
Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work” - 5ep
https://om.co/2020/05/23/real-reasons-why-tech-giants-are-hugging-remote-work/
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voisin
It is a huge bet that productivity in the long run is equal to or greater than
the savings in rent. When you do the math on the occupancy cost per square
foot relative to the labour cost on a per square foot basis (using a company’s
occupancy numbers divided by square footage of the office), it works out to 4
- 7%. If you increase employee turnover slightly or decrease productivity in
the long run by a small amount, you’ve erased the gains and destroyed your
company culture in the long run. Oh, and if you give your employees a bunch of
money to fit out their home offices and start paying for their internet at
home and give them money for lunches and whatnot, you’ve just erased a portion
of the savings in rent and further reduced the odds against you as employer
will be net positive.

It is a hugely levered bet and to see all of these companies making this bet
on the basis of a 3 month experiment with, to say the least, confounding
factors, seems irresponsible.

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highfrequency
The main potential savings is not from avoiding office leases, it's from
hiring engineers for 1/3 of the cost or less from places like Europe, India,
and Brazil.

~~~
foogazi
What stops them from doing that already?

Facebook has offices in Brazil:
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/saopaulo/?p[offic...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/saopaulo/?p\[offices\]\[0\]=São%20Paulo%2C%20Brazil&offices\[0\]=São%20Paulo%2C%20Brazil)

Why didn’t they close down the Palo Alto office already?

~~~
moises_silva
Brazil is a big country, not everyone lives in São Paulo. Why would they close
Palo Alto in any case? they want to _add_ to the talent pool, not exchange it.
Also, not everywhere you see offices they have engineering teams. The same
narrow-minded policies of having teams co-located prevents them from hiring
engineers there even if they have offices there.

As a data point, I turned down an offer for FB Palo Alto, one of the main
reasons being having to relocate from Toronto. They have offices in Toronto,
but no engineering.

Bottom line, they _might_ have some presence in some major cities, but if
they're serious about remote work the talent pool definitely grows
significantly.

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Thorentis
> So, you want to work remotely for Facebook? Great! All you have to do is
> figure out your own office space (much like how an Uber driver is
> responsible for the upkeep of their vehicle)

This 100%. But also - my own economic ideology position is that employees
should be as self-empowered as possible. If your employer owns all your tools,
your workspace, your IP, etc. then they completely control your access to the
labour market. The means of production should be as widely distributed as
possible to prevent huge power imbalance in favour of employers. Remote Work
will mean that people can move companies easily (which means putting up with
less shit since you can just move), be setup for freelance work already if
they need extra income or want a break from working for somebody else, can
learn more about their toolset due to being responsible for setting up an
environment to work from home, etc. While there are some downsides, I think
this is an overall positive.

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shuckles
The real reason may just be the failure of a legitimate second hub after the
Bay Area: Facebook needs to hire 10k more people this year and maybe tens of
thousands more over the next decade. There is no single place they can do
that, and by the time they tally up all the possible other offices it might
just make more sense to shrug your shoulders and make it officially and
literally “anywhere.” In this version, it’s likely the emerging technology
hubs which lose to cities with simply great quality of life or low costs, and
the Bay Area continues relatively unaffected.

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rcurry
Working remote just makes so much more sense. My old routine was - get up,
have some coffee, start dreading the one hour commute, then do the one hour
commute, then get to work and spend an hour decompressing from the one hour
commute... now it’s get up, pour a cup of coffee, start enjoying working on
stuff in my bathrobe. And the coffee is way better than what the office was
paying for :-)

~~~
Lammy
I'm sure we'll all come to love the new routine — get up, have some coffee,
work until you go to sleep.

Even if you personally are capable of enforcing work/life separation there's
zero chance an entire company will when so many people already fear the
Performance Review looming over their head.

~~~
whateveracct
That's just not gonna happen. I currently work remotely as a software engineer
at a BigCo (not a tech company) and the company policy has consistently been
to great weekend work & long hours as a team & company failure.

I just don't see an every-waking-hour workday dystopia ever happening if the
industry goes more remote.

~~~
nathanlied
And even if someone consistently cannot separate work from home life -
'traditional' employment will not vanish. Many companies will have zero WFH
(or very little), while others will have a gradient between full-office worker
and full-WFH.

I'm a "WFH Apologist", really, but I'll readily admit it's not for everyone.
Many people genuinely like in-person socialisation at the office, others can't
separate 'work' from 'home life', and we could go on forever on potential
issues. Which is why no one will ever see me advocate for all tech companies
to go as remote as possible normally - that would exclude a pretty wide pool
of potential candidates.

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cm277
All these analyses are forgetting one big reason: culture (and yes, cost too
of course). The first office I built (out of 6 or so) was open plan,
specifically because I was starting up a tech company in a conservative
culture where the 'boss' was behind a close door (often a solid, non-glass
door). Open plan meant not just more people per sq.mt. and cheaper
construction (which it does, by an order of magnitude); it also meant that the
boss was available for any question no matter how trivial by just calling out
his name.

That was a huge step back then. I know it's almost expected now (which is
probably why we're ready to move to remote/open cultures) but you gotta
remember why open plans were revolutionary when they appeared and what cubicle
farms meant for the company values, not just its lease payments.

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ThrowawayR2
Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost
productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs
are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the
employees to get that productivity back, they would.

A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their
employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk their
employees getting COVID-19, but not for the reason he states but instead
because that people worried about getting sick at the office are less
productive, and 3) they want their precious little cash cow employees back
producing milk at full speed as soon as they can.

