I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies.
This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.
My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones.
I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.
This conversation, when I've had it with people, usually ends up with the same conclusions: people would like to see their coworkers face-to-face like.... a couple times a month. People have deep relationships with others without needing to see them 5 times a day, after all!
I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.
It is an interesting question. I have two new team members we added 2 months ago. Neither is very technical and, admittedly, it can get challenging sometimes, because pre-WFH, I could have just showed them what to do instead of spending 20 minutes trying to explain what I want them to do. I could technically grab a screen, but.. apparently, neither learns well that way and just yesterday I had some really odd issues with sound and MS Teams screen sharing.
Anyway, as much as I love remote, in person has its benefits.. like being able to strangle someone when needed.
As a developer, WFH actually facilitates things like pair programming and peer review. Especially for introverts like myself, it is much easier to do a screenshare of your IDE and review code in a group than try to sit next to each other or review code on a big screen in a meeting room. This has become a thing for us now (let's jump on a zoom and i'll show you quickly), for anything that's too complex to slack.
The ability to easily screen share and record sessions as needed means I can get the big picture in the initial live session and review the details later via recording as needed (especially those nitpicky code details nobody remembers the first time around).
I will miss this when we have to go back to the office.
Bad latency, pixelated screensharing, frequent issues with sound and video. On top of that hardware problems with bad microphone setups, cross talk, etc.
I hope that at some point someone is going to show up and take this seriously. Treat it like a medical service, or a least close to. But I'm not holding my breath. I believe it was least year that I read that John Carmack had measured the latency of his cell phone and found it to in the vicinity of 700 ms.
Hm I hadn’t thought about this in that way - this is very true - we maintain a lot of close relationships with people we don’t spend nearly 40 hours a week with.
And fwiw, I think I fall within this line of thinking - for me going to the office would be productive if it were at its absolute most once per week.
> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
This is going to be the big struggle for teams who formed in person but are now hiring remote.
I joined my current company about six months prior to the pandemic and had ample time to get to know my colleagues face-to-face, making the transition to remote working very pleasant. I'm not sure if the experience has been the same for people we've onboarded remotely; they're productive but I'm unsure if it'll be easy for them to build up the same kinds of relationships.
You also tend to get into situations where there's a social divide between a subset of the team who have constantly worked together synchronously in the past and new starters who only appear in 2D on Zoom. This may not be a problem for some people, but it's a concern for someone like me who gets a lot of their daily social interactions via work.
There's definitely a social part of work that, IMHO, waxes and wanes as you go through life. In your 20s and pre-family it's a significant aspect of your social life. Then I think it wanes as you have a family and kids when you don't have enough time for everything and work socialization is a chore. Then I think once again after the kids move out work socialization becomes more important again.
I find my older coworkers have more friends at work, simply because its the people outside thier family they see every day. I am friends with zero coworkers but also can spend my evenings out with friends - I don't have familial duties
> I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face.
One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year. Obviously not everyone can every join all of them, but I'd imagine most still would do 2. Ideally the families should also be invited.
I am sure it would still come out cheaper than maintaining office space and build stronger relationships than the mere coffee break talk.
>One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year.
This proposal is so far outside what I’d consider ok that I’m not even sure whether I’ve understood correctly?
If employees are going away together somewhere for a couple weeks, four times a year, then they’re spending 2 whole months away from home, living in another ___location (maybe a hotel?) And the suggestion that they take their family along? What happens to the partner’s work? The kids’ school and their friends? Your social life?
And this is just scratching the surface of the practical considerations - totally setting aside the dystopian aspect of spending so much of your own time with your co-workers.
Even with your extra proviso that not everyone would need to join, if a company had this one aspect of their work-practice, then I’d avoid them at all costs
I worked remote for 5 years before COVID. I was somewhere around 10% travel to customer locations, and about 1 week per year to HQ overseas. It was a great balance. I’m not sure how that would scale to an entire company though as one week of travel expenses worked out to around $2000 for domestic travel within the US. Does the cost of carrying office space work out to more or less than $8k per person per year?
COVID style isolated WFH ruined WFH for me and contributed to burnout.
You're not including airfare, food, and meeting space. It might not quite reach $2k but pretty close.
But that's likely still cheaper than office space. That ranges anywhere from $20-$70+ per square foot depending on city and how nice it is. So even a tiny desk space is 500-2k a month.
Still, you guys assume this would be within the US, only. Excuse me for saying that, but that's some typical, US-centric kind of thinking. There's really whole world out there. If you're going to go for 2 weeks, go to Asia, South America or Central/South Europe and pay a third of the costs. Heck, do you know how cheap country side airbnbs in Portugal or Italy are? THAT'S how you build lasting memories.
Time becomes expensive then too… Jet lag is also a substantial issue. You have to accommodate the lowest common denominator in these situations. (People who have substantial family, don’t do well with jet lag, and aren’t very fond of long flights in economy)
Personally, 2 weeks is the minimum in my book for any kind of substantial time difference (4+ hours) and substantial flight time (8+ hours each way). I’m sure others feel even more aggressively than I do. I cannot imagine how people with kids would feel. The food and bacteria issues also just make things really challenging for many people.
There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun. Thus, you don’t really get to enjoy the spectacles as much because you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working. I’ve been in exotic destinations before and had work stuff come up. It is not fun anymore. Terrible if anything. Rather be home than be in amazing place but unable to enjoy it.
You make some good points. Time difference is definitely a factor, but the thing is that with people WFH, you presumable are already dealing with people working in different timezones. So you organize those trips to always be somewhat within +-4h of the most of your employees. And those who can't join, will join into another destination. It would surely be one of those things you'd have to have a team dedicated to organize. But that's a team that would replace a bunch of existing, office-specific operational positions.
Food and bacteria – well, that's true. Although not everyone is affected and these come mostly from poor hygiene of either cooks/staff or the employees themselves. You make sure you choose a trusted and tested locations and educate your employees over tap water usage. I guess not much more can be done.
> There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun.
I think it's a matter of the vision. I absolutely would have made it to be more fun than work. First of all, in my example those would be frequent, so there would be less or no FOMO and not everyone would go to each of them. Which means you could definitely delegate the line support to those absent. If you ended up getting called in for help after all, that's just life. But, that's also unlikely to happen each time you getaway.
> you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working
Well, no. I understand it may have been like this in your case, but it shouldn't be. I see those getaways more as a concentrated leisure/team-building activities you otherwise do throughout the year in the office and still get paid for. Except here you have an added benefit of actually being able to hold some really cool, out of the "cubicle-box" brainstormings/hackatons. Plus all the team building games, parties, etc. – again, all those things you'd normally do in the office to actually bond with people.
My $8k figure was based on 4 company get togethers per year ($2k * 4).
$2k for one week of travel expenses was based on 5 nights of hotel at $150/night ($750), 5 days of rental car at $200, gas for the car at $40, roundtrip flight at $500, travel to/from home airport at $60, parking at home airport at $50, and 6 days of meals @ $55/day ($330). Grand total $1930 plus taxes and tips.
When my company rented out the convention space in the Hard Rock Hotel plus rooms for 50-100ish employees, the room rates were still $150+/night. Granted that was the same week as CES, but I don't think hotel costs scale down that much unless one is willing to sacrifice ___location or something else.
The other things should be scalable a bit with tradeoffs. That said, I wouldn't be too keen on going on a week long work trip where I can't leave the hotel, must eat every meal at the hotel with my colleagues, and don't have any way to get around. To me, that means a successful event would have to budget for people expensing at least some of their own meals and for people expensing at least a few taxis/ubers.
Again, my experience with big company gatherings is tied to CES which is its own beast, but in the case of CES my company pretty much left everyone up to their own devices in terms of getting to/from the hotel and for most meals. Hotel rooms were also individually expensed (but out of a reserved block of rooms). My company was obsessive about expenses and the cost of CES, so I imagine if there were a cheaper way to do it, we would have been doing it that way instead.
The thing is I did not even think of doing that in the US, one of the most expensive of places. And even if in the US, you don't have to go to another city. No, quite the contrary. Some wilderness. Alaska, maybe? Montana? And that's not for the whole company at the same time, but for individual teams. You want some sightseeing? Sure, how about Puerto Rico? Or abroad, like Mexico, or South America? The options are limitless. Assuming people WFH anyway, it doesn't have to be "close" to anywhere in particular.
Yeah, as a long-term essentially remote employee, IMO you need to have week-long team meetings. Probably quarterly. I hesitate to require weekends. On the other hand, I have traveling about 130 days per year pre-pandemic.
First off, take "week-long" as maybe a few days--perhaps a combination of broader team, smaller teams, and other syncs. Why more than one day? It's just more efficient if people are going to travel anyway. Especially long distances.
People are social and, in my experience, remote interactions work better when people have previously connected in-person.
> My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
None. I started 3 different consulting jobs during the pandemic and always felt very productive and very connected to my colleagues, even though I never met them.
After working remote for ten+ years I disagree. There are things one can better understand about a person in a face to face meeting. When discussions become differently casual. Also some discussions are simpler in a completely informal circumstance ("random" meeting at the watercooler) than a virtual meeting of any kind.
People talk online too; it’s different for people who grew up using text messages and social media where they’re accustomed to building and maintaining online relationships.
I’m old, so don’t look at me, but when you look at the cohort of folk who are dealing with wfh successfully and productively, it’s, in my direct observation, younger folk.
None is perhaps true for more people than you think.
The ones who are struggling are the people who don’t “do chat” (ie the “oh no! I despise slack” group and the “let’s have a call to discuss that” group) and managers.
...and to be fair, it’s a lot harder to be a manager remotely; I can’t deny that.
...but people can build meaningful relationships online; it’s just different, and that’s hard for older people, in general.
Many of my best friendships were forged online, often in groups collaborating on doing real work.
I have not been able to get any such spontaneity during remote work with my group or division at a large tech company with mostly young coworkers. I haven't been able to figure out why.
> the “oh no! I despise slack” group
Chat can be super useful, but can also create a nasty interruption culture. I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.
It pains me to see the number of people who reply quickly to chat messages all day in order to show they're 'working' rather than doing their jobs.
