I know it's cool now to rag on remote work, and I definitely get that not everyone wants to work remote. But boy, I don't ever want to work in an office again. It's not just the time saved, the privacy, and the lack of commute, but the simple fact that while code is building I can throw some laundry in the washing machine, check the mailbox, keep an eye on my 3d printer, have my pets around, crash on the couch for 10 minutes, make a quick trip to the grocery or post office, use my pull-up bar, be home when large packages arrive, eat out of my own fridge and pantry, have a podcast going without having to put on my headphones, not wear shoes, use my own bathroom and spend as much time as I need in there, and so much more.
This works great if you have a huge and well-equipped home. I could set up my place to be both a home and an office, but it wouldn't be cheap (for starters, I'd want to rent something bigger). Considering taxes, this would be equivalent to at least a 20k pay cut due to costs being offloaded on me.
I totally see why employers love that.
Additionally, FAANG and startup tech offices often serve as more than an office - they tend to have a lot of shared amenities that are just not practical to have at home. I don't use a 3D printer often enough to own one, but there is one in the office. Gym? Office, and it has more than a pull-up bar. Post office? Office. Inbound packages? Post office. In the office. Grocery shopping? Happens much less often if you eat out. In the office. Why would I want to eat out of my own fridge and pantry (and have to prepare the food myself) when I can grab tasty food prepared by people who actually know what they're doing?
The benefit isn't just that the stuff is free; the benefit is that it's all right there. It's an incredible time saver.
This is going to be a huge benefits cut for tech employees, and a massive cost-cutting measure for tech employers.
If the office is just an office with no amenities, and you have a sucky commute, then I can see why WfH would be attractive.
Having worked in the FAANG / startup offices you describe, they always felt like they were designed to appeal to someone in their early 20s who was irritated that they didn’t have the benefits of living at home with parents who take care of “adult” responsibilities. Instead of calling it immaturity, we tech folks give it a more digestible name and call it “time optimization”. Some of us like the autonomy of maintaining our lives without some parent-like figure - you know, actually growing up? It was funny - when I worked there and described the benefits, one of my non-tech friends just stared at me and said - “so... they give you that so you never leave work? That sounds miserable.” Changed my outlook forever on the benefits.
Looking down on this might help you feel superior, but I always view this "you should grow up and swallow" tone as a bit backwards. Among the current 70+ year old generation around here it is common to think people are lazy for using dishwashers and washing machines, and doing it the good manual time consuming way builds character. Not really common nowadays but 20 years ago you heard it all the time.
Why rail against people using convenience and amenity as if it's some kind of character flaw?...
I don't mean to put words in OP's mouth, they may think exactly as you've described, but I think the issue is less of a character flaw and more about being sort of trapped at work.
If part of your identity is your workplace, perhaps that's fine? That can be hard for people to understand when they don't integrate their work into their identity though, and that could be the distaste.
And I agree with the spirit of your post, I believe. I think it's important for people to find their own methods for establishing an identity, but more importantly to teach everyone to recognize and respect alternative methods without trying to rail against them as you say.
They framed their argument like enjoying those perks was a symbol of immaturity, which is what sets the condescending tone.
I love having a good cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. Going out to eat is such a massive time sink and you really should eat with your coworkers where possible. On-site gyms are the same, if I'm already going to the gym after work, why make a special trip?
It doesn't mean that you're stuck at work the entire time. In fact, I'd argue that it can reduce your time at the office, if used right. Use your breaks to run some errands that you'd normally do after work. Schedule your workout for 3:00-4:00 if you have a meeting that runs a little later. Etc.
You can be a fully functioning adult and still enjoy those benefits.
The immaturity is not realizing that the tech company is reinventing the company store of the past. the salary and these cheap perks (compared to more salary) still net out to a win for the company. if it wasn't, they wouldn't do it. and that time you spend washing clothes at home can also be spent talking to other ppl at home, watching tv, reading a book...not working.
also, quite frankly as someone who has had a life that spans restaurant cooking and FANNG employment, that food will never be as good for you as food you make for yourself/ someone makes for you at hom.
My dishwasher doesn't work well, and after thinking about it, since I don't have a lot of dishes, I have been doing them manually for a few years.
It has not really enhanced any aspect of my character. If anything I tend to get paper plates more often because I don't want to do the dishes sometimes.
That actually wasn’t what he was railing against though, he was saying that it was manipulative of the employers to provide all these services with the intention to keep their employees at their desks for as many hours of the day as they could, rather than fostering a degree of work life balance.
Using a washing machine benefits the corporate scumbags of the household appliance company. Benefits are not mutually exclusive.
I'd also argue that the only nefarious benefit is possibly keeping you stuck in the office. The employee being happy, healthy and with more time on their hands is a benefit to both the employee and company, and a much larger boon to the employee.
I previously held a job at a tech company with nice amenities, including optional dinner. Dinner didn't start until 6:30, and they stopped serving breakfast at 9:30, so if I wanted three free meals I was at the office for at least 10 hours a day. Sounds bad, right?
Guess what – I was also free to go run an errand in the middle of the day, leave at 5 to go to a fitness class and come back for dinner, or just leave whenever and not come back. Many days I'd work from home until 11:30 or so, and then go in for lunch. Some days I'd work from home entirely.
You can call me an infantile corporate slave all you want, but I knew what was going from day one (that the food policies are designed in the company's self-interest was obvious and not, to me, repugnant) and perfectly capable of taking care of myself when I need to, thank you very much.
Since I left that job, I've cooked for myself and my partner quite regularly. Shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc is an incredible time suck, and most of it much less fun than the extra 2 hours I spent at the office (half that eating, and the other half maybe working or maybe not). It does feel nice to be in control of my life this way, but if I were to go back to employment I'd absolutely desire the perks I had at the previous job.
as though these "responsibilities" are worthy of spending time. If it was possible, eating out and not having to chores (of washing dishes etc) is a good luxury.
> they give you that so you never leave work?
yes, this is why, but if you understand what the trade off is, and decide that it's better, then it's not miserable. And if you also happen to enjoy the work, it's a win-win.
Sounds to me that people who does not enjoy such benefits are just getting sour grapes.
The benefits rapidly lose their value once you have kids. Free breakfast / dinner? Who is picking the kids up and cooking for them?
Onsite laundry? Have fun dragging the whole family’s dirty clothes around. Also, if you have room for kids, you probably also have room for a laundry machine.
On the other hand, kids take a ton of time, so losing time to a commute is brutal. You lose many hours of being able to think at home without someone constantly interrupting you. If the commute time is spent driving to an open plan office, it is doubly useless. Can I just work from my car or a coffee shop or something? There’s a reason most big tech companies saw their productivity skyrocket during the lockdown.
Also, there’s much more cleaning, cooking, etc to be done. With work from home, I can turn off my laptop, and read a paper and change the laundry without dozens of interruptions.
If I need to come into the office, screw the perks. Give me an office with opaque walls and a functional door.
Part time WFH and/or a real office are going to be at the top of my list of amenities the next time I look for a job.
Just a minor correction: data I saw indicated productivity rose overall but was cut in half for parents. Of course, I attribute this to lack of childcare, which will return at some point.
I'm curious – if you lived in an area where a dedicated home office room would be prohibitively expensive, would you want a single-person office in a Regus or WeWork for yourself, close to where you live?
What I want is that if you work from home, you get a stipend to your wage equivalent to the cost they would normally spend on your office space.
I did a quick google which said that in SF, office space is $80 / sq. foot, I presume per month? Assuming you need idk, 15 - 30 sq. foot per employee (not even counting shared spaces), that's $1200 - $2400 / month to be added to your wage, plus a bit for expenses like desks, coffee or lunch that are normally offered by the employer.
I read another post or article that made the statement that if you work from home, you should be earning enough to have a bigger house with dedicated office space. Of course, working remotely would also mean you can move around the state or country where housing prices are lower.
For me, I bought a two bedroom house a few years ago; it works for me, I have my desk set up in my bedroom, quite comfortable but I would still like a dedicated work / hobby space, so if this work from home keeps up, long-term I'm looking at moving back to where I grew up in the north part of the country (NL), where houses are bigger and cheaper than they are over here.
Absolutely true, but it's worth mentioning that it does free up capital. That could go straight to a CxO's bonus, but also to larger budgets for Project X/Y/Z.
Not having to commute is also a big time saver, and that one is just on you, the worker. The Mr Money Mustache blog calculated that every mile you cut off your commute saves you like ~700-800 bucks a year.
Data point: we once rented 800 sqm and fitted in the order of 60 people. This was not as crammed as typical SF startup space (it was in Europe and a large corporation), we had groups of 6 and in between meeting rooms, bathrooms, pantry etc. So that‘s more in the order of 130 sq ft per employee. According to your numbers that would translate to $10k/employee
One of the key benefits of WFH is that people can leave the city where rent is expensive and find a bigger flat for cheaper outside the city limits. In my opinion the ability to have more time to spend with my family and friends outweighs any benefits of having a chef or gym at the office. On another note cooking is one of the most valuable life skills I learned to late, I recommend taking it up, not only does it help with living healthy but it's also a good way to relax and take your mind off things or spend time with your significant other :)
They are benefiting from this just as much as you are. Remind your employer that he's also saving money by not having to pay for an expensive office space in the city center and all the things that go with it like hiring cleaning services or building staff. Any equipment you use to work on should be either reimbursed by him or factored into your salary as well (monitor, laptop, internet connection, office chair, desk, etc). There are a lot of bargaining chips, just depends on how you present them.
I guess perspective matters, in my opinion an average engineer working at Facebook should be able to afford his own house in a nice neighborhood and be able to provide for his/her family so that they live well. If that's not the case then maybe engineers ought to start forming unions or demand profit sharing from companies.
The more employers willing to hire remote workers, the less this argument works.
Still, I already make 1/2 as much as I could make living in Boston, living 90 miles north of it. That is "local market" salary though for a job that is ostensibly on-site (partial remote / now fully remote due to COVID).
> Additionally, FAANG and startup tech offices often serve as more than an office - they tend to have a lot of shared amenities that are just not practical to have at home. I don't use a 3D printer often enough to own one, but there is one in the office. Gym? Office, and it has more than a pull-up bar. Post office? Office. Inbound packages? Post office. In the office. Grocery shopping? Happens much less often if you eat out. In the office. Why would I want to eat out of my own fridge and pantry (and have to prepare the food myself) when I can grab tasty food prepared by people who actually know what they're doing?
I definitely get why people want these sort of perks, and I don't want to invalidate their appreciation of them.
In reality, it's unusual to find a company with all of those things at once. For starters, I bought gym equipment for my home because I hate the experience of most gyms. If I can get my workout from home, an office gym is just adding a middle-man. In my experience, not all companies are happy when you use their address for your various Amazon orders. Eating out all the time costs way more than eating at home. Besides, there's nothing stopping WFH'ers from eating out if they wanted.
Again, I'm not trying to diss the lifestyle of the kind of work environment you're describing. It's just not what I prefer.
Huge and well-equipped? Why? I work at my dining table. It’s still better than going to the office. Also your office had a 3D printer and gym... you must realise your office is absurdly better than most people’s offices. Most people just have an open plan space full of irritating other people and maybe a pingpong table.
Also: There are clear health benefits when having a "proper" chair and a table in right height (maybe even changeable, someone can stand for a while) for a place where you're spending large parts of the day.
Also in my personal experience from working from home for 10 years, having a clear separation between "work" and "private" is essential for a good work-life-balance. Otherwise it's too easy to do that one more thing and check that one idea all the time instead of calling it a day and doing something else.
For a while - especially while young - a dining table works. But for a permanent setup it's not the right way.
> having a clear separation between "work" and "private" is essential for a good work-life-balance. Otherwise it's too easy to do that one more thing and check that one idea all the time instead of calling it a day and doing something else.
This has been one of the hardest parts about the switch to WFH for me. I enjoy listening to podcasts/YouTube videos related to what I'm doing at work whilst doing mundane take around the house and I've been increasingly finding myself hearing something that triggers an idea which leads me to jumping back on "real quick" whole it's still fresh in my head.
I only realized over the last few weeks just how burnt out this was making me. I noticed my kids (which I split time with their mother one week on one week off) constantly having to ask later and later into the evening if "I was still working or not".
Since making that realization, I've committed to working specific hours during the week when I have my kids, only getting on outside those hours for actual emergencies. I give myself a little more wiggle room during the weeks I don't have the kids but I'm making a conscious effort to evaluate what I'm doing in those extra hours and whether or not it's something that could be done when I "get in the office" the next day.
Since starting this, I've found myself and my kids being much happier during our weeks together. During the weeks I don't have them, with the extra time I've gained my shutting work down, I've started doing more things I enjoy outside of work again. Going for walks at a local park to play some PoGo, going out at night to do some star gazing with the binoculars I bought and never used because I was always exhausted. I really wish I'd have started this a long time ago.
I've had a coworker in a similar situation once WFH started. He told me that he just has trouble turning it off at night. I have trouble understanding this perspective because no matter how much you work there is always going to be more, and no matter how much you do you're still getting paid the same salary.
My take on this, is if you want to keep working, after you've met your obligation to the company, why not just work on your own stuff? If you work on something that's "yours", there's a possibility of being able to earn more based on how much effort you put in.
> no matter how much you work there is always going to be more, and no matter how much you do you're still getting paid the same salary.
There can be two factors at work:
- intrinsic motivation: you care about a problem and are curious and have some drive to solve it. By not having an environment that pulls you out (i.e. colleagues leaving the office) one can get lost in it
- fear of being rated as unproductive: when not in the office, you might have the fear that your manage might think you are lazy or somebody else might outperform you or whatever and you want to be able to show results. That's the main thing you have to show. In an office scenario you would also have your presence "oh he did something" in WFH focus on result is higher.
One thing I try (sometimes with more , sometimes with less consequence) to do is if I receive a message late or see late commits or such i tell my engineer "you are working too long hours" to remind them that they don't have to work long and it's good to call it a day ...
That's exaggerating a bit (e.g. I'm still home on weekends and evenings, meet friends, and there are places that are neither home nor the office), but is not entirely wrong, especially during work days.
Keep in mind that "in the office" doesn't mean "at my desk" or "working". People who don't have such a nice office would spend some of the already scarce time e.g. first getting to and from a gym/maker space, and I'd much rather spend that time working on some hobby project. I'm certainly in company-owned buildings quite a bit longer than 40 hours, but I don't work longer, so I do feel like my work-life-balance is pretty good.
(And if you start arguing about mindset/being "at work", then surely being "at work" 24/7 because work is now at home would be worse).
These office amenities were a major argument in hiring, and a company that didn't have them would have to pay me a lot more. All the amenities being near a place where I am, with low-friction access, is one of the key benefits that's hard to replicate.
Maybe if I lived in a large complex with many like-minded people there'd be a way to set up shared spaces like that, but I haven't heard of any place like that, and it's hard due to access and trust issues.
Even if your commute is longer - being in the office doesn't mean working. If you live alone, coming home at 23:00 and going straight to bed doesn't have to mean poor work-life-balance.
Imagine coming in at 9, having breakfast, working three hours, lunch from 12:30-13:00, working 5 hours, dinner, then spending the evening in the maker space until you need to go home.
That is a poor work life balance. If you are alone then I understand it can be hard coming home to an empty house. I would suggest trying to live with roommates or going out on more dates, anything to build up your personal life outside the office. What happens if you get fired? Where is your personal life at then?
These hobbies can be done at home or somewhere else, but yes, it's a risk. Not everyone needs daily non-work social interaction every day, some people are perfectly happy with not seeing friends outside of the weekend. This is especially common in tech.
> spending the evening in the maker space until you need to go home
that's the definition of single-minded sadness.
life is so much more. heck, even having a SO that doesn't work for your same employer makes the point invalid. imagine having other more important duties, like having to take care of your parents in their old age or your kids.
what you're describing only works well if you're in your ealy twenties and have not much in your life besides work.
Married, no kids here. Youngish tech prof (28) working for one of the companies represented in the FAANG acronym.
We have all the amenities the OP talked about and more available in the office and I’d still rather work from home. Not to mention being full time remote for almost 2 years allows me to live wherever I want, which can be substantially cheaper than the major city my home office is technically in.
