
Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/twitter-will-allow-employees-to-work-at-home-forever
======
jjjensen90
I always thought I enjoyed remote work as an engineer/architect, I did it for
6 months by my own volition before coming back. I am extremely unhappy. I
really miss being in the office with my coworkers and friends. I've struggled
deeply with overwhelming sadness at the idea of not going back anytime soon.
My work has suffered from a lack of dynamic interactions. I get lots of focus
time, just like I did at the office, but working in the same building I live
in has been brutal. Maybe I'm different than the average HN reader, but I'm a
social butterfly and not going in to the office has been devastating to my
mental health, my appetite, my motivation, and my overall interest in work. I
exercise the same amount, I eat just as healthy (just less), but something is
missing. If this field goes primarily remote, I will leave.

~~~
wonderwonder
I have worked from home for the last couple of years. Prior to the Covid
shutdown, I had generally enjoyed it. Once my children's school closed and my
wife's work switched to work from home, my productivity has plummeted. I find
it impossible to focus as every 10 minutes I have a young child running into
my office, or have to listen to them yelling at each other (as all kids do).
My wife has had a hard time adjusting and she is equally distracted by the
kids and her frustration feeds mine. She is forced to be on conference calls
for most of the day (I am actually surprised at how many there are, they are
all calls with executive level people so she cant opt out. Almost all income
producing departments have to pass through her team and they laid off her
support staff) but is still expected to complete real work as well which she
cant do now until the calls stop after 5. I have been able to get very little
deep work done and find myself working until 2 / 3 am to accomplish the same
work I used to do in a normal shift.

I feel very bad for my kids as all they want is to be able to play with their
friends and do all the things they could before so I do my very best to not
show them my frustration. Its a depressing situation all around but I am very
grateful to actually still have a job while so many others have lost theirs.
My kids ask me why I have to work so much all the time, as all they want to do
is spend time with me.

I guess what I am trying to say is the current situation is not optimal.

~~~
mundo
My company (large-ish un-sexy software company you've never heard of) gave the
software managers clear direction on this: "It's not realistic for people with
school-aged children to be fully productive right now. Do not demand they take
PTO or ask them to work at night. If they can only work five hours a day,
that's what they can do."

I suspect it's unusual that my boss actually said that out loud, but I hope
everyone is thinking it. This is a temporary situation none of us planned for,
and it ought to be reasonable and expected to lower your standards until
schools and childcare are around again.

~~~
SystemOut
We might work at the same company!

I lead one of our teams and that's pretty much the explicit directions my VP
gave us. Actually, the entire leadership team gave those directions. It's made
me glad I switched jobs 18 months ago.

Somehow I'm the only one on our team with kids but some of my team has had a
difficult time managing the change from an emotional standpoint and I just
treat it the same way. I don't expect them to somehow magically "power through
it". They're normally very productive and I know this will pass.

~~~
mcv
By this attitude you can recognise reasonable employers that care about their
employees, and are not merely looking to exploit them.

------
christiansakai
I think this is the hugest news yet. It suddenly opens the pool of candidates
to all across the country.

I expect other tech giants will follow suit.

Those who previously can't afford or don't want to live in big cities like
NYC/Seattle/SF because they are older, have families, or various other reasons
now are included in the candidate pool.

This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete
with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers,
experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller
software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction. Whatever the case
is, suddenly fresh graduates, mid level developers, senior developers, are now
competing on the same pool. It is getting even more real to compete in the
high FAANG salary job openings now.

This serves as a reminder for us, whether fresh graduates, mid level, or even
seniors, to always to keep your edge. DS&A grinding, system design, etc, do
whatever you can to not lose your edge.

As a matter of fact, I think almost all knowledge workers will find themselves
in this situation. If you are a knowledge/office worker, huge competition
looms over the horizon. Never lose your edge.

~~~
product50
You are wrong that FAANG companies will pay the same salary as you make in SF
if you are in a low cost state like Indiana. I have a friend at one of those
companies and they were running a survey to gauge employee's keenness for
permanent wfh - and they were very clear that employee's salary will be
adjusted based on which city they are based in. So, while this is still
healthy, since FAANG pays pretty well, but don't expect half a million dollar
working from your house in Indiana.