~~~
paulryanrogers
> A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote
> outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving.

Really? Three years working remote and I'm still more productive.

~~~
pzh
It’s also a matter of culture. For remote employees to be fully productive,
the company’s culture needs to be heavily geared towards remote. You can’t
have 50% of the employees in the office having impromptu hallway conversations
and whiteboard discussions while the rest of the team that is remote is half-
isolated, separated from the in-office idea generation, and only gets to hear
about what was decided by email. You’ll effectively end up creating two
classes of employees: the in-office superstars and leaders who are highly
paid, and the cheaper remote workers who have a glass ceiling on their career
progression and are mostly relegated to the execution of the in-office team’s
vision.

~~~
hiram112
> the in-office superstars and leaders who are highly paid, and the cheaper
> remote workers who have a glass ceiling on their career progression and are
> mostly relegated to the execution of the in-office team’s vision.

I went remote a few years ago, and last year, without even asking permission,
I dropped the lease on my overpriced DC tiny condo and moved a few hours away
where rent is half the price, and eventually I'll buy a real home for half the
cost of DC.

While I definitely had more opportunities to network and hobnob with
management while in the office, the reality is it didn't matter in the long
run. My salary hasn't gone down since moving, and I save money on tolls,
lunches, gas, and now especially rent which is pretty significant.

As a developer, I've never once been offered any sort of 'path' to anything
other than continued code grinding and JIRA tasks. At best, I'm often give
pseudo-promotions to 'team-lead' which includes more work on my end for no
extra compensation, respect, or authority.

There are so many people who CANNOT code, I've never seen any company I worked
for helping their developers move towards the business or management teams. In
fact, it's almost as if they actively oppose it and gatekeep any knowledge
that's related to sales, customers, revenue, etc. After all, what would they
be needed for, if we could do their jobs, too? And if we knew what value we
provided, we might get a bit more uppity when it came time for raises and
bonuses.

Furthermore, most jobs of mine last less than 4 years or so, and if you don't
move on you're not getting raises, nor are you accumulating more required
buzzwords for the resume.

I kind of gave up on moving up the corporate ranks into a management or more
respected, higher paid position years ago, and now I play for myself. That
means I continue to accumulate money in investments, and hopefully, by about
45, I won't depend on any company's promises or continued raises, and instead
can opt out of the corporate system, go live on a beach, and start my own
small business. The odds that the stock market will continue paying 8% are far
more likely than any company I end up working for will provide opportunities
for more pay, authority, and respect, especially for engineers, regardless of
how good of friends I am with management or happy hours I attend with them.

~~~
Ididntdothis
"While I definitely had more opportunities to network and hobnob with
management while in the office, the reality is it didn't matter in the long
run. My salary hasn't gone down since moving, and I save money on tolls,
lunches, gas, and now especially rent which is pretty significant."

I think being in the office can be very beneficial if you have the ability to
talk to management and be viewed as some with potential for promotions. I have
tried this but somehow I don't have the ability. My path was always to deliver
stuff without needing much guidance. So now I am remote. I will probably not
move up much but I have carved out nice niche for myself.

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one2know
At least in Amazon's case they used their massive hiring power to force
everyone into a small region of the city owned by Paul Allen, developed by
Vulcan Inc. Then Amazon payed four times the market rate for the properties
from Allen.

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valuearb
> each employee in the San Francisco Bay Area costs an extra $20,000 to
> $35,000 per year

This is where they lost me. I can make $140k working remotely for a job that
is a minimum $200k in San Francisco. And that is just salary. It doesn’t count
rent, lunches, and other office costs.

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aSplash0fDerp
Its the new companies that build on a "remote first" / "work from anywhere"
foundation that have a tremendous advantage here.

With a few more "cultural shifts", there will be little overlap left between
20th and 21st century work structure(s).

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hprotagonist
“ok, no more dorms, everyone just go study at those cool, full of freedom off
campus apartments!”

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k__
I'm saying this for years now.

Companies burning billions for real estate alone, while all their teams are
working remote in respect to each other anyway.

My hopes are, this will relieve cities from the huge burden these companies
were...

~~~
bradlys
How are cities hurting? The cities are the ones refusing to build. The
landlords are profiting from this and so is the city. (Higher land value =>
higher tax revenue)

Do you really think this will "relieve" anything except push the problem onto
other cities that also refuse to build? (And will inevitably push out people
who already had to leave the big city due to the cost)

~~~
k__
\- companies that settle in a city require office buildings

\- people working in these companies require living space

If fewer companies where in the cities, the space for offices and the space
their employees need to live would be free.

The prices would go down.

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paulryanrogers
TLDR cost savings for the company

