Why is remote work seen as a gift?
cdoyle.me
cdoyle.me
I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that can truthfully deduct the cost-for-living from the compensation they are offering. It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.
Also, from my personal point of view, it's the time I'm saving for myself, not the money. Electricity is quite expensive nowadays, and my standing desk and audio/video equipment also wasn't payed by my employer.
What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".
//edit: fixed typos and added a/v equipment to my ramblings
Imagine haggling with a supplier like this. Crazy we put up with it.
Does it have challenges? Yes. Am I a valued employee? Yes, I am potentially one of the most valuable employees after my first year in my team. Easily top 20%.
I visit my team every few months for a week. Mostly the point is so we can go out for dinner and I get to have some drinks with them. The workday itself is changed very little by being in person.
That's like saying the price of goods and services should be about the cost of producing them. No no no: the price is about what buyers will bear. In the same way, salaries are about what the worker will bear.
If there is an arbitrage lever to maximize profit, any business will use it.
I just don't think this is true for the overwhelming majority of employees, including developers.
Corporations have enough staff that they can lay off hundreds or thousands of workers without a single worry. They can hold out not paying you the rate you want for much longer than you can afford not paying your bills and eating. Eventually, you will accept a lower salary and if you don't there are plenty of others who will. The vast majority of all employed people have next to no leverage compared to the companies that hire them and companies know it.
The large problem with the collusion before was that the 3-4 that already paid top of the market salaries colluded to keep them the same. It doesn’t mean they weren’t still top of the market for someone with a given level of experience.
But a professional in a small team, usually witha bus factor of 1? This means a hard time finding a new employee + months of training, while the old worker probably found a new job before they even quit at the first one.
There are plenty of blogposts from the other side, about "never give a raise to a flight-risk, because their loyalty is already shot". The business strategy is to quietly hire a (typically cheaper) replacement, then fire the uppity employee.
This depends on how happy/able the employee is to leave to find an alternative.
A while ago I was at a trade fair in Germany and happened to see an advert from a jobs website, it read (roughly translated): "Hate your job ... ? It's your own fault!" (ie that you've not yet left the job you claim to hate...)
Must be nice being wealthy. Most people can barely go a single month without a paycheck.
> severance pay or unemployment insurance
Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
And this is quite good compared to what happens almost anywhere outside of Europe.
> Transaction costs for employer depends
For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal. Only small companies suffer significantly when losing an employee.
Not necessary wealthy. For people with median pay, it is more about financial responsibility. According to EU-SILC data more than half EU population has financial reserves for at lest three months.
> Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.
Here in Czechia it is 2 months notice period, then severance pay is 3 months (for > 2 years of employment), and then 5 months of government unemployment benefits on ~half pay. So 10 months to find a new job.
> For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal
Even in large businesses you can have small teams with domain experts, losing them can be costly.
Most corporate cultures are inherently authoritarian, with money being used as a proxy for power.
Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority.
Stock is an even more specific proxy for power, which is why stock options that have real value are usually reserved for those at the top of the hierarchy.
This is also why remote working is unpalatable. Even if it increases productivity it also enhances worker autonomy and reduces the power differential. That's not acceptable in an authoritarian culture.
Attitudes to remote work can be a useful indicator of how central hierarchy is in the culture.
Why does any company every pay more than the legally required minimum, then?
If you have 10 employees and you want to hire 3 more but to do that you have to increase their pay by 25% in relation to others then you might decide not to because this decreases power for everyone (should they find out what you're paying these others)
Oh come on. This is a cynical or Marxist take, but it's pretty obviously untrue. A flea market, farmers market, FB marketplace doesn't have a substantial power imbalance. A market may have a power imbalance, but it is not required. People can exchange goods/services at equal power, and routinely do so. And if I understand economics correctly, that's the purpose of a "free" market: no artificial power imbalances.
It's only later laissez-faire and neoliberal capitalists that turned "free market" synonymous with a lack of regulation and a playground for the biggest and most powerful companies.
Arguments against will be that value "is" what people are willing to pay for them, which is some combination of supply and demand, but I find this just too simple. Technically it's true that the "value" of something is the price someone last paid for it, but then we get situations where we say a Bitcoin is worth 40k usd or whatever tf the price is right now. And then suddenly its value is 20k, and if you ask why you'll get thirty answers, all wrong. Maybe the price was 40k to someone and 20k to someone else, but the value? Nah. And the price alone tells us basically nothing.
The interesting thing for me is the third person. Me, in this case, to whom Bitcoin is worth 0, or less than 0 because I would consider it a labor cost to own a Bitcoin (figuring out a wallet or whatever). How does someone to whom a Bitcoin is worth 40k then then around and say "Bitcoin is worth 40k" to someone like me?
To capitalists trying to nod their heads and say ah the price is high, supply must be down or demand must be up, I say, good luck predicting human behavior, that usually goes great.
For me though I agree with you, the value of goods is some combination of their production costs, in any meaning of the word "value" that matters.
"But what if someone spends an entire lifetime of labor producing a single widget nobody wants? Clearly demand plays a part in value!" I don't know, go away. Why would that happen? Sure, ok, also include in value calculus that hopefully people only make things that people actually want. (the capitalist argument here is, the profit is to be found in the margin between cost to create and the price set by desirability - to which I say exactly, profit should be eliminated)
Edit: someone else had a comment they deleted talking about how profit is necessary so as to have surplus to save in case of equipment failure, I'll paste my response here cause my thumbs put in the labor so by golly I'll get the Payout
Traditionally, are profits sequestered to be used as savings like that? In my experience the equipment breaks and both companies go bankrupt because the executives in the c corp spent the profit on themselves already and are happy to just go find a new investment.
Actually in my experience the other company, the co-op, doesn't go bankrupt, because the workers are smart enough to safeguard their well being with rainy day funds. This might be one of the reasons coops are repeatedly shown to be far more resilient than traditional companies.
While I am not an expert, I remember reading about it on "The Classical School: The Turbulent Birth of Economics in Twenty Extraordinary Lives", by Callum Williams. It made sense to me.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49374783
While linking to the sources is useful, I would appreciate any argument correcting the above since, as I said, I am not an expert and it makes perfect sense to me.
This is not true; Marx's model of exploitation (known to modern economists as the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Model (PECP)) does not concern itself with what demand and offer agree on within a labor negotiation. Marx says that workers do not sell their labor, they sell their labor-time (e.g. X units of time/goods) during which they exercise their labor-power. The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced during that time is where this 'exploitation' comes in.
The idea that exploitation is a matter of opinion or agreement adds a moral or justicial spin to what Marx considered to be a fact of the capitalist economy. Whether the people involved are happy with the situation or agree to it does not change this discrepancy of value or its representation in money.
Marxism is explicitly amoral, it does not concern itself with that is morally right. It is a social science that analyses the contradictions within the material world and their consequences.
> The discrepancy between the value of the time and the value produced
I am thinking how can one value this time. If it is valued by the market (how much someone is willing to pay for it) we would end up with the same problem, no?
It must be intrinsically valued, I am assuming.
The capitalist wants to pay as little as possible per hour, but will on average long term not be able to pay less than the cost of living. Capitalists pay just enough so that workers as a class reproduce themselves (so there are more workers), but less than the value the workers produce.
What is the "value"? Well, the prices cannot be explained only in terms of offer and demand (a society with an offer of 100 pens and demand for 100 pens and offer of 100 planes and demand for 100 planes still would not sell pens and planes for the same price) nor entirely because of the price of raw materials (because this only postpones the explanation: from where came the price of the raw materials?). It also cannot be explained only based on subjectivity, because there exists a number, which is a very objective measure, representing the price if you balance offer, demand, assume competition and discard several perturbations. The "value" tries to explain this basis value that later will became the price and show objectively and numerically how the wealth is produced and distributed.
This "value" is measured by Marx as the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce the product. Given a car, the value represented by a car can be measured by the mean time necessary for the workers to produce that car in the industry plus the value transferred by the machines and tools used by those workers (whose value came from the workers that produced these machines and tools). Both manual and intellectual work need to be taken into account and you can also assume that some complex tasks or more intense work can produce more value than simple tasks in the same time.
Given this, you can compare the value produced by a worker with the value of the things that the worker can buy with its salary. This is how Marx measures these things and shows the exploitation in the society.
There is bid price, ask price, and last sale price.
Do they indicate "value" to the specific people making those transactions, bids and asks? Sure. Does it have to be the same for everybody? No, and that's why trade happens.
Being a shareholder requires capital, which the vast majority of people don't have.
It's like asking "why shouldn't workers work for subsistence income instead of asking for more money?": the obvious answer is "because the only reason they would consider doing so when they don't have a choice"
But that tendency comes with a lot of asterisks.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted though.
Seems like a dangerous analytical framework.
This is literally why one function of the state is to act as a non-market-participant so it can provide a safety net. There are some things markets can't and shouldn't try to do.
The market has been taking care of it for too long, we're getting too fat, we need a few decades of food controlled by the police to get back into shape.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the average American waistline, but yes, this part is absolutely true. Unhealthily so.
You're not helping your argument with this example imo.
If I am a CEO of a remote-first company and it truly doesn't matter for me where the employees are located it makes no sense to overpay for labor in high cost of living area.
So if there's a company A that pays $X in high COL area, and $X/3 in a low COL area. And then there's a company B that pays $X/2 everywhere. Then people from the low COL area would go to the company B, and people from the high COL area would go to the company A. As a result, company B gets the same results 2 times cheaper.
Repeat this process enough times and the salaries will be equalized. Of course it's not immediate, there are companies rigidly set in their ways; there are people who won't move no matter what; there is limited supply of both companies and workers; etc, etc. But eventually the market forces will do their thing.
The assumption dorwi's asking you to make is that moving to Silicon Valley somehow makes you work twice as fast, or that only engineers who work twice as fast live there.
Basically, lunarhustler is making the assumption that humans who can program end up at roughly the same quality no matter where they live or how much you pay them, while dorwi is making the assumption that how much you are paid is directly related to your productive output.
Beyond that, highest paid people I know aren't paid well because they're 5x as productive, they're paid well because they solve really hard problems - the types of problems you don't run into at most companies.
To use an analogy: neurosurgeons aren't expensive because they're really good at "doctoring". Even if you had all the $$$ in the world you wouldn't consult one for a sprained ankle.
