Reddit to vacate current headquarters and relocate
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Good, this is the kind of post-covid planning we need to see from companies. This will save money while letting those that want to come into the office still have a place to work. It's insane how many employers are forcing employees back to the office because they refuse to let go of their pre-covid building leases.
Wikipedia reports[0] they had 700 employees in 2021.
There's so much money tied up in commercial real estate. It feels like a complimented mess. Just look at NYC. Building owners will let units sit vacant for years rather than lower rent costs. Which then lowers building value, etc.
> The online discussion forum, which previously subleased 78,000 square feet of office space at 1455 Market Street, is planning to significantly reduce its footprint when it leaves the Mid-Market neighborhood later this year. The social media platform will soon move to a 47,000-square-foot space at 303 Second St. in SoMa, as the San Francisco Chronicle first reported.
I find it a little ironic that your purely contrarian approach would include levelling that accusation at me. I've tried to keep it light-hearted, but I think I've tried enough.
Correction: Unless you're working in some kind of cooperative, which you almost certainly are not, it's actually the shareholders who are depending on you. Your coworkers only depend on you to the extent that they're also dedicated to serving the shareholders.
- Not all work is best done remotely.
- Some situations require micromanagement.
- Some people need the sort of hands-on in-person management to have them achieve their best.
All of these things justify office space, and all of them can be true without invalidating your very apparent personal preference toward fully remote work. None of these points are particularly hot takes. Just the realities of the workplace instead of me being blinded by my personal desires for how things should be. It’d be great if none of these were true. As a remote employee myself, personally save me a lot of travel time. But I can’t just close my eyes and write snarky Hacker News comments and magic it into reality.
No developer with any sense or dignity is going to work at a piece-rate. And honestly, it doesn't make much sense for an employer, either. Do you want all your productivity evaporating into a never-ending haggle over tasks and what happens when someone can't complete one for reasons outside his control?
The people making $50k a year can tell you tons of stories about things that weren't in their control. High performers realize everything is in their control to fix or push to a large degree, and even if that one task does implode out of your control, you take it and grin and move on to the next task.
Would you really turn down the chance to make 5x what your coworkers do, just because sometimes in a blue moon you got screwed on a particular task and didn't get paid for it?
Piece-rate only makes any sense if you're doing the same thing over and over. If you're developing the same piece of software over and over, something in seriously wrong.
I don't see why tasks couldn't be devided up and given a value and people get paid for completing it. Some would be easier, and some would be harder and worth more. I might not be a veteran developer, but from what I see this could work.
It would not work because the scenario you describe would amount to seeing "all your productivity evaporate into a never-ending haggle over tasks." Also you presume that you can be good at estimation and assigning "value," but everyone actually sucks at that. That's not to say that no one can accurately estimate anything, it means everyone sucks at estimating when it really matters. Your idea also kneecaps your ability to delegate, and motivates pay-later kinds of corner cutting.
And it would be worth trying IMO, because the potential for productivity improvement is insanely high. Dumber things have been tried (codling tech workers).
Are you talking about your time selling cars? Have you actually seen a software engineering organization work by paying commission/piece-rate for the completion of tasks?
> And it would be worth trying IMO, because the potential for productivity improvement is insanely high. Dumber things have been tried (codling tech workers).
It's not worth trying, I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't been tried many times before. It's a bad idea that's easy to think of, and appeals to certain kinds of prejudices and misunderstandings. I've spend enough time talking about it.
By the way, have you ever read the classic software engineering book PeopleWare? If you haven't, you should.