Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

fortune.com

188 pointspg_1234150 comments

I work for a large tech company that gives me complete optionality around where I work. What was largely an in-person culture has turned into one that is almost entirely remote and geographically distributed.

For us, "remote work" isn't even a topic of conversation anymore, it's just the way things are. Yes there are some types of collaboration that aren't quite the same or require a little more effort, but we've largely navigated around those things.

I often think about the contrast between my experience and what I hear has been a year of absolute hand-wringing on the part of our largest competitor who is adamant about return to office. They've had fits and starts, unhappiness at every level over the policy, and it all seems futile.

I expect the arc of time this will play out across will be long, but I'm optimistic that our flexibility gives us a major hiring and retention advantage. Our competitor on the other hand just looks like they are distracting and handicapping themself.

IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss. The culture just isn't set up for it. I don't think it's impossible to "fix" these companies, but it is quite difficult and would probably require replacing the entire leadership team. Many boards are understandably opposed to that and go with "let's just go back to how things were" instead.

One thing I’ve heard repeatedly: remote work is not just in person but with teleconferencing and more chat. It has to be managed differently. The organization has to change how teams are organized and operated.

> IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss.

What happened during the years of COVID? Was it fine? So could they really not do it? It's more a don't want to rather than can't.

No, generally these companies had productivity plummet during covid. Just my experience at a few companies that transitioned to remote.

My company has been working remotely a long time, in that all meetings are Zooms and 99% include people who are far away, but management is increasingly insistent that we join those from the office.

IMO the biggest shift with remote work is building a culture of writing and async communication.

Like sitting down, thinking clearly, writing your thoughts and sharing.

At Stripe, this was perhaps the biggest differentiator in their culture compared to anywhere else I’ve witnessed.

Writing docs to clearly communicate where things are, where things are heading, where they should be heading was just as important as writing code.

Many in-office companies don’t have that. Some higher ups make decisions after verbal chat, throw it down the decision chain. Every level down, some details are lost and the ICs don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

I have complicated relationship with Stripe, but their writing culture has made a forever impression on me.

I spent many years in a company without documentation culture. There were project plans for managers, but no single technical document. All the requirements were gathered during meetings verbally. So the guys who were for decades in the company were hiding information from new hires and that way were controlling everything. It was super toxic since nobody could advance without kneeling before all mighty old dude. This company couldn’t exist without office.

Wow you just described my current gig, it’s like they have this inner circle of management/architects that just withholds information. No one documents anything. It’s a fucking mess

Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy. Making a big deal of returning your cattle to the farm is just to soothe investors when you have a subpar product

I like to compare it to releasing films in theaters vs streaming. The former has a large industry that has relied on it for decades, as well a subset of consumers that love it. The latter is more convenient for other consumers, as well as being embraced by some companies. Shareholders naturally want to take advantage of whichever is more profitable, which often is a mixture of the two.

That is an interesting comparison, since streaming is bankrupting all the media companies and will likely change movie studios for the worst.

Streaming is not bankrupting media companies, the fact that there are numerous other ways to spend your time viewing content from numerous other content makers is changing the market for media companies.

Had media companies maintained their exclusivity on people’s screen time, then they would be in an even better position. But the supply of content exploded, from video games to YouTube to TikTok and Instagram and even forums like this one.

More supply relative to demand means lower prices.

It's probably also true that streaming almost certainly aligns to different types, quantity, and production values of content overall. And there are always ongoing demographic and public fashion trends going on as well.

I agree with your point about competition. On the other hand, mindless channel surfing has mostly been replaced at the same time. People do it to some degree with streaming and even channels setup for the purpose--but it's a less natural fit.

And lower prices almost universally means lower profits for manufacturers. As prices fall, factories increase production and efficiency as they chase a diminishing profit margin. They are running flat out right until that margin disappears and everything suddenly stops. The frantic rate of tv/film production today, the insane production costs for a marginal return, fits that pattern.

I wish I could upvote this more, the cattle back to the farm is on point, exactly what a lot of these execs think but are afraid to say out loud.

"Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy."

Try doing manufacturing work entirely remotely. Good product doesn't move when you can't actually make it.

> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy

A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't".

99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

Maybe they would be able to afford more if they didn't spend so much of the budget on renting out offices, eh? Remote work has gotta be leagues cheaper, even if you own the building you still don't even have to pay people their commute fees.

The biggest cost savings from remote work comes from lower talent cost (read: 20-50% lower salaries) because instead of hiring exclusively in a few cities, you can now stop hiring in expensive cities and hire everywhere else.

Wait till they realize there are high-quality devs in SE Asia, South America and India. That remote job can be done by anyone, anywhere. Literally.

