place, but airbnb may not even give a shit about that and accuse you (the owner) of fraud. That risk is also mitigated by paying up front like you said.
The three months doesn't make much difference. I might be a responsible tenant when I use airbnb, whether in lots of short stays or one big one, but that doesn't stop other guests being awful.
Your three months just incentivised the owners to keep it as a short-term let.
Full disclosure: I have used Airbnb in the past.
In general, most of these places were already vacation rentals before Airbnb came along, and the landlords were well prepared to rent them independently of the platform.
- I moved in to this place back in X. All the people after me are transplants and ruining the place.
- I stayed for X months. All these people who stay less than X are terrible.
- I drive a car of size X. All these people who drive a car of size > X are terrible.
Do you not recognise that you were the exact kind of person ruining cities the world over?
Is your anger directed at Airbnb or at the tourists? Both parties just do what's in their best interest. It's a typical economical transaction which makes both sides better-off.
The problem is that the Airbnb situation creates externalities. In your case it's annoying neighbours and, in the broader sense, it's e.g. the gentrification.
Local governments are the ones to blame here and the ones who should be responsible to manage the externalities. There must be some clever policies to mitigate the problems.
Rhetorical flourishes are fun, actually getting to know a city is also fun. As we say in Bangkok: Recommend!
Long story short everything I thought would get negative blowback or go up in flames didnt. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never does.
Our students work through around 1000 hours of computer science fundamentals remotely, build a portfolio of fullstack applications remotely, get hired at FAANG companies and startups remotely, make their employers happy remotely and get more of our graduates hired remotely.
As someone who used to work in and believe in traditional academia I still can't believe there's no catch. But increasingly it's becoming clear that there's not.
Except that the students can't hook up with eachother and there's no free bad coffee.
Also society could still totally collapse at any moment I guess.
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PS I love the green futurism manifesto vibe of airbnbs statement, I wana work there now
Do you believe that remote work is a net gain for society but is a net negative for many individuals?
Much like schools double as a day care for children, work often doubles as a social club for adults.
What full remote has done is made it harder for me to consider moving. Sure, I could move anywhere, but I'll show up there knowing essentially no one and have to just go out and meet people by force of will. There's no group of people at my new office I could connect with and at minimum get some recommendations of places to go. Even if you don't become friends with your coworkers, having some amount of in-person social contact is important for most folks, and knowing you have to build that yourself is daunting.
So what? 2 birds with one stone and all.
That can be good when it lets people tailor their environment to their own peculiar interests. And it can be bad for people where the normalizing environment of a shared social space helps them drag some deficient attribute back up to a healthy level.
Academia has actually had this model for a long time - people moving with their families for postdocs every few years and keeping in touch remotely with old colleagues
mountain towns would like to have a word here.
I'm skeptical this will work out for Airbnb though. My personal experience is that people who self-select into this type of lifestyle are not going to be as productive. There's too much to do and see in a new city, people to meet, foods to try, parties to go to, coupled with much less oversight.
A critical component for remote work productivity is having a routine that somewhat mimics the routine of going in to the office. That said, it can be really hard to detect low performers, and the market is really tight right now so this might be around for a while.
This is what I found, ended up renting an office because there are far too many distractions and random annoyances. For example, a lot of vacation locations have building work going on constantly and, in many Mediterranean countries, leaving a barking dog out on your balcony all day and night is considered normal and neighbourly.
Also finding a location with a decent internet connection, reliable electric & plumbing, and decent furniture seems to be expecting too much?
I think currently this is a big caveat. Getting a work permit in other countries is not that easy, even for Americans or other countries with more prestigious passports. Maybe with AirBnB clout it is easier than without but I'd say it's still quite an issue.
That being said, I'm really excited for what the future could provide with AirBnB focusing on this. Maybe it will be easier not just for Americans and the like to work in other countries but I really hope it will be easier for others from places such as Africa and Latin America to work in Europe and the US as well.
Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
I work at a remote first company and HR have given a nod and a wink to this, but with the requirement that you maintain a permanent address and pay taxes in a country where they have an office.
Are you sure this is the case? You’re not allowed to get hired locally but I believe you can work online for a company based in your country of residence provided you don’t stay long enough to become a resident of the new country (which you can’t on a tourist visa). I visited Canada for 6 months on a tourist visa. I had a full immigration interview at the airport when I arrived and they were perfectly happy with me working freelance/online for those 6 months. They were just clear I couldn’t become an employee of a Canadian company.