~~~
bachmeier
Just want to point out that there's no rational basis for this argument unless
the employee in SF is much more productive.

To put it another way, do you currently see pay adjustments based on housing
costs for employees living in SF? Have you ever heard of differences across
employees simply because one of them has a more expensive house?

~~~
nemothekid
"Cost of Living" adjustments are a red herring, what they really are is really
"competition density".

There are plenty of tech companies paying great salaries in the bay because
they have to, otherwise they would just go work for someone else. On the other
hand, if you lived in Oklahoma you aren't going to say no to $LOCAL_OFFER+10k
just because bay area salaries are $LOCAL_OFFER+90k.

As long as this disparity exists, I forsee bay area salaries and CoL still
being high. Until companies move headquarters out of the bay, the trend will
continue.

~~~
danielrpa
FAANG doesn't determine salaries based on cost of living, but cost of _labor_
, which maps to your concept of "competition density".

There is no rational reason for Google to pay bay area salaries for Indiana
employees - will they really say no if Google offers 300K instead of the 500K
they would get in the bay area? Sure, the person could reject it to make a
statement, but most people would gladly take a salary that would buy them a
small castle.

All FAANG needs to do is to beat local salaries by a significant margin to get
well qualified employees - that would still make these people WAY cheaper than
bay area employees.

~~~
badpun
> FAANG doesn't determine salaries based on cost of living, but cost of labor,
> which maps to your concept of "competition density".

Yep, that's exactly what a Google recruiter told me - they try to pay at the
upper end of the _local_ market.

------
Ididntdothis
It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need
tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration
tools.

To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher
you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess
most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language
or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.

~~~
dumbfoundded
Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need
other than a remote desktop + video conferencing?

I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water
cooler.

~~~
jeffbee
Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home
permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face
meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due
to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks
will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a
big comeback.

~~~
dumbfoundded
I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people
work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of
managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH
certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0
though.

~~~
ranci
How exactly does it help to pass communications through a person (the manager)
that, for the most part, does not understand the technical details of which
they are speaking? We literally pay for slack for communication. No one needs
an arbitrary human to act as a gatekeeping communication conduit.

~~~
dumbfoundded
Maybe at tiny companies. At larger companies, you can't scale communication as
a fully connected graph.

~~~
ranci
I guess that's why you have multiple slack channels instead of one. You're
trying to justify paying someone over 100 grand a year to be a worse form of
communication than the software you're already paying for to communicate.

~~~
dumbfoundded
I don't think I'm trying to justify any San Francisco salaries, lol. The point
I'm trying to make is that a single person can only have so much
organizational knowledge overhead. Facilitating communication between the
right people without spamming the wrong people is tough.

The github corporate move from a flat structure to a hierarchical is probably
a good case study to read if you're interested:
[https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800](https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800)

------
dddbbb
I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties).
In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I
understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family
to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people
want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments
but a short commute) and have no responsibilities outside of work, in this
situation WFH loses a lot of its lustre.

~~~
throwaway713
If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living
area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15
years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle
for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my
life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.

~~~
Vysero
I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far
far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or
small house, and settle in. Currently, where I live, despite the fact that I
make almost 30k/year more than the medium average income I still can only just
afford a one bedroom apartment spending the suggested 30% of my income.
Imagine being able to buy a house!!!! What a world that would be!!!

~~~
CodeSheikh
What's the guarantee that say your San Francisco/NYC employer will keep paying
you city rates when you are living in a small town in mid-west. At some point
they will catch up and start saving money this way. Everyone at a tech company
is not a crucial employee. Don't get me wrong, I am all in for getting paid SF
rates while living in a cheap Texas suburb.

~~~
kbos87
Bingo. As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had
conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that
it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the
availability of talent in a particular market.