Some industries may have regulatory protection, but I don’t think it’ll be long before others start mass-outsourcing the kinds of jobs people thought were safe.

Some already realized that. For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I used to work at a US company that had offices here in Mexico and had a GREAT QA team in India (despite the hatred they get here in HN, Indian techies are GOOD! ) .

The TZ problem is what ended up fracturing the relationship between the teams . Us/Mexico teams synergy was just great, while Indians were generally disconnected.

But yeah, US and Canada companies that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage". I'm slowly but steadily trying to help this happen. Sorry?

> For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I've seen more of a mentality and attitude problem than timezones. Often these other offices are just treated as 2nd class citizens without enough context to act.

> that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage"

My company has been trying to do this (pay top percentile latam salaries) but it’s just been a larger grind to find decent devs than when we were advertising US salaries. “You get what you pay for” seems to be at play for us.

I imagine remote work can give you some edge but we’re trying to get 2 devs for the price of one and it’s really hard. We’re probably losing money on all the time wasted (you get a ton of applicants at lower price points).

I think the timezone issue is being mitigated - I’ve found Indian devs (only picking them out because of direct experience) were generally already working odd hours to at least give US overlap, but I think asynch tools will continue to get better and make it less of an issue. Probably doesn’t work in a five person startup where you need a lot of direct/constant communication, but especially in mature companies, I think the timing issues are very solvable (where they haven’t already been addressed).

Agree on the quality - there were some devs we worked with who needed more hand-holding, but a majority were very capable.

Offshoring is nothing new, it's been happening for at least a decade in earnest, of course far more for manufacturing. Even if you just count since the start of the pandemic, companies have now had 3.5 years to figure this out. Where is the mass-outsourcing?

It’s coming with higher quality candidates. For a long time, off-shore devs were uniformly mediocre and generally made things harder. I think that has been changing over the last decade, and is changing faster with more and more high quality online education.

Thinking that there will be a switch-flip moment (or that, because there hasn’t, there won’t be) is, I think, a limited view.

Average American devs just aren’t enough better, or won’t be soon, to justify the massively higher cost, and I think the push from a lot of devs around remote-first policy has forced employers to figure out timezone/asynch issues.

I will say that I’m really guessing about 3-5 years from now. Happy to see other perspectives!

It‘s like unions squeezing out more than market rates, it eventually renders the companies uncompetitive

Then companies should lobby to make unions required.

If there was any entity that had enough power to enforce this worldwide I‘m sure companies would jump at and lobby like crazy. We are blessed that no such (Orwellian) entity exists (yet)

You can enforce it in the US. Which I think would be a good idea coupled with a humane immigration policy that focuses on lifting everyone up.

You can also enforce it through trade laws, requiring imports to come from union shops.

What is Nvidia's gold mine? They don't make their own chips, right? Doesn't that mean that other companies can quickly catch up, if they are even behind?

Look at the history of 3dfx . They were up there with envidia at the dawn of 3D graphic cards wars. But bad logistics brought them down.

Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.

What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up.

For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor.

You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.

Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.

I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware.

There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn’t make a dent in the usage of CUDA.

My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don’t win on first principles alone (“parallel design is well understood”). It’s the details that make you stand out.

Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia’s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth.

https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H

They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work.

They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp.

Nvidia thus built their gold mine.

I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.

Any insight into what those design mistakes are?

Take a peek at CUDA

    They don't make their own chips, right?

In 2023, this is a moot point. Neither does Apple. Neither does AMD. Neither does Qualcomm (which makes the vast majority of mobile phone CPUs). Neither does Broadcomm.

To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.

Remember how Marissa Mayer in her bid to rescue Yahoo made everyone come to office. Even to relocate entire teams to US.

How did that go?

she got her golden parachute. who cares about the suckers who had to move?

i think it comes down to bad management.

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment?

I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learning, to just generally noticing that they're struggling and stepping in to give them a hint / engage in a discussion, I just love the kind of "hands-on" aspect that you get from working in a non-remote environment. I want to ask my intern (my team is pretty small so we just take one intern at a time), to come 3 days a week at least just to be able to go through training with them like that, I recognise that people don't like it but I don't know how to do otherwise. I also can't help but feel like it helps to integrate the new team member in the team better, whereas a fully remote employee may end up being left out when part of of the team do see each other in office once or twice a week. But the prospect of either having a 2h long zoom call to see them act in a step by step manner, or to give them tasks and leave them by themselves until like 3h later to check in and see "ok, so, what'd you do? Oh, you got stuck on some dumb problem for 1h?" Feels shitty too. And I can totally understand interns that don't dare ask questions on slack for fear of bothering people in case they ask too many. Being able to just turn your head and ask someone next to you or a couple desks down is just so much easier.