His other primary argument was related to not being able to have work life balance when your work is in your home, and this is all dependent on the person. Your work space still needs to be a space you only go in while working. That way there is still separation between life and work, and your SO / family knows that if you are in there you are working.
If you are taking calls in bed, or coding on the couch then of course you have no separation you’re bringing stress and work to your place of relaxation.
Remote work is only going to become more prominent as time goes on (IMO) so people are going to have to figure it out. It took me a year before I truly started being as productive as I could possibly be from home, and I complete 40-50 hours of “work” that I would do in an office, in about 15 hours spread out throughout my week from home.
The 25 hours I get back are put into side work / projects and family.
I also don’t have commute time and save a boat load of money not eating out at restaurants in a city every day.
Don't understand either, there me and the missus and the boy in a 2 bed flat, my PC and dual 27" monitors lives in the corner of the living room (facing in since the screens act as a barrier) - we are tight for space but working at home wouldn't be an issue for me at all, in fact it's something I want actively.
At a Facebook office I saw many people bringing their other half + kids to the office for dinner.
I know all the arguments of "it's to make you stay longer" but having the option of a free, zero-effort, healthy & balanced food option available to my family is a very useful perk in my eyes.
As a family, a healthy zero-effort meal is going to set you back £40-80 in London (£10-20 per head). Even on a FAANG salary, doing that regularly on your own earnings is a little frivolous.
Learn to cook, guaranteed you will have healthier meals then any chef will make you with ingredients that you chose and with a low overall cost and to be honest it doesn't take much effort to do once you get a good routine going.
I fully agree and grew up in the kitchen so know a thing or two about cooking. I am time poor however and juggle many activities (including exercising 10+ hours a week)
To cook you need a well stocked pantry and you need to buy fresh ingredients. Then cooking itself takes time - prep work + cooking time. Afterwards you have washing up.
All of that takes time and effort. It's nice to have the option to get back that time and energy 1-2 days a week.
One of the best things about working from home is you can go stick something in the oven or slow cooker long before dinner to amortize that cooking time. But that doesn't solve meal planning and inventory management of your kitchen.
It's nice to be able to turn up at a canteen and know there will be 8+ varieties of fresh veg and 2 meat options and a fish option without fail. I also rate the canteen over a restaurant in some ways as the incentives are slightly different. A restaurant wants you to come back as much as possible so has incentives to make food "tasty" aka jack the food with sugar, butter, oil, msg. A canteen generally just tries to not to make too much of a loss.
I full support and advocate for this - however, eating out is often an experience vs just having a nice meal. I love cooking, but occasionally a nice meal out is preferable. In the absence of that, my bank balance has grown, but my desire to do more cooking of the sort I'd get out has diminished.
I do love cooking, but to replicate some of the experiences you'd get out, you do have to spend a lot more. Obviously you can cook a lot more home-friendly meals, but when you start doing anything especially interesting there's a large increase in cost as you pick up specific little ingredients to do a nice meal at home once in a while.
that is one the of the amazing things about living in or close to downtown. the apartment is good for private uninterrupted rest. entertainment can be outsourced or abstracted away from the 'home' - stand-up shows, musicals, theatre, dining, parties, all things that would be less fun if you did them at home anyway.
>This works great if you have a huge and well-equipped home
With no experience of SV tech lifestyles, I would have imagined that with sky-high property values, amenities should be relatively cheap and therefore plentiful. Why wouldn't all homes be "well equipped" when the cost pales in comparison to the property itself? If a shack costs a million dollars, isn't the cost of appliances, furniture, carpet, paint, etc. negligible?
Also, I don't see why you have to have a "huge" home to have a washing machine. I've had one in places ranging from about 800-1300 sq. ft.
You sound like someone who needs to "grow up". Most of you at FAANG's are like overgrown children, who think that they are living their best lives in this infantilized environment.
Same, it's amazing. Especially if you're an introvert. The difference is that with remote, at 5 p.m. you can also be done with all the household work easily. My home is cleaner and better maintained than ever, and I have more time.
So much better than having bs talks with colleagues about things I don't really care about - now, I only have non-work related discussions with whom I actually want about topics that I actually care about. It's just so much better.
Not even mentioning the cash savings since cooking at home, no more needing new clothes so often, the environmental impact etc.
You want an extra-special superpower? Get a couple teammates and in east Asia or the islands of the Western Pacific, and a couple more in Europe or Africa. Once you solve the remote work problem and get over a bit of your trust issues and get used to the time zones, your team can do 3 days of work every 24 hours. Probably a little easier to add in India or some other 4th node because the 7-9 hour separations are tricky to find any overlap at all, but adding a 4th slice of the world is also a bit tricky.
I agree. I take little breaks during the day, toss in some laundry, take a short break on the patio, etc. The flexibility is great. And no commute.
But I'm not sure how I will like it when the world gets back to normal and the family is gone. Right now I have my two elementary age kids and my wife at home, so I'm not lonely at all. In the past I found that spending day after day in a completely empty house was a sure ticket to loneliness. Maybe that'll change this time, but I'm not counting on it.
It can be great but after 6 weeks I just needed to get out of my home. Maybe it would be different if you could go out more and not everything would be closed.
That said, I have a 15 minutes walk to work. What I would like are flexible models. Maybe three days in office, two at home or something like that. Granted, that doesn't save money and I also detest workstation sharing or open offices.
Conferences are nice and all, but there is no technical replacement for meeting people in person. Especially since with conferences, your exchanges are often limited to the people relevant to your job, so basically I mostly talked to nerds.
Still, the stuff you mentioned is very convenient of course. I feel it is a bit unfair to colleagues that work in production. Those just don't have the option for home office.
Work for me has almost always been 10-20% party. I get to be with people. Discuss things with them. Have lunch with them. Do extracurricular activities with them. Design solutions with them. Solve problems with them.
For whatever reason doing any of that on slack/zoom feels super inferior / depressing. One is a playground and the other is solitary confinement.
I fully acknowledge lots of people have jobs they hate at offices they hate. I'm just not excited for this new future where we all stay isolated at home.
I agree. I find slack/zoom to be a terrible replacement for the old casual/impromptu/hallway conversations. Sometimes the best information is learned in those formats.
A lot of it seems to depend on if you have a family at home or not. With my wife, dog, and cat at home, I don't feel isolated at all. If I was here by myself, I could see how there could be a desire to go back to the office just to be around other people during working hours.
I 100% second this sentiment. Granted, I live in the Mid-West, my workplace is not a startup, I'm skewed towards introvert, have ADHD, and my work is not necessarily collaborative.
Being in the Mid-West means car-centric living, WFH gives me at least 8 unpaid hours back to use as I please. I used to take a longer route on my way home, to decompress and avoid the stress of traffic. My carbon-footprint is also lowered significantly, which is personally important to me. As an introvert, I no longer feel the need to decompress from hours of maintaining false appearances and shallow office interpersonal relationships. The corporate world also loves meetings, and I estimate that the move to virtual over physical meetings saves literal hours per week (just by eliminating the need to physically move to a location, as well as the context switch and disruption of focus).
Additionally, as someone with attention issues, not being overstimulated by my surroundings helps my energy, focus, and productivity.
Again, I know everyone is different, but after living the wfh life, I am not sure if I can ever go back. I can see the argument against it, especially in the startup world. I still think it can be managed, with the right approaches and the right team.
This is almost exactly me, as well. Still need a car, but I don't have to commute at all, entirely WFH. It saves so much time, and like you, the familiarity of _my_ work area, setup exactly as I want and need it, makes me so much more productive.
While this is true, I miss the physical interaction with my co-workers, the random chats, all the nonverbal communication and just the vibe of being at the same space.
I'm in Belgium. I absolutely don't look forward to it. Just posting to make sure the "silent majority" does not stay silent. We had major changes in the past because of that silent majority thinking "it's just a fad, it will pass"...
Fair enough! But hopefully we can in the future choose ourselves between being in the office 5 days a week of fully remote.
I understand not everyone has an hour long commute or has a home situation suitable for work. But before Corona I didn't have a choice and the 5-days-in-office norm was almost set in stone. Maybe if you're lucky your company allows working from home on Fridays.
Although, I can't comment on working from home with Belgian internet. ;)
First: my employer allowed an average of one day from home per week (you can schedule them as you see fit). Also, internet in Belgium is reasonable, depends on what you pay ofc.
I think choice is most important. But whatever the choice, it has some consequences. With "work from the office", team meetings are assumed to be in person (everyone in the same room). With "work from home", team meetings are assumed to be online. Both require different infra, and if there is a 50/50 mix, you just need both...
Every meeting starts with 5 to 15 minutes of hassling with the online infra (someone got a new laptop, browser update, local infra was replaced and is not compatible with our stack) - this is how we had it for the past few weeks since we were allowed to work from the office again.
And indeed, it depends on your home situation: while my kids were home schooled too, work from home was just terrible.
However, if I can work from home, how can I justify sending my kids to school...?
So maybe now is the time to f* it all and become a stay-at-home dad
>But whatever the choice, it has some consequences.
I think this is one reason you see some fairly strong pushback on the idea of a lot of permanent remoting. When everyone has a choice, those who want co-located teams actually don't really have a choice. I say this as someone on a very distributed team who has been on and off, more or less remote for about 15 years now. But if the rest of your team chooses to be remote, you can presumably choose to be in an office but you'll be mostly talking to people over video.
Agree, but it still has another side: when me and a number of co-workers choose to be mostly in the office, you get some form of discrimination. The people in the room get my full, almost undivided attention, while all remote people get a time share.
How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?
>How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?
Hopefully immediately on a distributed team. No one is going to keep you from having beers with your local buds. But making decisions while having beers with your local buds should absolutely be out of scope. That's how distributed teams operate.
Which comes back to my earlier comment. If half the team goes remote, the half of the team in the office can't just pretend those who aren't in the office don't exist. And management needs to take action if that happens. So, yeah, if a choice is given to not be in the office, that's going to/should affect you even if you're fine with going back to business as usual.
Normally the recommended solution to the loneliness of the long-distance worker is to make friends and go out locally - but right now we can't do that either.
I've definitely concluded that being in the office some of the time would be best. And I miss air conditioning.
I had a linkedin birthday pop up with a buddy I used to go to lunch with every day about 2 jobs ago. We'd hop into either of our cars and just go bitch about work together for an hour and eat cheese burgers. I loathe being in most open offices but I really miss those interactions and friendships.
I also biked to work daily before lockdown. I've been doing a "fake commute," where I get out every morning before my work day begins. Either cycling or walking.
Same here. Even walking 20 minutes every morning is nice to start a day. Now working from home requires some discipline, and I compensate it with doing a spontaneous jogging during a day.
Exercise and sunlight before work has done wonders for my mental health while working from home.
I'm lucky that the first part of my commute through green areas — I can ignore the second part through a congested part of London now that I don't have to end in the office.
I don't understand this. Why? Why couldn't you go for a 30 minutes bike ride every morning as if you were going to work? and go back home? What's the difference?
I think purpose. It's easy to take it as a perk that you can ride your bike for 30 min and get "free" exercise while you go to work. It's a bit different mindset to ride your bike just for the sake of exercising and not having a bigger goal behind it.
Can you bike to somewhere that you can work? I don't bike, but I often drive somewhere and work off my LTE connection. Got a little desk that mounts to my steering wheel and everything.
Much simpler solution as suggested by other commenters: Simply get into the habit of riding a quick 30 minute loop on the bike before working at home. Biking or running just for the sake of exercise is a completely normal thing to do and I don't see why it has to be justified by a specific purpose like commuting.
Same here, I love it. I can bake bread during short breaks from work: 15 minutes to mix and knead the dough, then 3 hours of proofing, then 10 minutes kneading, followed by 45 minutes proofing, then 5 minutes to preheat the oven, then 45 minutes baking. If I'm in the office, that's 5 hours from start to finish -- there's no time for that on a weekday. But if I'm working at home, it's just a few minutes away from my desk.
WFH has been great for me and my wife hopes I never go back to the office. Saving two hours of commute time is a huge bonus giving me more time to spend with the family or work on projects around the house. And like you wrote, I put up laundry everyday so I don't have to spend time doing it in the evening, same with dishes, cleaning bathrooms, etc. Even better, dinner is now ready at 5 or 6:00 instead of 8:00. When I get into the groove I can crank my music and not worry about disrupting my coworkers.
The downside for me is the daily meetings that I now have so that we can handle all of the old hallway conversations. And while I have a home office setup, the desk and chair are sub-optimal at best.
I think there's a distinction between fully remote and using an "office" as a collaboration space where people come in once every week or two to get to know colleagues socially and talk about work-related things. I'm not sure I'd enjoy being fully remote but I also don't like five days a week office working.
Plus, if you're only going there occasionally and never for the entire working day, it's not really a "commute" any more. I would never accept a 90 minute commute but if I was doing it on the train once a week and not at peak hours that would be totally fine.
The only reason for me to not go back to the office is: fixed working hours. Sure, my contract says I have to work 40h/week, but I just can't. If I'm at the office, I would probably work (focused) around 4 or 5 hours. The rest is "wasted" with: chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff), breaks... but I have to be there for 8 hours no matter what. At home, I can work those 4 or 5 hours (focused) and call it a day. I don't have to pretend I'm working, I just close the laptop.
Same outcome (for the company), less (wasted) hours for me. This is impossible to achieve if one has to go to the office. (can you imagine entering at 9am and leaving at 2pm while telling everybody: "hey, I cannot work anymore, I'm only able to work focused 5 hours per day. See you tomorrow!".)
I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5.
What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
I started on a remote-only team about 6 years ago. For half of that time our only chat system was a 1-to-1 and you could do group chats but had to explicitly invite people and they had to accept. When we switch to Slack (although Teams or Riot or open source would have worked too) and had always-on chat rooms, things changed dramatically.
Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.
100% agree. Working remote for about a decade. When we added slack before the company had teams for our group it completely changed the dynamic for the good. The company added teams right before COVID hit and it’s been a blessing. It has forced the entire company to adapt and adopt it quickly. It worked. I connect more frequently to nearly anybody I need to. I have more water cooler talks then ever.
Oddly, our shared social chatroom was most active when we were all in the office. Over the past few months it's tapered off to the point where now there's a week gap between conversations.
Ours has also tapered off over the last few months, not because people are remote, but because they're afraid of being called out for not being sufficiently woke. Easier to remain silent than try to appease the cancel mobs.
Yeah it’s easier to not say hateful things than it is to try to “appease the mobs”. So I guess that means if you’re not talking to your coworkers anymore, the only thing you could contribute to the conversation before was hateful things?
My team has very nice conversations about the weather, our pets, even video games we’ve played or movies we’ve watched. Nothing “woke” about it. If you’re worried about being canceled, maybe try saying something that has nothing to do with politics?
After 5 years or so working remote I noticed a few of the same things:
* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.
* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.
* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.
* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.
All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.
To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.
To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.
> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.
Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.
As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.
I strongly recommend ‘random’ rooms in your shared chat messenger, or a way to make random rooms in whatever communication infrastructure you have. They’re vital for maintaining social interactions
I like these channels a lot. I have to ask, though, doesn't #hot-takes end up getting people in trouble? Like HR trouble? Or at least stuff like starting political flame wars between colleagues?
"The imperial system is awful compared to metric, but Farenheight is a better temperature scale for humans than Celsius."
"soft-close hinges/slides are a worthless and annoying novelty in modern cabinetry. they feel worse to open and closing a drawer without slamming it isn’t that hard"
"Cartoon Network was way better than Nickelodeon in the 90s-00s. Both of them win over Disney Channel any day"
"email should be banished, just like faxes and cheques. it’s an extremely inferior and unsuitable medium for how we communicate online these days"
"cucumber is an overrated and is only good in gin and tonics"
Basically, nothing is actually of consequence there, but people get fired up and have strong opinions. It's a fun interaction.
Well, everyone probably does need to agree on what is off-limits for work conversation. Putting something like "Joe Biden is a communist" or "Black lives matter is just a front for foreign agitators" into #hot-takes is probably not something you want people getting into at work in most cases, right? (Note that I am not making either of those statements, they were purposely chosen to be extremely provocative.)