I work for a very pro remote work company, but that’s still how we did things.
You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to
a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market
rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a
voluntary move. People usually weren’t jazzed about it but understood.

~~~
SauciestGNU
Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it right. Is the employee
contributing less to the company based on their location in a cheaper market?
I think not. So why should we as workers allow a company to extract more
profit from _our_ labor based solely on our physical location?

~~~
dvtrn
It does feel quite bizzaro doesn’t it? The manager here says

 _Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there
is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move._

my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary
value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in
Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers.

I’d love to sit down to coffee with a hiring budget manager one day and get
into the weeds on CoL against present value and just do all of the math until
the cafe closes or one of us has to take the first coffee induced “bio break”.

Or at least, this is how it would go if my company tried to sell me on this.
Hell, I might even be amenable to the pay cut if the company was otherwise
doing right by our relationship as employer and employee and I felt
sufficiently invested in continuing that relationship, but we’re going to get
real mechanical and be VERY thorough about it.

~~~
wtetzner
> my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary
> value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in
> Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers.

It doesn't have anything to do with your skills. It's just that they believe
they can replace you in Indiana with a lower salary.

I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense, just that they're probably thinking
about it in that way.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Or that there is less demand for those skills in Indiana so the market for
those skills _in Indiana_ pays less than the market for those skills in a
separate location. This raises the question of if "remote" is its own "virtual
location" in terms of market. Unfortunately, there is not yet enough remote
work for there to be an established "remote" market distinction.

For people where there is only a handful of people with those skills in the
world, they command ny/sf pay wherever they live.

~~~
dvtrn
This is an interesting take. I am a remote worker (technically in Chicago),
but my employer is headquartered elsewhere. We have offices in Chicago. But I
live in Indiana.

What's my 'demand market', as it were? Is it Cali where my parent company
lives? Is it Chicago where the subsidiary division I support operates? Or is
it Indy?

How does one negotiate salary taking in all that when negotiating a permanent
full remote transition?

(This is just for the sake of the hypothetical, I’m very satisfied with my
current actual arrangement, but we’ve crossed into a new working world and
consider me a career “prepper” or something)

~~~
aaronblohowiak
i think there are reasonable arguments for each permutation of answers!

Ultimately, every negotiation comes down to BATNA (best alternative to
negotiated agreement.) You have to demand from the company you think can/will
pay the most the amount of compensation you are confident (but perhaps not
sure) that you can get from the second-expected-highest company. This is
similar to a Vickery auction -- the winner is the person who is willing to pay
the most but they pay the price the second-highest bidder put forward.

In tech labor, the distribution of compensation for the same work is much
wider than almost any market participant realizes.

~~~
dvtrn
To your last point, what would be the closest comparison? Is there even one?
I’m sympathetic to the reality that there are lots of variables at play here
between work sectors, but do you think a reasonable analogue exists in another
industry, and could any actionable models be taken from, iterated upon and
applied to tech labor with the effects of equalizing the demand curve and
negotiating change through all of this?*

Appreciate the back and forth on this, it’s an interesting set of conditions
we’re wading through as a society and I enjoy the thought experiment.

———

* there may be a better way to phrase this question, unable to figure how to put it, at the moment-if you’ll accept the pleasantry as far as the hypothetical will warrant it.

------
shibeouya
I work in FAANG and I am really not convinced this is the start of a trend.

First Twitter was already moving towards permanent WFH before the pandemic, it
only accelerated their plans. I highly doubt (m)any other companies were also
seriously considering that move before the pandemic.

Second, working in a remote only team is very different from working in an
office, or even from occasionally working from home. I have seen the best
managers get completely clueless when managing full remote people.

Third you lose a lot of things by going full remote. You can no longer have
hallway conversations, sharing new ideas over lunch, trying to pitch new ideas
organically. You lose a lot of spontaneity by going full remote, which I fully
expect to impact innovation potential. Some of the best ideas in my group are
things that came up from organic conversations that we have been productizing.