I don't mind people being remote once they've gained a sense of independence, but I feel like I just can't do the first 2-4 months with an intern fully remote.

How do you guys do it?

I'm sure people will pipe up to say worked fine for me/us but it's definitely one of the specific issues (i.e. not generic culture, energy, etc.) that I've seen raised. I'm sure there are all manner of best practices--some of which a lot of companies don't follow in-person either. But, at the end of the day (absent any in-person time), you probably need to work harder and accept both inefficiency and that it just won't work for some people.

I'd just add that socially I would have found it really difficult to graduate from school and worked from my apartment indefinitely.

Thank god someone feels the same. No one cares when I put this argument forward against remote work especially for me as a junior/beginner dev

People may care. But, if the company policy is that people can work remotely when they want to, asking others to commute into an office on a regular basis is a pretty high bar.

I've got 13 years of experience, and I really worry about new people starting remotely today.

I'm not saying I would have failed completely if I started out in a fully remote environment, but I am very confident that I would not have leaned nearly as fast or as much or as deeply. I bet I would be multiple years behind in my career at least.

I get that some companies or teams or individuals seem to think they have figured this out (seeing some responses here). I hope some among them are writing books (or detailed blog series) specifically on this topic.

Sounds like a good argument for apprenticeship-style training. The trades do it fairly well, and I reckon you could probably skill up a number of IT folks and jr coders with a similar approach.

I experienced this when we brought on junior members and an intern right as COVID hit. The short answer is that you do it like anything else you do remotely.

Zoom, chat, email, regular check-ins. They join the standups and team calls, learn who to reach out to for help, are assigned a buddy, etc.

There can be benefits in terms of teambuilding and camaraderie in a collocated environment, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally different about a newer employee. Their lack of experience will be more about what they don’t know about the company, and not a lack of ability to collaborate remotely, a skill that they have most likely learned by now. And if they can’t collaborate remotely, they may not be a good fit for a remote company.

>a skill that they have most likely learned by now. And if they can’t collaborate remotely, they may not be a good fit for a remote company.

Those are both good points.

To the first, you really can't look at it through a "when I was a boy" lens. A lot of things are different with respect to communications today, especially those who went through school during the pandemic. Even outside of work, although I certainly still get together with people, I find that a lot of the time, we're quicker to setup a zoom call rather than go to someone's house or travel to some meeting.

And, it's a bit harsh, but you're also right with your second point. Maybe (assuming the company has decent practices) if remote doesn't work for them as an intern or other new hire, they may not be a good fit if that's also going to be the primary mode of work going forward.

> And if they can’t collaborate remotely, they may not be a good fit for a remote company.

I work for a REMOTE first company and we had a junior developer that was struggling with not being in the office. The good news is that they were able to move to another company with a local office. The bad news is we didn't see that they were struggling until it was too late. Maybe if we were in the office we might have been able to reach out and help sooner.

I feel like employee happiness and job satisfaction is harder to manage remotely. Or it just might be that this employee wouldn't have worked out anyway. Who knows.

> I feel like employee happiness and job satisfaction is harder to manage remotely. Or it just might be that this employee wouldn't have worked out anyway. Who knows.

It is, but there are mitigations. The big one is that you have to ask. You can't bump into an employee and have a chat on the way to lunch or in an elevator and get a candid take on X or Y. You gotta ask directly, and often take the temperature a few times.

Experienced employees will vent or direct complaints -- squeaky wheels, grease, etc. -- but the noobs may not know how to complain, or if they should feel invalidated, dumb, etc. Hard to know what condition your condition is in.

Remotely it takes more intentional effort. I think a hybrid model for juniors is best. If fully remote is the only option then you really need to be proactive about supporting the junior. I don't think a on site model for mentoring translates directly to a remote model. You really need to plan communication.

Focus on Screen sharing, huddle/discord (something that lets you talk but lets you off the "meeting mode") or actual days in office if possible

Prior to remote, many companies got by without much thought about the onboarding process. Basically, they stuck a new person in an office and assumed it would work out. With remote, companies have to be deliberate in their process. I have found this to be a good thing.

This x1000. If you think that you're going to do exactly what you were doing before remote work and it's going to work you're going to have a bad time.

The way you work has to evolve and you need to put more effort in initially depending on the area.

> Basically, they stuck a new person in an office and assumed it would work out.

That still doesn't work and never works. Right might have amplified it but no difference. In places without onboarding and training lots of people are still confused.