After you're necessity for that market equalization is long gone.
We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize. The Market is manipulated and owned, and not by us. The tipping point is past, and the majority of society has yet to realize, our only hope at this point probably requires violence and capital destruction, sadly.
And who is 'us' in that comment?
Seems to be all going pretty well.
"Normal people in the western world are better off than they were at any/nearly any given time in the past."
and
"There is a staggering amount of wealth inequality in the western world right now, and there are very concerning signs about what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture."
Not sure what you mean 'what it is doing to our politics, economy, and culture.'? All those are doing ok as far as I can tell. At least not worse than in the past.
I'm talking about inequality within the developed nations—specifically, the US (I believe it also affects the UK; I don't feel qualified to talk about such effects beyond that, due to lack of information).
As for what's happening with our politics...if you can't see that the current situation is wildly different than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago, then I'm sorry, but you have not been paying close attention. We have people proclaiming themselves as actual literal neo-Nazis storming the Capitol building in an attempted coup, in open collaboration with certain members of Congress and the wife of a sitting Supreme Court judge. And while some of the people involved in the Jan 6 coup attempt are, indeed, being convicted as they should be, to my knowledge, none of the politicians who are complicit have been publicly investigated. This is not normal, it is not healthy, and while it is not entirely due to the increasing wealth inequality, to claim that that has no part in the level of polarization today and the rise of extremism...well, it would be an extraordinary claim, and thus require extraordinary evidence to support it.
This is a case where, at least in certain respects, times are provably getting worse than they were before.
If politics are too fuzzy and nebulous for you, look at generational economics: I don't recall the precise figures off the top of my head, but the baby boomers are still holding wealth vastly disproportionate to their share of the demographics, and younger generations have vastly less income and wealth than they did at the same time in their lives, while over the same period, prices of many important things—like homes, health care, and higher education—have all risen much faster than the rate of inflation. The kind of house that someone working minimum wage could have afforded in 1960, they'd now need a white-collar job (probably requiring a college degree) and several years of savings to buy.
You can't just handwave all of that away as "eh, people have complained about times getting worse since the Ancient Greeks".
Can't afford to buy a house or start a family at anything like the rate 50 years ago that's for sure.
You can always afford to start a family. The question is what trade-offs you want to make.
People used to do with less.
It might be there are people who are able and willing to burn money for a long time. Sure as hell it doesn't stop me the startup founder to set whatever salary ranges I believe are efficient.
We don't give people different offers based on where they say they live.
Rather, we have a salary range for a job, and we look for people who are attracted by that salary range. This usually means people in SF, NYC, and other high COL cities disqualify themselves, so we end up hiring many people outside of tech hubs.
In other words, if you simply stop hiring in the top 20% COL cities, you can hire talent at significantly less salary ranges simply because we're not competing with Google, Amazon, etc in Silicon Valley or NYC.
Which allows us to hire a greater quantity of people. E.g. 2 engineers at $150k instead of 1 engineer at $300k.
But the key to this is not making a salary decision based on location. Instead, just set a salary range and you'll find what parts of the country people are willing to work at that range.
I have my home address, but I actually only spend maybe 4-6 months of the year physically located there. This kind of pisses off most employers due to the tax situation as well as them treating it as if I'm gaming the system by being physically located for much of the year in lower cost of living areas (though sometimes I've even gone to higher cost of living areas for months at a tiem).
A situation like this where the salary doesn't really depend on location so it wouldn't be treated like I'm actively trying to game anything would actually be preferred in my situation, and to many others I know as well.
Exactly. We've had multiple employees move to different cities/states during their tenure. That wasn't a problem with us (from an employer perspective) and there was also no expectation that salary would be adjusted in response to a move, since location wasn't factored into the original offer in the first place.
For run of the mill junior-ish employees who are treated as disposable cogs by my company, your strategy worked effectively. So we ended up with junior employees in LCOL or foreign countries (mostly Canada and Mexico) and senior levels in SFBA / NYC.
There is no real equilibrium in markets, only forces that push constantly in one direction (maximizing profits, lowering costs, increasing capital efficiency).
In fact, if you think about it, the upper limit to profit margin is
profit_margin = (price_sell - price_buy) / price_sell
It's mostly about what you can negotiate to be fair. Refusing to pay you more is their way of telling you they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer where you are which is legitimate. They will reassess if you show them a better offer from a competitor if they really want you. A big part of negotiation rests on your best alternative to what's being negotiated.
> It's different, and you need to adjust your processes
So you actually agree it's complicated from a company point of view.
Except when they collude to drive down wages or pay for laws to make it harder for workers to organize keeping them weak. Also "where you are" has been made irrelevant for many workers because they can get employment anywhere without going anywhere. That means what's really being said is that they don't believe you can get something better than what they offer anywhere.
Except that employees would do the same thing that employers do all the time and walk across the line as soon as someone offers them a compelling deal, even if it isn't at the "collusion" price.
Perhaps the company doesn't see it worthwhile to argue over peanuts.
Btw, it's getting bigger in the US as well over the least few decades.
Singapore is a place with a smaller gap, and less regulation. That's part of the reason they went from third world to first world.
Where you put your developers shouldn't make much of a difference to how much business you have?
However you are up to something: big cities tend to be more productive. That's the reason people and businesses put up with the higher rents and other inconveniences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
A good indicator is the finances of the company. If you are going to be another cog contributing marginal value, for whatever reason that is, then it's going to be difficult to argue for better salary (thought they MIGHT give a higher salary, to everyone, like e.g. Google). If you can however have a big impact and they have good revenue or funding, then it's a lot easier to argue for higher salaries: "so you are making $300k MRR or just raised $5M of VC money with 4 employees? And you have more tickets and bug fixes to improve growth and reduce churn that you can feasibly do? Great, let's talk how I can effectively help to slash those tickets and then we can discuss my compensation*".
Classic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
* though if the company is crushing it so much, and specially because your marginal tax rate might be already at 50%, evaluate asking for some Stock Options/RSUs/etc.
which means you're a contractor, rather than an employee. I do think this is a better way tbh, as you can potentially own all of your healthcare costs, and optimize your taxes properly. And you can probably charge a lot more as a contractor, to make up for the lack of job security etc.
It is a poor reflection of our tax system that running your own entity that you then pay yourself out of can have lower taxes than simply earning money as an employee.
In the city where I currently live, lots of small businesses try to claim that their employees are contractors. Those businesses depend on the ignorance of their workers.
In France, companies also like to contract out a lot, either to "freelance" or regular outsourcing shops.
The reason I put freelance in quotes is that there's no such thing here, legally. You have to have some form of company, through which you invoice the client.
But then, whenever you want to get the money out of the company to pay rent and eat, you'll be hit by, more or less, the same taxes the employer would pay. For a given unit of work, it's not cheaper to contract out, there's no real tax loophole.
As far as I know, the state doesn't really care. It may even prefer it, since contractor rates are usually higher than salaries, so they get to get more tax.
The only situation where it would crack down on this is if the would-be employee complained. Since this is considered a "precarious" arrangement, if the contractor can prove that they're basically an outsourced employee, they can ask to be converted to an actual employee and the state will back them up.
However, depending on what you do, people can end up paying less in taxes overall as a contractor because you have more flexibility for deductions. There are very little options for an employee to deduct any expenses in the US, whereas, a contractor could potentially deduct the cost to commute to an office, their cellphone and home internet (if used for work) and even a portion of their rent/mortgage for a home office.
Cities definitely don’t have the resources to track you down and I’m not sure employers especially larger ones have any mechanisms in place to keep track. I’m not advocating for this just surprised it’s not more well known. Though I suspect it’s common and just not talked about much for obvious reasons. Certainly there are also jobs that require you to physically work from a given state as well for example.
How do so called digital nomads handle it from a tax perspective? Do they maintain a residence for tax purposes? Is that any different?
What makes it more problematic is that it's not just tax offices that would be interested in finding out. The company you work at may also get in trouble with the tax office as they pay employment taxes too, so they are probably interested in the fact that you're deceiving them. If your manager suspects you're not being truthful and follows up with HR this could easily get you in trouble. As remote work becomes more popular, it becomes more likely that companies will pay attention to this.
Knowing all of that, I'd find it quite hard to justify playing these games. It just seems like asking for trouble, with a pretty good chance of getting it.
For example, it's de facto not illegal to drive 5mph over the speed limit on the highway. No police officer will pull you over for that unless they have some other prior reason. So in that sense, lack of enforcement has made the practice legal.
You can, for example, get employed at 10 companies and then outsource all the work (someone got caught doing it and it was in the news).
If you want to cheat, you can, but you probably should not be discussing it on hacker news.
They probably have a "permanent address" at a friend's house or through some service. And it's probably technically fraud. That said, the US is not really setup for citizens not to have a permanent address in one state--even if just for things like driver's licenses. You can do things by the books for tax purposes but I suspect a lot of people moving around don't.
https://www.annuity.org/personal-finance/taxes/residency-req...
Ultimately it comes down laws, regulations and taxes. Company wants to make it easy for itself to deal with that.
You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.
California FTB very much cares if you are collecting SV salary but are not paying CA taxes by living in LCOL areas. Unless you are a CPA, please do not spread lies.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/publications...
If the reason is bullshit, there's no need to bullshit back.
If the reason isn't bullshit (e.g. coz they want you in their Manhattan office on a moment's notice) then having a virtual address won't help.
WA has no state income tax, but a beefier payroll tax, so it's cheaper for me but more expensive for the company.
You know the old saying, noting is certain except death, and the will of the department of taxation for the state of (California|New York).
.. where are those tax exempt? In the UK they're treated as income at the time of vesting, which is not unreasonable https://frazerjames.co.uk/rsus-a-tech-employees-guide/
So yeah, you do need to learn about the different examples. It's something people just talk about in the valley and ultimately/generally is where the "high compensation" from tech comes from. In other countries/cities people don't even know what any of these things are.
[1] https://zajacgrp.com/insights/what-you-need-to-know-about-do...
There are perfectly valid reasons why that's not the case, see here:
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...
For example, moving to a low cost of living area is something I did as a choice so that I could save more, and this came with a cost: my friends live further away now. They’re saying I should be penalised for this by not being able to save more compared to their employees who stayed in the high cost of living area.
What a bunch of hypocrites. The perfectly know that what a person is currently making does not come "organically" into the conversation. The employer does whatever is in its power to have this information from the candidate.