Fourth has to do with company culture. I can't speak for every company, but I
know that at my company there is a very clear favoring people local to where
the HQ is located, probably at least in part for the reasons above. I don't
see that changing easily. East coast to West coast in the same team means you
have 3 hours a day where you can't have your whole team available at the same
time.

What I expect to happen is most likely much greater flexibility for companies
that were not open about it before, but full time remote for everyone seems
like a huge stretch even over several years.

~~~
alex_young
The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat. You can't easily
replicate that with a zoom culture.

~~~
echelon
> The value of the valley has always been the hallway chat.

Is it, really? I always hear and read this, but I see very few anecdotes.

In thinking through my own interactions, I'm not sure anything that happened
in the hallway, break room, or at lunch table actually contributed much more
to the bottom line than conversations I've had over VC and Slack.

~~~
xenophon
Parts of the story may be apocryphal, but one of the most famous case studies
of office design contributing to collaboration is the Pixar office. In the
late 1990s (and to this day) the modal layout for larger companies was
dividing teams into dedicated buildings by function withn a broader campus or
office park.

Per the story, Jobs had the notion of designing an office that encouraged
interactions between teams with broad open areas, communal social resources
and bathroom placement in central atriums to encourage unplanned interactions
between teams.

'Brad Bird, director of The Incredible and Ratatouille, said of the space,
“The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…But Steve realized that
when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.” '
[1]

[1] [https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-
an...](https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and-the-
legacy-of-steve-jobs/)

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
> "Many offices are arranged in U-shaped units of 5-6 individual offices..."

And then they went back to private offices to get stuff done. Both are
requirements to the formula for this success.

I've worked from home for about 6 years, but I still went into the office for
the occasional meeting and white boarding /idea session. I don't think total
remoteness will work very well. You have to have in-person interaction to
collaborate effectively. It's just human nature. The delay of voice chat
deteriorates the spontaneity of communication.

But going back to work to the all-open concept, where there are, effectively,
no private/personal spaces, is also not the way forward. We need to get back
to the old-fashioned idea of having offices for knowledge workers, and not
just the VP's (who are never there any way).

------
robbyking
I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll
switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week
with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is
in the office.

I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus
transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've
proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.

That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are
fewer distractions and better food options. :)

~~~
the_watcher
I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of
both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance
of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the
average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem
to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.

~~~
bradlys
I agree. I would quit. This basically forces employees to get another room as
an office. If my employers pays for it, fine. But if they don’t, it’s bs that
I’ll have to continue to work from my living room because we don’t have a
dedicated office space. It’s driving both me and my SO crazy because we want
separate spaces to do our work but we are in a studio/open 1-bedroom.

~~~
gen220
I prefer working from home, but I also totally agree with you. Especially
since they got rid of the uncompensated business expense deductions for
individuals in the tax code, they're really just outsourcing the expense of
maintaining an office.

However, I fully believe I can build a home office that's better (for me) than
most employers can, at a fraction of the budget. It's a more efficient
solution than a centralized office, but it's coming out of my pocket and not
theirs, so it hurts me more.

Of course, your direct complaint seems to be the square footage, not the
hardware (desks, etc). That's a tougher one to solve for, because larger
square footage is opex instead of capex, and it'll be more challenging to get
your employer to part with opex dollars.

~~~
exmadscientist
It's interesting that adding square footage is opex for businesses (leased
commercial real estate) but often capex for individuals (purchased residential
real estate). And then the capex is mortgage-financed back into a monthly
payment that is effectively opex....

(Yes, there are larger apartments, but they are somewhat rare. Maybe this will
change!)

~~~
gen220
it's only capex if you own the home! :)

In NYC, 2/3 of households rent, according to a 2017 government survey:
[https://www.census.gov/programs-
surveys/nychvs.html](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html).

Not to take away anything from your point: it is an interesting thought
experiment. For people who have an intuitive understanding of opex v capex,
it's also a very convincing argument for owning your apartment (since your
mortage "feels" like opex, but is actually capex, and it's always better to
spend capex dollars).