I have brought up a dozen or so freshies over the last thre years, with mixed results. My approach has changed since the beginning. Initially I would spend a lot of time; casual chats 1-1 and with teams to establish personal bonds, long sessions going over documents, the domain, active support and coaching over progressively harder tasks. This was not successful at all. Now, I just drop them off a cliff. Within the fist week, I have a short chat to get a feel, and throw them a non priority not too difficult task with no deadline. The ticket contains barely enough information. I add them to a few chats, point them to the docs home page and say goodbye. Based on the turnaround time and the quality of the work submitted abd how they go about seeking help I get a REALLY good gauge about their aptitude and attitued. They are either active about doing the task or they putter around and come up with excuses. Don't care much about code quality unless it's actually horrendous. This is great at catching ppl that faked their was through the interviews, the leetcode monkeys and other less desirable traits. Based on this the next task either involves a lot of collab or little to none. As and Bs get a difficult independant task, C's get an easy to medium task that needs a lot of interaction. In both cases they are "prod" issues that, the importance of the delivery and the deadline are stressed, they have to do an internal and external demo at the end. Team members are on standby for support or takeover if absolutely needed. This approach is WAY more sucessful. And stressful as well for the newb, but trial by fire seems to be the best way to get people integrated and being productive. Everything is learning on the fly, domain, process, culture, tools, everything. Compalined about not enough docs? Ok you go make the docs? Didn't like some part of the process? You make sure it changes. Didn't get enpugh support? You schedule the support call.

The biggest learning for me was that the amount of time spent coaching was inversely related to the "success rate". For those who genuinely wish to learn whatever the approach is makes little to no difference, for the others it makes a massive difference. Some hate it initially, but the consensus is that they all appreciate being a valuable contributor. Noone wants to be stuck in the back cleaning up docs or writing sorry tests for so done else's shitty code or doing wild goose chases or ,"ramping up" for months.

We have a strong team/collab culture. Everyone is "nice" the worst thats going to happen is that people leave you on read. My advice to all is to not worry about "bothering" people. Bother as many people as possible, ask all the dumb questions. You DM 10 people or post in a GC with 50ppl the same question in a minute. If I don't have the time I won't respond, but someone else will. If you need I'll stay on a call with you for hours while I do my work. So I actually think the amount of support available remotely is much more than the office, if you get over your hangups.

Struggling and being lost, wasting hours or days on the dumbest issue are all part of the process and there's no way around it, so the sooner you get comfortable with it the better. We work in domains where Google runs out of answers very quickly, the SR guys are still figuring things out and half the time noone knows what in world is happening right now. Getting on your own two feet is your responsibility.

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this.

It makes a lot of sense to me, and resonates with the experience I've had both as a noob to programming (or to a new role) and as a person responsible for onboarding.

A controlled trial by fire with asking for help if stuck encouraged.

Thanks a lot for this. I'll definitely try to imitate this for my next intern.

    The biggest learning for me was that the amount of time spent coaching was inversely related to the "success rate". For those who genuinely wish to learn whatever the approach is makes little to no difference, for the others it makes a massive difference.

This is an interesting point. It might be due to extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. Does anyone know a good way to measure people's motivation? I guess there should be a set of multiple choice questions that could be asked to evaluate someone's source of motivation, then tailor training to their needs.

Best I found was the giving the first task without a deadline, they claw their way through it and get it done asap or you get a series of excuses for a week, or somewhere between the two.if they ask you when or with what quality it needs to be done,it right off the bat it's good sign.

Hire good people. And good people want to work remote.

Not sure about intern, but I've onboarded a lot of new people and I love it. I just take 1-3 hours a day and have them share their screen and work on their task.

Once they're comfortable, the sessions turn from a pairing session to a planning session that doesn't last as long, and with a few 10 minute checkins.

Eventually the person ramps up. You just need management to carve out time for this so you aren't overloaded, and you need to make it clear that the person isn't interrupting you, it is part of your job to help them, even being proactive and asking people if they want an extra pair of eyes for those who don't feel comfortable asking for help when they need it

Yes, and it’s honestly more comfortable to share screens over Zoom than it is to try squeezing next to them at their desk in an office.

or using their disgusting equipment. I would absolutely refuse to use some coworkers keyboards or mice...

> Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment?

What about interns/juniors needing training can't be solved "asynchronously" via Slack/Teams/Zoom/email/video call + screenshare?

In my first programming job I learnt Vim , simply because I saw other people doing it and thought it looked cool. I feel doing the same remotely would be tricky. Even if I learnt of it, how would I ever quit Vim and switch back to Slack?

I imagine that there would be less of a chance of you learning Vim and sticking with something more common like VSCode. And if VSCode meets your needs, then it doesn’t seem like a problem that needs a solution.

FWIW, I’m saying this as an enthusiastic Vim user. But I’d be able to do what I need to with VSCode just the same.

