Cookingboy

>It was doable 10-30 years ago

And 150 years ago you can probably buy a few acres of land in SF Bay Area for less than the inflation-adjusted price of a townhouse in Mountain View these days.

Real estate is one thing that does not scale infinitely. Population grow, things change.

>can't blame them when they get out into the market and finally start saving that they're 10 gonna be 10 years behind for the rest of their life...

That's the thing about Americans. The speed of change in this country has finally increased after decades, especially when comparing to many fast developing countries. A lot of people just don't know how to adjust for that.

>"I can't afford the house I want

Americans especially have a very skewed expectation when it comes to housing. Many people here are like "I have an upper middle class professional income, my family should have no problem affording a 3-4 bedroom single family house on a quarter acre lot with a big backyard for our dogs to run around in right in the middle of one of the most desirable metropolitan areas on the planet! Oh btw the free public schools should be excellent too!".

Saying something like that would make you sound insane in pretty much all developed countries. U.S. is a big exception due to historical reasons, but people really need to adjust their expectations going forward.

>it's pretty messed up if you're making 3x the national median household income

3x national median income would actually mean something if real estate costs the same nationally, but obviously it doesn't. Many areas in the country costs far more than 3x in terms of real estate prices.

If you make the 3x the median income of the area you live in, then it would be a stronger argument.

>Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve accountability from Baltimore politicians?

Nope. Education is such a complex and critical task that letting local politicians to decide the fate of our children in the hyper competitive 21st century is borderline insane.

>Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?

That's complete strawman. Most countries have non-partisan experts (i,e non-politicians) in charge of education. Just because everything is politicized and hyper-partisan in this broken country doesn't mean it's the only way going forward.

Compared to what? I grew up in Shanghai and went to great schools but I also attended one of the best public school districts in Texas for high school, and there are many areas that I think my high school did better than its Chinese counterparts.

>solve poverty, and/or socio-economic divides in housing distribution

Most countries don't have education quality this much tied to local property taxes. It is totally possible to increase equality for education without fully fix income/housing inequality.

If you want relatively equal access to education and ensure minimal gap between poorer areas and wealthier areas, then there is no alternative other than a centralized education system where tax is collected federally and funding and initiatives are driven by comprehensively studying the needs of the whole country.

Just like many other things in this country, the distributed, State/local based education system simply does not scale for the 21st century.

The reason we are wasting so much money in education is despite the total cost, due to the siloed/localized system we have, we can't effectively direct funding to places that need it most. The federal government can spend tens of millions doing some "study" in why education sucks in rural schools, but it can't use a penny of that money to actually pay salaries of teachers in rural schools. In some other countries you have national programs where they pay young teachers extra to go to less desirable areas to teach, and that's just one minor examples we can learn from.

And that's not counting the whole federal budget. Just imagine how many school districts like the one from this article we can save if we just build one less Ford class aircraft carrier.

>Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to hear that a Senior Engineering Manager at Rakuten, the "Japanese Amazon" and one of their top software companies, only has the TC of somewhere around $100k USD. And the position was in Tokyo, not exactly a cheap place.

Many senior engineers at "top tier" domestic software companies get paid somewhere around $70-$90k, which is pathetic for even LCOL areas in the U.S.

Hmmm… I wonder why people make movie adaptation of novels then if text can do everything.

>Very curious again, because even in HN there were a lot of stories where people are willing to even resign, to keep the freedom that they discovered with not having to work in strict constraints

What do you mean by "even HN"? HN is extremely biased toward super introverted anti-social people who prefer working alone and not have human interaction. Using HN as a data point is about as biased as it gets on this topic.

Think logically for a moment, if the majority of people have "working remote" as their number 1 priority regardless of nature of work or compensation, then places like Silicon Valley wouldn't have existed in the first place. The good engineers would all have left and taken a lower paid remote contracting job working from home (and some indeed have in the past).

At the end of the day we do have internal survey data from FB and Google and other companies, vast majority of them do not want full remote work.

>You're making the assumption that people behave rationally.

What? No, my original post was completely about how people don't act rationally, and that's why WFH will not be as amazing despite it can be more product in many cases.

>If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial.

There are surveys at Facebook, Google, etc. The vast majority of people do not want full remote only. Most of them prefer a hybrid approach.

I don't have much to add and I don't disagree with much of what you wrote, just wanna say thanks for the write up.

I'm not moving goal posts at all, I'm simply giving you concrete examples of things you cannot accomplish as well under full-remote. I never said you can't be a fully remote code monkey, and you may be surprised to find out that the "best people" aren't code monkeys.

> but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water...

That's just simply not true. Plenty of companies have been allowing remote work since way before the Pandemics and no, they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".

The best people care most about the project they work on and the people they work with and also the compensation, only a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1 criteria when push comes to shove.

In fact, I know a ton of brilliant and driven people planning to leave remote-only companies because they prefer a different work environment. All the internal polls from everywhere I've seen states that vast majority of employees do not want full remote.

>This is likely because the prize money is significantly funded by the tickets sold to the “meatspace”.

Absolutely not. The prize money was exclusively funded by the sales of in-game battlepass, which is purely digital.

> Of course this is true, but that isn't evidence that hackathons are inherently more productive if they're in person. In some ways, they're less productive in person.

But human beings aren’t robots, and we value a ton of things other than pure efficiency and productivity.

And I’m the OP here, fwiw, I think the hybrid approach where people go to office 1-2 times a week will be the most universally accepted.

There are a ton of productivity to be gained for people who otherwise cannot be as productive working alone remotely, that’s something you seem to not realize.