I think the original argument was a meat because a meat is a single, semi-solid, blob of a single item. Salads are non-mixed collections of goods and soups are homogenized(?) liquids.
Or did they collapse the state of matter for soups and meats?
Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.
When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)
One of the biggest QoL improvements for me has been not traveling. I enjoy visiting a new city every once and a while and meeting new people for work, but now in retrospect, my overall work life balance has significantly improved with no business travel.
If they did a better job of making sure you got a chance to see the city instead of the inside of a hotel, a taxi, a convention center, and office, then I think it would be different. Young people get suckered into it because they don't know yet that they're in for something worse than not going at all; being moment's away and not being able to take advantage of it.
My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after.
He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.
If you have the control and are in a position to spend the time (which may well depend on family situation), it's partly a function of making the time. Which I've usually done when practical. The timing is not always practical but, in normal times, I've made a point of tacking on personal time to work trips. At the moment, I'm sorry I didn't extend one or two of my early 2020 trips more, but who knew?
Traveling a lot is what I really miss--for all that I complain about it. I was hoping that I could at least do personal travel relatively freely in the fall but that seems a non-starter. I definitely need to figure out a Plan B if, at some point, I can reasonably travel for myself but events are all still shut down.
I think the need for an office depends a lot on the type of work that needs to be done. If you're working in R&D or science, for example, it's really (really) hard to make much progress alone, without people bouncing ideas around, showing you how things work, whiteboards, etc.
Sure, you could do some of that on zoom, but the psychology of it is very different, and the spontaneous component of it is gone completely. It's awkward to slack someone with "hey do you want to talk about some ideas i have, using the awkward zoom annotation tool?". They'll probably say yes, but then other people who might have something interesting to contribute (or learn) will not be present. Also the feeling of interacting with people via videochat is weird, especially if you're new to the workplace.
Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; b) human beings around you who work on similar things; and c) a sense of community. I realize that many workplaces are toxic and don't offer any good versions of b) or c), and working remotely could be better then (though a better idea would be to find a new employer if you can). But, though many people are thriving in this new work-from-home environment, equally many or more are suffering.
Also, regarding the 4-5 hours of productivity a day: yeah! There's been a lot of studies on this, and some countries/companies have been experimenting with 4 day work-weeks or shorter workdays. There's definitely progress to be made there.
> Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home;
This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation.
Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode.
Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.
I find that dressing the part also helps. Something about trying to be a professional engineer in my shorts and britney spears t-shirt doesn't seem to motivate.
You're right that the spontaneity is missing. Everything has to become formalized in some capacity to ensure everyone knows what's up as well.
Just recently I noticed that my coworkers were all jumping into a slack thread. It was a thread that was active hours earlier but that I missed out on, so I couldn't put in my input. If this was in the office, the fact that everyone was having a big conversation would be a signal to turn around and engage in it, but in the virtual world, someone has to specifically @ you to have you join, or else create a formal meeting to discuss it.
The small connections that grease the wheels of communication are gone or are more challenging when you have to do them over Slack or video call.
I really don't understand this. In a cubicle farm environment, you'd walk over their desk, interrupt whatever they are doing, and ask them to follow you to a separate meeting room to use the whiteboard? And how are other people supposed to contribute if you close the door in order not to disturb anyone in the radius of this meeting room?
I found that it's much less awkward to hit them up on collaborative tools. Meetings are also much easier to spin since you don't have to herd people into a single room and convince them as hard to use their limited time on this meeting since they can just do something else in the background if they're not in another one.
Well, in my workplace for example, there'd be spontaneous questions that would move to the whiteboard, and ideas could be fleshed out and developed there. Also, research meetings and journal clubs would be lively and full of debate. Since WFH started, none of this has been the case.
Again, i think it really depends on the people and the workplace. Some people are really content working from home, others are losing their minds.
Text chat is amazing. Maybe growing up in the heyday of chat services has made it feel natural to me, but I don't understand these complaints about how people don't feel like they can connect emotionally etc etc.
Do you need to do these interactions over Zoom? Or is it habit?
It's like, if you can connect with a book, you can connect over chat. It's just words.
The most productive workers barely scrape 50% productivity; however, idle, chat, socialization and other “wasteful” time isn’t wasted. You learn things about the needs of other groups, colleagues, the politics and all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.
> all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.
When people say these things I seriously question if they've ever worked remote before. Yes if being remote makes you atypical for your workplace, then you'll probably be left out. But if you're working for a remote-first team the it's completely different. Nearly all of my closest coworkers I've met have been at remote companies.
I have had tons of interesting conversations, brainstorming session and just generally fun discussion while remote.
Honestly, I have personally found the amount of more toxic conversations also drops when remote. The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like (working with people you don't like is fine, but having to have conversations with them, go out for team drinks with them etc is another thing). This leads to generally more toxic behavior, since you have to put more energy into those social interactions.
> The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like
This is actually a problem with remote companies.
It's really easy for teams to silo themselves away in private chat channels and form exclusionary cliques. It's fun for those in the inner circle, but it's miserable for newcomers and anyone else trying to get work done without being part of the in-group for a particular project.
Obviously the same dynamics can play out in a real office, too, but it happens much more frequently when it only takes a few clicks to make it happen. People are much more likely to be mean to each other when it's just a screen name on your computer rather than the real person you have to see every day.
How is this any different than office based companies? My team has multiple cliques; the coffee bros and the vape bros. The Windows admins and the *nix admins. The sports fans and the sportsball haters. The desk lunch people and the restaurant eaters. Some of these overlap, but not always.
Now that we're remote, it's much easier. None of the high school bullshit. If you're on a project, you're assigned work and have project team mates if you get blocked. With daily standups (even for non-programming roles), it's pretty easy to see who's struggling with a story, who might need some help, and who's rocking just fine.
I have actually spoken more to my coworkers while remote than at the office where its one big open plan room where having a conversation will bother 20 other people.
Interesting, because my pre-COVID experience managing remote teams was just the opposite.
The toxic people were much more likely to play politics or manipulate people when they were just a screen name in Slack than when it was Jim from down the hall with a wife and two kids. The office politicians were always hiding away in private Slack channels or even separate invite-only Discords that they created for the in-group to talk separately from the rest of the company.
In fact, one of the quickest ways to defuse politics and toxicities was to fly everyone to a location for a few days of meetings. The context didn't matter so much as just getting people in the same room.
It's the same phenomenon that drives people to be friendly and civil in person, but then tear each other apart on Facebook or Next Door. In person communication is more human.
Hmm strange ... I guess I was lucky or that it varies widely? Or maybe the effect I am noticing is eg. that is easier to ignore "office politics" when you literally can mute a meeting.
Stereotyping, I know that HN is a bunch of introverts, but we were built for actual, face to face, human contact. That can't really be replaced with anything modern technology can offer us. Maybe in 10-20 years...
The time spent on distractions and procrastination was around 1 hour per day:
> On average, the research shows that knowledge workers waste one hour and four minutes each day due to distractions and procrastination
So to be clear, people were working for more like 80% of their day, but not 100% of that time was considered core work or productive meetings.
People don't simply socialize and mess around on the internet for 50% of their work days at most companies. I've been at companies where people get away with that level of messing around, but I wouldn't say it's the norm.
Also some teams practice "watercooler-based development". Requirements and coding standards are passed by word-of-mouth. Being remote in an environment like that effectively means you're cut off from key knowledge required to do your job.
Also going by parents idea that completing a task is the end of your workday, any socialization is eating into your free time. The entire thing has added stress as you race towards completion each day
I agree that the socialization part is not actually "wasted" time and I would love to do it as much (or as little) as I want per week (ideally one or two days, instead of five days per week on a forced basis).
I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home. I've always tracked my time even when working from home to make sure I'm doing the amount of hours I'm getting paid for.
If this person was contracted to achieve a certain amount of work done I'd totally understand, but they're contracted based on time. Kinda surprised how positive the Hacker News crowd is towards skipping work for up to 50% of contracted time. I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
> I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home.
In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment.
> I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world.
Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week.
In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly.
>but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time.
This isn't true. It depends on whether the work is cerebral or not. Certain workloads are limited to as little as 2 hours per day, for 2-4 hours of real knowledge work per day. The rest of it is either extremely suboptimal or of a different class.
Something semi-mechanical like translation or categorization that isn't obviously mechanical could probably occur for a full workday.
I have and had plenty of full days of coding smart solutions where, when i was in the flow, would even forget that i hit 8h work.
If i really hit my head against a wall because i literaly have an issue i can't figure out right now, i will still try to find different angles or take a walk but i will not just close my laptop after 2-4h of work oO?!
If you're working 8hr straight I'd guess you're following up on work you previously invested a lot of time into.
I don't really see "coding" as productive work. The entire point is the write as little as possible. Most of my day is full of reading and thinking about the problem. The actual coding part is quite small.
It's possible to focus 8 hours every day, you just have to sacrifice some more of your time to rest afterwards.
It's just not worth to throw your life away for someone else. Especially if your peers don't do it, and you won't get rewarded proportionally for doing it.
It's definitely a mindset and is self-fulfilling, once I started working in a restricted area (no internet, cell phones, other electronics allowed) I stopped feeling like I was having trouble working 8 hours a day.
The person does the same amount of work at home that they do in the office, because when being in an office there is a normal background level of distraction, socializing, breaks etc that interfere with the person’s work, causing them to only be productive for 5 of the 8 hours. But those “unproductive” hours were paid as part of the expected 40. They are still in essence paid as part of the 40. This person’s output for the company is the same (if not better). Lost time from friction caused by office life is restored. BUT spending that restored time on work can be suboptimal. Eg if I push too fast, I sometimes make subtle mistakes that are time consuming to undo. Or I get out of step with coworkers and have to find a way to cool my heels anyway. People are positive about this because the worker is happier and more effective at the job, whilst reclaiming some hours, and contributing at the same level as always, which deep down is what the company is buying with their forty hours - a certain contribution of work per week.
People are paid to be available to do 40 hours a week of work, not to actually do 40 hours of work a week. Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start etc still counts as work because you’re on the companies time not your own.
That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.
Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.
It is simply impossible to accurately measure knowledge worker productivity on an individual basis. Any attempt to do so causes serious unintended consequences where employees attempt to game the metrics instead of doing the right thing for the business.
I think it's possible, but usually non-cost-effective because it has to be done on a 1:1 basis and therefore doesn't scale well. For example: I can intensively audit a developer's code for a couple weeks (in real time) and usually get a good feel for the blend of skill/time/effort being invested. But it's so time intensive for me to do that, that it's reserved for extreme situations.
Writing code is only a small part of a developer's job. If you focus on that then you'll miss a lot of other key productivity factors, such as contributions to team design discussions, code reviews, defect root cause analysis, etc.
So in short no, it's not possible to accurately measure developer productivity even if cost isn't a factor. Employee evaluations are necessarily subjective and we simply have to accept inaccuracy.
The trouble is that this assumes pre-determined quantity of work. The reality I've seen most in places is that there's no end of stuff to do. The work is never "done."
What there is instead is an expectation of how much work you're supposed to get done per unit time (albeit calendar time in shops that have things more together). But this is in turn informed by how much time you are expected to devote to work vs other parts of your life.
That's not how salaried positions work in the US. If you work 60 hour weeks you don't get paid overtime (but if that helps you perform beyond your peers, you might get promoted faster).
Not universally true, I am salary and get paid overtime. In fact, of all the software jobs I've had I did unpaid overtime only a couple times a year at most, never most years. I absolutely wouldn't do unpaid overtime regularly - paid overtime is fine, if I were expected to do unpaid overtime regularly I'd leave. Overtime has always been at base pay, not time-and-a-half like hourly employees.
Every salary job I've ever had (I've had 4) required everyone to do their own timekeeping ever day, no working six hours a day and calling it "full time" unless you charged the time off or I guess lied.
Companies typically don't pay for hours worked but fo the value that is delivered. It's common to see people work a lot more than 40 hrs a week as well without overtime, and this is legal as per most employment contracts.
If you are a freelancer billing hours, then yes, I agree it would not be ethical. But still it's somewhat of a gray area. In theory, you should be able to raise your hourly rate to compensate for the fact that you can get more done in less time. But in practice, you might not get any clients if you advertise a higher than usual hourly rate, at least until you build a reputation.
If my company could lower the cost of its product by half and still make the same yearly revenue, it would. And all the executives would get huge bonuses.
I think I've expressed myself wrongly. I'm not a contractor, just a normal fulltime employee. This normally means (at least in Europe) 8h/day 5 times per week, hence 40h/week. I'm not being payed by the hour.
Most HN readers probably regard the concept for being contracted to work for a certain number of hours (rather than achieving certain outputs) with inherent contempt anyway so they're not going to be upset about turning one into the other.
I feel the same. For the last 3 hours of the day I just state at my screen in zombie mode. With wfh when I start to feel braindead I just lay in bed for 15 minutes and when I come back I feel refreshed for the rest of the day. With no pressure to look like you are constantly working you can do what works best since no one can see more than your output at the end of the week.
Yes, i'm the same. And if you're like me, i suppose sometime, in high pressure situation, you can easily work 10 hours straight. Doing this at the office is impossible, doing this home is easy (if it stay exceptional). I'm more productive home than i was at the office, and this is really surprising for me ( i assumed i was just a slacker).
I'm genuinely curious - would you be so kind to share what kind of coding do you do, and for how long have you been doing it, when you can code for 12 hours not needing to look up how to do something online (syntax, example for a best way to approach something etc)? I'm asking because this is one of my worst fears - how genuine of a senior, experienced developer am I, if I probably wouldn't be able to do 2 good hours of progress without the internet...
I've been forced to work without the internet for large swaths of time. In the beginning its a pain, but once you get all the resources you need local, you can speed up past what you can do with the internet.
The key, for me, is to work without the internet, keeping a list of things you need and when you hit a hard snag, go online, grab all the things you need, repeat. This allows you to slowly accumuate almost everything you need local.
Now you have the ability to full-text index the entire shebang and when you get to the point of real-time responsive full-text search on all your manuals and all the source code (libraries included), you'll be kicking yourself for not getting to that point much sooner.
It was truly a game-changer for me. Googling for answers and filtering through the crap is a huge time sink.
It depends on what it is. If I'm doing something in C, it's much less likely that I use the internet for anything. C and Unix grew up before the internet. Man pages are installed on local system for quick and easy reference.
If I'm doing something in a less familiar language, library, or framework (or even new techniques), then I fully expect that I'll rely heavily on internet to find code samples, reference, and documentation.
I do a lot more writing than coding. But, while I used to be able to do stuff surrounded by books, absent an Internet connection, I'd have to work through something with lots of [need to check], [flesh this out when can look up], etc. if I tried to do anything in the absence of an Internet connection.
Guess I must be wired differently, but I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”, rather than “I’m convinced this is the output required of me, thus I will do no more with my new found time.” shrug
Everything you produce once you are punchy, you will have to re-do tomorrow morning during your productive hours, at which point you have to keep working later to get done what you had planned for today, and now you're in a never-ending loop of reworking your code.
I don’t tell my coworkers when I do this but at Apple we are adults and can go to the bathroom without permission. You can come and go as you wish, that notwithstanding the waste of colocating with and/or commuting to an office. I want virtual reality so I can be in shared spaces for impromptu conversation and coworking.
(Edit: I really don’t miss my boomer/genx coworkers jamming out to hair metal)
FWIW, for a long time I've worked roughly 11 to 4 and have not caught any flack for it, as I get my work done. It entirely depends on the company you work for. (I'm not saying my situation is common, just that it does exist.)
Figured I'd chime in and say that I'm basically in the same situation.
I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle.
My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day"
Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit.
The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.
I can't get any work done with my kid around either. But the difference is not that I'm home instead of at the office. The difference is that she's at home instead of at school.
When kids go back to school some of the work from home conflicts will end, but kids still get home from school early afternoon, and schools typically only open 180 days a year - whereas most officeworking adults have to continue working into the late afternoon, and show up for about 240 days of the year. If you continue working from home after schools reopen, you're still going to have days like these lockdown times...
Well I'm fortunate to have a six-figure income and a job that affords a reasonable amount of flexibility. So throughout the school year I work 9-15:30 and then make up the last hour or two after my kid's bedtime. In the summer she can go to camp for hundreds of dollars per week and I keep a similar schedule.