But they are not hiring you for "value", you are just a body in a seat filling a "role".
Real game to play is: you ask for X money, they propose Y money, agree and do Y amount of work and not the X amount of work. It's entirely reasonable to "quite-quit" even at non-minimum-salary compensation levels.
Play the game as fits your needs. For example, adjust your work output and use the freed time to look for a better employer.
Also, if anybody asks, I live in Bermuda.
What, no! It should be about what offers you can get from other places. If your offer is close to your local salaries, then that mean the company thinks you would have a hard time getting a better offer from somewhere else.
For example, I can get x$ from Google, but that doesn't mean SAP or ASML should also pay me x$: I don't know anything about their respective ecosystems, so I wouldn't be able to contribute much of value.
It's complicated because a large number of managers haven't figured out how to manage a remote team.
Remote work does an exposé on the usefulness of these roles. And of course, those holding them, would be eager for everyone to return to the office work theater.
> duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code...
To think that code can be “fixed permanently” shows a complete lack of understanding and insight into programming, and brings to mind the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect - if Graeber is so wildly wrong about a subject I know well, why do I trust him on those I don’t?
More so than ever with the push for MVP and agile ticket stat chasing.
I imagine that the only bug that gets fixed "permanently" is in a product that nobody uses enough for it to need change. Like some failed MVPs.
And it looks great at the start, the project is making great progress until people start to leave and the tech debt starts to kick in. By that stage all the "high performance" agile rock stars have pissed off to another company and left behind their legacy.
And then its death by 1000 cuts, things aren't logged correctly, no proper exception handling rather just do a print(e) and falling over, any integrations with 3rd parties aren't documented when they break and its just a mess.
(I know that in eg France is basically impossible to fire people, so I can see why they might have lots of bullshit jobs.)
There's always the human factor in capitalism. And with the human factor comes ego.
IIRC, Graeber roughly compares CEOs to feudal kings. You want more people under your rule as a metric of success. Also, the "king" often seeks to have a big "court" (top-level managers) to reflect their prestige.
The effect is cascading. The "king's court" members want their own smaller courts (second-level managers) and compete with their peers for power, as measured by the headcount. As we go down, unecessary hires will start to occur, only to justify a title.
And everyone involved in the theater has an incentive to turn a blind eye on the situtation.
See also how share prices often increase when layoffs are announced.
Whether we hire a dedicated manager or have the responsibility rotate among teammates really depends on a bunch of factors both internal and external to the team / company.
Most people who get a job in America (can't speak for other places) are not interested in managing. It's too messy. If more doers took on management work - we'd be able to push out shitty managers. Until that happens though, my recommendation is to immediately move to a different team or company as soon as a shitty manager is installed.
In salary per value to the company you are extremely overpaid, assuming you live in the west.
I don't think you want to open that can of worms.
Edit to add:
All those people moving from India to the US for the money could then stay in India.
You're not competing with the remote work crowd. You are competing with local cost of labor. If the market switches to just value added, unrelated to location, then you're screwed.
The big problem is that labour in India isn't all that productive. Offshoring isn't some magic bullet. Companies have tried that and are still trying.
Google, Microsoft etc have offices in India. They also keep their offices in the US and Europe not just out of imaginary obligation to westerners, but because it makes economic sense.
See also how Apple still does lots of the design work in the US, but manufactures in China. They would off-shore more off the design work as well, if they could. (And if Apple could but would not, someone else would do it and eat their lunch.)
There are great people in India. It's just more conducive for them to get better pay if they manage to get an H1B and move to the US.
If they could just "work remote", then you (as an American, or at least someone who can and does work in the US? Well, applies to any western country) are no longer competing with "people from India who manage to get an H1B and have a family situation compatible with moving countries", but suddenly with ALL qualified workers in India.
Big tech in the west employs HUGE numbers of expats from lower paid countries. A very large portion of which Big tech paid for the H1B (or equiv) and relocation costs.
If you are remote, then you're only valued on your output. And I'm not saying you're in a poor position against a random engineer from India (nor presumably from a random engineer in the US), but you'll be in a poor position against the equivalent of your amazing local coworker who moved from India (or hell, any European country with less pay) because that's where the job was.
If the job is "anywhere, because it's remote", then I'm saying that you may not be on the winning side of this change.
Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
> Opening up "work from anywhere" is not like offshoring to save costs. More like given two equally valuable people, why should an employer pay a premium to one, just because they chose to live in a higher cost of living country?
Yes, and that's progress! That's good!
Most just think they're clever and exploiting the system, and the thought that they'd get paid lowly Texas (or Ohio) salaries never occurred to them.
Though I do think 'off-shoring' from California to the Ohio vs off-shoring from California to India have important aspects in common.
For better or worse, agglomeration effects are real, and for some ineffable reasons software people are more productive when located in Silicon Valley, rather than Ohio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
However the pandemic forced an investment in making remote-work work. That's not even so much an investment in technology (hardware or software), but more taking the time and effort to figure out what works and doesn't work. It's full of soft factors.
Why pay to get H1B and shipping for someone from India when you can just hire that same person in place and not only save on that, but also salary?
Offshoring in my experience does not usually work on an individual basis.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. It usually turns out that these lower paid employees are significantly worse, and Indian nationals who are highly competent demand salaries similar to Americans.
But it's literally the exact same people, in this case. Big tech currently pays to move them to the US, and then pays them higher salary.
That is very different from spinning up a department in India.
All else being equal, the only reason to hire a distant programmer is to pay them less. From the firms perspective they can't easily tell if a distant programmer is more effective than a local programmer so it is a struggle (market-for-lemons style) to justify paying the same amount. If the costs are equal, may as well hire local.
It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee (including the risk of a bad hire), not the value they provide. Companies can't measure the value individual programmers provide anyway.
You could reframe these points so that they look like advantages of global businesses... you'll have someone to vouch for and evaluate people across multiple talent pools (increasing talent supply), the majority of your team will never be sanctioned simultaneously (diversifying that risk), and as for cultural norms, don't we all know that diversity is strength.
Saying there are no advantages to global remote first besides cost is underselling it; there are important advantages, for one
> It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee
asynchronous remote makes documentation and written communication central, which at the end of the day makes it easier to replace employees.
Cost is important too, if you can literally hire 50% more workforce that's one hell of a deal.
> All else being equal, the only reason to hire a distant programmer is to pay them less.
Yes. To give some example where not everything else is equal:
There can be benefits from covering more timezones, or benefits from covering different jurisdictions (and tax regimes).
Tell that to the kid getting paid 14 cents an hour on the other side of the planet to make your $1,500 iPhone.
Most people will be envious of the transaction relationship be it employee/employer or consumer/seller and feel that they were cheated, regardless.
The wage was too low, the product was priced to high from one side and the wage was too high and the product priced too cheap from the other.
There is actual cheating but it seems like people are never(rarely) actually satisfied, and social media has made it worse.
Making remote work and pay for productivity more common and accepted, would help that kid. That's good!
Employment rules, customs, and laws vary by at least state and country (and minimum wages vary by city). How would I know what laws applied to the employment relationship?
Do you report and pay federal taxes and state taxes separately? Or do you just deal with IRS and they forward the docs and the money to the state you live in?
Yes. They are separate sets of forms that you pay (or get refunded) independently. They're basically unrelated exxcept to the degree that deductions/refunds may come into play.
The employer is making various deductions and payments, e.g. into unemployment, based on the state you live in. So your employer really does need to know your state of residence.
NH has sovereignty to set their minimum wage (subject to the limit of the federal minimum wage). They might do that to attract business there. Massachusetts has the same sovereignty to set their minimum wage. Which state should give up their sovereignty so that an employer [possibly out of state] could practically hire people without knowing where they live?
You suggest how much you are willing to pay me to the government. And I get information how much I'll be earning after taxes and required social security fees.
If I don't agree or the amount you proposed is illegally low then I can't work for you until you decide to bump up the salary.
If I agree I start working. You pay to the government the full amount. Government taxes it and transfers the rest to me as a salary.
If you pay too little or too late you are on the hook with the government. But you don't need to know where I live or what the taxes are.
With electronic system the whole procedure of hiring could probably take an afternoon or less and zero knowledge.
It's a balancing act. If companies pay based on value added to the company, they will wind up paying more than average in low COL areas, and less than average in high COL areas; so they won't be able to hire people in high COL areas at all. If they scale pay based on COL, they'll be able to hire people in both areas. So yes, it's not "fair" to people in lower COL areas, but it's not arbitrary either.
You say it like it's a bad thing. If they can hire people for relatively cheap purely from low COL areas, and make the company work, they should totally go for that. That's the whole reason behind having offices in even cheaper areas like Vietnam, instead of just the American Midwest.
Of course, if you can't actually run your business purely on people from low COL areas, that means there must be something the people from the high COL areas bring to the table that's worth it for your business. And that's proves the original commenter's point that the company should pay you according what value you bring to the company.
It's called the "job market" for a reason. Both sides (employers and employees) are trying to maximize their returns. It's never going to be solely about the value we as developers (or any other occupation) bring to the company.
Keep in mind that not all companies are competing for talent globally. [1]
The real question is whether companies that compete in a local or regional market will be able to continue to pay local rates to anyone with specialized skills who can also go remote, or if they’ll just give up and find some other solution.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Sounds like your interview at companies who employ the former, not later.
https://www.zenefits.com/workest/cost-of-living-vs-cost-of-l...
They all want to sell nationally or internationally whilst paying based on what they think the local market value for labour should be.
I’ve worked remote and managed remote teams for a long time. I would say it is indeed more complicated.
You may not struggle with remote work and may do fine interacting remotely, but that’s not true for a lot of people. It’s very common to hire good engineers into remote positions and discover that they can’t focus at home, they misinterpret digital communications, or that they just wanted a remote job because they read somewhere that they could work 2 hours per day and nobody would be able to tell.
The obvious retort is that you just need to hire “right”, but that’s not an easy thing to do.
"You may not struggle with office work and may do fine interacting in person, but that’s not true for a lot of people."
I have people who do far better at home than in the office, and some on the other end of the spectrum. People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.
What is hard is tooling and setting up processes that work for remote people. The world is at the start of figuring that out at scale and there is lots to learn. But hiring is always going to be the same game, finding the right people for the role and its requirements.