Couldn't you see this just the same when screen-sharing over Zoom?

Yes, I think you could. However this type of interaction (screen sharing) is generally scheduled (stand up, all-staff, etc.) while most institutional learning is done off the cuff. For example, when I was a younger programmer I spent quite a bit of time outside with an older programmer. He would go outside to smoke and I would go outside to take a break. We talked a lot and I learned a ton of stuff on those smoke breaks.

At another job, long ago, we had a free soda machine on the first floor. So, every day around 2:00 several of us would get together, walk downstairs, grab a soda and talk about stuff. It was a great bonding experience and allowed us to become much closer as a team.

We've been trying to recreate these "water cooler" experiences with Zoom and screen sharing but haven't had much success. Everything feels forced. We have a daily "hangout" meeting; no one is forced to attend and most people don't. I've been trying to get management to have a 2-day on-site event every quarter but it hasn't worked out. We used to do a quarterly on-site event in the before times (pre COVID) but not anymore. Ironically, before COVID most of our employees were local and in-office and we still had on-site events for everyone.

yeah zoom based hangouts are usually pretty cringe and I don't enjoy most myself. have felt similarly to you that on sites are really the only consistent way this kind of stuff happens, but it's been hard in my company to motivate management to pay for those

Perspective from someone who entered the workforce during COVID, I found being onboarded remotely was just fine. My team lead is 27, and the rest of us are under 25. We bond and engage socially in our Slack channels just fine. We meet once a week, but banter less than over text.

I don’t mean this in a flippant way - for better or worse, social media has transformed the way this generation communicates. Online slang is an adaptation that evolved as a means to capture the full range of human expression in character limited unicode strings. Group chats are the atomic unit of social networks in the digital age.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a generational divide when it comes to how efficient remote work and learning is, and the success will vary from team to team depending on its composition. The latter is self evident enough, but still useful to keep in mind.

Personally, I find there’s an argument to be made that water cooler experiences are forced, since it’s synchronous communication that makes it less possible for a party to politely disengage midway through if that’s what they wish.

Video calls with screen sharing a couple of hours a day. Just as good as face-to-face

When COVID started we hired a few people from college. It was a bit harder but not significantly so. They simply stayed active on chat and video calls, otherwise their biggest problem was the lack of a good spot in their place for WFH.

I haven't got the sense that industry does a whole lot of training. Generally speaking they want you to do that on your own time at your own cost. Sure I've seen places that had interns but they were mostly used as cheap labor as opposed to a desire to train anyone.

I trained all my new team members remotely by:

1. Checking in on them often to make sure they weren't blocked.

2. Screensharing or pair programming (one on one) to teach them necessary skills.

3. Making it 100% clear that they could reach out to me or another senior team member at any time for help - if we're too busy we'll just respond later.

Works quite well as long as your senior engineers aren't overworked and can actually dedicate some time to bringing juniors up to speed.

For big tech specifically part of the issue is that they fired a significant percentage of people managers on the ground, often orphaning entire org trees - especially in remote offices.

No longer having a good sense of what everyone is up to, they are using ye old attendance as a proxy for doing work.

Idiots.

Why are companies so hellbent on asking their workers to waste hours in commute? WFH hurts people with “soft” skills the most. MBA types.

It's the tax breaks:

>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.

>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

That makes some sense. Massive amount of people converging on a downtown area does things to the local economy.. especially if that economy was adapted to cater 80% to them and 20% to tourists

Maybe that's a small part, but even if you look internationally, 87% of CEOs in the 2023 CEO KPMG poll want return to the fiefdo-- office.

https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2023/09/ceo...

Do similar tax breaks not exist outside the US? Seems like a sensible thing for the municipality to provide and for businesses to accept, in general.

At least none I'm aware of that are bound to occupancy.

Existing tax incentives are probably one of the legit reasons why some companies are concerned about wide-scale WFH though I tend to agree with a sibling comment that it's probably also not a major factor.

It's reasonable for cities to be concerned. Empty offices take a lot of supporting businesses with them. And, absent a need to go into an office, a lot of people will (and have) decide that the tradeoffs of urban life aren't for them--especially when their favorite restaurants or coffeeshops go out of business and friends move out.

In the US, many cities have had significant downcycles before. There's no law of nature that it can't happen again.

Force people into the office so small businesses don't close? Sounds like communism.

I think its the unknown. Are big corporations with lots of WFH employees successful in the long term? The reality is no one really knows so its a risk. Maybe it'll turn out fine, maybe it'll increase productivity, maybe the company will slowly die as the culture crumbles. There is a lot of arguments going on but realistically no one has ever tried it.