This is especially true in markets like NYC, where you might never reasonably
expect to pay off your mortage (since it's a coop, or the principle is 10+
years of untaxed salary).

~~~
maerF0x0
trying to learn from your comment,

Would it matter the interest/equity proportions of the mortgage payments? Also
what about the other costs associated with owning the real estate (taxes,
maintenance)?

~~~
gen220
In a word, yes, but oftentimes the factors you mention either break-even
between renting and owning, or tilt the table in favor of owning, on a long
enough time horizon. This is _especially_ true if you're a high-income
employee with a lot to gain from itemized deductions.

Interest in most loans is front-loaded (i.e. your payments are mostly
"interest" rather than equity in the earlier parts of the loan), and you can
write off payments towards mortgage interest on your taxes in the US. So,
while interest is technically opex, the government currently allows you to
treat it as capex, tax-wise, because they want to subsidize home ownership. If
you aren't in a top income bracket, this won't affect you much.

Other costs are tricky because, in competitive markets at least, taxes and
maintenance cost are _usually_ priced into your rent, so you're _usually_
paying them whether or not you own your home.

The big difference is that when you own the home, the taxes and maintenance
costs arrive all-at-once (when your home floods, or the boiler falls apart),
rather than amortized over years of residency. That's why mortgages are almost
always "cheaper" per-month than rentals: rentals price these costs in,
mortgages do not. If you have a good chunk of liquid savings and can afford
good insurance, exposing yourself to occasional all-at-once payments are not
very risky.

Also, you can _eventually_ and _typically_ write off big expenses (if you rent
out part of your home, or sell it later and keep good records).
[https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-home-
improvemen...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-home-improvements-
tax-deductible.html)

------
fermienrico
Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent
can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The
question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw
talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

~~~
daenz
I've had a related thought: is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on
where they live? I understand that there are different cost of living factors
for different places, but that's on the employee's side and should be none of
the employer's business. If they employer can pay $200k/yr for a remote
employee, it shouldn't matter where they live, and so scaling that value seems
discriminatory to me.

Anyone have thoughts about this?

~~~
xenocyon
> If they employer can pay $200k/yr for a remote employee

It's interesting that folks envisioning a globally uniform payscale tend to
posit SF salaries in Hanoi rather than Hanoi salaries in SF.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Not really. I think we just assume that the situations where housing can't
keep up with employment would shift the `income minus necessities` equation in
our favor, making the massive assumption that we're willing to move somewhere
cheap, or that enough other people are willing to move somewhere cheap, or
just not move here in the first place. If the necessity of commuting to SF
goes away, SF housing prices are less impacted, so it's more like Portland
salaries in SF, and closer-to-Portland cost of living in SF.

------
caseyw
I’ve worked from home for a number of years. It’s all about having a normal
schedule. My family knows when I’m in the office, I am at work. There isn’t
anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in
my case.

I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and
your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.

~~~
Hard_Space
I've been working from home for about 16 months, and I'm afraid my partner
doesn't quite get what a different head space I am in when I'm working, when
she comes for a friendly visit if she isn't busy herself. I can seem cold and
even abrupt, sometimes, when she comes to see me. But it takes so long to get
in that space, it is _hard_ to be brought out of it.

Ironic thing is, she also works from home about 80-90% of the time. Guess she
inhabits that mind-set more easily than I do!

~~~
winrid
I recommend you set boundaries and expectations.

------
gregkerzhner
In person teams are easy, and fully remote teams are easy too. A blend is
extremely hard to get right. If you are in a meeting and some people are in
the room while others are beamed in via a projector, the remote folks will
always feel like second hand citizens. Depending on what kind of person you
are, you might have enough skill to still participate in the discussion, but
it will always be harder than just being in the room.

The best way to do partially remote is to have even the in-office people dial
into the meetings individually as well. This also means trading in your
whiteboard for remote collaboration tools like Lucidchart to allow remote
folks to contribute as well.

If you actually do this, then I find that over time, the in-office people will
begin to question why they are in the office and slowly drift off to be
remote, leading to a 100% distributed team.