>Chat can be super useful, but can also create a nasty interruption culture
How is does chat creates an interruption culture compared to people literally standing in your shoulder and directly interrupting you? At least with chat I can decide to ignore the notifications until I’m finished with my current task.
Sending a chat message is a really low bar: people send off chat messages at will, without respect to whether someone looks like they're concentrating, wearing headphones, have the door closed, are in the office, whatever. This is fine so long as chat is regarded as async, but in a culture where people feel compelled to get them in real time, chat becomes super interrupty, even compared to people coming by.
If people exercise good judgement on ignoring notifications, it's less rough, though the tooling is really poor for using chat for async tracking, organization, triaging, and replies, even compared to emails or tickets.
I despise slack more than probably most anyone. I've been working remote more often than not since the early 90s though, so remote is very natural. Non-stop interruptions will kill you though, regardless of job ___location, so close that slack tab.
> I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.
It's called email.. in the case of slack, just let it send notifications to email. That's how I monitor slack, I'll check my email when I have free time between concentration sessions.
It certainly depends on how willing you are to just have a random off topic chat with someone over IM. For me, there are a few people where if its the last hour of the day, we will just spend 30 mins half working half chatting. This helps build relationships with the people you work with in an otherwise unproductive period. If they are really busy at the time they can just tell you.
During 2020 I interviewed people, hired and onboarded a new person, ended up interviewing for another company myself, joined them, have interviewed and hired new people at the new gig. Never met anyone in person. No issues at all.
Been doing similar conditions for much longer than a year though. Over ten years ago I was leading a team of 20+, everyone distributed across the globe, nobody in the same timezone as me.
I strongly disagree, between people that do not turn on their webcam during meetings, don't stay after 5 ect ... there is no social connection and nothing forces them to do so.
Many people, if not most, have more potential to connect better when more senses are engaged and more experiences are shared. These relationships sustain over time, with some degradation of course.
One thing that I've expressed to my company and coworkers is that I'd like to see full remote become more of a norm but I'd also love to see team building events remain as well. If there are a few times a year where everyone congregates in one ___location (probably at less expense than actually keeping an office set aside for them for the year mind you) and has a picnic or hackday that sounds awesome to me.
The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
> We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks.
+1 this sentence; personally, I'm not interested in the fully distributed model espoused by some evangelists. I still desire physical proximity, with just-enough/just-in-time physical interactions as determined by myself (and relevant coworkers). I would love working for a business that offers something like an internal WeWork - reservable low-density dedicated workspaces, near social venues and transportation.
This rings true for me. I was in a very hectic workplace when the pandemic began and was able to function pretty much as effectively as I would in office.
Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.
Personally, I have joined a company and scaled the team from 12-52 engineers over the pandemic. Our productivity is through the roof and everyone is getting really well and forming good connections.
> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
IME these relationships are a function of how much time you spend talking with people and not of physical proximity. At my last job the person I was closest too was on another continent. We worked quite closely so I spent way more time talking with them then some people that sat a few feet away from me. We knew each others lunch and break schedules better than the people we ate lunch with.
There is a tendency to talk more with people next to you and only zoom someone for direct work discussion, but in both scenarios there's room to force some socialization. In our line of work we even have tools like pair programming to enforce these relationships.
I was a good bit more productive over the first few months of the pandemic than since then, and I attribute some of that (though not all) to the fact that most of the work I was doing in March to June of 2020 was on projects that had been originated back when we were in the office, while the projects I've worked on since then were originated after we went remote.
This isn't quite about relationships because I knew the people involved before; it's more about not having information that you tend to get just from being around the office. I'm not saying this is an argument for going back into the office so much as being mindful about communication.
The team I was on had never met in person. I think fully remote can work for a large portion of the population, once the same effort and resources are provided to them as in office workers.
I feel in opposite way and my experience including few years of pre pandemic remote working.
At office you can work together with same peoples over years but not get any real clue about who they are truly, because lot of politics, pretending and fears included in office life. On remote work peoples usually more open, honest and direct, in most cases it easiest for them to share stuff that they have passion about or describe real issues in life (But I think that also not true if your work required to do lot of short projects with different peoples).
Also, if you already work with someone for a long time remotely it always nice to meet him in real life and get to know little more.
Perhaps. I note that when I worked in the bosom of the valley long ago (Netscape campus on Ellis), often I was working with others in the organization who were in different buildings and I never met them. Working with others in different countries has also been the norm for me for decades, predating my own remove move.
I wish society learned that there are things more important then corporate efficiency. Maybe optimizing for our quality of life should take precedence over squeezing out that last 10% of work effectiveness.
I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.
Europe seemed to have realized this a long time ago. Many Americans still make work much of their identity, and worshiping The Line (the stock market) is in direct conflict with labor rights.
I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing.
When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother.
I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.
I have also been working remotely for the past around 7 years.
After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC.
It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in.
Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh.
I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
Similar experience. Pandemic made everyone work the same way I do. That said, I worked in 100% remote teams the previous decade so the Pandemic just opened up the rest of the industry as a potential place to contribute.
I do think many of the WFH productivity gains seen can probably be attributed to 2 things:
1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom.
#1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen.
#2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.
>compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
A big problem with hybrid is that you're forced to live in the same locality as the office, and most companies aren't subsidizing rent, but at the same time you need a decent office setup at home to be effective and that isn't cheap.
I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.
My worry is: let’s say my employer finally gives in and lets me work full time remote. Great! I can finally move to the Nevada desert or somewhere with low cost of living. I will likely take a modest salary reduction. Still wonderful! What happens 3 years later when there is new leadership or something and they pull a Marissa Mayer and declare remote work “bad” again, and recalls everyone to the headquarters? Now I’m fucked. I need to move back to the Bay Area after 3 years of housing price inflation! It’ll never work out. I fear once I leave I’m never coming back if the company changes it’s mind about remote work.
Once you have the job, you're a black box that takes inputs and spits out work outputs in return for a monthly payment, and the company doesn't need to care where you actually are doing the work, as long as the black box works to specs (the JD).
The company might or might not need to pay taxes differently on its end.
On your end, you (the individual) are required to file an income tax return with the state you reside in. If you lie and say you are unemployed that's very obviously fraud.
Whether the company you work for is willing to deal with any extra tax paperwork that might be required if you relocate is of course an open question.
No, there are residency laws in each state. I'm not sure what happens when they conflict. For example, camping for 1 month each year in WA isn't going to get you out of paying CA income taxes if you own a home there that you live in the other 11 months of the year.
As a junior engineer, this is how I felt. Before the pandemic, getting help was as easy as sending a ping and rolling my chair over. Now, ironically, it's far harder to get help, as getting into a meeting (even a short, impromptu one) is a significantly bigger deal.
I go into a minor state of social anxiety and just struggle to get anything done for a good 10 minutes before a meeting. Mainly because there's far more of a "I'm interrupting this person" feeling when I can't see their screen.
There's a little bit formality with it, but I've also found that "hey, let me record this" is a super power. It makes it a lot less critical that you understand 100% up front and then it's there for reference.
Send them a zoom link on slack, saying you want their input on something. Clicking on the link is literally their job. Source: I'm often the recipient of those zoom links.
(And if you don't get a satisfactory response, get another job where there are helpful senior staff).
I think we're going to see a massive knowledge gap start to manifest itself within the next 1-3 years. Employees that are junior or started during WFH are going to find it difficult to stack up against senior engineers who have been around since before WFH.
Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.
I think that's an interesting point - most of us more senior folks either have an innate work ethic or have been trained for years to fear a boss looking over our shoulder when we're checking facebook or whatever... Training good work ethic into people who have never worked in an office is an interesting question society will face - but do bear in mind that there are plenty of jobs that are pretty much unsupervised from day one. While a super market might look really open and visible stockers can wander off for a bit without anyone noticing and a lot of the contractor-employee jobs (uber, lyft, roofing) have never had much on site oversight.
Businesses need to stop caring about if you're on facebook 8 hours a day. If you're getting your work done at the end of the week that's all that really matters.
The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.
I think that would be a great - but we also employ by the hour not by the task which I also think is great. Sometimes I get tickets marked with three story points and think "Ha, let me just push up a quick patch" and other times I discover a dark dark hole at the bottom of assumptions that eats away at days.
It's really hard to generally evaluate employees on productivity - especially in CS - and so our compromise is that we all lie a bit and say "We're paying you for 40 hours a week" and we reply "Yes - my compensation is tied purely to the fact that I am here for forty hours".
I think it's a much longer road to better employee respect.
Every place I've worked as an FTE, the focus was on the job, not the hours. In fact, I've had many bosses say as much, usually implying that after hours work might be necessary and they'd expect me to take it uncomplainingly.
And I have, though it's always tempered by two things, namely, A. If the job routinely requires > 40 hours a week, then the job is poorly defined and we need to modify expectations, and B. That if I'm working to the job and not the hours, it doesn't matter if I only put in 30 hours one week, if the work is being done (and, likewise, if THAT is routine, the job is also poorly defined, and I need to ask for more things to do).
For me pay by the hour means:
- if the task will take much more work, company will still pay you and they will take the loses
- if the task is done faster, you'll just get more work and company will take the profits
I think this is European approach, trying to eliminate the luck factor out of ones success.
That's not how this works - even if you get your currently assigned amount of work done your manager will always wonder: "how much more this guy could accomplish if he wasn't constantly distracted by Facebook?" Which is a legitimate concern.
Why? I would think most tech related learning happens with out other people involved. Learning languages, self study, Stack over flow and simmiliar, reading books. Idk if junior employees need to coddled as much as people think. Maybe just the bottom doesn't cut it. Developing your knowledge on your own is a skill you need any way.
I’ve always felt this way about learning too. I’ve never had anyone offer to be any kind of a teacher or mentor long term. However there is a huge narrative around mentors and people talking about how much they learned from others so I have to conclude its either my personality type or just something that used to happen more in the past.
I think even experienced people struggle in that environment though. I don't think any junior engineer is truly a blank slate. You've usually had internships, unrelated jobs, made it through college where you develop skills to be resourceful and navigate unclear situations.
"but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions"
About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides.
My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen.
I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk.
I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.
> My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved.
I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned.
And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
"And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites."
