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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

I talked to an acquaintance who ran a startup that went remote during the pandemic. His view was that the self-motivated conscientious employees were just as productive remote as they were in the office, if not more. The problem was that when they left the office the people in the office became less productive.

To me that makes a lot of sense and aligns well with my experience of office life. Some people depend on seeing others around them working, or they can’t get much done.

I asked him if he thought it was fair that his self-motivated employees essentially had to provide this service for free to the company, and spend time commuting to do it. Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.

(This was in Sweden, which has a more collectivist work culture than the US.)

EDIT: But to be honest I think there might be more truth to @kitsune_’s sibling comment.

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I think a lot of this comes down to perception of ROI for management. If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office, why would you expose yourself to risk? I'm in this situation now where I'm hiring early employees and looking to grow, and about 90% of the decisions is how well can I derisk this hire.

I don't need elite developers; I need competent, conscientious "75%" developers. It doesn't make sense to spend time interviewing, onboarding, and hiring, just to expose myself to another risk factor.

Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.

> If the employment market is giving you qualified candidates at the price you seek in-office

Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...

> Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Yes, because the employment market is not a free market. You can find (virtually) any employees your heart desires, because workers are highly motivated to not die. In addition, they have no bargaining power, meaning they take what they can get. They don't have visibility either - hiring is a perfect black box to them.

The scales are not only not balanced, they're almost completely tipped. This is why companies can pay below market and still get a constant supply of (shitty) employees. If you simply lower your standards, you can get infinite employees. They could hire children if they wanted, and it would be easy. They could pay 50 cents an hour if they wanted. Luckily, the laws prevent this - but it's most certainly NOT an issue of demand. There's a high demand among children to work and there's a high demand among laborers to work for poverty wages.

I'm not sure of the relevance - we're not talking about child labour here.

We're talking about highly-skilled software engineers and product specialists who are used to being able to command high 6-figure salaries with considerable additional perks (RSUs, bonuses, 3 meals a day on campus, free laundry...)

Those are the folks Meta/Amazon/Google are mandating return to 5 days a week in office. The folks stuck doing manual labour in their fulfilment/data/moderation centres... those ones mostly never were allowed to go remote in the first place.

Of course it's relevant because it's all the same. Software engineers have merely deluded themselves into believing they command things. Without a union, you have no bargaining power.

Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. But you're not, you're a cog like the rest of us and the only thing you command is a shitty drip coffee machine in a cramped break room.

This is a matter of class, not a matter of profession. You, and I, are being bullied by our employers because we have absolutely 0 say in how we work our jobs. That's no different than any manual laborer - minus the ones who are unionized.

In a matter of irony, mechanics and such that operate in a union have much more control over their workplace. If their job allowed it, they could trivially strike for the benefit of WFH. That's not a power you have, you're too busy bending over and then later justifying how you wanted to take it all along.

What you say is certainly true in general, but there are a surprising number of specialists kicking around big tech companies who are not particularly fungible, and replacing them means likely poaching their counterpart from another firm. Those are the ones you really don't want to decide they'd have more fun working remote for a startup...

> Is the employment market actually giving you that?

Yes. Not all applications benefit from FAANG experience. There is a lot of work to be done that pays in the 130-200 range that isn't necessarily cutting edge. I should add, benefits are excellent (major medical) and it's a private office.

> Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...

I can believe it. Sometimes, you just need technical excellence to bring a product to market, otherwise you fail. But other times, you can simply apply well understood paradigms to well understood markets and have excellent financial returns.

It's the difference between an excellent business and an excellent product. When you have a choice, choose the excellent business.

> Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.

In a relatively free labor market (like e.g. California’s) that perspective is fine with me, because you probably have to pay more for the conscientious “75%” developers you need. But Sweden has a heavily regulated and unionized labor market where differences in pay are typically motivated by the collectively agreed “fairness”.

I can assure you that your argument would have been just as foreign for my acquaintance.

If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign. Entrepreneurship in Sweden (at least according to a quick google search) is relatively rare. Most of the entrepreneurs coming from the nordics I have interacted with have been decidedly less social contract oriented than even I am to the point where they seem almost like Gordon Gekko caricatures as though they are attempting to behave in a manner they think someone attempting to operate in a market-driven context would act. I am not sure that this argument would be totally foreign to your acquaintance, at least based upon the entrepreneurs coming from that region of the world in the USA.

> If I'm being totally honest, I am not sure it would be totally foreign.

I think I simply have more information than you do in this case. :)

(Because I know the person we’re talking about, and because I’ve worked in Swedish startups for 20 years, my own and other’s.)

If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.

I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.

> If getting the best developers for your budget isn't a priority, hiring remotely allows you to stretch your runway further.

If I wanted to stretch my budget, I would go to LATAM. Developers marketing themselves as "go remote, stretch your budget further" will see just how far it can stretch.

I'm hiring in the USA because my business requires knowledge of the US business environment (benefits management) and require in-person because it's easier to prevent mistakes which can attract the ire of regulators when you are small and don't have formal review processes.

> I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.

Possible, and I didn't interact with only Swedes; I interacted with mostly Norwegians and a few Swedes, so I may be generalizing somewhat. But it really seemed like there was a collective sense of "I need to act as ruthless as possible to run a business here". I don't think American business customs are well understood in practical application.

That's kind of normal so I only pick up companies that offer remote only positions with no strings attached.

That's fine? It's a market. Work for whoever is offering mutually agreeable terms for as long as that remains the case.

Of course. That basically divides the market into 3 segments: (1) companies that fully enforce RTO, (2) those that partly enforce RTO ("hybrid"), and (3) those that give you a choice - full WFH or coming to the office when you wish.

Based on what I observe in my niche, (3) have an enormous advantage when it comes to both hiring and maintaining senior talent.

> Don’t think he could fully grasp the question, didn’t see a problem with that at all.

Ask him if he ever considered actually asking the self-motivated conscientious employees their opinion and preferences - and watch his mind boggle.

Basically, employers hate a power imbalance in favour of employees.

That's a problem that can be encountered by companies that don't think through how remote work is supposed to work at their workplace. It's easier to craft processes when everyone is remote (i.e. if the company is remote-first).

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