If you don't do this, then the remote people slowly get isolated and cease to
become valuable contributors, eventually either leaving to fully distributed
teams, or coming back into the office. Either way though, the partially
distributed team eventually gravitates one way or the other.

~~~
smileysteve
I find these points definitely true;

\- "conference rooms" are inferior to an individual at an individual laptop
with a headset on.

\- If any collection of people are at a conference room together they're
exchanging looks off camera or notes before or after the meeting.

\- Being fully remote makes you think about online documentation first, not
copying it later.

------
moneil971
I’m not sure why it took a pandemic to make this a real option for major tech
companies. At my previous company, the bulk of my team was in NY and I would
commute an hour plus each way to sit on endless video chats and conference
calls with people in other time zones. But working from home was frowned
upon...unless you were a contractor, in which case you had to work from home
bc there weren’t enough desks.

~~~
dudul
Your anecdote reminds me of the time a company I was interviewing at flew me
half way across the country for their "onsite interview", and 75% of the
sessions were me, seating in one of their offices, zooming/skyping with the
interviewer.

~~~
WorldMaker
One company did that to me _twice_ , the whole while telling me that they
never allow remote work and I had to relocate to Mountain View, especially
despite _neither_ team I was interviewing with was based in Mountain View.

The team I had the most face-to-face interaction with was because I managed to
talk the recruiter into to allowing me to interview in the SF office, where
some of the team actually worked, despite continuing to insist I'd have to
move to Mountain View if I got the job, that "no one" works in the SF office
(despite the closest thing to a majority of the team I interviewed with did),
and that remote work was also not an option. That trip the worst interview I
had in the day was remotely with someone with "regularly works from home"
seniority despite "it's not generally allowed". So much about that interview I
suffocated in dumb mistakes because I was angry about a lot of details about
that interaction given conversations I had had with the recruiters immediately
before and after.

The second time the team was mostly based on the East Coast (closer to my home
than Mountain View, lol), the recruiter insisted I had to interview in
Mountain View, and the only person I interacted face to face with that entire
cycle was a different recruiter (terrible flights and bad traffic included).

I had a very hard time not feeling very personally insulted at how much they
wasted my time with remote interviews I could have done from home without
needing to fly most of the way across the country, continuing to insist that
remote work wasn't possible for the positions I was interviewing when very
clearly remote work was already the default if they expected people to be in
Mountain View working for teams in other cities. It was not a great way to
sell Mountain View to me as an option, and I was already quite clear with them
that Mountain View wasn't a city I find interesting to live in, if I could
avoid it. (Not that I could probably afford SF or even East Bay, but very
specifically if I want to live in the Exurbs of an American city, I don't have
to leave home to find equally carbon copied wastelands of strip malls, parking
lots, and bad traffic just like Mountain View.)

~~~
ptudan
Seems like your experiences with Mountain View are el camino real and the 101
to/from SJC...

Go about 3 miles west and you'll find beautiful mountain forests :)

~~~
WorldMaker
Well yes, my experiences with Mountain View are dominated by these sorts of
interview trips trying to "sell" over-sprawled corporate campuses to me for
possible relocations. It's not exactly a tourist destination in any other trip
I might take to the Bay Area. These companies clearly aren't doing a good job
in selling it to me or why I would want to live/commute there.

(I can directly contrast that in my own experiences with an interview in
Huntsville, Alabama that gave me a much greater appreciation for the
Huntsville area's beauty far beyond "it's where we went to for expensive space
museum field trips in school". It did help a lot with my interest in that
position, though that wasn't a position that happened for other reasons.)

Tech companies are so focused on making their interview cycles all day
gauntlets and grueling/wearying tests/challenges that so many of them forget
that they are also in the process of trying to sell the interviewee on their
company, their lifestyle, their neighborhood. If you are asking me to
potentially relocate, then of course I'm going to be paying attention to every
part of how you sell your quality of life and its surroundings. (Especially,
if I tell you I'm willing to relocate, but would _prefer_ remote work and
would need to be _sold_ on the relocation. I've asked employers to try to sell
Mountain View to me and so far most have failed at making it seem like a place
I would like to live. That's a lot on them.)

------
rosywoozlechan
It's strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100%
remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike
open offices, they're noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is
mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack,
and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team.
I'd be happy if we just go back to offices or even cubicles. I miss my
cubicles with my mini-whiteboard and my own little corner with a desk with
drawers. In the bay area at least we've been crammed into ever-larger open
spaces like workers in a meatpacking plant, with smaller desks and more noise
and disruption.