If I were hiring for an oil rigger it would not be more complex than hiring for a great developer. It will definitely be different, but all recruitment is different and sees different challenges. But it's always going to be about knowing what to ask, knowing your industry, and doing your very best to find a process that selects fairly and efficiently. Remote work hiring is just a different challenge that we are all just getting used to. People are hard problems to solve.
Are you claiming that the complexity of managing in-office is usually, roughly the same as managing remote teams? I'm asking towards magnitude/degree, not if both are sometimes true.
If not, you are stating the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes"
In my experience, more people struggle with remote than in-office. I've found a lot of satisfaction in returning to a primarily in-person team for this reason. But that's just my experience, an anecdote. Not everyone should be like me, and I'm not saying everyone should return to the office or that WFH is bad. What I am frustrated about is that it seems like many people take dogmatic pro-WFH positions and do not acknowledge the nuance of these issues.
Case in point, you struggle with WFH, others thrive. I just don't see any problems with employees not enjoying WFH as being significantly more complex than, say, an issue with someone struggling to get into the office on time. Or being stressed out by a stupidly long commute, or having no time with their children. And so on. There are pros and cons abundant that pretty much level it all out.
You really need a team of like-minded people w/r to remork work. They started working as a company with people from different company locations forming "a team". And after Covid started, they realized it's perfectly fine to add people to the team that do not sit in offices.
Thinking back, at my past employer, we had a subsidiary in another city, and failed to work with them. It would have been so much easier if we'd been able to do that. But management didn't like it, so it didn't work.
How could a statement about recruitment be contorted into one about management
An employer, especially one that isn't just a Human being but a company, will only pay you enough to make you sign and incentivize you to work. They don't care at all how you make your living.
And there are tons of just dumb things in remote work policy today. My company does cost of living adjustment based on the state you’re in. So if you were to move to a high cost city in a low cost state (Bozeman, MT), it’s a brutal effective pay cut. But if you move to low cost city in an expensive state (Yreka, CA), it’s a huge effective pay raise. Despite, theoretically, the employer getting the same value.
I think these will sort themselves out over time, but it’s annoying in the short term.
They refused to even talk about it, even as I protested they'd wasted so much of my time and I was about to sign. I walked away and found a much better paying job elsewhere.
Your salary has never been even related to the value you bring the company. That is just the absolute maximum they're willing to pay. Your salary is the lowest your company thinks they can pay to get a suitable employee. They pay remote workers less because there are remote workers willing to work for less, simple as that.
There is some correlation, don't get me wrong, but it looks like people are generally undervalued at the low end of the compensation spectrum and overvalued at the high end.
no shortage of threads here or reddit or elsewhere: "new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years" and the like.
there is a reason jumping every 2-3 years gives a better raise than sitting in the same job.
Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.
I guess that can happen. I suspect in the majority of cases, you keep your shitpay even if you become a supremely efficient pillar.
Employers are not friends, they're businesses who thinks like psychopaths, so manage your expectations and get as much money as you can from them. You need them but they need you, so get the juice and move on when it gets hairy.
It was identified as a stupid idea from the start but I was curious what kind of concessions it involves. Like you cant just call a useful method anymore, it has to be known what it costs precisely given the exact work load.
It didn't take long for my mind to be blown by the completely insane overhead. Counting consumption of system resources is consumption too! While exact calculation is not very complicated every step of the way I felt tempted to just estimate it. Sorting out micro transactions in a secure way???...
Eventually I got distracted by the parallels with our society. Job agencies here charge 95% of the salary earned but the administrative overhead hardly ends there! The real cost is hidden in the estimated stuff. After all the taxes and subsidies are calculated someone at the tax office has to repeat the calculations. In some almost fixed percentage of cases mistakes are made and it takes judges, lawyers, law makers, lobby groups. Tons of expensive transactions along the way.
Before you can even get to work there are licenses, permissions, diplomas, certifications, health and sanity checks.
If your job is to dig holes one would think it involves little more than a pair of good boots and a shovel. End of the day you want a shower, a good meal, a roof over your head and some guarantee you don't have to dig holes the entire year round. (We are mistaken to think people in poorly paid grunt work are interested in trying to make ends meet.)
If you have just 20 people digging holes their performance becomes extremely measurable. They know exactly how good they are at their job. Rewarding them involves such an enormous clusterfuck of fuzzy params which may accumulate to 10 fold their salary (or more!) that their performance becomes irrelevant to their reward. The cost of accounting for it would be much larger than the cost of poor performance.
What we can do is reward their boss or their supervisor. We do that to maintain the illusion that every bit of overhead needs to be there. It is all there for a reason ofc, it is a legacy system slowly migrating from manual paperwork to automation.
You could have a very simple government app like Uber so that those who dig holes may dig holes. Customers and hole diggers can review the quality of the holes themselves. Contractors can use the API to have expensive fast holes, cheaper slow ones, an all you can eat rate or a hybrid between the 3.
But that is not going to happen, in stead we build machines to dig the holes, deploy even more administration, engineers, designers, repair shops etc lots of complicated skills required and the hole diggers can get social support while looking for other work which involves even more circus of estimates portrayed as measurement.
Some sub set of the bean counting is incredibly important and their work makes modern society what it is. Don't ask me to measure it tho.
Simplicity has its appeal. We could build monasteries where each monk maintains 1 module. If it worked for kung fu why not for array sort?
You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance.
> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team.
Straight out of college I worked at a place where they handed me a 1 year contract where I was paid below market rate. When I was reaching the end of my contract I asked for a meeting to review my salary. I had a meeting but it's outcome was a firm "we want you here but we will only offer you the same pay". I sat on that and on the day before my auto renewal would kick in I handed my resignation. I was immediately pulled into a meeting with my manager where they promply offered me over 20% pay hike.
Do you honestly believe I only gained importance the moment I resigned? They were the same people who said a few days earlier in no unclear terms I was not getting a raise.
The most ridiculous aspect of your unfounded personal belief is this idea there's this universal performance evaluation law where every manager and every boss is binded to hand over rigorous pay adjustments reflecting anyone's performance, and that there is no such thing as being exploited. Back in the real world, the whole economy revolves around people trying to get more value while paying less, and there's a almost universal pressure to not only eliminate any kind of leverage from employees but also make them perfectly replaceable cogs in their machine. You are pressured to not discuss salary with your peers, let alone other employees. You get what you are paid, and you should feel happy for it. If you work hard that just means your boss is getting more returns over his low investment.
For sure I assume that everyone did their homework and found a great company to work. That's the step 1! The step 2 is to be the best version of you. That's the most important factor on your salary, assuming the step 1!
Good luck
Edit: we've asked you more than once before not to post like this. If you don't want to be banned on HN, we need you to heed these warnings.
Never happens. I have no idea where you got this from, but someone fooled you really hard.
Looks like you know all companies and every relationship between employee and employeer to come up to a bold conclusion. Or maybe you are just a fool.
Alright, Mr Gilbert, cloud engineer, microservices architect, UX person, whichever. What is your value to the company?
Well, I help to design a.....
No, your VALUE. As in, money. How much money do you make the company?
Errrr......
Why is this surprising? People like to pay less for things.
But then again, I'm grateful that we are in the position to get support from the government.
In person jobs have a smaller market. Everyone is subject to the same COL, so the min salary the employer must pay has a certain floor to it.
Remote jobs have a larger market. If you're remote, your employer may as well hire someone from Ohio that is willing to work for half your salary. You have to compete on cost with those cheaper employees.
They had a main office in South Carolina in an area with very low cost of living and salaries that matched. They had an office in Phoenix and an office in Seattle.
Ended up standardizing pay based on Phoenix since it was in the middle. This was actually a really big deal because the majority of the company was in South Carolina while only about 40 people were split between Seattle and Phoenix.
Why limit yourself to the CoL due to geographical location? How about the CoL of someone who is single and someone who has 2 kids in college? How about the CoL of someone who needs expensive drugs as opposed to someone healthy?
Oh you adjust to CoL? Well, then I expect my salary to be indexed on the inflation. Oh no? You only do the standard 3%? But what about CoL?
As a side note, a salary is not about the value you bring to the company either. It's just how much they have to pay to find someone with your skills.
Another factor is that some (many) managers frankly have no idea what their employees do. Physical presence management is the coping strategy.
That being said, I do agree that in-person collaboration is richer and things can spontaneously be invented in ways virtual work will not allow for.
My advise: don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Coming in 2 days per week or so does have benefits, but there's also this other thing:
"It doesn’t matter where you work, as long as you get the work done."
I don't think everybody comprehends the consequences of this, which are not only positive. It's an open invitation to move your position to the lowest cost country that outputs quality that is acceptable. Flexibility goes both ways.
That was already happening way before WFH took center stage during COVID. If they're gonna outsource you, they're gonna find a way to do it with or without WFH demands.
Having worked with a number of overseas teams in China and India, it's actually somewhat difficult for US-based teams to work with teams up to 12 hours "distant" and also who have different sets of official holidays. I've been in so many status meetings that are either late at night for me or late at night for overseas team members so we can sync up, only to have bad network weather make it difficult to hear each other. Management tolerates these difficulties and added delays and inefficiencies because the labor cost difference is so large. While I love the idea of relocating overseas myself I don't think they'd tolerate continuing to pay what I earn as a US-based person once I was no longer US-based.
And then negotiating important things is fraught because it’s way too late/early for half of the participants.
We tried that before, outsourcing was a huge trend maybe 20-30 years ago?
The problem is the second part of your sentence. There's a reason that particular business practice settled into a niche of call centers.
It turned out that good workers want to be paid what they are worth, regardless of location. Everything, including labor, is priced based on what people will pay for it - not what it costs to produce.
I think what I'm seeing is that this isn't quite true. It's not where you work, but it is when.
I worked in-office for the first part of my career, then in 2020 went remote (coincidentally, right before the pandemic started). My 2c:
- overall, no major differences.
- casual chatter / schmoozing is easier. I can DM people async instead of popping over to their office or meeting randomly at the watercooler.
- Meetings are ~same effectiveness. Main note is that zoom makes it easier for less traditionally social aggressive people to get a word in - between the chat function, raising hand function (which is a lot less weird than doing the same physically), zoom eliminating height differences and evening out voice volumes (imo big effect here for women especially, it levels out soft-spoken people with the big booming aggro types).
