Spotify Will Keep Remote Working | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Will Keep Remote Working

edmtunes.com

91 pointsbilsbie25 comments

Good. Unless you're creating a physical product, there is no need for everyone to be physically in the same space.

The sooner we stop treating founders and CEOs like infallible job creators and start pushing back on all the RTO, the better.

That hardly stops there. You'd be surprised how much a modern company that makes physical products can cut the need to be "in the same space". Nowadays designing, training and even testing can be done digitally up to a point where a decision of mass production is made. VR/ER for Inspecting plants or training staff with equipment that is still being produced on the other side of the globe (you can use extended reality to use it in actual space it will be used, or full VR, to interact with it with overview of its surroundings, being able to fully test software and UI of screens the machinery has, etc).

That is not the future, these are things that are actively used, successfully, now.

Exactly. My first remote job (pre Covid!) was for a hardware company.

Surprisingly few jobs require daily hands-on work nowadays.

Assuming selfish motivation: are they having trouble attracting talent? Maybe they see hiring trends turning around.

Anecdote: My girlfriend, a recruiter, says she's seen more recruiters being hired.

> she's seen more recruiters being hired

This is a good sign for the whole industry at large, considering how bad the tech job market has been for the last two years.

That or forcing people into offices will make the best leave.

Interest rates got cut.

Is there really that direct of a relationship between hiring and interest rates?

Yes. If the short term rate banks can lend to each other (the fed funds rate set by the central bank) is lower, then all downstream longer term rates / bond yields tend to fall:

https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/

This is simplified, but:

Say you have a billion dollars in cash. With rates at 0% and inflation at 2%, you might as well spend that cash by hiring some engineers and chasing a hit product. Or an OK product.

With rates at 5% or so and 2% inflation you can make decent money keeping your cash in a savings account paying 5% YoY. Unless you're sure you have a good idea, you might as well park the cash and skip out on all of that "hiring engineers" business, which may not result in a good product anyway.

Spotify is a good employer but they don't pay tier 1 salaries.

Haha. I just checked levels.fyi and they get paid way more than I do. Anyone know if they are hiring for Haskell/Gleam/Rust/OCaml?

Interestingly the only software engineering position I see on their site is on site.

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