This summer, we're foregoing camp due to safety concerns.
Same here - I don't have a separate room for work (never needed it) and have 2 pre-school kids at home. Average period without interruption: 10 minutes. I do so little "real" work during the day, that I need 4-5 hours at night to catch up...My wife doesn't work for a longer time now, so there's not a lot of understanding from her side - if I complain, I'm considered a drama queen and I only care about work...If this keeps up, I'll have to rent another small apartment or find another solution.
I have been struggling with this a bit. It is kinda like the “unlimited PTO!” phenomenon where it is honor system based but can trick more work out of people. It is difficult to prove 8 hours of engineering work so the stress of my week can vary wildly based accuracy of estimates and how desperate I am to prove my skills haha.
I'm a developer and pre-covid typically only stayed in the office until 2pm most days (lunch with the team, work for an hour then leave). I would tell everybody that I was going to work from home the rest of the day. Nobody ever cared. this is the future I dream of for all of us.
This is basically the same for me, plus the commute. The office manager doesn't get in until 8-9am and he was the only person who could unlock the office, and would leave around 5:30pm, meaning if you want lunch away from the office, you aren't going to hit 40 hours per week.
Where as now, I start my day around 6-7am (I wake up "early" every morning), I try and quit around 4pm, and take a 1-2 hour lunch sometime between the two. This schedule is only possible working from home. I now hit 40 hours per week week every single week that I work all 5 days, where as before I would hit 30 hours. And even weeks where I only work 4 days, I still hit ~35 hours after shrinking my lunch.
I feel exactly like this. I can work , focused at most 4 hours every day. After that, I want to stand up and go running because my legs are killing me. So home office is heaven. When I'm done I'm done.
I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine.
Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge.
Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office.
I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.
Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.
I wasn't clear, I meant when I'm socializing with co-workers while I'm on the clock, such as gathering around the cubicle. Not at home or a bar.
Edited: for clarity.
The OP mentioned they work 4-5 hours a day and are distracted the other 3-4 when at work (in the office).
I was saying during those 3-4 hours you have multiple side conversations (on company time) that it makes sense to the company to encourage. Not just cuz co-workers who get along have a better work environment, but that it makes a more interconnected environment.
> Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.
Glad to see I'm not the only one..I wrote a script that records (manually) how much time I am able to focus each day, and it averages around 5 hours. On the days when I have to work overtime, it'd be around 6.5 hours.
I can easily imagine being judged based on my output, not my etiquette.
It'd reveal most people to be largely about etiquette, largely useless if not outright harmful in terms of output if contemplated a little.
Most software jobs are re-implementing the same shit another company has already done. It's worse than useless - sipping tequila on the beach would actually be a net benefit for humanity - it'd alleviate stress, tension, traffic, hubris, carbon footprint among other things.
If contemplated a little more - most jobs are enabling this insane rat race and the immense infrastructure around it, which nobody individually is really that interested in continuing.
It's like religion or circumcision - we do and believe things and we don't even know why - most would be better off not knowing and not believing - just give them tequila and a beach :)
A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're also offloading other costs to the employees. Things like:
Some companies are taking this into account, but not all.
A personal anecdote: we had an all-hands meeting today and the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back. Whether or not that's temporary nostalgia for a previous life or an enduring need is an interesting discussion, but there are definitely people wanting to go back. I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
I am more that willing to take on those costs to work from home forever because I get the freedom of no commute which not only incurs an obvious cost but puts me at risk each day.
I also find my costs reduced because now I am no longer eating out for lunch, let alone because I felt pressure to do so daily.
However there are companies that are overly proud of their head quarters and other real estate and are going to be loathe to give it up; this includes elite addresses and locations
Many people in big tech hubs don't pay for lunch. Work provides it. Now, they all have to pay for lunch that they weren't paying for before because the office is closed. Sometimes this isn't just lunch - but up to 3 meals a day. Same is true with transit. They took a company bus or work paid for public transit.
Now, people who were living in spaces where they didn't have a dedicated office space are dying for one. (like myself) And, unfortunately, the competition for homes with more bedrooms has skyrocketed. I'm looking at paying $2000 more a month just so I can get a couple more bedrooms for office work! Moving away for a year or more isn't a real option either.
If my time's worth $50 an hour, it'd have to be a damn good free lunch or a damn short commute for the free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute trade to be a good deal.
Don't forget the huge benefit of lunch just being there.
I spend a lot more time dealing with food now (cooking, cleanup, groceries) than I spent on my commute. I could go to a restaurant, but if I don't want to eat the same thing every day, getting there and back and waiting for the food is going to take more time than my commute, especially if I do it for more than lunch.
Even purely from a time perspective, free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute is an EXCELLENT deal in my case. I can totally see that being different if your commute is longer than 30 minutes.
I kinda agree, except that I actually like cooking.
Even still, I've been working later (7pm approx) as I've started with a company based out of California (I'm in Ireland), which sucks for eating food.
Slow cookers/crockpots are kinda ace, you can dump all the ingredients into it in the morning, and have a meal when you finish work. As a bonus, the smell of the food is nice in the afternoons.
I mean - I'm not really arguing that you should commute just for a free lunch. If anything - I was making a bigger argument in regards to the office space part. I'm fine with the lunches at home right now. (I can only blame myself for the poor lunch options on any given day) The $2,000/month that I'm looking at spending just to have office space is a bit of a bigger deal, imo...
And it's really not the norm for companies to pay for meals or commuting.
But, yes, if you want to continue living in an expensive urban area, the cost of an extra room is significant. I do consider myself fortunate that I live in a semi-rural area and have a dedicated office. I know a number of people who are fleeing city apartments to more rural areas.
I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.
Do I get the $400K salary? I’m not at the $400K salary level but neither are most people who work for $BigTech. The salary bands for the AWS consultants/solution architects/engagement managers are the same as the equivalent SDE roles. I would think the same holds true for GCP and Azure.
I can tell you according to levels.fyi that my salary is the same for my level as someone living in Seattle. I also know an SA living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is making the same for his level as someone in Seattle.
Would I move to the west coast for $225K compared to what I could makes locally? Heck no, $400K, maybe. At this point in life, even my local pre-Covid salary was “enough” for us to comfortably meet our short and long term goals.
The extra $70K-$80K basically just gave us enough to tell my wife don’t worry about going back to work surrounded by Covid when school starts back and the rest is going straight to long term goals - save more for retirement, pay off the house faster, etc.
Doubling our income wouldn’t make any lifestyle differences. What are we going to do travel in a post Covid world? Buy a larger house for three people and within a few years 2?
Thanks for the data :) For me, extra savings would just go towards automating more things in my life. All of the things that are broken or malperformant in my house could be resolved with a few phone calls. If I still have money left over after that, then it would probably be invested to generate more secure and reliable income. If I only have 500k in the bank, I feel weary about putting half in dividend stocks that might not pan out like I hoped. But if I have 2 milliom in the bank, then $200,000 in dividend stocks feels like child's play in terms of risk :)
That brings up another interesting and off topic aside.
I made plenty of $bad_life_decisions until 12 years ago. So early retirement is out of the question. But that’s okay, I’ve never hated my career, my previous jobs at times definitely.
But, with a paid off house, the amount of savings I should be able to amass in 20 years by the time I’m 65, and hopefully social security is still a thing. With today’s rules, your spouse can either collect their social security or half of yours while you are both still living. We could easily live off of an (inflation adjusted) $4500 SS + the hopeful retirement savings.
> I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.
Congrats, you don't live in silicon valley. Woohoo. Your life is not everyone's nor is it representative of what everyone can get.
My employer will only keep people who will show up at the office. If I found employers regularly paying $400k+ for remote - I'd consider it... But I don't see them often.
Well, most people aren’t making $400K at $BigTech either according to levels.fyi
I had two choices when I could see myself topping out locally as a bog standard enterprise dev - either I could go the r/cscareerquestions route and “grind leetCode” so I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard, and move to high cost of living area or I could focus on gaining experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant” somewhere where most of the jobs are remote with travel.
Right when I was about to pull the trigger and start applying for local companies, Covid hit, the local market dried up and I got an email from an Amazon recruiter.
I thought I might as well try. I can answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and I had the relevant experience.
I am shocked there are people who get 3 square meals a day all paid for by their job
I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
And why would you pay $2000 for a "couple more" bedrooms? You're telling me you can't put an L-desk in your living room? This thread just has ridiculous scenarios upon ridiculous scenarios, like the guy who would need to take a "40k pay cut" to get a home gym and a 3D printer.
I live in a small (400-sqft) 1-bedroom that has no internal doors. It was never rented as a WFH space. If you and your partner are both on calls a lot of the day - it's kinda hard to do them if you have to talk over one another. It used to be you had 8-hours of separation a day. Now, you don't have any. More bedrooms would provide some of that.
Some people like having living rooms without office furniture jammed into them - go figure. Most people I know would have to get rid of some furniture in order to fit a desk nicely into their living room.
> I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves
The 3 meals a day thing just sounds like gatekeeping. "You must not be a real adult because you want food that's included in your benefits instead of having to labor over it like the rest of us who don't have such benefits!" (Or you have to pay for those meals to be delivered - which is very costly on an individual scale)
What if you can't go get your oil changed now? Should I say, "I'm appalled that there are adults getting oil changes at service centers and are upset that they now have to get those oil changes done themselves"
You work from home, there is no one forcing you to live in a 400 sq ft apartment, and there is no one forcing you to share it with someone else. The fact that you relinquish that responsibility to your job is what is ridiculous - you choose where to live, and now that you WFH you can work from wherever you want, the fact your home is only 400 sq ft, and that you want to actually stay in an area where you have to pay upwards of $2k just for adequate space is not your workplace's responsibility to fix.
And the argument is not that these people getting 3 free meals arent adults, it's that they are actually unprepared for a world in which they themselves have to pay for their own breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Availability for space for one. Moving your whole family in a different even state for the other -- which might not be an option, breaking lease etc during a pandemic. And not all employers have clarified when they expect employees to come back. Are you going to move across states for half a year, 3 months, less?
Also, those lunches are not free: employers offer them as part of the compensation and to keep you at the office working late. Compensation negotiations always bring up the benefits as an item of your compensation. If a company makes the argument that they are paying you in fact x,000 more in the form of benefits, they are now breaking this agreement (even if it is oral) and not paying you. (I have had a "if you end up working too late and there is no food in the office, we will pay for the food and keep working." style of clause).
Similarly, some people do negotiate working from home most of the time and doing a 3-4 hour commute once a week in exchange for reduced salary, to enjoy a larger and cheaper home. That is an obligation the employer placed on the employee and asks for money to lift it, and allow them to live somewhere further away.
Related to the workspace, I do personally like to change working environments (e.g. coffee shops at times, quiet room at others) etc. Most people though need to consistently separate work and rest of their lives.
And the workspace is the responsibility of the employee unless you have a remote work contract. (Certain countries have legislation on the matter in fact for both cases.) Imagine a car mechanic being asked now to service cars at their home instead. For engineers the work environment is not a power plug, some paper and a laptop, even for software engineers. That is romantic naivete perhaps, and dangerous thinking.
If employers send surveys around and ask point blank if people have screens, space, good desk and chair, keyboards, high speed stable connection -- home connections now have to take the slack from enterprise ones -- good access to all the servers, they disagree with the above thinking. They wouldn't be paying for all of the above in the first place, otherwise.
Of the Americans I know - quite a few. Of the foreigners - obviously quite a bit less.
Beyond that - friends can also be more important than family. I know plenty of people who won't move because all their friends are where they currently live - and they're fine with not being close to their family.
This is a very localized issue. Most people (I included) do not get even free lunch at work and there is no free transit to office either.
Both are cheaper than average (I think the buss is 1/2 the normal ticket price and the lunch is 2/3 of normal "take out" price) but certainly not free.
Everyone is also thinking this the wrong way around. People are thinking "how would this fit my current lifestyle" instead of "if this is the new normal, how would I change my lifestyle and would it be better over all".
I don't live in a big city even now, my commute is about 20minutes each way with a car. As it currently stands if I can stay working completely remotely I probably will and I will be selling my apartment and looking for a house in a more rural area. Something larger than my current apartment so I could have an actual office (in an ideal world there would be a separate building that would act as office / workshop). Currently I'm struggling with no dedicated office space, but that is because being 100% remote wasn't an option.
I get that many people have grown to expect free lunches and whatever from their work, but in over all work force thous people are in tiny margin group and while it sure would be sad if they lose the privilege, but needs of the many and so on.
Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).
>Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).
Yet places like Google would argue for them as part of their TC. The companies that tend to offer these benefits don't usually get rid of them until they're going out of business...
Nobody in the management of a company like Google would ever breathe a word about meals and transportation being part of comp, because if they are part of comp then they need to pay taxes on them. The two companies where I worked that had expensive on-campus meals both had systematic approaches devised by corporate lawyers to make sure that meals did not appear to be compensation.
It’s your job as an employee to not drink the kool aid and to properly value benefits provided, regardless of how they’re marketed. Cash is king, everything else is window dressing.
No one is drinking any KoolAid. I care about the fact that I don't have to go through the cognitive load of figuring out every meal. This is a benefit I personally experience and so I factor it in my analysis. I don't care how my employer reports it in their taxes or balance sheet.
Also, cash is king but companies can offer benefits at scale that will be much harder to access for me as an individual.
Mostly healthcare in the US. And a few other things that are tax-advantaged by being benefits from an employer (like 401(k) matching). I'm not sure that I can think of much else, other than negotiated travel and other discounts--which I don't really consider "benefits"--that are harder for me to access as an individual.
A dedicated personal office is very nice if you full-time work from home. It's much nicer than working out of a bedroom, especially if the bedroom isn't that big.
I'm on board with you on not wanting 100% remote anymore. I used to want to work 100% remote but this pandemic has shown me that working in any sort of team remotely is hard to get right (most companies don't). I've come to the conclusion that 3-4 days/wk max is viable and can be healthy.
The problem is there's so much information and communication that happens implicitly through our day-to-day actions that when you're remote, you have to make that information explicit. It's tiring as hell.
For example, meetings. In person, you can look at a room and understand some basic relationships-who is talking to whom, who is laughing, who is avoiding, etc. This gives you valuable information on the shape of the team and how to navigate and work best with each other. Turn that into a zoom meeting, however, and that information either has to be explicitly pointed out or it is lost. This kind of thing eats up valuable cycles for information that could have been communicated in a literal glance.
Remote meetings work best when they're frequent, short and small groups.
Good remote teams have better communication in my experience because very often "implicit" communication in an office means you think you communicated something but did not.
Making all communication explicit is a useful habit to into, and overall improves everything.
Your coworker is totally on the money with this analysis.
More so, I think folks like me that had a 5 minute walking commute are losing out a ton of benefits by not being near the office anymore.
I'm lucky the weather's been cooperating but if I had to have the A/C on for days I would easily be spending $60-100/mo just for HVAC, forget the extra water, electricity and other utility costs for the extra usage at home.
We got a $500 WFH stipend but it definitely won't cover 12-16 months of this.
Overall though, I realize I'm in the minority and most people are winning back their time and money.
At least with my own company, the approach has been pretty reasonable.
They know they're saving money in the long term on space, and they're splitting that with employees pretty fairly. $1500 up front for all existing employees and all new hires to provision a space to work remote, and a $125 a month in reimbursement for internet/phone/electricity, no questions asked.
Frankly, it's made the transition pretty positive for all parties. The company saves a ton in the long term on rental space, and employees get a nice perk.
There are still folks that would prefer not being remote, but most folks are pretty happy without a commute.
I can take public transportation which is $2.50 a day. If I don't then parking downtown is $150 per month in our current building, but no one is allowed to go into the office. We're getting a new building next year when we do return to the office and parking will be $250+ across the street or $300+ for garage attached to the same building. That's what it costs me to run my ancient, inefficient 220 volt window unit and keep an uninsulated wooden garage apartment cool in the summer. I will gladly go back to the office when it's allowed.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
I don't understand this, why?
Regarding the rest of your comment, I totally agree. My mom and sister both work for a large, old-fashioned company, and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started. They both had to buy setups out of their own pocket, and these are not people making tech salaries.
Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though. It's really preferable to have a dedicated space for an office, and this is not free. It's one thing for someone who made a choice to go remote, but for people forced into it, it feels unfair to me.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the new world, offices are viewed as a perk rather than a requirement due to all this. I personally work remotely for the record, but talking to many people in my life, it's clear this is not for everyone.
My sentiments are similar to OP's, and for me a large part of my job satisfaction was getting to hang out with really incredible people all day, getting lunch with those people, getting afterwork drinks with them, etc. Hanging out on video chat just isn't the same.
Of course, an argument can (and maybe should) be made that it's smarter to to keep your work focused on the work, and find your social outlets elsewhere. However, the unfortunate reality is that for those of us far removed from school and our home towns, work is where we tend to make our friends.
On top of that, I just enjoyed the change of scenery in leaving my apartment in the burbs to go into a nice office space in the city. Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.
Of course that later point would be somewhat mitigated in a world where I could work out of shared space or the local coffee shop, so I'm not sure if that's an indictment of remote work in general for my purposes.
> Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.
This is because of corona, not because of working from home.
True, hence my follow-up sentence on this point being mitigated in a world where we felt more free to work in alternative work spaces.
It's not like I don't get out to run, go to the park, or even occasionally meet a friend for a drink on a spacious patio. So my comment was somewhat hyperbole. But sharing the same space for work and sleep is still driving me a bit batty.
We all have different needs of course. I recognize I don't share the same needs as many. Hence I'd never advocate for a workplace that didn't accommodate those that did prefer to work remote.
I used to work remotely and really disliked it. Not talking to coworkers and being stuck at home all day were the two big reasons. I'm right back there now due to the pandemic, and it's much the same, the evenings and weekends are somewhat more boring than before but we still manage to get out and do stuff because the weather is nice this time of year.
I think this could be different with a complete overhaul of corporate culture but I haven't seen it yet in 20 years of employment with "teleworking" being an option at least part of the time. Perhaps remote-first teams really are different, but you're still stuck at home all day, or spending time and money going to a coffee shop and maybe finding a seat+wifi, etc.
I was working remotely for a few years and in my opinion coworking spaces are the best of both worlds. I like to leave my apartment for work, I need a environment where I can concentrate and I like to see and talk to people, making friends. But I also like not having a boss around and being able to come and go whenever I want. You have all this in a coworking space and if you move to the opposite part of town (or change the city) you just change your space so that your commute never gets more than 10 minutes. Best of both worlds!
People say this but I don't really see the alternative. I can't imagine going to a coffee shop to loiter every day. The reality is I'm gonna be at home in my office, and that is tiring.
>and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started
That is such a low life mentality. Not to give two screens worth $200 to someone who's probably making 10-20 times that a month.
What I envisage is super localised hubs,or small office spaces in residential areas. Small building nicely fitting into the area and offering local people some level of office like environment
As far as I can tell, this seems to be an introvert/extrovert thing (for the most part). Extroverts miss being around people they can engage in conversations with, while introverts love not having extroverts around trying to engage in conversations with them. I think both camps have valid needs and right now the extrovert's needs aren't being met to their satisfaction.
This isn't always the case. If you are an introvert, work often is your main contact with other people. Work at home would be like working third shift for me, no "sunlight" of contact with other people. It'd be way too easy to be alone.
I consider myself an extrovert and I love wfh. I don't consider conversations at work to be socialising. I guess it helps that I live with a few other people and play games with friends after work so I don't really feel alone or stripped of socialization.
I can see the opposite as well. Extravert people can socialize more easily outside work. Introverts still need to socialize if they are not antisocial. For me(introvert) it much easier to socialize at my workplace: No need for smalltalk, we already have something in common. Outside of work you have to start a conversation with a stranger which can be really hard for an introvert.
Exactly - I'm lucky in that I made a deliberate decision to have a slightly longer commute because it meant a bigger house and closer to an amazing school my children attend. I'm fortunate to have a proper office that I can enter at the start of the work day, and leave at the end - separating my work and home life.
Having to work from your lounge, or kitchen, or worse bedroom makes it much harder to switch off.
Yep. The people who optimized for space at the cost of a longer commute are the winners here. Those of us who prioritized a short commute with the expectation of not being home every day for months on end are losing.
My open office already has a voluntary return; but you gotta wear a mask and get temperature checked. I’ve already been on multiple calls with people in the office.
Long ago I made the decision to live in a smaller house close to work. My company's office is 15 minutes by bike from my house. Riding through the cool air every morning was a great start to my day. The office is perched above a canal. As I worked, I'd watch the boats go by and the bascule bridge go up and down. It was a great life.
Now I'm working in windowless cinderblock closet in my basement. I live near family and friends so just uprooting to a mini-mansion in the country isn't really a workable option. Companies clearly valued nice offices as a quality of life benefit to their employees, but now providing that nice office experience is squarely on my shoulders.
If my partner and I are going to be working remotely for the long term we'll probably need to move to a bigger house that can give us both better work spaces, which will probably cost $200K-$300K more than our current home. $250K financed at 3% interest over 30 years is $1200/mo plus things like heat, maintenance, furnishings, etc.
I don't expect my company to pony up a $15K/year remote work stipend, but also I see this a WFH future as a net downgrade from my old way of life.
The place is chosen not only for the cost. Some people like to live near the park, or downtown, because theaters museums movies bars dancehalls are all there.
Those of us who genuinely prefer city living and amenities seem to be relatively few among the crowd on HN.
I used to work full-time remote, and had the choice to go anywhere I wanted in the world. I still landed in NYC, and stayed because I loved a diverse, walkable community with amazing nightlife, culture, and parks all around.
I eventually took a job in an office in the city because I liked having an occasional social environment with coworkers, both in the office and outside of it. Working at home full-time as a person without a family and more social needs than I was willing to admit for a long time was extremely isolating, but I don't want a family yet.
I'm eager to go back to the office as soon as it is safe at scale for all the same reasons I was eager to leave my remote job and go into an office again most days originally. Moving somewhere cheap and more isolated to have more space to work at home is about the lowest thing on my priority list.
(But I recognize that I'm fortunate to work at a place which always had pretty good tolerance for remote work, even pre-pandemic, even if I didn't take advantage of it... and also lucky to have coworkers who I generally enjoy being around and working with.)
@notjim @chosenbreed37 - I chose not to expand because it's specific to my own situation, but: I found remote work isn't for me. A selection of reasons (from pre-and-post covid experience): I find my communication stilted, I really miss hanging out with my colleagues, online whiteboards aren't the same, we have beer and board games, aisle conversations are useful, it's easy to see if it's OK to interrupt someone with a question in-person, and frankly it's motivating to have people bustling around working on stuff directly related to your own work. Half-and-half remote and in-person is probably a good balance for me. Yes a lot of the above reasons are a) privileges and b) can be mitigated with good remote work discipline, but again, it's just my preference.
> Really the biggest cost you're leaving off is space though.
100% agree. Many people are literally working in closets or worse, if they even can.
@taurath - "Quarantine Work Is Not Remote Work" good point. People are learning to support their remote colleagues right now, whether they intended to or not :) So "normal remote work" might be even better after this chapter concludes.
I think it depends where you live and your situation. I have coworkers in small NYC studios who just want to get outside. I have others who don't mind not taking the train for an hour a day.
Many coworkers have a nice big house to work from. The ones with kids most want to come back, because they appreciate the mental separation they get.
This. People with many young kids, especially, seem to be absolutely miserable.
More interesting than remote/in-office is that we don't seem to be acknowledging the inevitable permanence of social distancing measures. No more four-dudes-in-an-office. No more coming to work with mild cold symptoms.
Maybe, oh goodness please, the return of actual OFFICES. With DOORS. Thats the only way you're getting me to come back into a work office, barring a rediculous raise.
I went into the office this week as I had physical work to do in the equipment rooms. Very few people are there (normally 7k, now it’s more like 700 across 10 floors)
It’s been so long since I wore headphones I forgot how bad it was. Zooms were difficult as other people in earshot (only 4 people, all about 4m away) were talking at the same time.
But if I had an office with a door (like I have at home) and a fixed deal with monitors rather than hunching over a laptop (as I do at home) maybe things would be different.
I'm in a one bedroom Brooklyn apt. Any time I open up my laptop, my 2yr old daughter climbs onto my lap and repetitively hits the caps lock key (it lights up on my laptop). Luckily, I've found alternative places to work from, albeit with less than ideal setups.
We run two office buildings on the same road: we went to the main one to collect all the IT equipment,pack it up and put it in the other,smaller office. We used to run fully in house. Yes,some people do want to go back to the office but the main reasons are: we were all stuck at home for months,so people do want to regain some sort of normality. Some have difficulties at home,so going to the office is better. Me personally? I run a 10 people team that will be half that size in a few days. I live in a 1 bed flat,so writing unit tests and dealing with dodgy suppliers,while Peppa Pig is blasting in the background can be challenging. However,I don't want to spend 3h on commuting daily.Screw that. The desk cost was about £3K a year,so I'm sure there will be some negotiation space to get something arranged for WFH.
I love working from home but I’m about 30-45 minutes out of central London and friends and family often ask me why I don’t want to go into an office in town for the buzz, it must be difficult working at home with a baby running round, etc.
I honestly wouldn’t give up working from home for triple my salary. The flexibility to come and go as I please, not losing time to a commute, watching the kid grow up. All priceless to me.
However, I have enough bedrooms to use one as an office, a garden I can work in during summer. I can understand if I had to work at the kitchen table with the family making noise around me I would be yearning to go in to the office.
I stayed in a hotel at Blackfriars at the start of the week. A supplier took me out for drinks, we went to the Cheshire Cheese, it was empty. And closed early.
Riding around was an interesting experience, London isn’t too bad at the moment with very few people there, certainly different to pre covid though
We were very reliant on consumer credit, while selling services almost twice the going price,which has now gone,so the sales won't be anywhere near of what it used to be.
> the amount of emotion on display when the topic turned to returning to the office strongly suggests people want to go back.
Could also be the most vociferous or those worried about losing jobs to outsourcing? Also there's morale at play which could be people wanting to showcase they're all-in for facetime and not wanting to be the only ones without team spirit. imo people will vote with their feet re: remote work by not interviewing or accepting offers at companies that force back to the office.
Agree there's a nostalgia factor at play and need for ongoing discussions, I think overall things are going to move towards greater flexibility and maybe flex days/time etc.
I worked at a job I loved pre-Covid - great coworkers, freedom to tinker, a large amount of autonomy, admin access to our AWS account so I didn’t have to worry about the infrastructure gatekeepers (I was hired as the de facto “cloud architect”), etc.
But, I couldn’t stand the loud open office. One of the reasons I changed jobs was because there was talk about us coming back into the office by the end of June.
My job (for a FAANG) now was always designed to be fully remote and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve job hopped for the last decade, but there isn’t a dollar amount that would make me go back into the office.
I'm not experiencing this and I would assume anyone employed at a larger or established company would mirror this.
I've seen our company quickly react to the reduced office related costs and have reallocated that to cover employee's home office needs: internet service, phone, supplies. If you needed a desk at home, that also was accommodated.
Being able to take our work computer(s), including dual monitors, was also immediately available to everyone.
Definitely a trade-off, as the costs previously mostly foisted off on employees were related to commuting to the office (time, car, parking, public transport, etc.)
The leading companies would take account of those costs. One would hope they would also adapt to take acct of home office costs
I'm seeing/expecting people will want to go in some, but not back to 5-days in the office. 2-3 days, when necessary to really do things together.
If this reduced office loading prevails, it'll also help everyone from workers to cities with the misery & costs of commuting (tho I did read that NPR has lost huge audience due to loss of commute-time listeners).
I find that the costs of all the things outlined in your list are either:
a) Things I would be paying for anyways as part of maintaining my residence
or
b) Vastly outweighed by the savings in time and vehicle wear/tear by not commuting to and from an office 5 days a week. If we use a figure lower than the official IRS vehicle cost reimbursement, $0.50 per mile, and my commute is 20 miles one way. That's 200 miles a week, same as $100.00/week vehicle expenses, or $5200/year.
Today I realized what I want most out of going back to the office is just going to lunch with my coworkers. What a nice experience to break up the day.
I had the best of both worlds, I went in once a week - but I loved going in. I met with my team, talked with our people outside my division. Grabbed some good "city miami" food, no "suburb miami" food. It was like a mini-vacation, every week and it energized me for the following week.
Hard problem to solve. Other people in the company had to go in every day, and I'm sure they LOVE not having to commute, and for good reason.
Companies can't really "rent an office space" for one day a week can they? It's not realistic. I wonder what will work look like in the next 2 years. I'm glad I had a chance to experience the office setting for a year at least.
I was already paying for all those things, and they were sitting idle during the day while I was at the office using another set of them that my employer was paying for. Except the snacks, I miss the free snacks, but my waistline doesn't.
I'm curious what the IRS will have to say about it. If self-employed people can deduct a certain amount of their square footage as an "office expense", can I do that too? All those things you just listed are now part of my employment.
I’ve been saying this for months on HN and it hasn’t been very well-received. Maybe such a large percentage were already remote that it seems obviously better to them?
> A coworker of mine recently pointed out that not only are businesses saving money by closing offices, they're
I hadn't considered this. I've always thought that many companies are tied to long leases they wouldn't be able to get out of that quickly. I can imagine some savings on the other associated office costs.
> I for one am even more in the no-remote-only-gigs camp given recent events.
My company was at the end of their lease for several office buildings. They’ve since closed all but our largest offices. We have some jobs that can’t be done remotely (security and certification requirements precludes outsourcing.) The remaining offices are running skeleton crews with the heaviest precautions we can do while remaining operational.
Those costs really doesn't add up to much for me. Most of the stuff I would have anyways (internet, electricity, HVAC). There's some small marginal increases I suppose. And I would bet that the costs are less than the savings from not commuting (especially if you include the value of your time), not needing new work clothes and not eating out.
I think saying they're offloading those costs is somewhat unfair since almost all of those things you would be buying anyway even if you went into the office. When I started working from home the only cost that changed for me was buying more coffee, and that's maybe 10 bucks a week.
My brother is also in the "I wanna go back to the office" camp. He misses his co-workers, and it's hard for him to get stuff done with a few young kids at home. I can understand it. Hopefully we just get to the point where people can pick. Seems like the easiest solution.
You can (Please check with a CPA before listening to this rando on the internet, I did my homework but it's a big deal and you want to do it correctly and legally) deduct any single purpose office space that you use at home from your taxes.
The company already offloaded the cost of travelling to and from work. My choice to live with a (reasonable) commute, but savings in petrol since March have more than offset other costs.
Agree with most of these, but man do I ever miss the free and very well provisioned salad bar at the office :( I've eaten more grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches during WFH than any self-respecting adult ever should.
It's interesting to me that companies are threatening to reduce pay if a remote employee moves to a lower cost of living area. It's hard to understand the logic when geography is the only change driving the decrease in pay. Same person, same job, same skills, same productivity, the only thing that has changed is the person's cost of living.
I wonder if a remote employee working in a low cost of living area moved to a high cost of living area would their pay be increased or would the company put up a fight? "You voluntarily moved to a high cost of living area, why should i pay you more?". However, "you voluntarily moved to a low cost of living area, i'm paying you less" is reality.
Yeah, ironic how there is nothing on https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ about cheaper packages based on the customers location. But they want to pay you less as an employee based on your location.
The most amusing aspect of Gitlab's location based compensation is that they spin it as employees in higher CoL locations should be paid more (while carefully choosing to ignore the corollary implication that employees in lower CoL locations are paid less for the same work).
Cost of living in terms of rent or expenses is not everything. If I work from India, I also pay in terms of reduced life expectancy due to higher pollution, greater chance of dying in a road accident and what not. If a perverse sense of 'fairness' (or a facade of it) is so important to companies, I would love to see these factors being considered too.
The company agreed to pay you X amount because that's the market in the area you and the employer are competing in. Once you expand beyond that area the market changes. You're now competing against all of the other engineers from SF to Arkansas (and beyond). Let's put this way. If you're working from Arkansas, why should your employer pay you 400k/yr when they can just hire someone else in a cheap COL area within a reasonable timezone for a fraction of that?