- Coding is the same. I've always had a private office (except for a brief transitional stint in an open plan which I hated) so it's not like people were tapping my shoulder anyway.
People seem to mostly handwave towards some mystical "innovation" rate that arises from people being crammed together. I don't buy it.
The big thing that does hurt is when getting some sync communication time is hard. I've had no problem working with people with ~3 hours of timezone difference and 5 hours of overlap. It gets fucky when that overlap becomes 1 to 0 hours (so e.g. working from pacific US coast and trying to talk to Ireland/UK/etc).
On-site and remote are not so different, I think, once you stop writing critical business stuff on physical paper and whiteboards. Sync-possible vs Sync-difficult is where the big difference is and you need a fundamentally different social and organizational structure to how you work.
Turns out many of they were never really for remote work but simply gave it lip service because it was so uncommon and could be used to bash commuting in a car. Now they're quite open about hating work from home because their agenda was never about reducing vehicle emissions, it was about creating more transit that they desired since they don't want to own vehicles themselves. If people can work from home, that takes cars off the road, but it also reduces the need for public transportation. The latter is what they were truly after, not the former.
There's also a smaller group who want public transit to dominate because they see it as a form of egalitarianism. If lots of well-paid people can work from home, they're not forced to sit next to people different than them on the bus and train each day. It becomes easier for them to stop caring about the issues that urban areas face when they stop going to urban areas to work. This is also part of the reason why they get so angry about private bus services bringing workers into the city. Workers on those buses aren't forced to "sit with their fellow man" nor do they have reason to support increased funding for public bus services when their employer has a private bus that provides a superior service (at least for commuting).
This is why I always use the cashier at businesses instead of the machine. I’m fully convinced that cashiers are the only “low” people that some people deal with all day and we lose something as a society if they go away.
[1] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/osdc/impact-covid-19-pan...
In Seattle, Boeing employees are the beginning of rush hour. They like to work 7-3 and so the highways fill up just before the school day starts/ends. So getting even a few thousand people to avoid cross town traffic is huge.
This sentiment is weird to me. When people express this, I think they have a myopic view on work. Like they view work as a series of JIRA tickets that need to be closed out. As a senior leader, one of your jobs is to teach the younger folks how to do their jobs efficiently. Your personal output is not that important. You are there to be a force multiplier. Teaching is much easier in person.
It's like people who hate the interruption of a colleague sending a Slack message. Yes, such an interruption is slightly annoying, but part of your job is to help other people. Unblocking someone is most certainly more productive than whatever you were doing individually.
Ultimately, very few things are built solely by an individual. "Doing work" is mostly about collaboration if you want to build anything substantial.
I'm in the leadership position you describe, and I've found remote work to be amazing for teaching because of screen-sharing. It's so much easier to get the team talking about some code over Teams/Slack/etc. than it is awkwardly huddled around someone's monitor or looking at a TV in the office. Remotely, you're able to see the code and have high-quality audio, and you don't have to worry about some higher up manager seeing a group gathering and thinking now's a good chance to get some internal publicity...
Of course, none of the above applies if the tools aren't used. I think the key to mastering remote teaching is good scheduling.
I'm in a agreement on this. I find reviewing changes much easier with screen-share than in person.
It also makes the process feel less confrontational in some respects.
Obviously I don’t know how these meetings go, just a passing observation
In my experience, most people learn much better from being shown concrete examples inside the workspace they already use compared to abstract examples on a whiteboard with lots of lines and arrows.
Also, when viewing/listening remotely, I will record the session -- especially if they're assigning a complex task or series of tasks. This allows me to playback and get things exactly right.
In person, I would have to smuggle in a recorder and it's often awkward or infeasible.
For years now, well before the pandemic, this is how such things have been done everywhere I've worked. The two people aren't huddled around the same machine, they're each in their cubes doing screen-sharing.
It's just a better way to do it, remote work or not.
I am actually doing mentoring every once in a while and it goes just fine over Skype thank you. I am remote since 2000.
In my experience this is not the case for developers. Being over someone from behind or having someone peer at my screen while I'm typing is much worse than just screen sharing where we both have our keyboards and two large monitors.
There's nothing that prevents remote work from not being efficient enough to further the goals of an organization. It also doesn't prevent one from being a leader and teaching younger folk. In fact, I've had to do this a lot and it's much nicer to get people on a video call and share my screen to teach or do team programming than it is to find a meeting/conference room in the office.
Some people don't like interruptions _precisely_ because it prevents from doing an efficient job. And it's more than slightly annoying when you're getting interrupted multiple times per hour.
Yes, _very_ few things are built solely by an individual, but _nothing_ prevents remote work from "Doing work" as you put it or collaboration between teams.
Meanwhile I just replaced a software vendor in China with one from the US. 70% more expensive, but also cheaper in terms of rework, code quality, deep understanding of the subject matter and care. Oh, and meetings during sane working hours are understated.
I remember the first time I worked remote, I had an appointment that took me away from the office and had to work at a coffee shop for most of the day. I immediately felt more relaxed and got my work done fast. I asked my boss if I could be remote a few days a week. He said no, probably because it was a small business and other employees would want to do this as well. A few years later, the company became remote.
I wound up moving during the pandemic and when we started return to office, I wanted to work in the Boston office close to me. The company said it's not my team's office. I was still able to find a way to work at the office a few days out of the week. Now the company says you can choose to work from any office in the country.
It's not rocket science. Certain scenarios make more sense for in-office work (tight-knit team that needs to be in constant communication with each other or new employee who needs more guidance), remote work (you're more experienced or have self-discipline and can get tasks done on your own or ask for help with a good infrastructure), or hybrid work (both scenarios combined or you can have 1-2 days out of the week that are team days).
Otherwise, you wind up in an office where a lot of people are wasting time either way with lowest common denominator conversations, living in congested cities with price gouge real estate and soul crushing commutes or remote locations you don't really want to live in because commercial real estate was cheap.
The overall assumption should be that you're a professional who's treated as a professional by the company with respect (assuming your a high-paid employee with professional experience). A lot of these return to office calls and recent corporate behavior makes me realize a lot of managers (usually not great ones) or companies sees employees as children who can't be trusted instead of adults who can perform professional work and communicate effectively.
Haven't we litigated this enough? If outsourcing was so viable and so valuable, it would be done already. Are we supposed to ignore: time zones, language barriers, cultural barriers?
This threat has been waved at highly paid techies for the past few decades.
If they could have, they would have.
The major difference has been in the dead time around work. Time spent commuting, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, etc. When working in an office, nothing much is achieved during those (maybe some socialising or reading), and work takes them out of my time rather than their time.
Working remotely gives that dead time back to me, allowing me to spend it on things I consider more valuable (e.g. playing a musical instrument, doing some DIY around the house, gardening, putting on washing, etc.).
It's that which I feel has given me a better quality of life than the act of not working in an office. If an employer is paying me, I don't object to doing that work where they request. What I do object to is the extra hours that takes out of my life that they aren't paying me for (typically commuting).
It would be a utopian world where employees respect and consider living conditions (eg single vs married; cost of living in specific area) and commutes. Make yourself valuable to negotiate better terms, or look for something better.
I could not agree more. You would always have leverage with salary negotiations during interviews if you can justify the value you bring on the table. For technical positions, unless the hiring process does not involve any technical assessment, it's quite easy to spot who knows what they're doing from those who are just good on paper.
For example, I sometimes lay off work but remain in my home office, and lightly task switch between personal stuff and work stuff.
By this I mean I answer some messages, mind some not-very-engaged, long-running tasks, or scratch some itch not on the schedule. Sometimes I reinstall a system.
Without the physical toll of going to the office in person, there are frequent opportunities to catch up, or get ahead at work.
On the other hand, if I go into the office, I do it the other way, doing shopping or running errands before or after work as I usually pass by locations that I wouldn't make a trip for if I was totally home.
It’s taken a while to adjust to this and fully take advantage of it, but it’s enabled me to spend time on hobbies and work on my personal projects far more than would have ever been practical when I was working in an office. Back then I’d get in from work, feel too tired to do much of anything but scroll through social media or occasionally watch a TV show, with chores getting pushed off until the weekend. Once the weekend rolled around, by the time chores were out of the way and I felt like doing me things it was already halfway through Sunday and I needed to start thinking about Monday.
That's the summary
I really miss the contact from the office but since most people don't go in any more, it is not worth much of my time to travel there.
Yes, we employ some people fully remotely, which is fine because that's what we knew at the time so we do get the benefit of the wider pool.
However, just because "I work really effectively at home", it doesn't mean that there are people who are not taking multiple trips to the shops, to school etc. since they can and although they could be doing their work when they get back, there is also a good chance that they won't or they'll be distracted etc.
Our productivity has definitely been lower during remote-only working although it is hard to attribute that to any one specific thing. The truth is that particularly in non-quantifiable work like development, it is hard to get a thermometer on how productive people are. The gut is unreliable and we want to trust people but if for no other reason, the office has less distractions for most people who can concentrate on their work more.
Could people make it work better? Yes. Will it always work well for everyone? No.
Would that not make remote automatically better because of all the pollution and time lost commuting?
The reality is that some people like remote work and some don’t. Some organizations have chosen to be remote and some haven’t. Nobody’s right or wrong. They can make the choice that they believe is best for them — sometimes that choice requires trading off things they like for things they don’t. For example, I work for a remote company and I really dislike remote work. But I really like the company I work at, so I choose to work there.
> I wish people would stop posting articles that imply that remote working is somehow objectively better
> we can just as easily make up the idea that people are less happy working remotely.
We can make up the idea that the sun is blue, but I think you missed my point. Please note I talk about productivity.
In the context of people claiming remote/in-person work is more productive and asking each other for proof, discussing about burden of proof, why not simply assume that remote is exactly as productive as in-person? Unless some undeniable proof is presented.
I find it an elegant way to diffuse this proof-of-burden.
Personally I decided a long time ago which one I prefer.
I can see why.
OK, let’s assume you’re right and they’re equally productive.
But who actually cares about productivity? Many individuals and individuals who speak for organizations say they do but their actions don’t match that.
And OK, let’s say people actually care about productivity. Remote work isn’t automatically better because you guessed that the pollution savings are large. Now, you can just kind of handwave that away and say of course it’s large.
But aren’t there other changes that result from remote work? How do you rank those vs. pollution and commuting time?