I'm an old git now and have space but back in the day I ... didn't. I'm not trying to say I understand your particular situation but I do sympathise and I hope it doesn't sound trite.
I wish you all the best and that's why I'm responding to a comment made two days ago.
We would basically get few people that will abuse it and slowly we will get back where we were. Worked in a company that was flexible about WFH but they had to change these policies because of those people.
Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.
I care much more about personal relationships than work relationships. For me, as a person who was already working from home my dating and socializing options got much better now that people don't have to work in the office. I can travel together with my significant other much easier as well.
My employer walked back all their remote work promises. In fact, the new policy is more restrictive than the old one, which allowed at least some flexibility in work arrangements between supervisors and their direct reports.
Yep. One of the FAANGs recently published a 2-weeks/year remote-working policy as part of going back to the office, whereas before the pandemic you could just ask your manager for permission and there was no 2 week limit. Kind of like the ever-increasing chocolate rations in 1984.
The whole 'matrix' of people vs productivity is interesting.
I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office.
I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity.
I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.
There is a right number of days per month where you have to meet people and socialize. It wasn't 22. It is not 0 either. But I believe it is closer to 0 than 22. Personally I feel about 5 days a month would be the right amount to trigger all the benefits of in person knowing.
i’ve worked remote full-time for eight years. The first year she was pretty weird, was a good employee? yes. But managing my home life and my work life was something I was still figuring out.
Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to.
I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point
I was mostly just referring to the fact that team/org/company productivity does not seem reduced compared to pre-pandemic times. As far as I know, no major tech company is dealing with more outages/incidents or slower product launches than they typically saw, unless their business model was directly impacted by spending pattern changes. I think most companies expected lower output from forced-all-remote teams but don't seem to be seeing it.
The usual way to explain this away is that social capital was built while people could meet in person, and is now slowly fading away. I don't know how true that is; it could be completely true, or it could be just a false "fact" that pro-physical-presence people cling to.
Another factor that I didn't consider is that there was basically nothing to do but work in many places - most things fun were either banned/shut down, or unattractive because they came with the implied threat of catching COVID. This includes vacation. I bet once recovery sets in, a lot of saved-up vacation time gets used at once, especially in countries and companies where significant amounts of vacation can be banked.
The video game industry noticeably rolled back a number of release dates but I don't know if it's fair to attribute that to team productivity or just a combination of supply line issues (big name games tend to launch with merch and physical perks that definitely would be impacted) along with the cost and stress of dealing with the pandemic. We've got some confounded variables here so it's hard to tell.
I'm under the impression that video games are always crunching anyway, so maybe the pandemic was just a good excuse to delay and finally get the time they needed.
Delays in video game releases are highly visible. Many companies had regular schedules that were clearly and obviously disrupted. It would be far less visible in many other software sectors, at least in the short-term. How would I know if AWS launched 18 new services instead of 27 last year? Often new product features/releases are not announced until they are ready to ship.
Very interesting, it's the first concrete example of the damage to social cohesion due to covid restrictions I've seen described. It is portrayed in a positive light (I suppose) in the article, though the anecdotal examples I know from real life are rather dark.
Replacing predictions with experienced reality. Seeing things continue as normal and at full pace while working from home which many expected was not possible.
Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
Does anyone have a convincing break-down of the overall economic effect? Remote has meant I sleep more (compared to a long commute). As well, my home has advantages - there's a dog here, patio access, etc. I think communication can be hard to do right, but I'm not sure if this resulted in more faults
All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it.
Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?"
Then, everyone will get to work from home.
Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office.
It's such a joke too.
My firm is letting us know they will be so benevolent as to give us 20% time WFH "hybrid" once we return but "you can't just all take Fridays" and "we will set the WFH schedule for you initially".
Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..
I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example, teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with local people for lunch and so on.
There will be a lot of opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside of work etc.
I think this will lift us out of depression and improve economy in many ways.
The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.
That last sentence has me baffled so I'm just going to ignore it - the rest of your post is interesting.
I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives.
The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working.
I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.
I've been back in my company's office in person (medium-sized tech company) for the last week with a small subset of employees before we all go back, and I've become pretty convinced that these hybrid models will not go well. Even while wearing masks and social distancing, I feel far more connected to the others that work in the office, and whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in collaborating effectively and deciding who gets what work, who gets promoted, etc. If everyone can choose whatever combination of remote and in-person they want, it seems impossible to me that there won't be extremely strong in-group/out-group effects that will cause big organizational problems for companies. But I'm saying this as a young person excited to work in person, so maybe others (parents, those with long commutes) feel it's still worth it.
TBH your personal experience has no bearing on mine. I can't help but feel like people with _opinions_ like yours are going to ruin it for the rest of us who are orders of magnitude more productive at home. "But I can't socialize"... I don't care. I would rather not work in tech anymore than return to an office full time.
I also think my point was about companies/organizations as a whole rather than individuals. Remote might be optimal for lots of individuals, maybe even the majority, but my guess is that the conditions it creates will cause an organizational problem. I don't think incentives between employees and companies are necessarily aligned here.
Where I last worked it was common to have your manager be in another country, sometimes with a pretty difficult time zone difference.
I was remote but many offices had a butts-in-seats policy because of unapologetically old-school top management. Fortunately there were quite a few middle managers who were able to creatively route around this inefficiency.
I don't know how long your commute is but I shudder at the notion of wasting my time physically travelling every day. Fortunately I am fully remote for at least the near future and I wouldn't mind travelling out every quarter for a week or something or some sort of periodic in-person work period. But sitting in traffic every day of your work week is no way to spend your life. Even taking mass transit means less flexibility in your day if it's not the automobile commute.
> whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in collaborating effectively and deciding who gets what work, who gets promoted, etc.
You're assuming a bunch of stuff here. There's something to be said for:
1. Having known people pre-covid, and so having a predefined "connection" with them.
2. The kinds of work that would or would not be more susceptible to personal bias. Web development, for example, is more impervious than people-management.
Ultimately what you're talking about is bias, and bias is shit and should be minimised. Remote working shouldn't be compromised as a result of people not being able to be impartial in their work.
Meanwhile I used to go into the office 3 days a week. That gave me enough face to face personal connection, while giving me two days without a commute to have a life, and get my head down and churn things out.
I hate the office but I will be back in as many days as possible as soon as possible. I am not going to be part of an out-group to an in-group that contains the people who decide promotions.
I have no doubt the people who come back to the office the quickest and the most often will get better raises over the next few years on average vs THOSE remote people.
I don't know the term for this, but in-person contact is important for metagroups/in-groups at work. People who are coworkers, but also friends as well, to an extent. People that you trust more than others not part of the group, and who you might even become friends with outside of work. I've found developing relationships like this impossible while fully remote.
I personally felt more connected and more aware of what everyone was doing when we switched to remote because people had to overcommunicate and write docs instead of having private conversations I wasn’t invited to.
I'm mixed on remote work, even as an engineering IC, despite claims that only management want in-office.
To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized, and employees are actively discouraged from eating with any teammates.
If you're the type of personality who gets energized by collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively destroying any office culture.
Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to go remote are unaffected.
I'd think the obvious rejoinder to that approach is, if they want to work remotely, they take the rough with the smooth. No, they are not going to be as plugged into casual office conversations. Their choice.
That's not what's happening in reality though. I gave you two notable examples but I know of a few more as well. This isn't hypothetical, many companies are actively seeking to destroy their in-person culture (outside of company offsite events). Of course, since every corporate move has to have a feel good PR element to it these days, the buzzword to justify this direction is equity/equality, and that since DEI candidates will be more likely to be remote, it's especially important to destroy Bay Area office culture to make sure remote employees are on equal footing. Again, I know many people at SV companies so this isn't speculation but what I've actually seen happen at several companies. And I'm really not trying to cast judgement on whether this is good or bad for the industry long term, just again noting that the idea that people who don't want to work remotely are largely unaffected by these decisions is totally false.
This is my experience as well. Companies are aiming for equality of outcomes even though WFH and office employees work in different environments.
I think it is totally fine for an employee to make the decision to work from home and obtain greater freedom at the cost of worse promotion outcomes.
The problem is that if employers say “hey you can work from home, but you are less likely to get promoted than your peers working in the office” they open themselves to discrimination lawsuits. What if there is a strong correlation between those who choose to work from home and a specific demographic? Well it turns out that women may be much more likely to WFH given the choice. Does this mean that the WFH policy is sexist given that women are much more likely to WFH and WFH employees have worse career outcomes?
I believe that this isn’t discrimination by the company because non-women who WFH have similar career outlooks to women who WFH, but there may be a case there and nobody wants to put that case to the test. Instead we get these WFH policies which bring everyone down — to accommodate those who made a choice to sacrifice their career prospects by working from home.
Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office, even though you expect there will be stuff like better promotion outcomes for people who spend more time face-to-face?
Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
> Wouldn't it be simpler to declare everything "hybrid" and then you don't have to track who's in the office.
That doesn’t fix the issue. Even if everything is declared “hybrid” there is still going to be an “in” group of people working in the office most days and an “out” group of people working from home most days.
> Nowadays presumably you have someone making sure your promotions aren't lopsided enough to look discriminatory anyway.
Having objective performance evaluations which are agnostic to WFH would be ideal but I am not sure if they are realistic. You are working against human nature and tribalism: it is much easier to have favourable opinions of those you interact with regularly. Not to mention that very few work places actually have objective measurements of employee performance, it is mostly all optics and how well the employee sells themselves.
I'm not sure about an increased risk of lawsuits, though worse promotion outcomes is a bad answer for other reasons. That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees. I don't think companies would want to design a remote-work policy with that belief.
> That sounds like remote employees are less productive than on-site employees
The linked study (in my comment) says otherwise. WFH employees were better performers on average. This means that WFH employees — when normalized for performance — had much worse promotion rates that their office peers.
This matches my personal experiences. Companies have decided that hybrid is the worst of both worlds (right or wrong) so they're actively choosing remote-only over in-person only.
This doesn't work. As soon as a meeting has 2 people in person, the first time a zoom glitches or a leaf blower is in the background; the 2 in the office will feel disdain for remote.
If the office mic in the room only picks up one person, the remote person will be left out; the 2 in office will feel disdain for the remote miscommunication.