There are plenty of companies who have tried it, and succeeded

Mostly smaller companies that built and hired remote from the beginning or at least early on.

Name one. I mean a real corporate with >10k employees.

I know there are a lot of people here who are determined to insist that remote work is an unalloyed good. And that any effort to get people to come into an office is a plot by commercial real estate-owning MBAs.

But things really aren't that simple. I work for a company that was pretty remote-friendly before and is quite heavily remote now to the point of closing down some major offices (mostly big suburban ones, not urban--which are mostly fairly small).

I think most people would agree that things have mostly gone "OK" but that forming new relationships has been harder, onboarding and mentoring new people has been more difficult, etc.--as well as softer things around engagement, connection, etc.

I've effectively worked mostly remote for many years but it's not all goodness.

Like all things in life, there is a trade-off when we choose remote work over on-site work, or the other way around. I’ll share my personal experience below.

I’ll reframe the argument to “can a company be 100% remote (where possible) without affecting profitability and productivity?” Anecdotally, I think the answer is yes.

Culture does take a hit. Can be harder for more inexperienced team members to quickly integrate. It also takes longer to develop bonds with colleagues and “enjoy” work in the same way as being in-office. In other words, working remotely takes all the fun out of office work. But in return, you gain an unthinkable level of flexibility. This is a big deal for anyone who likes to travel/live outside the city/has a family.

So to leaders who say remote work isn’t the same quality, etc. - that’s pure BS. What they really want is to get 8+ hrs from you. They belong to the school of thought “if we can keep our employees in the campus longer, more work gets done”.

That might be true to a degree. Remote work removes most serendipitous moments from work. You won’t accidentally bump into a colleague from a previous team, brainstorm crazy ideas together in your lunch break and create something magical. Which means innovation needs to be more intentional. The culture has to evolve and promote some free learning time and non-roadmap/exploratory work (such as a hackathon).

Anyway, this has been my personal experience working in both styles on both sides (engineer + leader). I don’t believe everyone will agree with me, and that’s fine. However it is safe to generalize that a significant % of people have been very successful at remote work, and aren’t buying the pseudo reasons against it.

That's a good take and, as to:

>It also takes longer to develop bonds with colleagues

I wonder to what degree bonds that developed in-person inevitably decay over time as people leave the company or switch roles, if the primarily virtually-developed bonds will be as strong or effective. I expect not. Off-sites can probably help (though some of the stronger remote proponents object to those as well) but that assumes companies budget for travel and time away from the day-to-day.

Whenever big corp types bring up this topic, I stuff Brian Moynihan in their faces. If Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, ran one of the biggest banks in the world remotely for a decade, I am sure some mids writing spaghetti code can manage.

Reads like you're implying superior soft skills for MBAs, and the other way round. If SWEs really thought this type of way, this statement would explain more about SWEs than MBAs, oh well

I like the "privilege for me, none for thee" theory: executives have typically always worked wherever. Suddenly giving that privilege to others upsets the natural order. The people under you aren't supposed to be your equals. You as an executive are supposed to jet around the country/world into offices full of smiling faces who will worship the ground you walk on.

This. Management should be screened phsycologically for toxic self-centered tendencies and treatment provided.

In a law firm, the most senior partner is a lawyer (and usually bills out among the highest). In a hospital, the head of surgery is a surgeon (and usually one of the best). In a fabrication shop, the boss is a pro with the materials.

Software is, AFAIK, the only wildly demanding field where senior leaders who can’t even remotely do the thing is considered normal.

> Software is, AFAIK, the only wildly demanding field where senior leaders who can’t even remotely do the thing is considered normal.

For what it's worth: just because you're the top dog in your field that doesn't mean you're a good manager.

We should actually insist on rolling out separate management and career tracks because either require completely different skillsets.

15 minutes of research would probably get you the names of highly successful technical people who spectacularly flamed out in a senior management role and incredibly successful CEOs of technical companies who lacked pretty much any hands-on technical experience.

Many companies do but the IC track gets hard just as the management track starts.

At my company, a Director and a Principal eng are same level, but Principal eng are people with industry renown. There are twice as many Directors than PENG, but you can keep climbing to SR Director, VP, SVP.

The leaders of hospitals almost always have MBA's, not MDs. Every medical department answers to the business analysts.

I was gonna make a comment saying “yeah but those MBAs aren’t dictating minutiae about how they complete their tasks (in the way software CEOs are assured we work better in an open-office shared desk hours from our homes)”

But actually there’s a ton of micromanagement in medicine too. It’s equally insane there though and transparently driven by profit motives over patient wellbeing.

> It’s equally insane there though and transparently driven by profit motives over patient wellbeing.

only in the US, mon ami.