It will be quite easy for you to win this argument when you assert that all your assumptions are correct.
My honest opinion is that most people that enjoy the office enjoy it because it's where they've gotten most of their socialization in their adult lives. As a result, they haven't built up lives outside of work. To make matters worse, our communities haven't developed to support people having "lives" outside of work (at least out here in the suburbs).
My hope is that as remote work becomes more prolific, people will rely on their local communities more for their social lives and all of these wonderful small towns will thrive again.
And I've never seen someone comment, "I'm pro-office because I have no social life." So why is that the prevailing sentiment?
To me it's more like those in favor of remote work find people who prefer office work very threatening and really look to knock them down a peg or two and discredit them. And what better way to do that than ad hominem'ing and insulting their social life?
It’s not that surprising because it’s difficult to admit to oneself.
Just one’s observations though.
There are so many quantifiably superior reasons to want to work remotely:
- Commute time
– gasoline savings
– can walk one's pets
The only pros I can think of for going into an office are a little more contextual to the specific employee:
- Poor home environment (noisy, distracting, etc)
– Loneliness
> Loneliness
I mean those can be pretty huge issues.
And no, I’m not taking what OP said in bad faith. I’m taking it as exactly how they meant it.
They have no actual evidence (besides their keen observation and desire to discredit in-office work) and to say that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives.
Yet they claim that people who prefer office work have poor/nonexistent social lives. I’m not sure but the traditional context of saying someone has a poor/nonexistent social life is rarely that of a compliment.
So you are saying that working from office is objectively worse.
If you don't pay hourly, who cares how people manage their salaried time? You should measure by outcomes whether people are sitting there all day in the office too.
People are either allowed to stay home or not.
I don't wanna be forced to go in so other people can feel good about me being there.
Ok not all teams could be reorganised, but I expect in reality a lot could be shuffled around.
Society is already too segregated with technology and I really do not think it's a good idea to move all of our in person communication to zoom calls. I really believe a lot of our current issues are due to the face people aren't communicating face to face enough and they've don't think of people on the other side of their screen as real people.
I think a hybrid work setting could be great in the right circumstances, but 100% wfh just isn't a great idea imo. If you are 100% wfh you need to force yourself to find some other social group.
Additionally, I'll add we have whole generation of kids being brought up on primarily electronic communication. They're not getting appropriate social skills to begin with and then we're talking about throwing them into a remote work world for their entire lives. I think this is just a recipe for increasing their already poor mental health.
I think we would need to somehow separate the mental unhealthiness of remote work from the mental unhealthiness of dealing with a worldwide deadly airborne pandemic. It could be that remote work in and of itself is great, but remote work with the additional mental/emotional toll of a pandemic is not so great.
I suspect that remote work was great before the pandemic, and will be great after the pandemic, and that in fact the pandemic is what caused our growing cultural communication issues (not to mention the other things that coincided with the pandemic: worldwide political turmoil, for example).
It was the social impact and not the disease itself that caused so many problems.
That's what needs to be removed from these calculations. Now, you can have that social life outside of work.
Everyone has an opinion on remote work and I’m fine with it, my problem is when PHBs mandate work from the office and make that decision for everyone regardless of personal preferences and situations.
You don’t even have to lie but you can just act like you don’t care about working remotely or not (which, in my personal case, is just the truth).
Simply put, make it known immediately that you will reject the job offer if it is not full remote, no questions asked. On my end, no "extra" amount of money they'd be willing to offer for coming into the office will sway me and many others.
There simply is no argument, I will not work for you and will go with another option if working remotely is not possible. If my job changes from work remote to not after accepting, I will not come in, and will look for new opportunities.
I've seen a lot of places play the game of accepting remote workers but then the CEO or someone announces back to office which is why I put the additional point there as well.
Before everyone says, “oh, go get some hobbies and live your life, work isn’t here for your social life,” understand that I have young children and no free time. I am nearing middle age in a city I moved to for work. I don’t have the base level of social interaction most people inherit by birth or school and no time to build one.
I miss asking my coworkers how their weekends went.
If you have no way of communicating with people remotely, that seems like the core issue. Or you’re just not using the tools available?
What stops you from doing that when working remotely? You don't just have to chat about work.
I’ve heard the argument, “well think about how they feel when you’re in the office and they can’t get away from your asking about their weekend,” but I’ve never worked in an office and not created genuine friendships that persisted outside of work.
I’m sure full remote work is fine for a lot of people and if I weren’t married and raising people, I’d probably be one of them.
Still, remote is preferable to full in-office. A couple of days of the week, maybe less, feels like the right amount of time in the office. Companies could downsize and schedule certain teams for certain days.
Luckily my team was in the office at least 2 days a week prior so I had those connections built up already - it wasn't a huge social hit and still felt those connections through remote communications since the foundation was there. The office had re-opened and in mid-2022 I was able to start going into the office, albeit with no direct coworkers. It was nice to have some kind of routine again.
I recently started a fully position. Its been hard to adjust, and has taken a toll on me. Onboarding went well, but its been tough to get situated with a group of new people that I have had little to no social interaction with. I'm hoping things click soon. There is an optional office space, though no one on my immediate team would be there. I'd like to get some time there once I break out of my rut.
It’s very hard to build connections when starting a remote job. I’ve started two jobs since COVID and still don’t have the connection that I had with the people I worked with before COVID.
But agreed, it's really shitty and I wish nobody would be in a situation where they feel like they are effectively ordered. I feel it's a result of your country's (US or India, right?) lack of unions and employee protecting labor laws.
It wasn't until I broke my toe and was told by the doctor to minimise my walking they they allowed me to (technically temporarily) work from home...
I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office.
I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona lockdowns.
The serendipity thing is real. We have less of it. We have many other benefits and we think it’s worth it, but to think remote doesn’t have downsides is a bit short sighted IMO.
When performing recent post-mortems it also became clear that when the whole studio was unexpectedly forced to work remotely, productivity overall slightly increased despite some initial concerns about adapting our workflows and communication channels.
Also, no need to sit there staring at the screen trying to look like you’re doing something useful after your brain has hit its limit on contiguous productive hours. You can instead get up and go do chores or go on a walk or something, give your head some breathing room, and then come back with something of a second wind in your sails which carries you through the end of the work day.
So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?
When we talk about some of the tangible things that we might actually want this "serendipity" for, these are the ones that I constantly see pop up:
- Spontaneously detecting and addressing small issues with the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing ideas for the product
- Spontaneously coming up with and implementing workflow improvements
These are all things that should be addressed as part of day-to-day work. The reason they're not addressed is often overzealous prioritization of shiny things to the detriment of everything else. Or, in other words, bad management.
That's all this "serendipity" is actually for: a release valve for the pressure imposed by bad management, which helps mask the effects of bad management.
All you actually need to do, in order to reap the benefits of "serendipity" without locking hundreds of people in the same room together, is incentivize the necessary interactions, provide people with the necessary time to act on their urges, and get out of the way.
Here's some free ideas that I've seen work in real life:
- Have a Slack room for people to share user feedback, and explicitly encourage negative user feedback (maybe a different room for positive and negative, to avoid dampening good moods)
- Encourage employees to suggest improvements to the product and the workflow, and to publicly (yet politely) vent about the current processes that bother them. Don't make a "feature request" JIRA form that dumps it into an endless backlog, never to be seen again. Instead, have people discuss the issue publicly in a Slack room, which allows feedback and potential improvements to be considered and taken into account, then have them create an issue once they understand what it's actually about.
- Your planning should aim to drive around half of the actual work that gets done, under the acknowledgement that the other half will be organically filled with work that needs to be done. It's always easy to pick the next task if you're done earlier than expected and there's nothing else to do. It's a lot harder to sideline planned work that you've explicitly been told to do in order to do something that's actually important instead.
Basically all orgs need something that acts as a random mixing function so that connections between areas can form and strengthen. Working in the same building can provide that, if the building layout allows for it, but it's far from the only option.
The problem is that managers, particularly those with a strongly hierarchical, Taylorist mindset, won't necessarily appreciate the value of lateral connections between teams. They end up benefiting from serendipity by accident because when they force people into the office those lateral connections form anyway.
edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.
If you're an experienced individual contributor, the shift to remote work was great. You got less oversight at work and more free time in your personal life. This category is a lot of the hacker news audience, so remote work is popular here.
It was less good if you were a new contributor. You might find yourself with less development and struggling to break into existing cliques within the organization. You may not have built good practices in personal time management. None of this is malicious, it is just failures that are easier to have happen when working remote and not being careful.
Managers have an even harder time. Good managers work by building strong relationships with their team members, not with carrots or sticks. That's harder in a remote environment, due to the default-private nature of most remote communication. The lack of relationships hurts individual contributors too, who become even more like cogs in a machine.
Overall, I think the ability to retain experienced employees and hire from a wide range of locations outweighs these costs of remote work, but they are real and significant. For Big Tech, where acquiring talent is relatively easier due to salaries and name recognition, you can see why they might prioritize in-office work.
So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!
They need you around to fall back on. Honestly, this is at least 75% of the reason behind the pushback on Remote.
this is it really, wish we can move past this adversarial phase of remote vs office and just let people choose what works for them, as individuals and where reasonably accomodative as teams.
nothing can suck the life out of a team or individual like multi level mgmt bureaucracy involving themselves in every little decision.
Many people point out that this makes team cohesion harder. I don't care, my economic output is meaningless in the context of greater life. I'd like to do the least amount of bullshit work and the most amount of important work possible, and the majority of the important work I do as a rich non-farming westerner takes place at my house or in my neighborhood. My coworkers at Office tolerate me, but my friends and family at Home love me.
I view remote work as a wonderful transaction heavily tilted in my favor. The company gets the same work they'd get out of me otherwise, and it gives up a monopolization on my physical being. I'll take a salary hit for that any day. People ought to start realizing that unless they're involved in the production of goods or services necessary for other people to physically remain alive, your job literally doesn't matter. You have X hours between when you wake up and when you go to sleep. The more of those you can spend practicing the art of civilization and the fewer of those you spend grinding out increases in shareholder value the richer society will be.
Seems to work out better as people have a few weeks of gossip and rants to offload vs seeing everyone daily.
Again, I want to reiterate: if it really made workers worth less, it could be factored into salary. It's not about that. It's about something else that has to do with management and control.
