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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

No comment on Tesla but the divergence between big companies and startups on the WFH issue is the first new tangible benefit to working at a startup over a bigco in a while. They never reformed the ridiculous tax treatment of ISOs and AMT. The bull market made RSUs and 500k yearly pay realistic at bigcos even for middling employees.

But bigcos don’t trust their own employees and have to justify their massive capital investments in office space. So there is a real, tangible benefit to startup life over cushy bigco.

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Anecdotally, the startups in my circles are the ones pushing hardest for return to office. Startups move and change faster and therefore the advantages of being in-person are greater (I say this as someone who works remote and loves it, but admits the downsides)

There are a few startups that have gone all-in on remote and embraced that as a recruiting point. However, they seem to also being using that as a way to justify lower compensation. Makes sense, given that a lot of people will take a lower comp in exchange for full remote work.

Meanwhile, I’m actually seeing more remote job listings from companies like Google

Anecdotally, every startup I've been involved with for the last few years has completely embraced the WFH and used it to expand their hiring pools to the entire country. I've even seen some who are using tools like remote.com to hire staff outside the US.

I've also done a lot of interviewing over the last year and only one startup (Vanta) refused to allow long term remote. Every other company I talked to said they loved it.

Hi! I'm the head of engineering at Vanta, and as of earlier this year, we do support long-term remote. You may have talked to us right before then.

Feel free to reach out again if you're interested and interviewing -- we're still growing quickly!

Interestingly I see some startup founders (e.g. Delian from Varda Space) and some SF VC types on Twitter lobbying against WFH, so I wonder how long startups will be different from BigCo's. At the mean time my current client (a large Dutch insurance company) actually promotes WFH and says they will never go above an average office occupancy of 40%, which translates roughly to 2 mandatory office days per week.

I wonder if more companies will start giving in as they lose applicants to companies that offer WFH.

This assumes that WFH is equally as productive as in-person for all companies.

Some companies may have conclusively determined that for them, in-person is far more productive than WFH, and so losing certain applicants is an acceptable tradeoff.

As an anecdote, a friend works on a team that does a lot of hardcore low-level algorithm development. They require at least three days of in-person each week, since collaboratively doing math on whiteboards just doesn’t work as well over Zoom.

But even if this is true (and I definitely believe there is merit to f2f interactions), it will come down to the labor market in every respective sector. Software engineers, for example, are in short demand, so if they prefer WFH, they will go to a company that offers that to them. Obviously not every job is appropriate for WFH, [insert YMMV disclaimer here]

“Never” - I don’t have much confidence in things people say when they say it with such surety. E.g. if they found out more office days equals more productivity, they would stick with 40%?

Agreed, although that is actually my own phrasing, so I'm probably to blame here :)

Plenty of bigcos still allow for 100% WFH.

True but plenty don’t as well. See Apple.

ISO?

Incentive Stock Options, I assume.

Incentive Stock Options. The US government makes you pay taxes on the full paper gain the moment you exercise even though a real exit at that price is still a long ways off or likely still low probability. It makes average employees either bound to an employer (and never get favorable capital gains), or they have to be wealthy enough to pay the full tax hit the year of exercise and not be destitute if it never pays off later.

In reality the rich get richer etc. etc.

> or they have to be wealthy enough to pay the full tax hit the year of exercise

Or they could take an 83(b) election when granted the options. Or they could exercise some fraction of their options. Or they could sell some of the shares in the multibillion-dollar secondary market when they exercise to pay for the taxes.

Your broader point stands. But there are more choices than “eat it.”

All a bunch of bandaids to get around what is the fundamental injustice. And the secondary market isn’t exactly active for small people and there is no guarantee the board will approve a sale.

> no guarantee the board will approve a sale

Most companies don’t require Board approval for transfers. (There are better ways to moderate the process.) Companies that do are the ones choosing to restrict their employees, not the tax code.

>Or they could sell some of the shares in the multibillion-dollar secondary market when they exercise to pay for the taxes.

Effectively you can't unless the startup allows for it. I have stock and when I tried to sell on the secondary market exchanges all said that there's a lot of interest but due to the company always exercising right of first refusal no one will bother.

Its not often mentioned in these threads that you can get what you paid in AMT back in the form of tax credits in subsequent years. Thats worth keeping in mind if you are doing a risk calculation about the probability that the valuation of the company might drop before your shares become liquid.

Words words words - if all of this can be mitigated then why have it in the first place? You work at a startup that hits and need to shell out 6 or 7 figures to exercise… “Bu bu but you can get it back!!” Just change the rule then! What is the benefit? It only harms employees of new ventures

My comment was intended to help people who might be in that situation better understand how AMT works, not to justify it.

But since you ask, the stated purpose of AMT is to make sure high earning individuals are not using tax loopholes to avoid paying any taxes. I assume it applies to ISOs to prevent employees from being compensated only in ISOs to get the better tax treatment.

Having paid AMT myself on exercising ISOs, I concede its an annoying additional thing you have to consider when taking an offer from a startup. But its not some grave injustice. Tech employees at successful startups with in the money options will be just fine.

Incentive Stock Option. SOs that vest over time or via some other performance metric

Interesting. I have no hard data, but anecdotally it is the startups complaining about WFH in my LinkedIn network.

Big co still wants people back, but will have a few remote teams for those who won’t come.

A large factor at big companies is layers of administration and middle management that are not necessary under WFH. Who do you think is producing studies saying WFH doesn't work?

> middle management that are not necessary under WFH

I think it's one of these lies that are repeated ad nauseam and now many people believe it. Managers are important and necessary no matter how their reports work. Before the pandemic I had bosses living in another country. Does it mean they were unnecessary? This logic doesn't hold any water.

I even think an argument could be made that they are more necessary. On the list of the many things a manager is responsible for are work culture and team cohesion. These things Twitter more active effort in a remote culture. You also need more active effort and structure to facilitate what otherwise might have gotten covered at a water-cooler conversion.

> layers of administration and middle management that are not necessary under WFH

How come they are not necessary under WFH?

The only obvious administration which is not needed (or needed less) is office management. So the people who make sure the kitchenett is clean, the toilets are stocked with toilet paper, etc etc. For every other type of “management” why would you need less of it all of a sudden?

They're necessary unless we've magically figured out how to give every employee twice as many hours in a day to keep up with communications and sit in meetings.

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