That said, if you're working for a multinational company, you may want to be careful. Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
My employer adopted a similar policy (just not as publicly announced as Airbnb's), and the way they work around this problem is by, assuming you reside in A, allowing you to travel and work in B but explicitly disallowing you from entering an office location in B.
Like you, I also wish the world worked in the way I like to imagine it should.
I think this is what AirBnB are doing. A lot of countries have a requirement for you to reside in it for at least half the year to be able to be taxed there and be considered an employee. A lot of countries allow people to visit for limited time, as long as you don’t interfere with the local job market - e.g being a tourist. Those two are not in conflict and you can do what AirBnB are doing right now, without much more accounting difficulties. Though I’m not an accountant and take my words with a grain of salt.
>And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
seems wrong to me. If I work in another country I'm still working, which means I need to pay taxes in my host country after a certain time (in Norway it's the first day afaik, in some European countries it's after a few months).
It's annoying, of course, but I'm using the resources of the host country while earning money, so it feels understandable.
Oh wait
So you can't open your work laptop while on vacation?
You cannot always take the law literally....
this has been discussed to death on DN forums. Basically yes you're breaking the law but if you don't get caught no one will know. Some people don't like taking this risk while some don't mind.
If I'm on paid leave, I'm still earning money, and I go to Asia - am I breaking the law? I'm still "doing" the activity that's earning me money.
If I'm on my paid leave, and fiddle with my blog, which gets ad revenue - am I earning money and thus doing illegal economic activity?
Not a lawyer so would love a more rigorous definition of "doing work" that is applied in Asia so I know if I'm overstepping. Maybe you can point me to some of those discussions?
As already mentioned, “Asia” is not a legal or political entity.
That's... an overstatement. Asking weird questions that indicate a risk of tourist visa overstays which nobody else bothers to ask (even if it is perfectly legal) will put you at risk of rejection, whether or not the law allows what you're trying to do.
Traveling to UK, permanent resident of Bulgaria (EU), Russian passport.
Border guard - “What are you doing in UK?”. Me - “Working on the clients premises and in their offices.” - “Sure come on in.”
All on tourist visas. Now I have BG citizenship there are no questions, but I wouldn’t think the sentiment is much different. As long as I’m not _employed_ by a company from the country I’m visiting, and stay a month or two, its fine, at least in the Europe. (I’m a contractor employed by BG company with clients in UK)
by “Asia” I meant no disrespect but I know little about the legal state of things there so seemed prudent to generalize
I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
I have very little believe that a majority of people can work from home, especially when travel. You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours. So I do understand why airbnb is telling their employees to do so, but curious how long it is going to last, and curious how real it is going to be (considering that it could be up to management approval as well). But I doubt that other companies will follow that.
I remember some studies mentioning that the real productive time in a daily 8 hr shiFt was 4-6 hours. If that's so, then it's completely doable.
Hopefully someone has a fresh link to one of those studies.
I used to take my PowerBook into the bathroom stall at work when I needed some alone time to concentrate, but it was embarrassing to get busted when it crashed and made that reboot sound so everybody else in the bathroom knew what I was up to.
And that would allow me to see the sunset the whole year. Would try to go to the park with my kid at 4pm every day.
The only people doing 8 hours of "work" are the people scheduling back to back meetings all day
In other words, a 4-6 hour workday means 2-3 hours of work getting done.
Literally nobody is productive for 9 hours straight. You end up doing low-value make-work projects because in a culture that values "time in seat" the work expands to fill the available time.
Remote manager here. This is definitely a huge problem with people new to remote work.
I actually don't care at all if people are doing something else during the day and getting their work done at night or whatever they want to do. However, a significant number of people really struggle to get work done at all when they first go remote and lack a repeatable schedule and the feeling of social pressure to be working like their peers. It takes a lot of coaching and mentoring to get these people back on track with their remote-ready peers.
Many other people have no problems working remote, though. IMO, the key to success of a remote team is to coach and mentor all new remote workers very intensely in the first months or year, but then also to be willing to remove people from the team if they just can't get work done remotely. You absolutely don't want a few bad apples to ruin remote work for everyone else.
That’s an incentive problem not a “be in the office” problem. Or you’ve hired lazy bums. Or the work isn’t interesting enough.
If the people are screwing around then fire them. More than likely the job is dull or not challenging or not rewarding enough. That’s a call for the company to step up their game and bring in A level talent.
Or don’t and keep on getting the C team that’s only doing busy work as a boss is looking over their shoulder.
You try firing someone in markets like NZ, Aus, lots of parts of Europe etc. Some people have for sure identified remote work as a meal ticket for life, it's frustrating.
"Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans."