I think its literally a meme.

Executives at different companies do communicate with each other, and recieve a similar "news feed." And in that pseudo social group, bringing workers back in became a popular self perpetuating topic. Its a thing others are doing, so they should do it too.

There are many other factors, but it has to be more than practicality and ego when Meta and Zoom are bringing employees in. Peer pressure is a great way to make smart humans do irrational things.

If MBAs have any skills at all, they seem hell-bent on convincing the rest of the world otherwise.

Enjoy the remote work now. It is a bubble. Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market. Those who had normal jobs pre-covid, and since are totally remote, ride a wave of higher wages. That wave will crash the day employers realize they can find cheaper talent online. If you work remotely then you have to be competative at an international level. Maybe you really are of the best in the word, but there is only so much room at the top. Beware of starting careers so easily outsourced.

I would also hazard that any job easily done remotely is also ripe for takeover by AI. If your job requires no in-person contact, it might not require a person full stop.

I am perfectly fine with that, what are you trying to say with this?

Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid?

pretty sure that is what the OP is trying to say.

Some will thrive, many will not.

That's always been the case anyway. Remote work doesn't change that.

If those people are really that smart, they won’t work for 5-10% of US rates for long, but eventually find the highest bidder.

> Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid?

Where do people find these amazingly smart programmers for only 20-40k/year?!

I have worked with a lot of people who would smoke me on an aptitude test but there is often a littany of reasons you wouldn't want them anywhere near your development team.

In most cases they hang at average because what we are doing is just CRUD and they have little initiative to dive deep into requirements refinement, product innovation, mentorship and other things requiring business acumen or outreach.

Nevermind that some of them are just grumpy assholes high on pedantry.

Modern paradox : Companies want global markets for products but no global markets for employment. What a tragedy!!

> Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market.

People have been saying that since time immemorial, way before the current remote work era. Heck, I remember that being said about programming jobs when I was in high school 18+ years ago. I'm still waiting for my job to be replaced by Indians.

being early is not the same as being wrong though.

That's the nice thing about unfalsifiable statements, you're never wrong.

I've been hearing it since 1995. Still didn't happen in a way all these fear mongers describe it.

Risk and accountability are why this is wrong. Local jurisdiction will be the limit to this in many instances. Adherence to local law will be politically controlled. "They took our jobs" as South Park once mocked.

At least I can afford a house with heating outside of London, lol.

Outsourcing to Indian companies like HCL was a thing way before covid and remote work. Results were varied. I never felt threatened as a remote employee

Everyone looks to india, but that isnt the only cheaper labor market. If you work a tech job in the bay area, the most threatening labor market isnt india or china, but west virginia and alabama. The most direct threat isn't the overseas person willing to work for 10% of your wage, but your drop-in replacement willing to work for 80% of your wage because they are paying 50% less in rent.

Wouldn't a Bay Area company outsourcing to West Virginia just be remote work?

I think the point is that it's remote with presumably fluent English, cultural similarity, and a time zone difference that is absolutely routine for many, many teams.

I think the issue is you keep saying 'cheap' labor and a 'crash'. It might be better to qualify your statement as SV/FAANG salaries may adjust down, but for the vast majority across the US salaries will likely go up. I would also bet that many in SV will happily take 80% of their salary if they can live anywhere they like.

Do you know anyone from these states? I know a bunch of folks and your characterization is inaccurate -- the talent that you have accessible from non-"premium" US markets is generally also not as good as what you'd find in NYC or the Bay Area. The set of people you're describing are those from these states that are both competent enough to work at a FAANG but also unwilling to move to an existing city that FAANG hires in. What I've found is that population in general is not that big -- people that have the ambition and grind to get into a top software shop in general are also willing to relocate for it.

When living and working in a major regional city, you can really feel the quality difference between locals (grew-up in the city) vs move-ins. The people who move-in have much higher motivation. I have seen this same pattern repeat over and over again in my career in multiple major cities.

In my experience, HCL "consultants" (non-full-time-employees) are consistently the worst for low cost, offshore talent. My old teammate used to say "HCL stands for 'hopefully can learn'."

Sure, if you believe the talent in those cheaper labour markets is actually equivalent. That's probably not the case, though.

Still, I think there is some truth to stay you say. I've always worked jobs that require me to come in occasionally to meet my users and get hands on experience with equipment they will be working with (like expensive lab equipment). For me the big win is that I can primarily do my programming from home, but my job could never be fully nor could it be outsourced.

> outsourced to a cheaper labor market

Have you hired any contractors outside the US lately? They may not be SV level, but hourly rates that translate into 150k-250k yearly are fairly standard through any contracting firm for people with experience. Can the lone, amazing and cheap person be found? Sure, but that's not how companies operate at scale.