Just get rid of all your meeting rooms, and have everyone do the meeting from the desk, so it sucks for everyone.
I mean, that's kind of horrific, but it's the sort of thing people are thinking of.
The other mechanism is, even if people are in offices, construct teams so everyone is in a different one, and so everything is remote even if you are in an office.
> To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively discourage any in person collaboration."
My perspective on that is that, at my workplace, the L4 lockdown in NZ was actually a significant improvement, which might sound counter-intuitive. That's because there was an implicit decision-making process where people local to your floor/building/city tended to talk together and remotes were second class. Once we were all on an equal footing - forced to be explicit in who we bought into Zoom/Teams/etc sessions - we got improved and more thoughtful interaction.
Since we've left L4/L3 we've managed to preserve that culture, even with people dropping into a cadence of a few days in the office and a few days remote, because it's normalised the idea that every conversation has a remote component. That's persisted for a good 9 months, so we'll see how it persists.
> Twitter is re-opening their office but in a crippled state, where the food options are massively downsized
Is this permanent? My employer is reopening, but I'm expecting it'll be awhile before amenities like free meals and snacks get back to normal. There may be more health restrictions initially.
I'm in a similar situation, so I guess I can answer. I start in a new role soon and particularly requested a team with no more than 1 day wfh/week.
I work in a applied ML and really, the technical aspects of the jobs are the 'easiest', ie. most well defined. In most cases focus + time will be sufficient for me to produce technical work. However, the real challenges lie at the intersections of models, infra, code, product and users. The goal is rarely is to build the best solution, it's to build the right solution.
Solutions to these can only be found by collaborating with people who own each specific part. Intense whiteboarding, pair programming, brainstorming, etc were the most interesting parts of my job. All of them have been reduced to a shadow of what they were during remote work.
Also, if I'm going to spend 50% of all my waking hours with a group of people, then I better like spending time with them. Being cooped up in a room my myself all day isn't fun at all. (and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it)
My coworkers are my good friends and if they weren't then I'd go somewhere else. (not drinking the Koolaid. I have no allegiance to corporate, just my nuclear peer group)
A 'flexible or remote-optional team' is a lie. Remote and in-person are diametrically opposed office cultures. Both require very different cultural traits to flourish. Ones that try to stay on the fence will inevitably converge into one of the two or end up as a complete disaster. ( coordinated 3 days at work, 2 days at home etc can work...but that's just at-office culture with benefits)
> and I have a huge community outside work, but it I don't like waiting for the other 50% to enjoy it
I literally addressed this. I stay in a group home and have a large community outside work. I don't want to wait for 6pm everyday to access people I like.
If anything, try making friends with people you spend time with for 50% of your waking hours. Live a little
Mostly that by having remote co-workers I get many of the downsides of remote work without any of the upsides.
Once a few colleagues are remote, all collaboration has to assume remote as the default. Even if I'm in the office I'm still stuck with remote collaboration, but I still have a commute.
That's one option, but personally I find remote utterly miserable and terrible for collaboration. I'd rather find a job where I see my colleagues in person.
The upsides for me of being in the office massively outweigh the downsides, but only if my colleagues are there too.
Because they enjoy the office. I prefer going to the office some but not most days and like occasional trips elsewhere so full remote is fine. I have friends who really like the social aspect of the office and working on a team where most of their teammates are remote would be very undesirable to them.
In practice I feel like you could just aim to have some teams be mostly people who like office and other teams be mostly remote. Would be awkward hiring wise though to send someone to a different team just on there office vs remote view.
i onboarded last summer as an intern and it was pretty miserable. language barrier with my intern manager mediated by zoom/blue jeans/portal plus the famously poorly documented codebase made it damn near impossible to get things done. i got a return offer but i'm pretty sure it was because everyone was struggling (skip said as much). i'm surprised they're doing this.
This is great news for some, but not for most. What will happen is that most employees will choose to return to onsite work because of the perks and deeper connections with colleagues.
If most of your team is not working remotely - let's be honest - it'll be hard for a remote worker to not feel disconnected with the rest of the team.
You're basically evaluated according to L5 requirements. Given that you weren't promoted at that point, it's likely you're not performing at those requirements, and you'll be slowly managed out. More often as people get close to the red zone, they just swap companies preemptively.
AFAIK, Google has a very similar policy. At FB, E5 is a "terminal level", so once you hit that level, there's no push or expectation to reach beyond that. I've been in the E4 red zone at one point, and spent about a year getting evaluated at E5 levels before getting the promo. You're not automatically out if you don't reach it in time, but you have to be showing progress, and it does get more urgent the longer you spend in that zone.
I used to manage a team at Google. L3 basically meant you had to be told what to do. L4 meant that while you may not regularly give a lot of strategic direction to the team, you could be relied upon to just pick up the ball and carry it forward toward shared objectives. Your code was good enough to not require a bunch of time- and energy-wasting back-and-forth with reviewers. What you delivered stood on its own and was more an asset than a liability to the team and the product.
If, after a few years, you still need to be told what to do in order to be productive day-to-day, you’re simply not developing, and unless you figure out what’s going on you’re probably going to struggle to build a successful career.
For my own team, the bar I set for giving higher assessment ratings was how well you could make and keep commitments to the team. If, after working in the code base with the group of people for a year or so, you couldn’t independently come up with useful things to commit to doing and couldn’t deliver in the timeframes you said you could, I would start asking you whether you are really happy and motivated doing what you’re doing with your career. For the few times I had to do that, the member of my team ended up admitting to themselves that they were making a mistake trying to do this type of work, and they moved on to something else where they were more happy and successful.
It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they didn't reduce my salary when I moved from an expensive city to a cheap mountain town, I just didn't get raises for a few years because my comp ratio was too high. I don't understand why people would rail against this kind of policy. It certainly didn't motivate me to move back to an expensive city.
I'm not sure how well this would work out for those geo-arbitrage digital nomads, but I don't think that companies should be particularly accommodating that corner case.
I don't understand this take at all, it's effectively saying that your pay should be driven by your needs as opposed to the value you create. I can see companies deciding that in-person value is different than remote, but where you are remotely doesn't matter. Especially in the same timezone. Working remotely from Kentucky vs Brooklyn makes no difference to the company, so why should they pay them differently? Do you ask people what their net worth is, and then pay high-nw people less since they clearly don't "need" it? What about DINKs?
I think companies will only get away with this as long as the supply of remote work is low. Once you start to see hard-to-recruit people leaving for higher paying remote work at another company rates will go right back up. Geo-Arbitraging digital nomads are only a corner case because most people don't realize it's an option. Once it becomes the norm then what?
Your compensation is driven by several factors, the two biggest being how much value you generate and how easy you are to replace. It has nothing to do with your needs. Even Google's official compensation policy explicitly notes that cost of living is not a factor and only local competition density is.
The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.
People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.
It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.
Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.
People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.
An element that is often missing from the conversation is the opportunity cost of the employee. A significant portion of a worker’s compensation should to go paying his opportunity cost. I think that despite similar productivity and the recent rise in remote work, an employee’s opportunity cost is reduced if they move to a remote mountain town.
It happens because pay is balancing employee demands with company number needed. Employees in lower cost areas will very often accept lower pay. It's still often very high pay for that area. I grew up in oklahoma where median entry pay for tech is roughly half of bay and fb is way above median pay in the bay. So to many people from back home even if fb gave an offer 30-50 percent less it'd still be much better than most local options. While I expect more companies being remote to put some pressure on salaries upward I do not expect it to ever be equal to hcol areas. I expect it'll converge to like 20-30 percent lower. Noticeable but still massive gain for those places.
The primary factor that defines compensation is competition; the market-clearing wage is a supply/demand thing - ask yourself whether junior developer productivity is that much higher now than a few years ago despite soaring pay.
Your value-added just represents a ceiling on how much its rational to pay you in some sort of vague career-adjusted terms; the vast majority of people don't even have jobs where that can be measured. Even those where it looks simple (say, sales) are actually much harder than you'd think.
This actually happened to one of my former teams. We lost 50% of the team in the space of a few months. As far as I know everyone got 10%+ raises from value-focused employers over the regionally paid company.
> I don't understand this take at all, it's effectively saying that your pay should be driven by your needs as opposed to the value you create.
Yes? Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?
Look, I'm all for less exploitation of workers, but I don't see how it's suddenly outrageous for American workers to experience employer relationships the same way those in India, Australia, or Vietnam do.
Your pay is driven by your political status. It has nothing to do with value generated or with needs.
If an employer is defining it according to your needs, that's a sign you have relatively low status. It's not a sign that the employer is correct.
This is partly why remote has huge potential benefits for employers. Committed remote means huge savings on office space. But it also lowers the chances of collective political activity, including unionisation.
For new hires I suppose it's okay but to adjust the pay of an existing worker whose output remains the same afterwards because they relocated is a bit insulting to me. It's a pay cut, not a "COLA".
This is irrelevant, though. You aren't paid based on your output, you're paid based on how much you cost.
Think of how much you pay for water. In place A, you might pay $0.02 per gallon of water. You move to place B, and they only charge $0.01 gallon of water. Are you going to keep paying $0.02/gallon? The value that the water provides to you hasn't changed, but why would you keep paying $0.02 when you could get it for $0.01?
In FB's view, you aren't any different. Even if you provide the same value, there's no reason to keep paying you $300k when they could pay you (or someone who replaces you) $150k.
My experience with these kind of dislocations is that your HR department starts tracking your target number internally based on your new circumstances and you don't see any pay rises until that number exceeds your actual.
I think it would be reasonable to pay people extra if they live in an expensive place, and the company actually needs them to be in that place. Like maybe they have to be able to get on site at short notice, so they need to live right by the office, or the data center.
The CoL adjustment is max 15% within the US. If you’re moving out of SF or NY to a lower CoL area, you’re making bank just on the taxes, much less CoL.
My office before the pandemic was basically people looking at screens and slacking each other rather than lifting their head up an inch to speak - literally even if the person was one chair over from them.
When we went remote, nothing changed other than people no longer had to commute. The feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly and consistently positive. Nobody wants to go back full time - ever. The most they’ll concede is a day or two per week, but I strongly suspect reality will be less than that.