I don't think that it's the right thing to do, but just to share what's being done elsewhere, for 1 it's absolutely the case in Japan.
As an anecdote from first hand experience, if your parents live close enough to your work (less than 2 hours commute) it's considered that you could live with them, regardless of what you actually do. Then, you cannot claim the $7k/year indemnity for accommodation. This is significant for a salary of $36k in this company (not in tech).
> How about the number we agreed on is the number we agreed on.
This is exactly what the company is doing.
They’re paying you the number you agreed upon until they don’t want to anymore (or until they’ve fulfilled whatever contractual agreements they’ve made). You’re not guaranteed to keep getting the number you agreed upon if your work sucks or the company goes out of business.
By the same token, you’re not obligated to hold up your end of the bargain any longer than you have to based on whatever agreement was made. Want to move to a cheap city and find a new high-paying job? Go nuts.
I don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding that the value of something changes depending on the context (aka "the market").
Soda at the grocery store? $1.50
Soda at the gas station? $1.99
Soda at Disney World? $30
Your skills are not worth a fixed rate. Your skills are worth more in certain areas because the demand is higher in those areas. As soon as you go remote, you are competing with every other remote worker in the US. More competition, lower price.
This is about the time that people start to imply (or even say straight out) that their skills are really special, and that there aren't good developers outside the valley. So they totally deserve the rate they're being paid.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are actually quite a lot of smart people who just don't care to live in the valley for various reasons, and they are all just as available as you are when the whole team is 100% remote. Companies are going to love it, but a subset of employees are going to be sad as the market rate adjusts to the new reality.
I guess as it becomes more obvious to people that the logical next step for a fully remote company would basically be to lay off staff in higher cost of living locations (I'm sure we are starting to see this), more people will internalize this reality.
Sure, but this is closer to having soda delivered to your home. The costs on the production side don't matter to you. You only care about price, quality, and delivery time.
I personally suspect the employment market is just not very efficient due to a lack of information. If companies had perfectly accurate information about how good every software person is, available for free, we'd probably all be paid based on that information, with our cost of living ignored.
You don't understand probably because your paycheck depends on not understanding, e.g. you think you are benefiting from the current status quo. Others call it unfair because their paycheck also depend on it.
What if the market says you can get away paying less for group X? What if X is some historically marginalized group? Does it make it OK? What if X = remote workers?
This cuts both ways; your ability to demand higher pay is contingent on that you can get that pay elsewhere. If other companies at your new LocalRate are paying substantially less, then your remote employer only has to beat those offers to remain competitive (from your point of view).
Each individual hiring case is wildly different, with different supply/demand and price dynamics, and it's nothing like the commodity sold at a gas station example. Yes some companies will penny pinch, but some companies just wont. Not worth their time.
I would argue most people in a organization actually are fungible, especially the more junior they are. At least in software.
It's not a coincidence that conversations around the number of engineers/designers required for a project commonly end up referring to them as 'resources' in most companies.
Since algorithm interviews are the current norm for filtering, there are a huge swathes of people who are just as good at beating such interviews but never got the chance due to their location.
Someone decided to drink the kool-aid the PM is selling. While business is business and we are not family. We are deeply human, don't ever refer to people as a resource if you want a more healthy working environment.. that goes for any industry or company.
Your salary is the balance between the leverage you have over the company and the leverage the company has over you. If they can get rid of you and hire someone remotely for half the price they will. If you want to stay in an expensive city while working remotely and the company can't do without you, they won't.
You can't think of your pay as a transaction based on value you bring. It's based on 1) retaining you 2) how much would it cost to replace you
For 1, what are your alternatives in your local market or remote positions (next best alternative). For 2, if they just fired you instead and then opened up the position to anyone anywhere, what would they have to pay?
Also, yes, I have moved from a low cost of living area to a high cost of living area and got a pay adjustment. It is standard to increase pay for those moves (they they are not always approved though)
Why not? It's a business relationship; both parties are in it to come out as ahead as possible. Why would a company pay a remote worker $400k/yr in Oklahoma when they can just pick from a country-wide candidate pool who will do the same job for a fraction of that?
Companies are typically very impersonal about money, to a much greater extent than people. I'm sure some highly compensated employees are about to be sad, but this is just business. It's a free market, and it just got a lot bigger.
My wife’s employer makes fairly drastic COL changes based on office location (bank with large corporate offices in 3-4 US cities and branches worldwide). From the lowest COL office to the highest, it can be 10s of thousands USD.
Edit - they don’t officially do WFH (outside COVID) so cant comment on that.
At my company, it’s about equality. Everyone gets paid within the same range for the same work after adjusting for cost of living. Move to higher COL, raise, lower, cut. It’s that simple.
So if I have 7 kids and a physical disability should I get paid more because my COL is higher? Shouldn't someone get paid for the work they provide? COL is frankly none of the f*cking company's business.
Except that this idea is always a farce. People talk about cost of living as though it doesn't vary wildly within a city from neighborhood to neighborhood.
You in effect pay people more to live in nicer areas. If I move to a place tons of other people move to it likely has some positives (better schools, more to do, closer to nice vacation opportunities), and higher costs.
Also if the high COL employee owns a property, much of that difference goes into equity in their home. Which they can they cash out and move to a low COL area.
A former employer of mine wanted me to relocate to their HQ in NorCal and they were going to give me a raise to cover the cost of living increase. (I decided not too.)
I see it as an opportunity to show you're a team player by moving to a lower-CoL area and taking a pay cut. Believe me - the bosses WILL notice who takes this offer.
Your employer probably has to pay state taxes/state unemployment insurance, may have to ensure that they are filing certain state forms as an employer of a resident of a given state, may have to adjust health care policies to address state-specific requirements (or residency requirements of the plan they have, etc).
Unfortunately, given the run-amuckness of registration and compliance requirements, it probably is needed for your employer to know where you live (or at least in which state and local taxation/regulation entity).
Yes this is accurate. At my company they've said in the past that they have to count business trips to certain states because once you have employees that have "worked" in those states for more than X days a year, it can be shown that you have a "presence" there and would need to pay state taxes.
The simplest solution to me as a director is to determine the value difference between on-site vs remote employees, then factor in the costs needed to run the office per person, and pay differently based on that delta. However in my experience my team is all getting more done remote, so if anything I should be paying them more to move out into middle America.
In my opinion, the argument companies really should be hiding behind is the cost of labor for a given geo. It's got cost of living baked into it, is sufficiently handwavy, yet still makes it a little more clear that you're compensated based on market supply/demand and little else.
Someone needs to run the experiment. Move to some place in Russia outside the Moscow metropolitan area. Apply to Gitlab. If you get the job, relocate to San Fran. See if your pay quadruples.
I feel like GitLab is one of the few places where this would happen. They have a salary calculator that's basically just band * CoL * performance in band[0].
GitLab was rumoured to be suspending hiring in Russia and China, but I can't see a reference to it on their page. They ban seemingly random countries [0] like Sweden, while allowing hires in Australia, wonder what their rationale is.
It's hard to hire remote employees in different COL areas without opening yourself up to legal liability, if people are able to bounce around and hold onto COL salaries disproportionate to the local area.
Ex, if a bunch of white and asian bay area employees relocate to Florida, taking their salaries, and then Facebook hires some local hispanic employees at 1/2 the rate... well, you can try to explain exactly what happened after you get sued, but that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And even if you legally get away with it, you are going to have a lot of REALLY unhappy employees.
Not to mention you're opening yourself up to a real game, where employees move to the Bay Area for a year to get hired at a high salary, and then immediately leave for 2x the salary. All you've done is turned salaries into a game that benefit highly-mobile employees.
So I definitely understand why this feels shitty, but I honestly can't see it working any other way for large corporations. You have to have some kind of local salary adjustment you can stand behind, when you're remote-first hiring.
I've thought about playing this game, one of the largest retailers in the country just pays you based on the cost of living in your zip code. I could move in with my in laws in Honolulu for a few months and use that zip code, get hired, and then move back to my low cost of living area.
There was a fansinating take on the potential impact of a WFH revolution on white collar works in The Telegraph the other day.
As companies embrace working from home and downsize their offices presence, a lot of the barriers to entry to offshoring start to disappear - if everyone is remote then a remote individuals in cheaper Eastern Europe will likely integrate a lot easier than when most the employees were sitting together in expensive London.
White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.
Personally, if my team stays remote, then our next hire will most likely not be London based. There’s a much larger pool of European talent available to us and we’re now better setup to and culturally open to hiring remote first. This isn’t something our company would have considered before COVID.
>White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Lots of white collar people seemingly have a very "meh" attitude towards manufacturing getting outsourced. What will the attitude be once these white collar jobs start leaving?
Wage decrease in one place means wage increase elsewhere. If someone who could do my job for half of my income, maybe they should get the job.
I place my future in the fact that it will be hard for employers to hire someone that can do my job (all facet of it) for half of my income. Sure there will be people slipping through the crack at that level, but hiring is a numbers game where you don't count on luck.
Having worked with overseas teams in the past, I'm not particularly concerned.
The cost of hiring good talent (whether remote or on-site) will always be the same. Companies (tech and non-tech) and government facilities have tried to hire cheap labor to replace more experienced workers for many decades. The result is usually the same with a few exceptions: poor work which has to be refactored, re-worked, or completely thrown out. Usually underpaid employees have no incentive to do anything more than what's assigned to them. The old adage comes true: "you get what you pay for."
In the end the employer has to deal with a shitty product and in the end hire the right talent to get the job done (which they should have done in the first place).
Agreed. It's actually amazing how often I've seen a company truly believe that the lower wages they pay to offshore workers has no impact on the quality of the product, only for the truly diminished nature to become apparent after some time.
That's not to say all offshore workers are bad, of course. Just that, just because you can hire an Eastern European for half the price doesn't mean they will produce the same quality work as the other people who were more expensive.
The flip side to that is with the UK leaving the EU will there be legal and taxation hurdles. Also, sometimes having local context, and the ability to meet locally at short notice is an important requirement. I don't think it's as clear cut in all cases.
Will there? Plenty of workers fly in from non EU countries to work in the UK and rest of EU.
We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa.
Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip.
Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa.
Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply.
If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already.
I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work.
Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing.
People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed.
When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.
Even within the EU every country has its own income tax rules and employment regulation. I'm not a fan of Brexit but I don't see any significant changes around this.
London is notorious for low SWEng salaries; you might not have any other choice than to contract somebody in Ukraine who didn't escape somewhere else if your own employees get higher paid remote gigs in the US...
I'm from Liverpool originally (live abroad now) and I have friends in Manchester earning £50-60k... in the North of England. That's a big wage in that area.
The stat you link appears to be for "IT" jobs across all of the UK. Restricting the search to "Software Engineer" and "London"[0] bumps the number up quite a bit to £72,500 as of when I checked.
Yeah, even both Google and FB pay engineers pretty terribly in London. I was once asked to move there, and I refused unless they accounted for cost of living changes. They didn't, so I stayed working at my original office.
There are plenty of companies specially in tech sector that build and support products that are focused and used in multiple countries, and are quite successful. They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience. Why would it not be possible to do it the other way around?
In remote work, communication matters more. Language barriers kill it. Working with non native language speakers over less than ideal communication channels is hell on Earth.
That’s interesting and something I hadn’t considered.
That said it probably depends on the job.
I’m currently working remote, but same timezone. I may go remote at a very different timezone, but the expectation is clear that I’m overlapping most of the West Coast work day (calls with vendors, team calls, etc).
For me that would mean working from 8pm to 2am, approximately. Not sure I have the stamina for that.
I reached that conclusion at the start of the coronavirus lockdown; that the managers who resisted letting us work remotely were consoling themselves at the outsourcing experiment they were conducting.
But I’m not too sure outsourcing white collar jobs will work.
Trumpism has 40% of the electorate in any western country. Add in the masses of disillusioned white collar workers, and populism will be the natural political position of every Western country (therefore joining the rest of the world)
Now imagine a “respectable” Trumpism, i.e. populism without the icky Le Penns, Salvinis, or Trumps.
Companies think that remote work works but they fail to realize that most of what happened over the past few months was based on prior momentum built inside the office they are carelessly ditching.
The team I work in has done more in a month while wfh than we have ever achieved before. I guess we will be able to prove this for sure soon since it doesn't look like things are changing this year.
also most people on your team has met in person, so there's that momentum too. It's a complete different vibe when teleconferencing with people you've met several times than with those you have not.
I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.
If it were that good, software engineering in the US would suffer the same fate as manufacturing: it would disappear to cheaper foreign workers and only specialties would survive.
> I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.
Would it be? Seems like, at a minimum, various employer liabilities that exist when an employee is working independently of whether or not it is at the employer’s location become less controlled in remote work, which potentially works strongly against that.
Also, the argument you make, even in the best case, fails to grasp the difference between “is” and “has always been” and the magnitude of impact of cultural inertia in favor of what has worked well in the past.
I like this point, we've had a lot of success going remote but also haven't been through multiple rounds of planning out the next quarters yet, everything was in place.
I'd say that totally depends on the area you're working in. If IT is at the core of your business, you'd probably be fine working from home. For companies in manufacturing/retail/etc. where the IT is not the core, I doubt permanent work from home would be equally good.
Looking at my company, the IT departments seem to be doing just fine. However, basically all people I know from engineering and other departments are really looking forward to come back to the office. Having everybody onsite is just so much easier if you have that many dependencies with other departments.
Also, I think the size of the company plays an important role as well. We're about 2000 employees in the IT departments alone, I somehow cannot imagine all of those people permanently working from home while also being able to properly cooperate with the other 100k employees.
Much of this momentum was negative though, meetings and rituals were built around everyone being in the office and being face to face. Remote work relies on much more async text based communication and many companies are still building momentum to work well remotely.
Couldn't you bring people together once a quarter or bi-yearly? Book a nice villa someplace exotic for a couple of weeks, get all the planning and coordination out of the way, give everyone the last few days off with families invited.
Going "someplace exotic" may be great for some people, but if you have responsibilities such as being the caregiver for an aging parent, being forced to be away from home for a couple of days or weeks can be a big problem.
True. OTOH, and not to invalidate anyone's experiences, but people shouldering such responsibilities typically have help already (either paid or other family). Otherwise they couldn't do their current job. They also, presumably, have plans/protocols for when they need to take a vacation or break. Unless they were otherwise spending all their free time on caregiving, which isn't sustainable or healthy. They could potentially use those same measures when it's offsite time and even be given some makeup time off later.
They could also get an exception and attend the working sessions remotely. But there's a chance that could lead to fewer opportunities for advancement for them, because they weren't there. Which sucks. It's not an ideal situation.
BTW, lots of enterprise sales companies already do annual "sales kickoff" events where they fly all their salespeople globally to a single place. It's not unprecedented.
This is resolved by going somewhere within an hour of the office location. It’s a good idea, but not everyone wants to be forced into traveling for work.
If everyone's 100% remote, there's no "office location". The best compromise is to find a location that minimizes travel for everyone. That might mean the city nearest the centroid.
> Unless they were otherwise spending all their free time on caregiving
You're not far off the description of parents of young and early school-age children. Kids are in school/daycare for part of the day, then at home, needing dinner, care, etc.
That's different from caring for elderly family members. Parents with young families (maybe not those with newborns) can and do take vacations and travel. They also often have paid help even in their non-work hours e.g. babysitters or nannies.
> lots of enterprise sales companies already do annual "sales kickoff" events
Salespeople know, when they take their job, that they'll be expected to travel for work. Developers may not expect that to be a requirement of their job.
I worked at a company that did this: big in person retreats, once or twice a quarter. I've now been working remotely due to covid about as long as I worked at that company before I was laid off. I still feel much closer and more in sync with my current coworkers than I did to my coworkers at the remote company.
I feel like everyone in my remote company is a total stranger and it's the strangest feeling waking up every day and working with total strangers. Feels like every project I have to prove myself and it's been making my impostor syndrome pretty acute. Cultures a big, big thing there..
Would that really be any cheaper for the business than just renting an office?? Flying people to nice destinations and putting them in expensive hotels along with their families is $$$.