Is this like just plan to be in the SF office during normal 9-5 work hours for a week every 13 weeks or is this like plan on a week long 24-7 corporate retreat away from your family every 13 weeks.
If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
If you can't make the time to spend a few days a quarter with your workmates in exchange for the most generous and fair remote working package then perhaps you're not a good fit for Airbnb. Which is totally fair. But they're not exactly taking the piss here. For many (many) people a week long retreat is a perk not a burden.
But if you have a family you actually like/love - then a full week away really is a non-starter. Especially if its Sunday night and Saturday morning travel. School plays and parent teacher conferences don't get planned based on the AirBNB week long retreat schedule.
And if you are in a dual income family with the stereotypical two kids - if both of you guys are in similar work situations - then on your "on" week - you're gonna be the one doing 2 school pickups and all after school driving.
I also did notice that there are plenty of parents who will blame their children for things they themselves don't want to do and not be honest about it. It's not the children that are at fault there though.
In the end, there are plenty of WFH jobs that don't need on-site time at all so you can pick and choose. It's a great market for an engineer to be in now.
Another new and perfectly legal way to discriminate!
>If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
And that's okay! If people don't like it or can't make it work with their lifestyle, they don't have to work there
It is business travel after all.
I recognize that kids makes it difficult. And there are also folks who find it hard to travel much at all. But I’ve found I have the opposite problem: remote work can be extremely challenging from a energy and social point of view without meetups. I’ve never met most people on my current team, and don’t have strong social relationships with them. Those are really only possible to build in person. I come away from meetups with a sense of camaraderie, energy, and vision that’s difficult or impossible to replicate over Zoom.
So for me, I have found remote work more difficult during covid without meetups. I burn out more frequently, and struggle to find as much energy as I’ve had in the past.
True remote work — not 4/5 days, or in close proximity to an office where most work — would be less viable for me without meetups. Just as remote work is less viable for some with meetups. And working in the office has huge drawbacks as well for plenty of people. So it’s all a balancing game, and I wouldn’t say that meetups should be ditched because of this.
I do want to note that when I think of a meetup, a lot of it is social and having a good time. While “real work” obviously happens too, it’s not like these trips are consumed by it. Getting paid to go to a pleasant location of your choice with nice lodging and a decent food/drink budget is super nice. If it was just going to a soulless office at a minimal budget with no expectation of having a good time, I probably wouldn’t be so much in favor of them :) But with a nice mix of meaningful conversations, socialization, brainstorming, and fun, they have a positive impact on my work/life balance. And I’m more productive as well. So it’s a huge win all around for me, and I hope most.
If its during normal work hours - employees with kids can live within 1-2 hours can suffer the commute for a week every quarter and socialize but still be home in time for dinner with the kids/wife.
Conversely - the single folks/DINKs can go out and paint the town from 5pm-11pm and experience the actual local nightlife.
If they can, people should find something that works for them because they'll probably hate it otherwise.
After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot.
In other news - sounds like comp is going down at Airbnb. Not a surprise.
And for western Europe, you don't even need to work ridiculous hours. If my current core hours (9am - 3pm) were in PST and I worked in Paris, I could finish my workday at 11pm in Paris.
If you ran into a show-stopper, capture it and being it up in your morning standup. They were all still in the office for at least a couple of hours when we got in.
that's a pretty realistic approach in my opinion. My company has people in India and Europe and it sucks royally to set up meetings with them. Either they have to work at night or the US people have to. If I had to decide, I would mandate at least a 4 hour overlap in working times.
I have been working remotely since almost a year now in several European countries and to filter out AirBnBs, which offer a decent desk and have stable internet takes hours. The "workstation" filter can not be trusted and neither the "has Wifi", which doesn't say anything about the quality.
An internet speed test should be required to be done by the host. This way I can avoid having to ask about the internet every time before booking - which takes sometimes half a day for getting a response.
Also DSL isn't necessarily so bad, G.fast allows for speeds that are close to what you can do with modern Docsis deployments.
>If you move, your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity.
I wonder how that will look like in practice, countries differ enormously in required pay for a decent living, especially within the US. Wouldn't states/regions for a few countries work better?
People love to predict this, they seek it. Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment). It's trendy now, which affects people who follow trends, but trends change fast. Talented people want to be around other talented people; smart, intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc. I don't think that will change.
What establishment do you think it's serving? To me, a return to the smaller cities where many of us grew up, or better yet, never leaving in the first place, feels like decentralization, which many of us think is a good thing.
> intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc.