Speaking as someone who now works remotely permanently, this has been... life-changing.
So for 10 years I lived in NYC and--don't get me wrong--there are lots of things I liked about NYC but I'm so over the summers and the winters. Also bear in mind that I think NYC is infinitely better for most people to live in than the Bay Area.
But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
Add to that that for the same price as my 50 year old 1 bedroom in NYC I now live in a 3 bedroom duplex apartment. I spend a ton of time outside and this has greatly increased my mood and wellbeing.
There are things I definitely miss: camaraderie with my coworkers, free food and the like but honestly I'm just over going into the office. I'm not sure I'll ever do that again.
The ability to live anywhere in the country just opens up so many possibilities.
It's worth noting that this doesn't enable a true digital nomad lifestyle if that's what you want. That's because you still need to be employed somewhere and you and the company are subject to the employment rules (and taxes) in that locale. Maybe that will change in the future.
> NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity
That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical. The city comes alive in such a unique way, people are outside relaxing in the parks, having backyard and rooftop parties, heading out to the beach on the weekends. There are a bunch of great weekend trips to be had a few hours away by train in Long Island or Connecticut or upstate NY. You can join an after work rec league with friends. There's concerts in the park once or twice a week, and free movie showings on the waterfront. The bars and restaurants are more lively.
One of the best parts of NYC in general is just how much there is to do if you like getting out and being social, and in the summer it's just turned up to the max.
Most apartments don't come with AC, but as long as you can afford $300 for a good floor unit to put in front of the window you can keep your home temperature very comfortable.
>> NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity
> That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
This, to me, is a perfect illustration of why the future of work is neither everyone staying remote nor everyone returning to the office. Some individuals thrive in close, convivial environments, others thrive when given the space that only comes with remote working; still others are at their best with a balance of the two.
Acknowledging and embracing this social diversity will be key to employers attracting and retaining the best talent in the post-pandemic world.
The problem is that any environment that allows work from home but has a significant percentage of employees in the office regularly will have a very hard time managing, in my experience.
It’s very hard to maintain the discipline of holding online meetings and documenting all important decisions when enough people are colocated. Face to face bandwidth is so much higher that it’s easy to forget there are a lot of people without that exposure.
I generally agree with this, but think it falls far outside of the bounds of work (re: "future of work"). I lived in NYC for 13 years, and worked remotely full-time for about 11 of those years. I explicitly lived there because I love the city.
Remote work allows us to live where we want/need and remain productive members of society. I've been working remotely for 20 years, living in wonderful cities the whole time, and I'm not going back any time soon (ideally, ever).
> I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
Summers in NYC can be quite mild. If memory serves 2016-2019 were all quite mild with only very brief hellish patches. Some earlier summers though were... horrible.
For me, the magical time in NYC is spring and fall, specifically May and September-October. Those are my favourite times in the city. The days are still relatively long. The weather is nice and mild.
But there is something about the oppressive heat radiating off the sidewalk and the buildings and the air is humid and completely still that is just completely draining to me, in the height of a bad summer.
Did you commute every day on the subway? If so how long?
I lived in NYC for 10 years and I hated the summer daily commute because all that aliveness led to hangovers and me sweating all that magicalness out daily on my walk and wait on the platform.
You aren't wrong that NYC is great in the summer but it's also a special kind of hell with heat and humidity. Both can be true.
Yes, between the sweaty walk to train, sweatier subway station, and potentially sweaty train car.. I started carrying ice water in my bag in summers. I also had a hack of stopping by the Duane Reade on my way to office with a walk-in cooler section and just standing there for 2 minutes before grabbing a drink to take to work.
Also how can we talk NYC summers without mentioning the unique combination of dried dog piss on sidewalks and decaying garbage. This varies by neighborhood, but if you have a lot of high rises you know what I'm talking about.
Lol, fair enough. I do remember once being pretty dehydrated and being about to pass out on the subway ride home from work, standing in the middle of the packed, sweltering train with no room to move. Luckily someone saw me looking pale and offered me their seat.
But at least in hindsight the good outweighs the bad :)
The trick is to keep NYC at an arm's length. Waiting for the Metro North in that dank cavern is more bearable when you only do it for pleasure and not business.
FWIW I was shocked how brutal the NYC summer was, and I’ve spent most of my life in Arizona and Texas. I’d guess it’s mostly the humidity and the stagnant airflow.
> But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
You're comparing FL winters to NYC summers? I'm not sure exactly where you are in FL, but... in most of the state, it gets as hot or hotter than NYC in the summer!
Well it's June now. We're pretty close to what summer is.
For the record, I'm in the Miami area. I think it's a little cooler here than some places more inland and upstate. Or maybe I'm imagining things. But what a difference the trade winds make (to me at least).
Like I said, it's June and I'm still not using the AC. I just open up my house and enjoy the breeze. Some people, particularly up north, like the have their AC on 60 and wear layers indoors. For me that's a meat locker. I'm all about it being 75F with a breeze inside.
South Florida has has an unusually dry summer so far and I think that has kept the due points down. As another comment said, give it time and it'll catch up to you. I'm in Boca Raton and it feels wonderful, but by July/August it really gets oppressive. September/October, statistically, has the most rain as well.
I've never lived or spent significant summer time in Florida or New York City, but your descriptions of summer weather sounded surprising to me. I looked up weather data, and Jacksonville, Miami, and Tampa all get significantly hotter (4-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher average temperatures in the hottest part of summer), muggier, and cloudier in the summer. Only Miami is consistently windier in the summer than NYC. Is the wind the only difference you're talking about? At least on paper, it looks like I would vastly prefer the summer weather in NYC.
Not op but have lived in Florida and NYC. I suspect the gap partially relates to the "constructed"/human/social aspects, and not the raw weather itself.
A NYC subway car without AC when it's 87 degrees outside is worse than 100° in Florida; Florida is a lot more effective AC, pools/lanais, open spaces.
Architecture definitely matters. Ever been to the Honolulu airport? Lots of open air. The Lihue Airport on Kauaʻi is open air. Check-in is in the open.
It's more often one section with broken ac and not the complete train; I assume the drivers have AC even when passengers dont. You can try to move to an adjacent car (which are then correspondingly that much more packed). I've experienced it in both NYC and Boston in the last few years.
If you’re moving from NYC to Florida as a techie you’re making some bank and are in a nice, modern place with central air near the water, golf course, or whatever your thing is.
In NYC, you’re almost certainly in an older, smaller building and likely have lousy HVAC. The subway is great, but in many stations you learn to love the unique aroma of garbage juice mixed with hot piss that tends to be a thing.
My guess is that a large part of the difference in indoor environments would be humidity + CO2 levels. Florida buildings are designed for a lot more airflow and have more attention paid to up-front HVAC design, so there's less "sick building syndrome" type stuff going on.
In a Florida summer, the outdoors is a swamp, but you don't have to spend much time there. The whole place is built for cars; you can (if you wish) go straight from building A, to your car, to building B. Presuming underground parking, you might never even touch non-air-conditioned air.
In an NYC summer, meanwhile, in many buildings, the indoors is the swamp. (And often their attached yards / alleyways as well, if they're enclosed around by tall buildings.)
15 year NYC resident, spend many long weekends going down fo FL in summer.
In NYC it may be a little cooler, but your exposure to the elements is constant. You walk to the train, lunch, coffee, dinner, groceries, etc out on the sweaty sidewalk.
When it's 90F, the train station might be 100F and train at best 80F though often much higher.
You can live in a $2-3 million apartment yet have a lobby not be air conditioned, nor the hallways or elevator. No one has pools. You can go down to the park by the rivers, but you aren't going in for a swim. All the concrete & asphalt absorb and radiate the heat.
I'd go down to FL in summer since if it's going to be 90F+ and humid, I'd rather be able to jump in the ocean or a pool.
Imo focusing on weather is overrated. I worked in the bay area for 3 years, and year the constant weather is cool but for me, far more important is where my friends, family and the things I want to be near are. A nice house, cool activities, vibrant community and stores, etc.
Not saying those things are in NYC, there's many other great cities, but I definitely wouldn't pick a place just for the weather.
IIRC part of South Florida (around Ft. Lauderdale) is the only tropical rainforest climate in the CONUS.
I've spent time in the mid-Atlantic region and time in South Florida. Miami in July is the closest thing to hell on Earth. But I'd rather deal with that and live in a beautiful climate year-round than deal with north eastern winters.
> Miami in July is the closest thing to hell on Earth. But I'd rather deal with that and live in a beautiful climate year-round than deal with north eastern winters.
Thank goodness the West Coast exists to relieve us of that dreadful dilemma!
> But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F.
What part of Florida? It generally starts hitting 90 in May most of the state and stays there into November.
I've lived in NYC and yes, January-March can be tough and a few weeks in September are awful but Florida is just oppressively hot for six+ months of the year. The worst part is it doesn't cool down at night so you don't even get early morning or late night comfortable outside time
Miami. I'm not sure it's hit 90F hit but it's definitely hit 85-88F. So close. I'm not sure how much hotter it'll get but I'm all about it still.
I've thought about why this is. Not commuting I think is a big part of it. So the weather doesn't have to bother me if I don't want it to. Like I literally don't have to go anywhere.
I think the trade winds are a big factor too. Hot, humid and still is a special kind of hell.
Another is expectations. Like if you live in Miami you just assume it's going to be relatively warm (even hot) and humid. It's not a surprise.
Lastly, I have more space here and more facilities where I live. I can go for a swim easily even if I don't want to go to the beach.
I have been to Tampa in June/July years ago and that was hell. My circumstances were different and I'm sure my attitude was too. It actually turned me off Florida for years. Up until last year actually.
Funny story: when deciding where to work remotely last year I was strongly considering Dallas (maybe Austin) and decided on a whim to go to Miami instead. I said if I don't like it I'll just go to Texas. I haven't left. Funnily enough, in that time Texas had the big arctic storm and a foot of snow in Austin. I think I made the right choice.
> It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F.
And this is simply untrue (according to Weather.com and Weather Underground). I mention this because there's this big push (I'm sure you've noticed) among tech/VCs/Miami govt to paint a very rosy picture of Miami as an alternative to Silicon Valley.