Don't get me wrong, I am not doubting for a minute that remote work has challenges, but that's the thing. We had to work those out. Security, compliance, VPNs, beyond corp, whatever... We already HAD to do it. The only reason now to discard that would be sabotage.
I think an assumption that I have is that the balance of supply/demand may be prejudiced against remote work, because it takes time for people to accept or be open to new ways of doing things.
Not surprising, given remote work didn't exist for 99% of that time period.
> they will need affirmative proof that the new way works better than the old way
If they couldn't find enough evidence during the last few years they have bigger problems than the choice between remote and office work.
I agree that status quo and stability have at least some non-zero probative value, but you have to acknowledge that the status quo only exists because the dinosaurs didn't document their prehistoric internet well enough, so our ancestors had to rediscover the concept of a zoom meeting.
(Edit: obviously I wrote this in jest, but in all seriousness, when considering the value of "how it's always been done" it's extremely important to consider how we happened to stumble upon the status quo, with a holistic and historical bird's eye view. This is consequential to the analysis.)
For many people I know this is the case, so I don't think pure remote or location work are "it".
I work 100% remote with semi-flexible hours and a big part of this is the freedom to leave my house and do things during the day, like meet up with friends, or go exercise while the sun is out in winter etc.
That's nice for you.
From personal experience on the other hand {statement of preference}
You guys can go to office together, and leave the rest of us out of this?
You can still do that. My friend rented an office a five minute walk from his home - it costs him 3% of his salary.
That's a completely different issue from remote vs in-person work. You should learn to be comfortable being alone/by yourself, especially as a man.
Also, noise cancelling earphones did NOT help while I was still in the office.
At home there's too many distractions and without people around me, I feel less accountable to actually work rather than scroll through reddit. Despite the people talking around me, I find general chatter less distracting than absolute silence.
Then I worked remotely, and while the silence was deafening for the first week or so, I grew to love it, and the focus it gives me.
Now I am back in the office some days a week, and it is worse than ever, in part as I've tasted what working in silence does for me. But mainly as non in post-covid times everyone takes their meetings at their desks.
Sitting near me today was a team of 5 people all on a call together from their desks, as one person was remote.
In the old days they would have grabbed a meeting room to run that call, but now everyone does it from their desks.
The noise is so annoying, and makes my remote days all the sweeter. Wearing noise cancelling headphones all day hurts my ears and head, plus gives me sweaty ears - which leads to more wax which leads to increased tinnitus for me. As someone with ADHD, tinnitus can really mess with my day.
We can, and should, strive to fill our social needs outside of work.
Why? Because work environment can change drastically, more frequently than friends and family. It is, on average, less stable.
I prefer to spend my working time AND leisure time with people I care about.
When I work from home I might have a few meetings in a day, but I'm just a few steps away from hugging my wife, and nuzzling my dog any time I want. While the people at my office might be casual acquaintances and in some cases friends, they'll never ever compare to the bonds of family.
Office worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that.
Remote worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that. Also here's an insult.
For some bizarre reason, for the folks in the office it's always like "I like this style of stuff" and for the folks remote it's always "I like this other style, but also you're a drone / have no social life / think work is the only place you get any social interaction".
We have quite a large employment market and there are enough in-office, remote-friendly, remote-only employers. Just match your preferences with theirs. Some friends of mine have been remote for ages and they're quite productive. My own org is all in-office and I like to think we're doing well. It's the kind of place I like to work at.
It's just preference matching. I want to work at a place where everyone wants to work in-office. I have that. You want something else and you have that. Yep, there's folks who'd like to do what we do but can't work here because we want them to be in-office. And there's folks like me who like other orgs but I can't because the team isn't around.
When looking at the wider pool of people commenting on this issue outside HN, I see antagonism on both sides. I've seen pro-WFH people being called lazy, entitled, antisocial, uncaring (because they're "killing downtowns"), elitist (because not everyone can WFH, and usually those who can have higher paid jobs), among other litanies of derogatory terms.
The truth is, this is an issue that people feel threatened about; however you look at it, assuming an even split of full-remote, full in-office, and hybrid, and assuming you're only happy with one of those options, you'll find your potential work pool diminished by 2/3rds. That's not a small amount. So people will take it personally and try to fight - some with logic and studies, others with underhanded means - for their preferred choice. Of course, I don't think things will reach those equal proportions anytime soon, if ever. So people who prefer WFH are waging a battle for a small % of overall jobs. You can see how that'd feel threatening - to have gotten something you love, and now seeing your options diminish or outright vanish. It is especially pernicious when cases of people with deep commercial real estate investments clamor for a return-to-the-office with all kinds of negative things to say about those who prefer WFH.
Just before COVID, I had enough of the isolation, lack of contact with my team and working outside of the rest of the world's flow.
COVID forced another 2 years of it on me.
Now I work in a bar to meet people and do all the human contact things.
I write software 3 days a week, still remote, and enjoy the balance.
Everyone on the team looked at one another awkwardly. It had never been discussed that anything else was a possibility.
The problem is even though all jobs are being advertised as "hybrid" or WFH 3 days a week, the contracts don't reflect that. They all stage your place of work is the office.
Now if my manager complains I'm late, I point out that I have a 45-50 minute commute with trains that come only every 20 minutes with very few backup options. 2 cancellations and I'm 40 minutes late. Tough. Either let me work from home full time, pay me more so I can live closer to the office, or be more flexible.
As long as candidates see it as a possible alternative to additional compensation, it'll be treated as a perk that can be revoked. Execs would do the same thing with bathroom access or access to drinking water if it was practical.
The actual remote jobs I've seen in that time all had weird issues like fixed (early) meeting times, more often than not even daily. Or performance tracking that went as far as installing third party monitoring Software while not even getting a dedicated work computer. Or being available at slack the whole time.
If that is what remote work means I don't get it. It's just as stressful if not more, minus the commute.
In poorly managed companies I've worked for it was very easy to get away with doing nothing e.g. I worked with a Service Designer who, when she finally quit, told everyone openly that she hadn't been given any work in a year
When you freelance on a project-basis, it's "I pay this person to create this thing for me", but they don't care whether you take 10 or 100 hours to do so as long as you deliver it at the price you agreed upon and the quality is what they expected.
When I still did freelancing I just asked for a rather high hourly rate and was super efficient in that time. At some point it got hard to find customers tho when other people claim the same for a 4th of the rate or less.
The ultimate solution for a lazy coder like me is just maintaining some websites that make money. My time, my decisions, my money.
It's a liability to let devs download code to their personal computers. It's risky from both physical, and intellectual property perspectives.
I really understand where you are coming from, but that's definitely not the standard I have witnessed so far.
Maybe where I'm working we're more harsh than usual:D because we've got the full package - company laptop, transfering anything work related to personal PC is a no go, at home we must use VPN with 2FA, can't connect unapproved USB devices (including mice, keyboards, phone charging, anything), heavy website moderation, and heavy user-based access moderation for anything, and the company laptops are 100% tracked - you have no privacy on it. Even personal phones have to follow some security measures to keep Slack and authentication app (screen sleep <5min, screen lock is a must, and Slack is password protected).
There are reasons to force people to work on a corporate machine, preventing them from stealing code is not one of them.
Or encrypt the whole repo and just send it to a bucket somewhere. I mean there's got to be a lot of ways to do it if you really want to.
Some guy commented on taking photos - are y'all really planning on taking a photo for every 200 lines, on scripts with lines in the thousands, in repos which contain tens to hundreds of files, which are just for one product? When your company is probably supporting more than a couple products?
unlike a prison, you're free to leave the job.
I know plenty of people working 2 jobs and simply don't have time to find a replacement for one. With wages at record lows, that also means if they lose one for any reason, it's not like a little breaky break while they find another, it means something on their extremely narrow budget gets the axe for that week or whatever. Usually healthcare, sometimes food. Sometimes rent, at which point if you don't have a friend's couch to crash on, you're homeless, and then it's astronomically harder to find a job. You are well and truly fucked.
So not everyone is "free to leave the job."
BTW I don't know the OP but the word I was going to drop in was not prison, it was slavery.
Edit: to clarify wages at record lows, I mean for the people working minimum wage or around there. Inflation and cost of living combined to make their real buying power lower than ever.
By those standards every single human to ever live has been in prison. Humanity will only be free once we're in a post-scarcity society.
To put it another way, there are ways to make money that spark more or less joy, and much of this variation is possible even for "regular folks" working "regular jobs". But most of that possibility space is yet unexplored.
Not sure whose fault that is, but I am reminded of the quote, "the opposite of courage in this country is not cowardice, it is conformity."
Most people just do what everyone else is doing (i.e. the 80% who are dissatisfied with their work) and then wonder why they are dissatisfied with their work.
What use will the wealthy and powerful have for the unproductive masses after robots can do all their work for them?
Is more likely that strong AI and robots will be used to ever more effectively control and oppress most of humanity than help or free them.
Unrelated, but what a definition… using the same word to define itself, and several times.
However, you are not free to force others to pay for you to do that; and that's what you're asking for.
What your argument boils down to is everyone else needs to do the stuff that keeps you alive (grow food, keep your power plant running, emergency services, treat your water) while you sit at home and scroll through TikTok. Sounds just a tad elitist to me.
You get paid to do a certain thing and if that thing requires you to be somewhere at a certain (like EVERY job) then you will be there at that time. I wish I had Superman powers and was essentially immortal, but that's no more realistic than you thinking you ought to be able to do whatever you want while still getting paid to do a job and think that's sustainable for an entire society.
Alternatively, you could start your own business and make your own schedule. However, it's not going to go so well for you with the current attitude you've got. Most likely you're going to have to do things when you don't want to do them if you want your business to succeed.
Which is really wrong IMHO. The employee is giving his work to the employer.
I suppose back when the demographic pyramid was still a pyramid, being offered a job, especially as a young person, was seen as somewhat of a favour.
Wrong… you mean they feed you.
So I’m asking why see work as a gift in general? And from there I brought up the fact that in german, work is something that is given by the employer to the employee. Which is really the wrong way round.
Because, as you indicated , there is an exchange happening. The employee is giving work and is getting money in return.
Good tech orgs list expectations for each role, and every senior role requires you to be improving the impact of others’ work as well as your own. Clearly that applies to managers — it’s literally their job — but many top IC roles pay the big bucks because you come up with projects and promote them under your own steam.