This strikes me as elitist, especially the mention of "sophisticated people". Now that I've returned to my home city, in what Americans often call flyover country, I appreciate hanging out with ordinary people. True, when I do karaoke, I hope the other singers will be good (speaking of arts and beauty), but there are good karaoke singers everywhere.
And G employees won't tolerate the forcing to be in office even if a ton like it. It seems they're the ones always demanding more from the employer (someone has to!).
Coordinating on Pacific Time would be less weird.
But, as I learned working at a company that's truly international, coordinating on UTC is better. Each employee only has to know the offset between their own time and UTC. They know when any local Daylight Saving laws shift them relative to UTC, and it's extremely easy to look it up if they forget. It's also extremely easy to look up the UTC offset anywhere you may travel.
Picking Pacific Time, and specifically Pacific Standard Time, is a weird choice.
Employee resignation took months, and relocation also took months.
This all sounds too good to be true.
This is with US parent companies and EU employees.
† The least I've seen was 20%, and it was a horror show so bad that it was worth it to switch to a 40% competitor.
The latter two are for tax reasons of course. Still made me chuckle though.
Not sure the pricing structure, but I remember office depot having an advertisement, it was probably like "As Low as $6" per pay period. Ths site says $70 a month but that's probably the minimum for the whole company. Then per check fees.
A good example is working remotely in another country. The US does not allow foreigners on a visitor visa to work remotely. It's a bit of a gray zone, since if you fly into the US for a business meeting, that's not regarded as "working in the US". But flying in for 1 month and working remote the entire time is.
Same with California income. Working in Nevada and then decide to work remote from California? That's CA income and taxable by CA. But of course people rarely even mention they're working in another state and rarely pay taxes owed.
Imagine Apple USA being taxed by New Zealand, for example. That's the main reason Apple employees are employed by Apple NZ
So I ask the owner If i can leave, with the offer that I won't leave any type of review just so he won't be scared of that outcome. He rejects my offer and basically laughs at me for falling for his listing.
After all this airbnb then takes down my review because "I had tried to manipulate the owner by offering not to leave a review if he let me leave"
Now I understand why places like this have good reviews. It's unbelievably easy to get negative reviews taken down.
1) None of the usual 90 days Visas allow you to perform working activities. Neither when issued in the US or in European countries. Even when you are still a resident and employed in your country of residence. See for example the allowed activities for a B-1 or a B-2 Visa.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
2) You also can't do it on a Schengen Visa for Tourism or Business.
Business Schengen Visa – Traveling to Europe for Business Purposes: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/business-schengen-visa/
3) Some professions like Airline crews, Military personal, Athletes and Musicians have specific provisions on the law that allow for their remote work.
4) For Europe the only way this might work could be with the relatively new Digital Nomad Visa: https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-news/digital-nomad-visas-eu-...
5) Each case will be different, subject to a long and complex process. The company announcement mentions:
"Starting in September, you can live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location."
They don't allow you to perform work within the jurisdiction. But no one cares if you're working remotely, and I'm not aware of any tourism visas that preclude it.
Digital nomad visas are not about legalizing an otherwise-illegal arrangement, they are intended to expand and promote it with longer visa terms that traditional tourism visas allow. It's about increasing the length of the visa, not legalizing it. But neither a tourism visa, or a digital nomad visa allow you to work in the jurisdiction.
Working in the jurisdiction is working in the jurisdiction no matter where the person paying you or your usual place of work (if such thing even exists) is.
If you are in the jurisdiction, doing labor for pay (regardless of where the pay comes from), you are working in the jurisdiction.
If companies are okay with this, then it's the "new normal" I suppose, but I can understand why Apple and Google want people face to face. If I knew I could go into work twice a week and meet with my team, I would enjoy that, but my team is global so it will never happen. It's definitely a weird experience.
But if this request for help arrived via group chat, I wouldn't have bothered to help. It was simply too much effort to either do screen sharing, or open the internal tool on my computer, replicate the state of that UI, and then describe the buttons the coworker needed. The one-minute interruption would be a ten-minute interruption. I wouldn't stay in my flow.
I work for a fully remote company, and better documentation is definitely something I've noticed here compared to on-site roles.
Personally I've worked remotely and in person, and I'm much more productive at home than in the office. There's a plethora of tools that enable us to get as much done if not even more without all of the distractions that exist in the office. This has been true in my former career working in sales and marketing, and is true now in my career as a software developer.
I've been able to avoid stalling by anticipating questions I could have and ask them ahead of time. That might be a (partial) solution to this problem.
> ... Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.