Every day this week is expected to be 86-89. And to folks not from Florida ... that's HOT in Florida. I've lived in NYC, I've lived in Austin, I've lived in "Hotlanta" ... there's nothing like a Florida hot. And unless you're right on the water, it feels ... like much more.
The last week in January this year had 4 days above 80. The last week in February every single day was over 80 and two days over 85. In 2018 my NYC-based company decided to come to Orlando in the last week of February. Five of the seven days were OVER 90!
There's obviously some creative license even hyperbole here. The point is that in the tropics (which I'd count Miami as in), the weather (in the dry season at least) is very stable. Just looking at the forecast for the next 10 days, literally every day it's a low of mid 70s and a high of upper 80s. Some of those days have a chance of thunderstorms.
In January through march it did dip down as low as the 50s on one occasion but generally speaking it was mid-70s almost every day.
I know this is an anecdote, but.. I run along the Hudson. I see some regulars only during March-October. They have houses in Florida, too, but can "survive" there only during the coldest months.
It’s possible if you become a contractor. That’s what I am now, and I have worked for two companies so far. I live outside the states now.
But it does mean dealing with your own taxes, charging a higher rate to compensate for those taxes and other bills, etc. however, I’ve found that I can charge higher and the company can still save money simply because they don’t have to pay for things they would normally pay a permanent employee.
But, it does come with a risk of losing your job more easily.
Typically for a freelancer/contractor (as against a consultant) yes but also no. On a nominal hourly or whatever rate you come out ahead, but life can throw you curveballs that mean you don't end up ahead.
I grew up in Naples. If you have only been there 6 months, you haven’t lived there during the summer yet.
That said, I actually love Florida’s climate. The problem with Florida for me is the lack of outdoor activities, especially in the summer except for the beach and boat.
I personally prefer the bay areas hiking, access to park, playgrounds etc, but if you prefer beach, Florida is amazing and you adjust quickly to shorts 320 days a year.
It's the best. I was able to move out of the place I was in, which was a traffic-dominated hellscape and a complete "non-place" and the ultimate marriage of convenience (and not even that convenient), and move to a great place with fresh air near a great beach for a similar price. I've got a tan this year already. Not because I'm trying, but because I went from trying my damnedest to never leave the house (the surroundings were that boring and unpleasant) to now getting outside every chance I get, because I want to. It's so obvious - spend your life in a place where you want to be. But it took a pandemic to give me and my employer the nerve to do it.
This makes Florida your domicile, so no state income taxes (but, of course, you're paying Federal taxes regardless of where you reside in the world). The mail processor in question caters specifically to cruisers/yachties and RVers. Give the address to work and family, no one knows you're living the digital nomad life unless you share. Get a Schwab or Fidelity checking account for fee free ATM withdrawals globally, and a credit card with no foreign transaction fee.
Is this recommending that you lie and say you live on this island? If lots of people are doing it with the same island, might some tax agency get wise and audit everyone with that address?
I see how one could, in theory, easily get away with a fake residency while remote working, but sharing the same address with many others and posting about it online seems like asking for trouble.
I'm not sure about the specific details of the island example from above, but residency laws can get complicated. Summering for 3 months is obvious. But what about 5-4-3? What if you own property in one of the states? The list goes on. A given state will have laws specifying who can legally claim residency.
It gets really weird if multiple states attempt to "claim" you - I believe there was a supreme court case regarding state income tax in such a scenario.
Well, tax circumvention never is a good idea, but I know plenty of military folks who get away with it though.
I once saw a sailboat named "Minsc", that had a dingy hanging off the stern named "Boo" but it was gone before I could snap a picture. Probably off to do butt kicking.
It's not tax evasion when active military does it. They have a system and criteria for selecting which state you want to be a legal resident of. I don't recall how it works off the top of my head.
In the digital nomad case you aren’t circumventing state or federal taxes. By saying you are in, say NC, when you are really in Thailand, Croatia, or Costa Rica depending on the time of year—-you are paying more taxes then you’d owe, not less.
Leaving aside timezones, which you could adjust to if you wanted to, the real issue is that your employers can’t be sure it’s complying with Thai, Croatian, and Costa Rica law and doesn’t want to be the effort in to figure out how to be sure.
This is a work policy. These are things I tend to take pretty seriously (YMMV). So, if the policy doesn't allow that that's the standard I'm going to live by rather than playing the game of "will I get caught?"
It's also why I've never taken a single document or line of source code from any company I've worked at.
Never been to Florida, but from all the cyclists I know, it sounds like the third circle of hell from about May to October. Between the humidity and the bugs and the rain (rain? in the summer? crazy to this west coaster!), I couldn't do it.
I've honestly been thinking through what it would be like to have a second full-time job. And by that, I mean actually executing satisfactory work for two organizations for the long-term. I work in a relatively niche space and am able to operate at a more efficient level than the type of employee most companies are looking to hire for the salary the employer wants to pay.
I make good money but if I ran at 100% capacity, I'd run out of things to do. Unfortunately at this point, there aren't a ton of opportunities to lead larger teams at larger organizations so I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just pick up a second job doing what I'm doing now.
Effort and execution-wise, I can't imagine it being a problem. If it were, I'm pretty sure I could outsource certain tasks to overcome those hurdles.
The part I'm not so sure about is maintaining visibility and how on earth you could coordinate meetings to avoid being double-booked while still maintaining at least the appearance of availability. I guess the difficult part with what I do is the fact that I do need to communicate with a fair number of people within the organization.
My company has already started its effort to bring all of us back in. There are some exceptions, but it is not clear, who can get it, so it is the usual corporate free for all, which means basically what it always did.. if boss likes us you, they may bestow a favor upon you. Throughout the entire pandemic experience I have become noticeably more cynical, but I have to admit I did not see the ridiculous corporate propaganda 'sitting in traffic is good for you' coming.
>corporate propaganda 'sitting in traffic is good for you' coming.
Wow, thank you for this comment, I've only sort of just realized this.
Eye opening / Watershed moment.
> if boss likes us you, they may bestow a favor upon you.
That's the rub with job as well, management simply can't follow their own return-to-office policy uniformly without bleeding talent, which is clearly going to lead to a lot of disgruntled coworkers. It's frustrating too because we have both productive and unproductive employees advocating for remote.
Just watch until many realize that WFH leads to people moving within the greater US and what timezone differences truly mean to your work-life balance.
Living in pacific time zone and dealing with Europe, East Coast and Asia just suuuuuuuuuuuuucks.
An alternative perspective: I work in EST and my coworkers are in Munich. It takes planning but it works out fine. We picked meeting times for critical things that line up correctly between us all, do minimal meetings, etc. I've also been on boarding to an extremely large and complex company at this point and so far I am CME.
At my previous company we also had people on the west coast and east coast.
The main thing: be flexible and reasonable. Does standup have to happen at 8AM? Will the world end of it's at noon? Probably not.
As someone who lives near a lot of FB employees I’m happy for them as well as for all the others who won’t have to suffer the impact of those employees commuting.
It cuts both ways.
I love WFH and would love to do it indefinitely. Used to do it 1-2 days/week at prior job.
My wife and I are both ICs and introverts, and happy to have the space/privacy/quiet.
However, my firm especially is really taking advantage of it.
They are getting far more work out of us while acting like they are doing us a favor by not dragging us back yet.
Meeting load is up 25-50%, but story points per sprint are still way up. Major strategic projects are progressing, profit is high and customer feedback is positive. Firm is in crazy growth mode.
People aren't really using their "unlimited" vacation time.
Managers feel welcome to send emails/slacks out of hours and not even ack responses during business hours. Getting hold of them during 9a-6p can take hours, and if you want to have a quick chat put something on their calendar .. good luck finding a slot any sooner than 2 days out.
None of this is sustainable after even a hybrid return to the office, and its accompanying time sucks of commuting/lunch pickup/childcare arrangements and people actually having social lives and things to do after work again.
"Unlimited" vacation time is so bizarre to me, it almost seems like a scam to me. Obviously it's not legally binding, otherwise a malicious employee could not work a single day and legally not face repercussions.
But in Germany at least, vacation days are a matter of law. The number of days per year is part of the contract, and there is a strict minimum of 24 days (at least in Bavaria). It is as far as I know not legal to prevent people from exhausting their allocated vacation days within the full year, a couple of years ago a court decided that employers have to remind employees when they risk expiring their vacation days after a year.
So I guess anyone who has "unlimited" vacation time does not actually have unlimited vacation time, but the opposite: The legal minimum of mandated vacation time, with the option to get additional time on top if the employer agrees. Effectively, any person who even just has one day more than the legal minimum, but fixed, has more right to take time off than someone with "unlimited" vacation!
I agree, and I also found the "no rollover" rule in Germany quite helpful. You have your very nice vacation allotment and you must take it or you will lose it and your manager may get a talking-to.
In many companies you are even required to take at least two vacations of at least one week each in any given year: the whole point of the vacation is to prevent you burning out.
Unlimited vacation time can be better than what some companies offer as standard. In the US, two weeks (or none) is the norm. 3 weeks is decent. 4 weeks is considered exceptional. (You might even get some holidays too) The standard amount in the US basically just sucks and there’s almost no employer offering European levels of time off as a standard.
Unlimited is where you suddenly can hit 5+ weeks if you get the right manager. But - again - depends on your manager and your relationship with them.
I’ve personally never had much of an issue taking 5+ weeks every year at my places of employment but I use whatever position I have to the best of my abilities. (And sometimes I get 6+ weeks in a year, very uncommon)
I work in an industry where 4-5 weeks off plus federal holidays and sick days is not uncommon for senior engineers.
What I have found is that "unlimited" actually works the opposite as it's more of a thing you have to ask for. With an amount spelled out it feels more like a fixed allocation you are entitled to and that you are deducting from. If you have the wrong manager (and good luck sniffing this out in interviews), it turns into a competition of who can use the least.
About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's boss about it in a non-confrotarional way.
Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a clear description and goal before setting them up.
I still get the odd day where my afternoon is completely booked, but I now have about 30 hours of uninterrupted work where I can program, trouble shoot, analyse data or pair program with junior people.