If you can do that all remotely, good for you. A lot of us cannot and we need people to be in the office N days a week for there to be some kind of personal overlap, where we can go from good to great, together.
If you make p30 salary writing unit tests for a 250,000 employee printer company then staying at home 100% of the time sounds like bliss. If you’re expected to be levelling up every six months at a series A with 30 engineers and you don’t want to come back into work post COVID… well the printer company is hiring!
The author talks about technology but everyone having laptops (versus desktop PCs) makes this worse, not better.
Anecdotal but I've worked remote for over a decade. This we did pandemic remote and now we don't thing is just goofy. Don't worry about places that act like that. They are shitty places to work when you can find a job that's remote, with remote people, doing remote work. Might have to work at it a bit but it's out there.
Don't settle for less and laugh in the faces of folks that think they can get away with treating you like someone that needs to be told where you work best.
Because (most) employees are willing to accept less money if they get to work remotely, and so it's seen as a perk.
Try to do that as a business and you'll quickly go out of business.
The inefficiency which is intrinsic in large hierarchical companies means you have to pay employees by hours worked, not by projects being delivered.
So you just assume some level of inefficiency and pay roughly accordingly to the output you can get. You can try to improve things a bit with some blabbing, some politics, writing a "mission", some perks, some beers - but you'll work within certain limits.
Peers or managers will keep themselves accountable for staying at least ~6-8 hours in the workplace - and, no matter how much they slack, it will be hard to get zero work done.
If people are at home, there will be a few individuals overworking but most people will just spend less time in work-mode. Measuring productivity is an errand's fool so any proof in this direction is as good as random data in my eyes.
Personally, I've seen productivity decline with remote and looking at my friends' instagram, I can see them working less (when they don't have a side hustle).
That said, I'm all for remote. It's just another perk to get better people: they get their life back, they'll work a bit less but at least you can get the best people.
Before COVID, I was already working in a remote only team and the quality of the people was astounding. Things were getting done even if people were spending half a day skiing, simply because a couple of hours of someone who is GOOD can help way more than 8 hours of mediocre people (which is often harmful).
After COVID, working with remote people has been crap, for the chronicles.
Justification. Rationalization. Denial.
Companies have spent untold billions of dollars on physical assets, structures, infrastructure, etc. and are loath to give up that power. The only way to keep the power is to keep those physical assets utilized.
In the mind of those holding the corporate money-bags, they /are/ being generous and gifting employees /additional/ resources by allowing Work From Home.
Try to put yourself in the CFO's position. Your company has 150 million dollars in physical asset / infrastructure in your city. And, yet, your employees refuse to utilize this infrastructure; they're revolting /refusing/ to use this already bought-and-paid-for buildings, networks, furniture, phone systems...
For the CFO, it IS a gift to grant WFH to employees. For the CFOs, the employees are a bunch of whining, ungrateful, assholes that they can't wait to terminate...
When you are at home, there are a million things to distract you. There's laundry that needs to be done, the kitchen cleaned, kids that want to play, there's a full fridge with stuff to make a sandwich, a TV that you can turn on, etc.
When you are forced to go to the office, you are forced to take care of everything you need to do outside of working hours. You have to make sure you have child care available, you have to make appointments for service technicians in your free time, or ask someone else to take care of it.
Seen like this, I think it's obvious remote work is a perk for the employee. Employee gets more flexibility, but employer gets less attention. So I understand why employers would pay more for people who come to work on site.
Nothing distracts me when I work from home. I was far less productive in the office with ping-pong games, chattering coworkers, long commutes, etc. When at home I just focus on the work and the day flies by. It's a hell of a lot less stressful too.
Then there is the the 5 minute round trip each time to take a piss or get a water refill, the wandering around between meeting rooms for 5 minutes that would just be a 10 second call drop and reconnect in teams. And because I'm in the office I don't have a feeling of guilt when I waste any of this time because fuck it, that's what they are pushing for.
Horses for courses.
Have you ever actually… seen an office?
Yeah, the company maybe but not the job to be done
These are very very different situations, with completely different implications for management, compensation, infrastructure, productivity etc. Just about anything you can say about one doesn't apply to the other.
Reducing your inconvenience and keeping your pay the same is a gift.
You even regain time and money you'd have lost on commute.
So these things should be considered when negotiating.
I think that last claim is missing data to back it up.
I find myself weighing up a potential salary cut if the right role has remote/decent-hybrid.
And then I slap myself upside the head.
Of course most people working in tech aren’t facing this issue and so think working from home is great for everyone.
More recently it seems people think working at home means you get to do things like washing, cleaning, babysitting etc as well. That’s not a work from home issue, it’s an attitude problem.
How did we get to a point where we consider this opinion to be normal? It is expected someone else to care for your children while you commute hours each day and work 8+ hours at an office? When you get home you still need to spend whatever free minutes you have with your children, cook, put them to bed, wash, clean, find some time to share with your spouse, then repeat daily?
How about we normalize working from home, and spending time with your children and spouse? Is it so bad to have your child do their homework on the desk next to you so you can explain and answer their questions? Play around in the room while you work, so you can actually interact with them, instead of being away for the major part of their conscious life?
Also, is it so bad to go load and start the washing machine while you wait for your build to finish? Maybe load the dishwasher? What do you do at the office at the same time? Go to the kitchen to prepare yourself an unhealthy amount of coffee so you can grind your busywork with more focus?
When I'm stuck on a problem or frustrated by some issue, doing the laundry is a great way to clear the mind and approach the problem in a new way. Similar to how you often get the solution to a problem in the shower or on the drive home. It's pretty awesome to be able to do that during my work day, and office doesn't really give good opportunities for this.
> It’s like trying to work in an emergency room
So… nothing about unsupervised. Either the working parent is doing that as per their comment, or a daycare as per mine.
In reality if the kid is home the parent is not getting much work done.
Of course it's also possible for offices to be noisy or otherwise uncomfortable, and you might not have any power to do anything about it. I guess WFH is a great option mostly for people who have a great home.
Yet, there was more peace and ability to concentrate at home than there was at my previous office. Less interrupts, no time wasted to driving. And my kids weren't at the kindergarten.
The remote possibility even gave me enough energy to finalize my MSc finally (at evenings), something I wasn't able to do while working at the office for many years. Weird, huh?
I do miss beers with my colleagues though. But that's a bit difficult when none of my colleagues work in the same country, not much difference whether I would be in the office or not.
I hope I'm wrong but this comment reads like it came straight out of this piece of satire - http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html
The additional productivity probably came from the added time per day and reduced fatigue from lower amount of noise (office room vs. open office floor). I don't think there's anything weird about it, I at least found working at the office very tiring since concentration was difficult and required energy.
Of course now that they're bigger, everything is a bit different.
If so, then that's not a luxury many people (including, you know, many wives) with small children have. Hence the comment that you originally replied to makes sense.
Plus if you worked an office job instead you would need day care, which is still an option for you when working remotely (unless you prefer nannies?)
If those same "emergencies" are urgent to you and demand your attention only when you work from home then the issue lies someplace else.
It's exactly having kids that makes working from home extra convenient. Though of course it definitely helps to have a separate room for your home office.
(Seriously, this debate is about as dumb as any other american political debate, just bunch of myopic people screaming at each other with no ability to think.)
And for many it has clear benefits: They cut down on commute, spend more time with family, pets, hobbies. More ambiguous: Less contact with colleagues, more/less focus, perks of slacking off.
It was always seen this way, right? Thus perspectives like Tim Ferris' "Four Hour Workweek" that revolved primarily around getting to work remote as a top priority.
> Did we adapt? Absolutely. Arguably, we thrived. Companies suddenly had access to a talent pool that was always there, but they were ignorant of. No longer did they have to limit themselves to people who lived near the office, or have to offer hefty relocation packages. Real estate expenses fell through the floor.
When I put my rational hat on, this is how I feel. Suddenly your talent pool expanded to not just a bunch of new people, but a bunch of new people at vastly different local salary rates. Personally, I think it's unethical to lower pay to match regional rates, but this reason alone made me think the era of the SF engineer had come to an abrupt halt as covid forced companies to accidentally discover massively productive engineering pools in places like India and the Philippines. Tell as many stories as you like about the time you had a bad remote engineer in India, one can't deny the pool is simply massive and for every one "ten-x engineer" in SF there's five hundred in India, just have to find them.
Anyway my buddy in NYC was telling me a bunch of companies were suddenly discovering they were able to maintain revenue while cutting out multi million dollar real estate expenses for their manhattan offices stacked with little snackies and bubbly water. Seemed obvious to me. There you go, that's a couple salaries right there, now you can hire even more remote workers. Why weren't we always doing this?
Then there's the simple ethical arguments around decreased pollution from decreased pointless commuting, increased mental health benefits from not having to sit in traffic mad for 120 minutes a day every single day, losing hours of your day to the commute, whatever else.
Now let me put my hat on that lets me get into the mind of a not very good manager or business leader that's successful less for sharp mindedness and more for winning a lottery of one form or the other and thus having access to more capital: I don't trust my workers, I need to see with my own eyes that they're working for all the hours I pay them to work, I don't realize that it makes more sense to understand our relationship as one of product output for salary rather than an arbitrary idea of time for money (I, as a non engineer, have no idea how long it takes to build things, but I demand 8 hours every day anyway). I don't trust those engineers out in India, I can't see them, where's my money going? Also, guess what buddy, when I was your age I took the train to work every day and didn't buy a coffee cause that's just how I remember us doing things, so suck it up and you should too! Improving technology should only be used if I, the least familiar with these technologies, can think of a way to generate profit off of them.
I know I'm quite cynical but this has been my experience sometimes. Most times though I've found companies to be quite adaptable and take the lessons learned as a gift: woah nice, we don't have to pay for an office? Why didn't we think of this sooner?? Everyone's remote and thus documentation is suddenly a lot more important to fill in the gaps that used to involve juniors tapping seniors on the shoulder? Woah, our business and knowledge base is so much more sustainable now, awesome! Keep doing more of that!
it boggles the author's mind because - likely - this person hasn't *ever* run a company or paid people with their own hard-earned money.
Everyone works better when in a physical room doing the same thing. True in the gym, in the library, at work, anywhere.
Some people work better when co-located with others. Some people work better in isolation. Some people do best with a mixture.
A private gym and/or a private library will evoke the same split.