Same way they take vacations. The parent working remote has more flexibility to take on childcare responsibilities the rest of the year, so they can probably work something out together.
Not true in my case, I joined a company during corona and started out remotely. I've been working there for 2 months and had the opportunity to go to the office for the last 2 weeks. What I've noticed between the first 6 weeks and the last 2 weeks is that there wasn't a difference in productivity.
There was a difference in amount of time wasted though. Going to the office is in my case much more wasteful, mostly due to travel time (90 minutes per day).
What I find most interesting is how this might transform inner cities. If central space is cheaper more space will be available to artists and other cultural activities while also making room for early stage startups which could give rise to a renewal of a vibrant inner city atmosphere in places where this has been on the decline due to high rental prices.
There's no shortage of cities where central space has become cheaper after their industry has collapsed, and they do not have a great record of turning vibrant. The rust belt and the north of England are the first areas to mind.
I have seen this happen in a medium sized coastal city on Australia's east coast. The major employer shut down in the early 1990's and the once vibrant inner city did indeed become a cesspool for a decade. But begining in the early 2000's it started to come back to life, and the people who moved in were the artsy types and the city became a wonderful and curious place while still having a bit of a air of danger and decay. These days it is somewhat gentrified, but it has become very beautiful and pleasant. In the end my city doesn't really have a central core which is a little problematic for public transit (terrible quality), but the old CBD is a lovely place.
The North of England has some good examples of the opposite. The Leeds/Bradford/Halifax/Huddersfield area is - was - gentrifying rapidly with an obvious shift away from the ruins of heavy industry to art/craft projects and enterprises of all sizes. The Calder Valley is almost notorious for it. There's also Salts Mill near Shipley, which is a carefully authenticised artisanal mall in an old converted mill.
And you'll find plenty of web/creative agencies plying their trade in the area, although that sector isn't quite as distinctive as in - say - Manchester.
It's all part of the standard gentrification cycle: - collapse -> bohemian -> artisanal -> gentrified -> investment grade -> collapse... but hurried along some.
That's true, but if now there is central space freeing up in major cultural hubs like NYC and SF, maybe it could be cool. These places might, although to a lesser extent, have the customer base of affluent people to support new cultural spaces.
IMO that's a big open question. Anecdotally, I've heard of a lot of people moving away from these cities, but most of them say they intend to move back. Since the appeal of both cities is largely in activities that are unavailable now, this is plausible to me. But it's also plausible people will find they miss the city less than they expected.
To me this is kinda sad. Software Developers are not vibrant or cultured and shouldn't really be in inner cities with the interesting people and artists.
It's a bit more subtle than that, no? GP specifically mentioned early stage startups. The argument is that too high cost of living makes cities less vibrant, not that developers ruin them.
Sure, the ability to work from anywhere in the world coupled with a severe epidemic, riots, looting, and boarding up of city centers will give rise to a "vibrant inner city atmosphere". Uh-huh.
Cities will still exist even if remote work rises significantly. There is a huge amount of buildings and infrastructure which won't just disappear. Rather, demand for them will fall, and since supply is flat, prices will drop. This will give opportunity to less lucrative ventures to work at the city center. Artists, for example, would have a harder time working remotely.
It's a common fallacy that rents fall when demand drops. In fact, they often don't, particularly for commercial space; the owners choose instead to let the spaces go unused. I've seen this happen up close with several buildings my city, in several neighborhoods. There was an article a while ago about how Greenwich Village suffered a similar fate.
Got a source to back up that claim? Detroit for example has seen inflation adjusted commercial office space prices massively drop:
"Adjusted for inflation, the average office tenant paid a peak price of $34.34 per square foot during the fourth quarter of 2000, 65.5 percent more than the current average rate of $20.76, according to Newmark Knight Frank data. It's almost as deeply pronounced for Class A space — which has the best amenities and finishes. Today's Class A rental rate is $24.36 per square foot, but in the third quarter of 2001, tenants paid inflation-adjusted rent of $38.12 per square foot, 56.5 percent more than now" [0].
Basically rents are too high, so businesses won't rent because it won't be profitable. In 2018 when the NYT article was written, "about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016."
So maybe this is bimodal: you have "rich" areas like Manhattan and SF and Seattle, where rents stay high even with low occupancy (landlords sitting on empty properties and enjoying the free ride of increasing asset prices), and you have "poor" cities like Detroit, where no one wants it and you can't even give it away ("free" property still comes with liabilities like taxes and maintenance).
I follow along in /r/realestate and it seems that part of the motivation for this behavior is that the owners are usually leveraged - they don't own the property outright, or if they do, they have taken a loan against the property. If they lower rents, it impacts the valuation more than staying vacant and waiting for a new tenant, which in turn has implications on the loan & ability to obtain loans in the future.
Can the city councils do anything to counter that? I wonder...I heard about Frome (Southwest England) where the local council took proactive steps to prevent the high street being filled with betting shops. I think they lowered business rates significantly and possibly other measures.
A land value tax can help quite a bit. It can both prevent landlords from capturing all / most of the value when rents rise and also help act as a cushion when rents fall.
The current property tax system that most cities use make little sense. It penalizes people for improving and updating the structures on their land. Cities should be encouraging property improvements.
If we don't get a working, _and safe_ vaccine in the foreseeable future (a real possibility), cities could all turn into Detroit - high density living or work just won't be epidemiologically viable.
It's not the 'everybody works there' that does it, it's the 'cheap enough that artists can live there' that does it. My mom split her time between art, her true love, and working as a secretary, or a maid, or an office manager. She had a way of living near where the art was happening, as artists tend to have very little money, as did she. She could afford to live just off the Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach in the mid-80's, as did hundreds of other artists. The South Beach that is now luxurious and pricey was once cheap, and shabby and a bit dangerous. That's really the seed of a vibrant inner city atmosphere. She repeated that (to smaller degrees) several times in her life.
I hear about artists being the ones who create vibrant neighborhoods a lot, and I'm honestly struggling to understand the causal effect that's being claimed. Do people really care about "living near where the art is happening" to the point where it would drive up property prices?
When I talk to people from demographics that are accused of being gentrifiers (young professionals), the overwhelming reasons they choose a neighborhood are to be near restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, shops, work and friends. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone pay a premium to be near an art gallery, or live near artists' private studios.
There are some gentrified neighborhoods that were known for their artists. New York's Soho is an example. These days the place is full of overpriced fashion stores, both independent ones as well as global chains. I can see why the shops were attracted - for branding purposes it might help to be associated with those artists. But I wouldn't say that artists turned it into a particularly vibrant neighborhood, at least not more than other neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan.
Is it that it's about correlation, not causation? It seems reasonable that artists would be attracted to an area for the same reason as, say, independent coffee roasteries (both require cheap space). I suspect it's only really the latter that are attracting new residents though.
I do suspect it's more the cheap part than it is the artist part, so it may well be correlation rather than causation. That said, given the same low rent in two locations, wouldn't the savvy coffee roaster pick the one with the artists? So, maybe there is a causal argument.
So the term "artists" covers a whole lot of ground here. It doesn't necessarily mean picture painters, but it's a shibboleth for a whole bunch of people with ideas and little to no money. These people try to minimise fixed costs, and move to "bad" areas.
The conglomeration of all of these people tends to lead to events, club nights and new and interesting businesses. This makes the area more attractive, causing others to move in and thus kickstarts the gentrification process.
For me working remote has come with a mix of upsides and downsides. One of the main upsides for me has been mentioned a few times in this thread, and that's the fact that without having people physically present, your performance is now necessarily more tightly tied to what you actually accomplish rather than how long you're present in an office. This gives employees a lot more autonomy and freedom with how they spend their time as long as they manage to get everything done. No energy and time needs to be spent keeping up the unproductive facade of looking busy.
On the other hand, losing the ability to have spontaneous hallway conversations does cut out a lot of the communication that would normally happen in office. The signal-to-noise of these conversations may not be so high in terms of actually communicating purely work related topics, but they do a lot to foster a sense that you're actually part of a team with people you enjoy working with. With IMs and video calls, communication happens much more deliberately so coworkers feel much more like these virtual entities who you only contact for purposeful knowledge transfer. Perhaps some people actually prefer this and see it as more efficient, but I personally find it to be a somewhat dreary proposition.
Ultimately, I think what I would prefer is a flexible WFH policy, with maybe 3 days in office and 2 days of flex.
I have relatives who grew up on a farm. Their jobs and their parents' jobs were at home on the farm, and they all worked together. It was something I was always envious of, although almost everything else about farm work is tough.
Now many of us might have a chance to live similarly. The schools will eventually reopen, but in the meantime many of us are working at home with our families nearby. There is a greater sense of family connectedness, and less peer connectedness. I actually think that is a good trade-off because spending too much time with people who are similar to you in age and interests causes some social skills to atrophy.
We can relearn to live how most people in history have lived.
This has been one of the positive notes of the 'Rona for me. Being home with my kids so much during the school year. Helping them with homework when I got the chance.
I feel like I've seen my wife more than since we met. It's been awesome in some ways.
Obviously some issues with kids and work but I have a great team and company. They understand.
I'm still amazed the fight seems to be "everyone works from home" or "everyone works from the office".
I've been fairly productive since we all started full-time from home in March. However I prefer working at the office. As time has gone on I've found myself losing routine. Either working sporadically through the day or longer hours in general.
Being somewhere does a better job for me of time-boxing work.
That being said, I also have my work and personal machine in the same room. So now I'm spending most of my time in one room! I'm working to rectify that situation.
I agree with you and find myself in a similar situation and mindspace re: time boxing. I found having a KVM switch to have to actually "go to work" and "go to personal" was a good mental switch. And make sure you have a good chair. I was having minor back issues before I upgraded my chair with how long I was spending at the desk.
I miss working in the office a lot. It's nice to have a physical separation between 'work' and 'home'. And I enjoy the company of my coworkers - it's fun to occasionally chat about something tangential to work, perhaps some interesting problem they dealt with in the past, or local politics or whatever.
I agree with this. I've known some of my coworkers 15 years. We talk now, but it's not the same as getting a bunch of people together to go to the terrible chinese place across the street for an hour and a half.
If there is one business I would not want to be in right now it is commercial real estate. I'll be letting go of 2/3rds of our office space at the end of this year and I may even get rid of all of it depending on how things develop.
With some luck this will have a nice downward effect on house prices in and around Amsterdam, where plenty of companies have converted houses to offices.
My wife used to be in commercial real estate. She said that that from what she heard from colleagues, the industry is actually doing pretty well at the moment, since so many offices have to be completely refitted for covid-19 precautions, and that's something that's also handled by those companies.
But right now a lot of places are still under contract for their leases. Might be a different story in a year or so when more leases expire and they just don't bother keeping their offices.
You want to know an industry that's really screwed? The industry she left commercial real estate for: events/conventions. Her current company has had basically no revenue since the first lockdowns, and that's not changing anytime soon.
She's been eyeing jobs in commercial real estate again as an escape from events, as they're in better shape for the moment, at least.
I always keep our leases short because you never know what the future brings. I'd hate to be locked to a five or 10 year contract. Sure, I don't get the best rates. But that flexibility has paid off more than once.
You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.
I work in CRE. There’s still a lot of demand. I think we tend to get a bit of a myopic perspective around HN due to most being in tech, which is well suited to remote work and also tends to have a lot of introverted personalities.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist all the way back in 1964 [1]. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress.
Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.
Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study [2] shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results, but rather learn from it.
As we start coming out of the pandemic, workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.
The elephant in the room to me is that companies talked a ton about creating spaces that are conducive to great work. The design and architecture of an office matters. Not all have it right, but for those who do, it goes a long way. See Pixar as an example. But all of a sudden everyones acting as if none of that matters, all because we get to skip a commute and sit in our pyjamas?
You truly don't know what you've got till its gone...
I wonder if this will result in the hollowing out of the American downtown similar to the 60s and suburban white flight. It just started to feel like the American inner urban core was coming back, density was increasing, more funding to transit.
One of the great tragedies of American society in the 20th century (in my opinion) was a focus on building everything around the car, the suburb, and the commute. Producing well paid office workers disconnected from any sort of community or the issues around them. Everything is a drive away, no one walks anywhere, feelings of isolation and segregation.
This is a huge question and I don't hear a lot of people asking it. What is the future for cities? How will this change suburbs? How can we create optimal communities?
I think it goes hand-in-hand with the coming loss of the car as a personal device and its transformation into "individual transit" as opposed to "mass transit". In the future, when you can use an app to get an autonomous vehicle to take you where you want to go, communities will restructure. Parking lots and garages will go away, opening up a huge amount of real estate.
I wouldn't mind starting a sort of "virtual salon" to talk about these larger questions. It's fascinating.
Eh, in-city autonomous driving is pretty much looking to be decades out at this point. And tons of people I know are fleeing cities during this and don't really expect to go back to regularly being in an office for the foreseeable future.
It will, because people will buy farther out. One of the major drivers of the urban core, density and transit was how bad traffic can be. You want to live closer to work, which is usually downtown. Now you want pretty much live on the outskirts or the sticks. Without the commute, nothing stopping cities from becoming extremely diffuse.
My company is just finishing building millions of square feet of additional office space on our campus. I wonder if someone up high is starting to regret that decision.
> Could anyone have honestly foreseen the pandemic and its ensuing upheavals?
Absolutely. Previous WHO classification has a "Phase 4: Sustained community-level outbreaks -> Medium to high probability of pandemic" designation, which has a roughly once-a-decade frequency historically. Compared to multi-quarter, multi-year scale of real estate planning, 10 years is not infinite long term. Of course it is so in comparison to quarterly earnings, share prices, average tenure of a fund manager, a CEO and so forth, so it doesn't get priced in or gets bundled with other catastrophes.
This pandemic might not be historically unprecedented, but the scale of the reaction to it (most office workers staying home for several months) certainly is.
I don't have to work in an office, but I do. My consulting company owns commercial space in Sunnyvale and Tel Aviv. I like separating home and work. I work at work, and do non-work activities at home.
I worry that this trend is simply to squeeze employees harder. Now employees have to pay for their own workspaces, desks, chairs, etc.
If I may ask, how far do you live from your office? Is your home comfortable and does it meet your needs? Is your office a pleasant and productive space? I know many people who do grueling 2-hour, one-way commutes so they can afford a modest-size home and half-decent schools for their kids. Consider that many people might not be in your position.
Will this trend revive the fortune of WeWork? We can have a future where teams within a company decide on “core days” where everyone is in the office but WFH the rest of the week and the company can pay for a variable number of office spaces depending on the week day. WeWork can become the cloud but for office spaces.
I think there was always a viable business in WeWork. Just not with all the excesses and crazy valuations. But prior to the current pandemic it certainly meet a need. Granted they were not the only ones offering the same service. But even that in itself would suggest that with the proper management it would be successful operation.
My cat is getting old, one of our dogs is nearly 15, the other has cancer, and my wife has a chronic disease. I’m glad that I can work from home and make sure my family is happy and comfortable. Working in the office has its perks for sure. But at home I have my own office with a coffee bar that is always open and always has the coffee I like. I can cook my own food or order it from any number of delivery services. I can take a nap during the day if I want or go for a run to help clear my head. It’s a net gain, for me, in every way.
Edit as I was thinking about it: I realize I’m lucky. I live in CT and rent is pretty cheap here. We’re only paying 2100/month for a 3br 4bath two story home + fully finished basement. Not everyone has that luxury and in a smaller space I’m sure I’d be more on the fence.
As I keep explaining to people, timezones are a harsh mistress.
The furthest you can really go in terms of proper outsourcing (as opposed to building part of the team remotely) is around +- 3hrs either side. For SF, that basically only allows for the American continent.
This is potentially something that could happen a lot more in the EU, as there's (somewhat) common laws and less of a timezone shift between the expensive (London, Paris) and the cheap (Sofia, Warsaw) places.
The owners of traditional office buildings who will see the most success in this crisis will be those who realize that --while, yes, corporations may no longer need as large a footprint-- there's still valuable use of the capital infrastructure they hold. The first ones to pivot to alternate property uses will do best.
Another set of commercial property owners will sit on their above-market lease agreements and try and squeeze blood from a stone.