Also, I've been told since I was studying CS in the late 90s that going into programming was a poor career choice because everything would be outsourced to India. Here we are almost 25 years later...

As far as AI is concerned, sure some jobs will be displaced. But, IMO the vast majority of AI will be a productivity multiplier. I've yet to be a part of company that doesn't have a list of projects a mile long they would work on if given more programmer time. Customer expectations will also increase and eventually we'll settle at a new, higher baseline where everyone is using AI to get more done.

>> Have you hired any contractors outside the US lately?

Yup. For a great many people in this world, contractors in the US are often the competitor cheap labor market.

>I would also hazard that any job easily done remotely is also ripe for takeover by AI. If your job requires no in-person contact, it might not require a person full stop.

Thats... honestly a bullshit that makes me think that you havent worked in cross-geo projects.

Why would in-person contact be needed if almost all stakeholders for my project are across US/EU/China/India?

You think remote projects are somehow easier or more trivial?

I'd want to remind you that there are countless complex OSS projects that are pushed ahead by remote teams.

> I'd want to remind you that there are countless complex OSS projects that are pushed ahead by remote teams.

... remote teams comprised of top 1% talent because they love their job so much they do it for free in their spare time.

Its not quite the same when you have a bunch of lazy wage slaves that want to do the bare minimum.

'Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market.'

Manufacturing was offshored long before office work, and it wasn't because factory workers 'worked from home' so employers saw the opportunity.

Office work has been off/near-shored routinely and increasingly since the 1990's. The decision to do this has nothing to do with the recent WFH wave.

Same goes for automation. Nothing to do with remote work. It will happen once tech is 'good enough' to take over. No amount of ass-on'chair maratons in the cubicle farm or the 'let's pretend we are working here' open space office plateaus will change that.

Nope. People have made that claim for 20+ years and it never happened. It turns out that the kind of people you can hire cheap are so bad that you have to hire really expensive experienced developers to manage them. And it still takes forever to get anything done.

There is remote, and then there is "away from office building".

I doubt most jobs are truly "be in the Maldives 24/7/365, we damn care".

Most "remote" jobs are just "don't come to office, but do be ~nearby, for reasons".

These reasons are often some sort of legal/tax type things (data security, tax rate calculation etc) They want the employee to be in the same/similar jurisdiction as them, both to avoid any legal liabilities and to avoid extra work.

It's difficult to let your sensitive data flow across borders, for example, and now one wants the headache of multiple tax jurisdictions, etc.

Now, whether you are "actually" physically present in the specific region is a different question, but at least offices like to pretend you are close by.

Also, people DO like to have group sessions, so they like to call up people to get together and has out things every once in a while, they'd prefer people who can visit without visa headaches.

That's why I feel truly remote is not as big of a threat as people feel like, and as some one who'd like to avail remote options, I feel this has been an actual barrier in getting jobs, so I think you needn't worry about people like me taking your jobs :D

I believe Heroku is remote first also (maybe Saleforce also but not 100% sure).

WFH is a great way to find companies you want to work for. Companies that don’t allow WFH are almost guaranteed to be toxic and dysfunctional. Good developers have choices. Non-WFH companies miss out.

Nvidia's model is roughly people sat in a meeting room with a big screen showing a bunch of people at home or in other meeting rooms. I think some people are office based, some hybrid, some wholly remote. They put up some solid engineering on that basis.

AMD engineering is much the same, in case someone reading this is thinking GPUs+remote sounds great, but they want to work on open source instead of proprietary toolchains.

That has caused a very competitive job market, their HR doesn't even give the courtesy of a canned denial e-mail after applying for jobs.

https://archive.ph/jzBIx

Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office. So essentially if you expect WfH making your life easier while being evaluated at the same level with others, you are probably wrong.

>Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office.

data/citation needed

Tech has always been hybrid with some people being 100% remote. I'm not sure what the point of all these articles are. Even at companies that had a butts-in-seats minimum days per week rule it was always guidance and actual compliance was left to the local manager.

I would have a problem with metric based enforcement such as we are seeing with Amazon, though. Seems like management just wants to lay down rules and have them followed.

They’re so rich they could do almost anything and it would “work” — at least in the short term.

How much of a corporate real estate portfolio do they have?

They just built the second of the two large buildings making up most of their HQ in Santa Clara. Those buildings were designed and selected well before the pandemic though.

In their ability to change colour on demand, those in C suite can put even the best of chameleons to shame.

If executives' enthusiasm for remote work during pandemic days were an erect phallus, employees who counted on executives' words have climactic fluid on their faces. I expect nVIDIA to be no different; it's only a matter of time.

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