I believe we have to be constantly watchful "meeting creep" and always question stuff such as ritual meetings. If an IC is swamped by meetings, things are very wrong indeed.
And about the communication after work hours, unless it's an outage, I reply when I get back at work and so does everyone in my team. Maybe having this arrangement with your boss and setting boundaries is a good idea? You can't forbid them from communicating asynchronously whenever they want, but they need to respect that you won't reply to them right away.
Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality.
Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have!
Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.
One thing I'm curious is how Facebook's remote / distributed work culture (if exits) helps this move. Some company has strong on-site culture. FB probably has some of that, but I suspect they also have some strong online-talking culture using their internal Facebook (for Workplace?) and maybe more.
After all, their service is about connecting people online. Zuckerberg definitely has that in his mind.
Not sure about the UK, but as someone who lives in Canada and works at a tech company, I've recently been getting a blitz of linkedin messages and facebook ads encouraging me to apply to facebook as a remote employee.
Literally told a FB recruiter yesterday I was already earning near FB comp for global remote work, and for that reason I wasn't even intersted in interviewing for the position they were offering which required in the office work in SF after "corona ended".
I think it's important to consider that tech companies are still bending over backwards to get the most talented technical skills. if those ppl want remote they probably will get it now that this forced experiment had proven it can work.
The title missed one important piece: employees who don't choose remote work are required to come to office at least half of the week (i.e. three days). This is a less of a good news for most people.
Surprised this isn't higher, that's basically "back full time" to me but with a shorter weekly period. Very different than what I understood reading the headline.
Note that that's starting in October at the earliest, depending on how/when your local office reopens up. The Menlo Park campus is only "10% open" right now, so the only people in the office are the ones desperate to get out of the house, and we're not expecting the office to be 50% open until September. There is plenty of notice and time for people who really care about working from home to either apply for remote work or slowly adjust back to office work.
I don't think that Apple ever had a vibe as being especially great for employees. Secrecy to a level that you may not know what product you're actually working on, and heavy top down management as a result.
They also basically ban you from working on open source. One employee detailed that they could not release some improvements they made to a Wordpress photo gallery plug-in because legal told them it competes with the iPhone/iCloud photo gallery.
You don't think Apple has technical challenges in their software? That's really interesting to hear. I worked on software there for five years and it was some of the most interesting work I've been a part of. What do you consider impressive in software?
Not to the same extent as their hardware, which is best-in-the-industry as the A-series and M1 have proved.
This is some what Ive heard based on the teams in IS&T, and the fact that most of the most technically challenging software products, like the SDKs, OS, system apps effectively seem to have a 1 year release cycle.
Then again the place I work isn’t considered impressive in software at all so…
It’s interesting, because I’m currently interviewing with them and I definitely am hearing a lot of expectations of coming to the office at least a couple days a week. Which is pretty much in line with what the expectations were pre pandemic.
Yes but that was based on living near (commuting distance from) the company's offices. If my employer's office is in NYC or SF but I live in Oklahoma and work remotely, companies like FB and others I know of will pay me Oklahoma wages. I could be a Level V and make less than a Level I living in the Bay Area.
Let's be real. The loser here is middle managers. Not all of them. Just the ones who feed off of the high they get from having control over the office environment.
This strawman about middle managers in the WFH conversation is exhausting and annoying. Do you really think middle managers are some evil scum-sucking lizards that actually enjoy things like hour long commutes and wearing uncomfortable clothes? They're people just like you are, and they enjoy sitting at home in their pajamas just as much as you do.
Maybe, just maybe the issue is that middle managers have actual, legitimate reasons that WFH isn't a universally good thing. Contrary to what you may think, not every worker in tech is a high-performing star that produces flawless code if you just leave them alone in their home office. A lot of employees are lazy and will take advantage of the reduced oversight to slack off, a lot of employees are people who need constant hands-on mentoring or direction, and a lot of employees are just simply more productive when there's someone to impress nearby.
So while I respect that you might be the perfect worker bee who does whatever work is assigned with no oversight or hand-holding required, most employees are not that, and in-person oversight/mentoring (and if in-person oversight can't happen, get ready for increase monitoring on your work laptop usage) legitimately is necessary.
Here here. I want the office, to help me focus, and to reduce friction when communicating and solving problems.
Most of my job is not coding. My job isn't assembly line work. It is solving problems in coordination with my peers, which yields small amounts of code and configuration.
If I had straight-ahead clear as day coding to do, and I was motivated -- then, yes, being at home in my own environment in the quiet would be great. But that's not my job, nor the job of many other people.
Working from home is not for everyone. I'm looking forward to returning.
I can relate to this a bit. Most here will quickly jump on the "Judge output and not effort" and dismiss the fact that judging output is very difficult, time consuming and often unfair.
If the task hasn't been done on time, it might be because the task underestimated the difficulty, or that the person had other tasks which interrupted this one. If the person tried their best and they are competent, the output doesn't matter so much since likely it would have taken an equal amount of time for anyone else to get it done. You can't ask people to do more than they are capable of.
When everyone is honest and trying their best there are no problems but its pretty hard to work out when they aren't.
I'm sympathetic to this position, but I do wonder: is it actually easier for underperforming employees to hide when they're remote? I feel like, anecdotally, they are pretty good at hiding in person too.
Maybe it makes them try harder to appear busy with real work when people are around to hover over their cubes, but I'm unconvinced that you can really wring blood from a stone.
Maybe around the edges the "personal touch" is enough to inspire (or frighten) an employee in a way that remote communication does not allow, but I've not seen many poor performers actually improve unless they were already personally motivated to do better themselves.
Sigh, sadly, as much as I would like to think otherwise, you do have a point. The universal part that is. WFH is definitely not for everyone. In our little group we do have one member, who has has started to abuse the situation. My immediate manager is not one to micromanage, but as our team has gotten bigger, we had to stop relying on trust. So we started to rely more on raw numbers. And it sucks, because this particular unit had a rather high level autonomy.
But... maybe that is the point.. there should be a way to get those who can do WFH to keep doing it.
I don't know if that's me, but I'm a engineering manager that focuses on personal relationships and remote has made my job harder and take way more energy. High fidelity communication is hard or impossible and the alternatives frankly, suck.
I don't _think_ I get high from controlling an office environment (not sure what that means) but I sure miss white boards and in-person collaboration.
It's not just you. I cannot manage to do people stuff over videochat.
Not to mention virtual whiteboards are a frustratingly poor imitation of the real deal.
On the other hand, I do work better on my own, when I just need to grind out some work.
I guess my ideal would be 2 or 3 days remote and the rest in office.
Have you tried Miro? It's $8/month if you want to invite others to edit your board. I find it offers good value at that price point. I'm a UX/product manager though, so I tend to pull in a lot of external visuals while I'm working. So YMMV.
You know one way and doing anything different is difficult. It also will challenge you and make you a better manager and person. Do you really need a crutch like the white board? Do you really need that employee right beside you? Take all of that away and you can still be a good manager.
> Do you really need a crutch like the white board?
Umm, what? Having been a manager and an IC I don't see a white board as a crutch at all, I see it as a highly effective tool for a specific set of problems.
I definitely prefer working at home when I'm heads down, I know what the problem is and I just need to crank out a solution. When I'm designing the solution to a problem with a group of people, or heck even just trying to fully clarify the problem, having an in-person session is just much more productive and efficient. What's more, having now done lots of remote design/problem solving sessions, both as the leader of the meeting and the participant, I find them always less effective in every way when there are at least 3 people in the meeting.
I am an engineering manager at Bay Area tech company and I love WFH. We have on-boarded lots of new employees and interns remotely and while there are difficulties the benefits seems to prevail.
Actually, I don't have anyone who is physically in California (I am the only one on my team who is physically there).
EDIT: list of WFH benefits (not complete): no commute (this is huge for some), ICs tend to do more focused work, ability to hire talent globally, giving option to people to live where they want to live (vs work), less seasonal colds, etc.
I think it is subjective. Having done both a few times, from both sides, and I still prefer remote. Little is lost and much is gained in terms of control over ones environment.
We surveyed the opinions of our 2021 summer intern population before they started and something over 90% of them expressed a preference to be in the office.
Of course, summer interns are a slightly odd population as the choice they're making is probably between doing their internship remotely from their bedroom at their parents house or spending ten weeks in the big city so there is that.
Aside from asking you should be exploring, probing, reviewing anything you have access to. Clues are everywhere and relying only on others to teach you will be a difficult strategy. If documentation is missing identify and get the docs fixed, opportunities can exist.
I have never interned. Maybe you expect that. I usually get thrown into the deepend of some codebase and asked to figure it out. My advise would be to get use to it and get good at it.
It will be bad for the permanent wfh employees. While they are eating lunch at home, their coworkers will be grabbing lunch with the boss, building those relationships, and getting all the promotions and raises.
Awful that so much of corporate culture is oriented around having a middle-manager bully. Always yipping and yapping about "productivity" never focusing on what you do as opposed to how much of whatever. Never wanting you to take breaks, but always wanting you to work unpaid overtime and taking all the credit for themselves. Super quick to make sure the blame is yours whenever there is an issue.
Engineers are some of the worst middle-managers you can encounter. Never work for an engineer middle-manager if you can avoid it unless you're an engineer yourself. They tend to come with huge egos and entitlement due to their degree and don't have the people skills to allow them to manage or run a team successfully. They only care about themselves and wearing their ring to make sure all of you know they have one.
I realize a lot of the HN audience are engineers. I don't care. Just because you're an engineer doesn't make you a project manager or even good at managing a project or a team of non-engineers. This is a self-delusion that many of them have.
IMO bitching about bad middle managers is like bitching that the kid making minimum wage at McDonald's isn't the epitome of gracious customer service.
I have been a middle manager, and can say pretty confidently that it is a very difficult and a very shitty job. This is one reason that it tends to pay quite well is that there are fewer people who want to go into it (as opposed to, say, high level IC).
A middle manager gets to make very few decisions but gets to be the messenger for the majority of them.
Middle management is not always useful, they mostly have the role of herding dogs, but if the work is not dumb and soul-crushing I don't think most people need to be herded.
(and I am talking as someone who built companies and led teams)
In my opinion, people should not accept to do this kind of work, but I understand that societies tend to be structured in a way to push a lot of people to work like slaves with the illusion of freedom.