I wonder if an Airbnb employee's pay was set using a higher location-based pay tier, would that be down adjusted, conversely? A single pay tier in U.S. means there are wide pay gaps between San Francisco, California vs. Billings, Montana for the same skill set/job role to be reconciled, correct? It only makes sense to me that they aren't adjusting everyone to the Silicon Valley pay rate in June.
Can someone share lights on how that single pay tier for a country would work?
Work from anywhere but ask your manager from where you can work. Also I want you here each three months for a one-week gathering, and if you're senior I want you to gather even more often. "The most flexible policy in the world" people are calling it LOL It's great a company like Airbnb does this, but come on!
Meaning that the best people are nomadic because its such a common choice amongst the best people, and would be a common choice among people with a choice. This is the experience they have with recruiting, and the CEO then pretends its because of a diverse pool of people that happen to live in a variety of towns where they stay all the time.
Just helping someone read between the lines!
Smart people exist outside of the SFBA. (Or Seattle. Or NYC. Or London. Or ...)
As someone who is intimately familiar with geographic discrimination, this was nice to read. I grew up and went to school in the US bible belt. When sending out resumes, the only companies I ever heard back from (even a 'no thanks'!) were local, or cosmic luck (hired an adjacent person and reached out to me.)
Over the past two years lots of people left the SFBA, Seattle, NYC etc. They didn't move to the US Bible Belt they went to islands, Miami, Austin, Southern California....
so to keep talent and get some of the other talent back, they released this statement. about nomads.
It's not about people with feeble parents and health issues that get them stuck in the midwest, or those really there by even easier choice. Maybe it will never be about them.
Its not charity, its a reaction to their own workforce.
I used my life in the bible belt as an anecdotal example, but it can apply to many places.
Disparaging a company's move just because - acktualllly it benefits them - will have you hating every business on the planet.
My point here is they didn't _have_ to do this. Places like Google and Apple are all but telling remote workers to kick rocks. Others like Facebook say 'be remote but we are doing CoLA.' ABNB's policy here is the most fair (and generous) out of the ones I've seen. If that attracts workers, good for them.
I don't personally think that US pay for work done in Bali as a non-dom is sustainable, but paying Indonesian rate for work towards US profit is just as unviable.
Whats the happy medium?
I work in IT, and I know it would suck to be told "you're worth less because you pay less rent" but this actually is normal: The majors are already telling SF residents "take $10,000 to move to Austin but we pay you less" And the majors are already saying "stay in India and we'll hire you and pay you less" -So it is not like there isn't already real world downward pressure on pay.
(the context here is that I am paid way above local average for Australia and way below FAANG in the US, working in a not for profit)
I strongly believe in unions. Even with a union, pay isn't going to be uniform across a nation, or between nations to do the same role.
Musk is making Tesla in the US, Germany and China. I ask, non-rhetorically, which country do you think will wind up in the long term making more of the cars, and why? And, also non-rhetorically, why do you think "knowledge work" (which is what software is) is any different?
I mean maybe there is a contradiction between being green and the work in 170 countries up to 90 days per year + gather in person every quarter policy.
> Starting in September, you can live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location.
This looks particularly great, currently for my company is "just" 20 days, but this seems fantastic!
One other important aspect is the ability to work from any country/city which will greatly help certain locations to attract WFH people or tech-nomads. Speaking for my country, Greece, there are already some islands and municipalities advertising their offerings to attract new people. This is going to be a win-win for all and help with counterurbanization. Sure there are many technicalities still to be sorted out but this is the way to go, this is the way of the future.
I had a little chortle at this. This is going to be like building an application that handles timezones for you, but instead of getting timezones wrong, you're committing tax evasion.
Let's say you move to the UK to work for 50 days. Whether you're resident in the UK and therefore have to pay tax will involve myriad complexities including whether your partner is resident in the UK. It's just going to be such a faff, and it depends far more on the individuals circumstances than the company.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
I beleive this means that if you move to another country - your compensation will change, right?
I spent a lot of time outside US while waiting for my wife's visa to process and quickly wrote some advice on maintaining US domicile & "permanent address" while abroad:
https://www.kylehotchkiss.com/blog/domicile
Sorry about the misspellings and slightly ugly personal site but I hope that this helps somebody who may be considering working or staying from abroad for a bit!
Winners in this new paradigm: Owners of real estate in lifestyle towns like Boise, Boulder, etc. I also think borders between the US and Latin America (same/similar time zones) will become a lot more fluid. Why not work in Mexico City or Buenos Aires during the winters, for a fraction of the cost of living in the US?