> Reductions in office spending could likely be followed by layoffs and investments in technology that should help improve productivity with a reduced workforce, said Bill McMahon, chief investment officer of active equity strategies at Charles Schwab.
Why wouldn't anyone invest in such "technology that improves productivity", if that's available, outside of COVID times too?
Wow I'm surprised people are so eager to go back to the office and completely aren't valuing the potential freedom of being able to live where they'd like rather than where their work happens to be.
Corporate managers need to run the following exercise:
1) Quantify the loss in productivity from employees working from home. Call this "x."
2) Calculate the savings in rent you don't have to pay for putting the company's employees in an office. Call this "y."
3) If x < y, pass on savings to shareholders, take your bonus, and have a nice day.
4) Explore hiring candidates outside of major metros and see if you can pay them less.
Will not happen, of course. The modern corporate middle manager thrives as a sycophant, constantly praising their bosses / and boss's bosses - yes sir / ma'am, how high would you like me to jump for my bonus? Thus, they are desperate to get back into the office and play that sweet, sweet game of "office politics." Also, they probably leased additional space for more tech and digital marketing workers, so they are trying to not regret that decision.
Even the folks in non-tech jobs who hate WFH, griping about missing look-em-in-the-eyes managerialism, or how they can’t do management-by-walking-around, acknowledge the past few months have been more productive and curiously more collaborative (right people across national offices invited to “meetings” and able to attend).
So actual productivity up, other factors important to Taylorist managers (but not to individual contributors) sharply down.
A few years ago I had to commute from Orange county to Manhattan Beach. It takes 1 hour to get to the office (leaving at 5:15am in the morning) and 1.5 hour to get home (leaving at 4pm). By the time I got home I felt dead. It was a 30 mile trip. So to me the long commute is what makes WFH convincing.
I have read somewhere that maybe in future place in the office will be given by some employers as a perk, by default people will work from home (those who do office-like work, obviously, nobody will have car production line at home).
This can end up as dystopian nightmare, people will have to have cameras installed that will be watching them and some AI-like software will check if they work, when they leave designated workplace, etc. Spy software will check what they do on their computers and if this is work or something else.
All of this will count how much hours people work and wages will be calculated on that base.
My guess is that people would need to work more as compared to current work in the office setup.
If nobody is in the office, it won't be true. But is that even possible? A lot of people really like working in offices, even though the voice of those who don't are presently louder in media
Hopefully in the future we'll have more options rather than offices becoming completely obsolete. Personally I still need a good office environment to do my best work and an all-remote future looks pretty bleak.
Have any of y'all given mob programming a try? Several teams at work have adopted the practice and it's been really interesting.
Essentially, we camp out in a video chat and work on the same task together. One developer will "drive" sharing their screen—ideally, a conduit to type for the rest of the group—and everyone will talk through the approach.
It takes some tweaking (we're always experimenting with the driver's time), but it seems to be leading to better code. It also gives you face to face time talking with your coworkers, which you'd otherwise be lacking.
My team has been doing this almost all the time since we went remote in March. It works well for us.
It helps more junior team members as well, since they're able to watch how more senior people figure stuff out and ask questions whenever they like.
It also has the social element, which many people have mentioned they're lacking while working remotely.
As long as you're on a team with people who can communicate well enough and are happy to have their camera on, it's great.
I've only had issues when there's someone who is just lurking without a camera and they seem to refuse to turn their camera on for whatever reason. They're making people forget about them and they miss out.
This is going to be another short decision making drive, decided by the CFOs because they have the 'cost' numbers in front of them, whereas issues like productivity are a little more intangible.
We work in 'open spaces' because the CFO can definitively say "$/employee!" - whereas the impact on staff is difficult to measure. The 'up front cost' is the driver.
This same 'cost logic' will apply to remote working, once Ops can see 'how cheap it is' they will love it but it may have nothing to do with true ROI.
Just to offer a different perspective from the people lauding WFH - I get that it's nice to have your amenities all in one place, not have to spend time commuting, etc. And I get that for people who were already working from home, making the switch wasn't that hard, since you already knew your coworkers and had built relationships with them.
But consider the new people here. I've had a totally different experience coming into a company during this pandemic, not having already built those relationships with coworkers and having to ramp up on the team's tech/codebase. Every day I wish I was in the office, just because as a new person it is so much harder to get the help and guidance you need online. Whereas in the office I could casually shout over a question to a coworker, WFH I don't have that same ability. Everything feels super scheduled now, much more like a meeting, even when I just want to have casual banter. I think this is the huge downfall of WFH.
What I'm hoping will be the future of tech jobs is a hybrid of WFH and in-person work. I think that if you're someone who's been at a company for a while and can be self-sufficient at home, more power to you - feel free to work from home more often. But as someone who really needs more oversight and assistance while learning how to do my job, I still believe the office has its purpose -- we shouldn't just get rid of it.
I hope this leads to drastically lower rents in the NYC area. A lot of companies like mine still need some space, but even needing a little bit means we have to head way out of the city before we can find anything affordable. That makes commutes longer and we cant rely on public transit. Less giants eating up huge amounts of space hopefully means more smaller space needing businesses getting a better shot at profitability and sustainability
My company maintains offices in NYC and Boston (among others). We chose not to renew our Boston lease and are in the middle of breaking our NYC lease. We do still intend to maintain physical offices, but they will be much smaller and used mainly for meetings. Once its safe, employees will likely only be going in 2-3 times a week if they are near an office. I doubt there will be assigned desks in our new offices.
1) It will take away the only social outlet many people have. Someone may reply that work was never the appropriate place for that anyways but the real world has never worked that way. Humans have always combined work and social life since the beginning of time. And there won’t be some spontaneous rise in people joining social clubs or anything like that. It will only result in further isolation, further mental problems, further strange behaviors.
2) This will make hiring even more parameterized. Employers will count even more on pieces of paper and LinkedIn connections to gauge whether or not to hire someone. No ability to gauge someone’s presence.
3) This further enables corporations to have no concern for geography. No skin in the game. No loyalty to a place. No loyalty to people. You are now competing with people who are willing to work for a fraction of the price you do, and on paper you both have the same credentials.
sounds like what is already happening in europe where a lot more people worked remotely in tech, due to the lack of local tech. People adapt, and learn to socialize off-office. Limiting oneself to the office was always unhealthy anyway
Closing the office has increased our productivity, and for those of us who are not too socially isolated in our private lives, it hasn't cost us much.
We closed very early (early February) since most of the company came in by regional mass transit and I had been tracking this thing outside of the (confused) mainstream media bubble, saw it becoming a very big deal.
Imagine the situation were reversed: high speed internet widely available prior to the technology required to construct office buildings. Once office building technology did become available, how many would be constructed to shelter workers purely tasked with creating and manipulating information? I would think very few.
I really hope this trend sticks so that we can decentralize away from big urban centers. It would really allow us to free ourselves from crowded spaces/amenities, painful commutes, and high prices, as well as letting us seek out the community/culture that fits us best.
Am I the only affected by the work from home policy? Not having anyone to talk to for months is bad for my mental health, even as an introvert. I now wish I could go to office atleast once a week.
Also I struggle to find motivation to work and procrastinate everything.
If I'd be in your position (lacking social contacts outside of the work environment), I'd take the time to reflect my life and would try to determine what makes me happy.
For example:
Do you miss interactions with others? Join local clubs that fit your hobbies and meet new people. This is how life works IMO.
Personally speaking, joining different local orchestras/bands in the city im currently living in (since ~1 year) helped me a lot.
I decided to let my work be only work and search "purpose/fulfilling" in other aspects of life.
For me I dont really like working from home, but I would like the flexibility of having most time in the office but spending chunks of time like a few weeks or even a whole summer elsewhere. Doesn't save much on office space though.
In one hand, it's great to be able to get up late/avoid bad weather/go shopping in the middle. On the other hand, I don't have adequate space for a proper office, and I surely miss the great food/coffee/printer/extra screen/etc. services the office provides. Plus, as a BA, communication with Teams is always less efficient. There is also a huge risk of getting more friction with family members as well.
Overall I prefer to work in a proper office environment, best if I have my own office. Damn I need to be a VP to have my own office, meh, that's way beyond my pay grade.
Everyone raves about the work-from-home deal but forgets that we’ve all only been doing it for a few months - it’s still new and fresh. After a year or so of doing it I think we’ll start to see more mixed opinion.
Personally I’m OK with either arrangement, it’s more about the choice in the matter. The change of pace that comes with sometimes going into an office vs not is rejuvenating. Or even potentially the choice of being 100% remote and living in a different city for a while. Having those options are the real net benefit.
Office buildings are a $2,500,000,000,000 asset class in the USA alone.
Throw in retail and you're at >$5 trillion of value.
And the market is in total chaos due to COVID-19, fortunes are going to be made and lost on a ridiculous scale over the next decade as institutional investors reposition their trillions of dollars of equity in this market.
Institutional investors rely on commercial real estate as it's one of the only asset classes at SCALE that can:
(a) Generate cash flow
(b) Is asset backed
(c) Is highly leverageable w/relatively low default risk (debt)
As a result the world's largest institutional funds - pensions, sovereign wealth, insurance companies, etc typically invest a large allocation of their overall funds (10 - 25%) in the CRE class.
This lets them pay their current liabilities - teacher pensions, public services, insurance coupons, etc - with cash, while also generating longer term IRR returns on the appreciating assets to cover ever expanding liabilities.
For generations of institutional wealth managers retail and office space were the #2 and #3 largest overall allocations of their real estate portfolios (1)
Part of this is due to the scale in office / retail - those two product types represent ~$5 trillion in asset value and are only outstripped by multifamily ($2.9t) in scale. (2)
But as both office and retail have been slipping for the past decade institutional managers had slowly begun to reposition and reallocate to other sectors while keeping a toe in.
But as it's done elsewhere COVID-19's arrival has massively pulled trends in CRE forward by probably a decade with regard to the reallocation.
As a result what most CRE investment pros are expecting a significant increase in valuation multiples across alternative CRE asset classes including multifamily, self storage, industrial, etc.
What's terrifying about the idea of massive winners & losers in the space is the potential further erosion of returns on institutional investors, who are typically already well behind investment targets to maintain their expanding liabilities.
Not sure if this is the best place to post, but I'm trying to gather some insights for a personal project related to working at home. If you have 5 minutes would love to get any feedback. Google form is linked below. Thank you!
So, I'm filling out your form, and on page 3 there are four point scales from Strongly disagree - Strongly agree. You really should provide a neutral option, as forcing people to make a decision when they are indifferent will mostly just provide noise (some people will just be indifferent to everything, but you can normally remove those easier).
How will this affect commercial real estate? I've already noticed an uptick in "for lease" signs on commercial buildings throughout the major city I live in...
I wonder if this is going to be the beginning of the decline of big cities. Who wants to live in a expensive place if you don't need to commute to work everyday?
Being developer and working with developers (already pretty antisocial, introverted bunch) I see only minority of people can function well working completely remotely and almost none of the newcomers.
Thinking that people can work remotely for couple of months and extrapolating it to years and decades is pretty silly idea.
In the past it seemed that every manager saw wfh as a disaster where people will spend all day on youtube. Now at least everyone has been forced to try it out and see how it works. For us at least we have found things to be at worst, just as productive as before.
I was already unofficially remote. Meetings are actually a bit better with everyone at home on camera. The thing I miss is travel which was about 1/3 of my time. (And, fortunately, I live in a fairly rural location with a dedicated office and forest paths out my door.)
Company I joined recently will not renew the lease on their office next month. They'll get another smaller office that won't have the capacity for everyone and you'll have the option to go there (if you wish) on a rotation.
If home based staff cost 10% less due to not having to pay building overhead, and your competition takes full advantage of that savings and you don't - that 10% cost savings might just be enough for them to win in the long haul.
Remote work fights against ageism. That is one huge plus to me. I am in my 30's and worry about getting unemployed due to ageism. I am happy rote work is embraced.
We got our rent cut in half. Pre-pandemic we were getting a fantastic bargain on an office. Mid-pandemic, even with the rate cut, we're getting a terrible deal on a mailbox. :-)
Agreed. Getting managers to agree to WFH (and keep allowing WFH) has always been a struggle. Management hates it, because they can't see with their own eyeballs that everyone is "working" (with "sitting at their desk" as a somewhat-useful heuristic proxy for "working"). Lots of companies have tried full-remote, and very few stick with it long-term. I think that once the risk is low enough, we'll all be back to the exact same long packed commutes and open-plan offices.
I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound when it turned out that close communication between teams requires more than phone, email, and video. There are places where it works (I am an example of that), but it normally doesn't work all that well, because the advantages of being in one physical space are normally hard to quantify and thus hard to reproduce.
Not at all, but the good news is that your company will save lots on not having to pay for your office space. This money can be used for that executive level bonus your boss has been dreaming about.
I've worked from home and while I do enjoy aspects of it, I feel like a lot of executives only see the money saving aspects of it.
Ideally, we could have an office, but we could also have flexbility, I think this would be the ultimate outcome for both the worker and the employee, it's a shame it seems to be one or the other right now.
This is such an interesting turn of things. Science fiction has been talking about this since the 60s. It's a shame it took so long for a remote work revolution to happen. I am currently at my office but everyone else in the office is telecoferencing, so i have to wear headphones. This is a new normal. Office is not office anymore.
Cities have been left behind all these decades, they were hyperoptimizing for people commuting daily to factories which dont exist anymore, separated in residential and commercial districts for no real reason, managing peak hour traffic as if peak hour is an inevitability (and this hyperoptimization is much more prevalent in the US). We ve learned that "work" is a place while truly it's an amount of energy that can be put any hour. The cherished "work/life separation" is just a shift in attention, or rather, it can be all life now, a life that includes work. It's not like work-life separation existed before , in the sense that people don't stop thinking about work when at home or vice-versa. 9-5 schedules are only applicable to a small percentage of remotable-work. We have now the opportunity to redefine living itself. It feels like we are finally entering the 21st century.
An interesting question is what opportunities arise in this post-office world. One could see co-working offices becoming as common as corner stores for people who need them, not via global conglomerates like wework, but mom-and-pop converting their old abandoned properties to a work-from-office workplace/cafeteria. We will need new places, places to meet people that don't exist yet, services for people who will prefer nomad-style medium-term living, remote work visas, co-living spaces with all amenities, home-office retrofitting services etc. Work defines cities, and this change is not going to be different.
We also need to stop treating remote work as marginal , and remote workers as some sort of pariahs that are never accounted for in public city planning. Business happens at home as much as in the busy streets now.
What will come in the future boils down to psychology: Yes, being at home the entire time is miserable, we know that from animal studies. Our hippocampus gets excited by changing our environment. Going out for exercise is nice, but it's too short to matter, we need to find ways to maintain balance between movement and routine. Nomad living, or perhaps changing cities every few years (the way many academics do) may become a lot more common and commercialized. Schooling services for nomads may become a thing. It's tempting to think that we 'll go back to village-living, but if you've lived it you 'd know it's suffocating. Our new normal has to be better, not worse.
And tens of thousands of engineers from other countries around the world rejoice at what's about to happen to the job market to the remote senior developers with fluent English.
What I don't understand is how HN audience, mostly from a couple of tech hubs in US, is enjoying this. Don't you guys see that we're finally coming after your FAANG salaries?
Personally, I can't wait to get back into an office. Working from home has helped me break some previous bad habits and improve my self-discipline - which both positively impacted my productivity while working from home.
However, even with commuting time, I'm happier (due to distinct separation of home-time and work-time) and more productive when I have an office I work from 3-4 days a week.
During my last "remote" engagement I joined a small community co-working space in Boston after two weeks of "true" work from home. I've found my idea balance is 3-4 days a week in-office and 1-2 days "remote".
I envy those of you who can work remote without issue, even as an introvert who dislikes lots of people and distractions I can't see "remote first" as something I enjoy going forward.
There was a poll on linkedIn I came across with over 10k responses where the slight majority of people believe partial working from home was the best, beating out full working from home by a little, and no working from home being significantly in last.
i've been pretty much 100% remote the last 5 years or so. I definitely rely on coworking spaces to get out of the house and around other humans. It's especially bad when kids are in school and wife is working ( she's a teacher ). Being without human contact all day every day really weighs on me over time.