There is so much to measure how much an engineer contributes other than how many lines they churn out or how many PRs they merge. Things like training, mentorship, organizational level influences are critical to a company’s success.

In fact, companies values a lot of those soft impact so much more than raw productivity.

A huge portion of an engineer’s job (especially senior level engineers) aren’t strictly technical. This seems to be something people miss.

>Such things are usually unnecessary to the task at hand, and often detrimental

Have you considered the mere possibility that many people's work have different types of tasks than yours?

It's so hard not to make stereotypical jokes about engineers when reading comments like this XD

It's interesting how you used Taiwan and hackathons as example.

Despite their successes, I'll bet a decent amount of money that after Covid is over, many hackathons will resume to be in-person events.

In fact, think of this the other way, would people in Taiwan be happy if they hear they will be locked down forever? Of course not right? So people obviously derive some value from human interaction. And that value, as little as it is for some people, will very often translate over to working relationship.

>we didn't have spoken language for a very, very long time, and we interacted "just fine" without it insomuch as our entire ancestral history for a couple hundred million years survived to the point where homo sapiens could finally branch off and eventually figure out complex language. Same goes for writing. So, that's kind of the problem with naturalist arguments.

A simple counter-argument to all your examples: when something new comes along, they rarely fully replace what's there before, but merely augmented it or expanding the horizon. We didn't replace gestures and body languages with spoken language, and we didn't replace spoken language with written text. Technology will no doubt expand our interaction paradigm with new methods, but it won't fully eliminate the benefit of old ones.

>I was under the impression that comps have the practice of giving work to people that might produce good results with that kind of work, and trust me, people who might produce good results will want the freedom WFH makes possible.

Just because companies were only giving WFH opportunity to high performers doesn't mean all high performers prefer WFH opportunities.

Have you considered the possibility that some people actually are more productive when they have some physical interaction with their coworkers once in a while? In fact I'd argue that's most people.

Even for the best employee who do the most amazing kind of work, being in person and take advantage of politics and "ass kissing" would only help, not hurt. For two employees who accomplish the exact same amount of work, the one who has better person skills and being able to take advantage of that will go further in career.

>But on the other hand, people who have to depend on politics and ass kissing to keep their job and get promoted

It seems like you are under this very strong impression of people who derive value for in-person work only do so because they are sub-par employees.

>Your point is not very clear, sorry.

I honestly don't know how is my point not clear. Being able to have both face to face communication and technology based remote communication is better than being limited to the latter alone. I thought that was a pretty straight forward point.

I was simply reminding you that whatever advantage Slack/Email has over in-person communication for technical discussions, they lose that advantage for non-technical discussions, which are just as quintessential for an organization.

But guess what, chatting online and video calls augmented our communication, instead of replacing face to face.

The fact that even in this day and age, we still hold major online videogame tournaments in person shows you how important meatspace is. The International, the videogame tournament with the largest prize pool, was canceled last year when the entire game (Dota 2) was an online game. When it's held each year the tickets are always sold out and the arena is always full. You can watch everything online but it never stopped a fully packed arena.

So yeah, my point of face-to-face socialization will never be fully replaced actually gets even stronger support when you bring up videogames.

>In fact, in technical discussion, not conveying too much emotion is a great advantage..

But I'd just like to remind you that even the most hardcore engineering company cannot possibly having only technical discussions.

This really reminds me that how often HN miss the forest for the tree.

>They are doubling down on real estate because they have sunken costs,

I'm pretty sure a company like Google that has no problem killing unsuccessful products after multi-billion dollar investments, knows how not to fall for the sunken cost fallacy.

> execs themselves probably have serious personal real estate positions and

As opposed to move to a different state, buy a house 3x the size for the same money, and save 10% on state income tax? Hmm....

>companies have a sizable chunk of h1b-captive employees that has to stick around anyway.

The very fact companies sponsors H1b instead of having them working remotely from China or India is precisely because they believe in the value of everyone physically together.

>all that is overridden by the notion that this must take place in Silicon Valley.

No you are missing the point. I never said it has to be in Silicon Valley. It's already happening in many places in the world. Google has offices in Silicon Valley and many other parts of the world, and the value the bring is the same: bring people who work together physically together.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as you are happy and you get what you want out of your job.

My entire argument is that for most people, they will unlikely be having their cake and eat it too. But if you never cared for eating cake, then all the powers to you.

>There's nothing magical about in-person communication.

Other the fact that the brains of our entire specie has evolved for millions of years for this exact type of communication, there isn't anything magical, I guess...

The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled, even if technology can now match in latency.

Good luck replicating body language, eye contacts, subtle facial cues etc with Slack messages.

>Not knowing how isn't proof it can't be done.

Human interaction skills falls into the category of things that knowledge doesn't even remotely guarantee outcome.

You can teach a group of socially awkward and introvert people an entire 4 years course of how to be a charismatic socialite and most of them still won't become one.

> Lots of things are currently happening in the world that were just science fiction not that long ago.

And lots of things are still happening in the exact same way it has happened for thousands of years. Technology can very often amplify human instincts, but it will very rarely undo them.

Or rather that demonstrates the absolute value of physical meetings.

If all day long Zoom calls and Slack messages could have led to spontaneous discussions/new initiatives like that they already would have, but they didn't, I saw more sparks flying in one afternoon of social event than 3 months of planned video calls.

I firmly believe if Silicon Valley goes fully remote, then it will no longer stay the innovation engine of the entire tech industry. Startups in China will eat us alive. You simply can't replicate the energy of Haidian District or Shenzhen with group messages.