It’s pretty obvious why this doesn’t work for a large portion of people. I am glad for the child free and those who have little need for stuff - but it’s just not… realistic for the rest of us (who are the overwhelming majority of the population). It’s good for that niche 22-28 crowd.
It’s nice for summer break but it’s really hard to take kids out of school or to switch schools mid year.
Hopefully your reasons for having a child are compatible with the child spending time away from you cos that's going to happen eventually. Your comment suggests you're making a lot it assumptions about what it means for someone to be in a boarding school...
The implication is that the kids will be sent to boarding school because they are inconvenient for these plans.
From the language you’re using, it sounds like you are saying this is a possible way for this snow bird to LA lifestyle to work for a family.
But that you have not tried it yourself. Is that right?
Also, I'm not sure how the children would integrate with their classmates if they are only in the class 1/2 the year. Even worse if you are in the other country for the winter, i.e you child gets 2 months in the US school, is gone for 4, then back for 2.
I agree though about Boise. And all of Florida... etc.
Policy is what will dictate whether or not this is good and that’s not within the hands of any company. That’s up to the federal, state, and local governments. (Of which are all fucked - of course)
You already see this happening in rural communities outside of big cities. "Tech-bro" approved towns such as Asheville, Knoxville, Ann Arbor, Twin Cities, etc, etc are getting so expensive the locals can't move. Where I am from in Southwest Michigan has been facing a worsening housing crisis for years.
Luckily for most of the country, the weather isn't as nice as it is on the west coast, so homelessness will probably not explode as much as it has here. On the other hand, you have to deal with shitty weather ;)
I think the reality is that our housing costs and our fuel costs will catch up with Europe's. In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe. So now if you want to visit the rest of your country you're going to have to pony up for fuel.
Or the publicly subsidized healthcare and higher education!
Also why does public transit matter in a WFH/remote world? Seems to obviate it to a large degree, e.g. subway in NYC, which while used for many things, was majority used for commuting. It was losing large amounts of money even before the pandemic hit
My logic doesn’t really need to track with whatever you are talking about- look at the cost of housing in high cost of living places; has it gone down during the last two years of pandemic? Has literally -everyone- becoming a remote worker driven down the cost of housing? No; it has made it worse.
Is it cheaper to live anywhere on the planet now than it was 2,5,10 years ago?
Take for instance where I am from- Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is a great town I love with all of my heart but have no wish to live there. Houses are difficult and expensive to buy there! And compared to Seattle it is pennies. Wages aren’t rising in Kalamazoo to match the money coming in: but houses aren’t getting cheaper in Seattle either.
Residential real estate prices skyrocketing has more to do with government interventions. I fully expect ex tech hubs such as the Bay Area to trend down in prices in real terms over many years
Foreclosure moratorium, eviction moratorium, stimulus checks that allowed new households to form (kids moving out) as well as preventing the normal level of foreclosures, Fed buying trillions in MBS pushing rates artificially low, massive amounts of cash out refis to use in ad hoc projects that sucked up labor and resources for new builds.
Yes migration from HCOL to LCOL will drive pricing up too, but to say HCOL will go higher because remote work is here does not track logically at all. Sure, leisure areas will go up in value, work areas should logically decline. e.g. Manhattan, Chicago, SF, Seattle
Nebraska is not going to magically spring up natural beauty and culture.
If you worked in tech, SF was the pinnacle location to live for your career. If you were in Finance, it was NYC. There was no exception to this. You can live in any of dozens of cities and still get an enjoyable life/leisure. It's not equivalent at all.
So in this new world, an SF home will be worth $4m while an equivalent San Diego one $2m? No way. The disparity in amenities between the two is not big enough to justify that kind of spread, once you remove the work component. The entire reason SF became so expensive was relocations to work for big tech and the concentration of VC money. Not because it was unambiguously the most desirable city in the US or even CA.
So you take away the component that made it expensive to begin with and ??? it goes higher still ???
I have been working remote for startups since 2019 and for whatever reasons, you could attribute this to low interest rates I suppose in your favor, things have gotten INSANELY more expensive. NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, Miami I don't think they are getting any cheaper. These are Americas Elite Cities and thats going to command a demand that might seem to defy logic.
However I think people genuinely love living in these big HCOL cities. Otherwise it would defy all reason why they have been population centers for hundreds and hundreds of years. Take for instance Amsterdam; has Amsterdam gotten cheaper in the last 500 years?
To my second point, even if we are lucky and the money gets spread around a little bit what happens to the person working for 7$ an hour at the Hyvee in the Ozarks just because a small flurry of people from San Francisco and Seattle decided to settle there? What happens when he can't afford the property taxes on his paid off home anymore because a a random demand driven spike has increase the value of the properties around him to a point where he can't afford his property taxes anymore?