Terminology correction: control over the "office environment" (meaning bossing people around directly or whatever) is something you'd expect from the lowest level of manager. "Middle" managers are the next tier up, the people in the middle of the corporate hierarchy between the actual groups doing work and the VP-level senior executives.
Middle managers are famous for feeding off of email directives, I guess. Not control over the office environment to which they may not be local.
I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for under performance I can coast about 4-8 weeks before a given job fires me. Currently on a $1.5M run-rate for comp
this year. And the interviewing process is so much faster today, companies are desperate, it takes me 2-3hrs of total effort to land a new job with thousands to chose from.
I'm assuming this is facetious, but... high performers are potentially big winners in a remote world.
Let's say someone gets 5x the person next to them done. Very few companies will pay them 5x. Maybe double...
But if they can manage their time well enough to get X done in some fraction of the time, they could realistically do two or three full time jobs worth of "normal" work, and increase their pay - and income security - over having just one job. This doesn't work when you have to be in person all day, but remote?
A high performer that can produce 5x on a consistent basis in one job will only be able to produce maybe 2.5x on multiple jobs with significantly more convoluted career progression and schedules. Context switching and context setting are both quite difficult.
But a 5xer will quickly promoted to principal level (L6) within a decade of entering their industry if they hop around a couple of times.
L6s usually make 2.5x of what their peers make. So the conventional process really isn't that bad.
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Honestly, if you can consistently produce 5x and provide good estimates, then you should be consultant / contract hire for mid-tier companies. You will make a lot more money and have a lot more agency over your own life.
Finding clients is a hustle, but so is holding 3 jobs at the same time. So, pick your poison.
It's not my experience that high performers get paid more than peers, people who switch employers and negotiate better pay are the ones that are paid more. Staying at one company and working on career progression is a slow grind to good pay.
The way I see it is that I can come in to a fresh role on that 2.5x peer rate by performing a solid interview at architect/principal level. I then do this for multiple roles concurrently then I'm on 7.5x my peers. Which is actually a pretty good estimate to what I know I'm making in relation to others. I also find the principal/architect roles are sometimes less hands on and you're being paid for knowledge and advice, so it actually makes it less of a burden to product high output.
I feel like this is the post-covid take on the classic SO thread: "I automated my job, do I have to tell my boss" [1]
It really depends if you view employment as "they are paying you for 40 hours per week" or "they are paying you for a specified output, good for you if you can get it done faster!"
It's an interesting point but I think that we're honestly vastly overestimating how highly performing high performers can be - 5x is a pretty reasonable number to me for an extreme skill gap including an experience gap but ruling out the most junior folks.
We've already got a wage spread that more than covers 5x with most folks fresh out of college looking at 50k/annual if they're outside of SV and some devs within SV making 500k or more.
A 10x can't be a 1x in 10 places. Maintaining 10x the average productivity requires being in harmony with the work environment, the environment makes the 10x engineer as much as he makes himself, you can't do that while working 10 jobs.
This is all good if you’re just given sprint tasks and expected to crank out code for them without much supervision. What happens when any 2 of the 5 jobs decide to schedule a recurring meeting at the same time?
I currently run 3 full time contracts concurrently, and yes meetings clash, but it's easy to get meetings rescheduled if you just ask. Sometimes I have two calls on at the same time if I know its a call where I'm mainly going to be listening. Can always claim "bad internet" and drop out of one to answer question in another.
Approach management and discuss a comp increase? Tell them you constantly have tech recruiters hitting you up with far loftier packages but you love the current firm and just want to have a more equitable compensation package.
If not, start looking. There are thousands of good-paying jobs out there. We're in a significant labor shortage for engineers and many companies are upping the stakes through stronger compensation and fully-remote-forever work environments. Take advantage of the situation.
Why should they? Unless it's some kind of contract I don't think you can be sued for not doing your job - you can be fired (and likely would be), but incompetence doesn't generally lead to legal problems.
Many employment contracts expressly forbid you from accepting other employment without prior authorization from the company. If his employment contracts contain that provision, then he would definitely be in breach. But... damages would probably be limited to just the salary that the company paid.
Definitely true for most high-paying companies (meaning experienced enough to not have employment contract full of beginner's holes like this).
Explicitly forbidding another full time employment, full rights on all intellectual property, non-competing agreements etc. Also explicitly expecting to work ie 40 hours.
I would take this with grain of salt the size of Jupiter, since such behavior would quickly show on any employment feedback source that any proper company hiring should check beforehand. Being blacklisted forever for well-paying companies will bite back very quickly too.
In most of the Europe, I believe this would be illegal simply due to amount of work expected - there are hard limits on that.
If true regardless, it might not be the smartest idea to brag online about committing multiple frauds, which casts another doubt about the whole story.
Depends on the kind of contract involved. A full-time employment contract (what is often called "permanent" in the west) is one thing, a B2B arrangement is another.
Personally, I haven't had an employment contract for over 6 years now, and in fact to stay in the clear one should ensure they have at least two simultaneous clients - though most ignore that, at least in Poland.
Could be seen borderline fraudulent since no employer signing this kind of contract would reasonably expect this behavior. So that could add a criminal element in addition to the civil damages.
Conflict of interest - say you're working for two companies that are in vaguely similar spaces (e.g. Google and Apple). Seems like grounds for a lawsuit.
Dude, you're my hero, I'm currently at 3 jobs at once (used to be 4 but the contract ended) and this is 100% true, I like some jobs more than others and it really boosts up income and learning, can you share more secrets? It's been a hell of a ride for me
It's not very satisfying so definitely not retire early. However, it's a good way to raise the equivalent of a seed round without having to give up any equity and simultaneously execute on practical customer discovery regarding the needs of modern engineering teams in a remote-only world.
There were a lot of big words there but am I right at reading your statement as - "I'm exploiting employers so that I can found a start up that is able to monitor truant employees?"
The most unbelievable part of this is that you have 10 "mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering" that only pay $150k each on average. I do not believe you.
I 100% believe them. I'm doing something similar but with 3x concurrent roles and am considering adding a few more. You'll be surprised how bad you have to be to get fired. I can go days doing nothing, then crank at a few hours work for one pull request on a Friday and people are happy.
You should really consider working for several of the large bay area legacy companies like HP, Veritas, Symantec, NetApp, etc. The "work life balance" at these places is quite good in the sense that most engineers aren't working much.
I think you could easily do two or three jobs at once and accumulate overlapping stock grants quite easily. That overlap eventually gets your yearly to a serious amount.
That's hilarious and it sounds like a great anecdote for parties!
I'm in the opposite situation, I quit my only job because I couldn't stand wasting my time and I'll just keep on running my business (less money but freedom and time to make more and grow).
Out of curiosity and if you're happy to share, are you still running your own company while "working" these jobs?
No, I sold my company in 2019 and exited last summer. It took up far too much time to pull off anything like this. The new venture is purely in fundraising and research mode until I stop this little experiment.
Wow you really do sound serious. I have done ghost development for 2 jobs before, as in I took the job and had juniors help me out although I was doing majority of the work. Never thought of 10 jobs.
This seems way better for me to set my own funds straight than chasing investors for my product ideas. I do not think I can pull off the work needed though...
Thank you for your service as being a literal leech on the economy. There will always be people who try and exploit the system - trying to guard absolutely against them is a futile effort, but I hope the number of folks following in your footsteps is quite few.
And hey! Maybe one of your coworkers will see this post!
I'm a tech culture reporter at Protocol and I'd love to talk to you about this, if you're down! I'm at [email protected] or @anna_c_kramer on Twitter, and happy to provide my Signal over email if that's preferred. Let me know if you'd be interested in chatting.
Yes writing code, I provide enough actual progress that people must assume I'm either extremely methodical or woefully incompetent. I put in about an hour per job per day. I'm logged-in on slack/teams/etc and disable idle indicators. I use a virtual KVM to switch between laptops as needed. The biggest problem I run into is video meetings occurring at the same time, those I usually just disable video and blame it on internet problems.
Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
While it is not explicitly illegal, you are most definitely violating your employment agreement so your employer will fire you if they find out and might sue you as well.
The problem is really that multiple parties may be able to claim the rights to all of your output while you were on their payroll, which is obviously messy from a legal standpoint.
There aren't any laws about how many jobs you can have. Your employer is free to fire you if they find out though. Usually you have agreed not to have multiple jobs when joining, especially so at places like Facebook.
A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company. So signing two such contracts with two different companies usually means they both own the code you wrote for both companies, or maybe even trickier legal implications.
Of course you can try to get that clause removed during contract negotiation, but I doubt many people would be successful on that negotiation (you might have better luck to exclude some of your open source contributions).
Every SV company I've ever worked for has explicitly disclaimed rights to my work done off hours with my own equipment... as they are required to do under CA law.
I'm not sure how you can claim all work was done during off hours with ten full-time jobs. If OP got caught he could have some very expensive legal problems.
"A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company."
My experience, working for a number of silicon valley companies, has been the exact opposite. There is a clause that says (in legalese) "we don't own stuff you do on your own time with your own equipment if it isn't related to what you do at work"
It is my understanding that California public policy actually requires companies to put this disclaimer in work contracts.
They would have to last 1 year to get the full TC which isn't the point. They do the minimal amount of work to collect a $150k salary and then get fired in 4 months and move on.
This is the US, anyone can sue anyone for anything. That said, California has very favorable employee-protection laws around non-compete, non-solicit, notice periods, at-will employment status, and ownership of work. It's very unlikely an employer will sue over $10-20k. So far, they all just fire me and move on.
A bit of a snarky comment but I do agree that many tech companies have been sitting on their hands waiting to mimic what the FANG companies are going to do next.
pay adjustments have already been known for over a year, its not some secret. its to -15% to places like hawaii, -10% to miami, -5% to seattle/LA, or 0% to nyc
its based on cost of acquisition of labor in the region, not cost of living as you can see from hawaii
My ISP (Comcast) emailed me yesterday with a 33% speed boost, for free. They just redefined the tier to be 800Mbps instead of 600. This anecdote does not invalidate your prediction, but the correct prediction is "we don't know" rather than stating your point with such certainty.
This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.