What happens when he can't afford his medical bills because of this? I've seen what happens and its a hunched over old dude outside of a tent on the streets of Seattle.
This isn't really the tech workers fault or the locals fault, but the fault of our government to account for inequality. Just something I've been thinking about. I just don't think that remote work is going to make life easier for anyone in the short term, except for the already spoiled white collar worker.
Now that the constraint of working in a specific location is gone, yes, people will migrate to areas for desirability of living, not because they're forced to for work. However, price is an aspect of desirability. It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote. People like SF, but not enough to pay such a spread over arguably equivalently nice places that are much cheaper.
So yes, HCOL -> LCOL drives LCOL to be more expensive.
Also the reason cities existed in the past was because people needed to gather together to work/exchange goods. With remote work/internet that goes away, aside from education/leisure.
You seem to be implying Amsterdam exists because people like it, and not because it was a job center. I can assure you there were very few people hundreds of years ago picking cities primarily for leisure. The need to densify/build vertically lessens when there's no concentration of a downtown for work.
Plenty of people want to live in the Bay Area beyond those working in big tech. This isn't Detroit; there are plenty of other industries that hire people here. Not to mention all of the working class people who are commuting in from Richmond, Vallejo, and other LCOL areas. People want to move there for the Mediterranean climate. For the political climate. Not to mention the children of locals who have been living at home for extended amounts of time. Long-time renters. Remote work will not bring down real estate prices as much as you believe. Especially since housing scarcity props up the prices.
The real estate market, like all markets of the modern era, can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.
I used to work with developers in Eastern Europe who made the same amount of money as their peers in SF made, despite living in countries with median salaries of ~$8,000 USD a year.
People with skills can and do command high compensation packages that are independent of where they do their work from. Market rates for talent already factor in domestic and global markets.
In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and yet the FANG companies have been in an increasing comp arms race for several years.
If you really want to do it with less paperwork as a US company, you can get around the tax headaches even today, hiring through some outsourcing staffing firms. Lots of those in Latin America now. Quite a bit cheaper. Still a bit of a communication hassle. But that hard barrier of not being employed directly keeps things at arms length in terms of affecting the overall salary market.
No thanks. Couple this with the two or three trips I take per year with my girlfriend, I'm going to be getting on an airplane every other month at a minimum. That is way too much travel for me.
It does make more sense to me if that stays an option, and it's only the people who do move away who would have to travel. That way people could choose the perk of living elsewhere, knowing they would have the downside of traveling quarterly.
But for people who were hired on to an office job with no travel requirement shouldn't suddenly have a travel requirement so that their coworkers who move away have it more convenient. It might even be enough of a change in working conditions for someone to quit and be eligible to draw unemployment benefits. (I used to adjudicate claims, and a significant change in working conditions is one of the ways you might be eligible for benefits even if you quit instead of being laid off.)
But if you move to a different country, suddenly the work you do is worth less to the company?
Roles should be paid for the skill and work required, not the location of the employee.
Our travel company will be preparing complete packages for these kind of 90 day work experiences in Thailand, Bali and Vietnam.
Anyone interested hit me up in my profile!
...in the same country. Sort of defeats the point for many.
Aside from being a friendly policy to staff, I think this shows just how tight the labour market is right now.
Yikes. That's a lot of travel.
they recently banned the spouse (!) of some right-wing personality because they feared the banned guy might use his spouses name to book a room. Guilt by association. Of course no crazy leftist ever has been banned from airbnb. I am no longer using airbnb since I'm not woke.
You mention it in the next sentence - the local labor market. UK developers earn a fraction of what US developers do. We can debate the root causes but it seems irrelevant why it's true, only whether or not it is true.
I'm not sure why cost of living should factor into comp at all. I can have a much higher COL than you, but if you bring more value to the company, and you can get better offers than I can, you should make more than me.
Alice: backend engineer in London, able to get $120K from UK companies
Alicia: backend engineer in NYC, able to get $250K from US companies
Now suppose Alicia's company wants to hire Alice.
Certainly, I agree that it makes perfect sense in a free labor market for the US company to try to get Alice for $120K.
But the company I work for (a well-known US tech company) makes many claims about how "fair" its compensation program is. So what I'm inviting you to discuss is whether or not that company would have a hard time making an argument that adjusting according to the local labor market is actually "fair".
Essentially, Alice is being penalized for happening to be in a locality where her skills are valued less. But that is out of her control. Would it not be "fairer" for a company to adjust compensation as follows:
1. Firstly, according to skill / experience
And then, either
2a. That's it, end of story: skill / experience only.
or
2b. By local cost of living, within equivalent skill levels.
But for the many company’s that don’t, the justification is simply that the cost of Human resources is not based around output but around market dynamics like other resources. Fresh fruit in Japan costs more than it does in California not because the Japanese fruit is better per se, but because the cost of production is higher.
In what sense is the cost of production of a programmer higher in the USA than in the UK?
You keep trying to pretend that the local labor market is irrelevant. Until you accept that it isn't, or at the very least accept that companies don't think it is, you're going to keep talking past everyone here.
That's your problem right there - you believe them.
I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.
The thing is, we're used to the high pay now. Cut that and you're gonna cut efficiency. It's going to be hard to justify it.
Create bad will with your money makers good luck getting anywhere realistically.
There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble.
The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up.
I don't know which is right.
Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective.
The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.
For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects.
(I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)
- Big Tech has been expanding out of CA for over a decade (e.g. Amazon HQ2, Microsoft Atlanta HQ, etc.)
- Tech compensation is highly weighted toward equity (RSUs/etc.).
Taken together, these mean that more regions have at least one big tech player that's paying significantly in equity. This means that even if the salary portion of compensation is reduced for employees living outside SF, their overall compensation will likely still be very competitive.
At the same time, regional markets are heating up as non-tech companies increasingly are staffing up with the same React & Swift programmers needed in SF. Why leave family & move to SF for $180k base when you can make $150k base in Atlanta or Raleigh, where the cost of living is a fraction of SF?
(Given recent actions in the public markets, it's also worth nothing that equity-based compensation frequently is topped up to some extent when stock values remain depressed. It's been a number of years since this broadly happened, but we can generally expect the $100B+ club (at least) to issue meaningful retention grants if stocks stay down while the labor market remains tight.)
When there's zero friction and in fact a couple years successful track record involved in managing W2 staff in any country, the salary for new hires will reflect that.
No company will ignore this, because the potential savings are just monumental and there is no stigma attached.
Why work for AirBnB? You could work for another big tech company that actually has room to grow and produce some solid equity returns.
You bosses adopted open floor plan to save money, no matter how miserable it made your employees. Now you're "embracing" remote work only because you can't hire anyone to work in your miserable offices.
I was just recently in a situation where a host rejected the rental price after booking, and convinced the support team that i agreed to the adjusted price, which was then charged against my card. (To be fair there was some messaging back-and-forth between myself and the host prior to the booking that gave credence to this, but nothing official.) When i rejected the new price the host agreed to cancel, then again convinced airbnb to execute a guest cancellation, forfeiting all but $613 of a now $4400 booking.
It took me roughly a week with those funds tied up before i found someone in their support team (O.G. Lou G, i love you man) to actually listen to me and reverse everything.
This on the heels of renting a condo with hammer drills running upstairs 8 hours a day for the last three days of my trip and zero consideration or recompense from the host or airbnb.
(TV max volume from six feet away for relative comparison)
I just think it’s important to recognize that the hosts are completely carrying the company’s brand.
Unfortunately, hotels have been massively deteriorating in quality these last few years.. the hotels I've stayed in over the last few months weren't cleaning rooms more than once a week (and doing a half-assed job then), the front desk, kitchen, and room service were all massively understaffed, and they were more expensive than ever while still having the same awful internet/TV setups.
If AirBNB eliminates the ruinously large cleaning fees, I'll probably just stop staying in hotels for good
Days later after I was stable and out of the hospital, I found out that the cancellation gave me back I think $200 usd of the around $2000 I had paid....
At some level I kind of felt it as abusive. But I'm sure there are enough small prints somewhere to which I agreed to that explain why it's OK. And given my health issue I decided not to worry about that (puts things in perspective haha). I was more sad that I had to cancel the vacation/trip my wife and I planned, due to that emergency.
I've been near Todos Santos since January and the prices on Airbnb are, frankly, ludicrous for monthly rentals.
But then again that's the new normal, sky high rents everywhere.
Hopefully the infection hasn't spread to India, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.
The only way to pull off the whole, employee independence thing is to not concentrate resources in the hands of so few. You can work from your home, sure, but the CEO and board, for their risk receives outsized compensation and offers little control. It works because we a technologist breathing entrepreneurial air feel, one day I too will have millions in reserve so I won’t begrudge the few who are now.
I think a better response it to coordinate and not show up in the office or on zoom until…(I don’t know I am a contractor and have been working from home the past 12 years and really don’t have workplace complaints)