~~~
andarleen
I will have to shamelessly try and sway you.

Get a large house, a swimming pool, a home office room with all the games and
gadgets you ever wanted, a nice surround 5.1 system optically connected to a
gaming pc, a nice couch to rest now and then and plan your code ahead.

See if you still miss your cubicle (nothing wrong with that, but just what i
wrote a thought).

Thats my lifestyle since i starting working remotely. As summer is coming,
trees are blossoming, fresh and clean air. My client is pretty impressed with
my productivity and most of our e-meetings are held while we all sit in our
gardens (most of the team is remote).

~~~
TomVDB
I have everything you list above, and I'm not swayed.

I still looking forward to going back to normal. I've never been the social
butterfly who sees tons of friends on a regular basis out of work, and yet I
enjoy talking to others. Work gives me that, lunch at work gives me that too.

Some of my colleagues are razor smart. I can have lunch time discussions about
rocketry or special video coding algorithms or War time cryptography, just
random interesting stuff that I'd never have otherwise.

Working at home has some benefits, but how many times do you really use that
swimming pool?

~~~
andarleen
That is true - I miss this kinds of chats and interaction. But our team grew
up in the IRC days and we are used to long chats about such topics over slack.
Tho indeed remote work is a matter of choice - doesn't mean we all have to
enjoy it.

Re pool, i occasionally jump in during breaks, just enough to refresh my mind
and have a clear view over why that microservice is misbehaving. I only
started working remote 1.5 years ago and it may be the excitement of something
new, but i am loving it thus far!

------
gregkerzhner
I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to
hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the
office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships
is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or
you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way
though you are stuck with them.

I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing"
therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could
eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office
distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two
extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.

You can join a club, pick a new hobby, learn a new language, volunteer or even
start a revolution. Be as social or not social as you want, but the beauty of
it is that thats time you have complete freedom over. I choose that over
contrived interactions with a random set of people who happened to do enough
Leetcode problems to get in the same room as you.

~~~
_bxg1
The flipside is that it takes a lot more intentional effort, which many of us
may struggle to put forth. The vast majority of friendships are made in
incidental contexts: people you just happen to be around and interact with
through the normal course of life. Many adults struggle to make and maintain
friendships when they no longer have school forcing them to be around peers,
and become very isolated. I think your interpretation is quite overly-
optimistic.

~~~
psweber
You're describing the status quo before the crisis. We weren't suffering from
excess happiness and satisfaction. It's time for something new. The new things
are yet to be determined.

~~~
_bxg1
I'm describing a facet of human nature.

~~~
cplanas
Is it, though? Most of adults are "forced to be around peers" (offices), and
yet, they still struggle to make friendships.

------
dmode
Just to add a perspective, I work for a FAANG and we have no plans to go
remote and will very much be office based. In fact, most of the company is
yearning to go back to work. But our office space is pretty nice as well. I
personally am sick and tired of working from home and can’t wait to return to
work. I am tired of poor ergonomics of my home office, tired of constantly
having to schedule formal zoom calls for every casual chat, staring at the
screen all day, and not have any in person connection all day. My neck and
back is hurting. And I am putting on more weight simply because I am glued to
a chair all day.

~~~
gofreddygo
You sound so attached to that FAANG office of yours. Use that FAANG salary to
get a nice chair, a sturdy table, good coffee and a coffee machine. Home or
office, staring at a screen all day ain't good for no one. And that weight is
from the eating not the sitting. Try cutting that out a bit and run around
your home, setup a home gym, do some pushups. And for fucks sake turn that
phone off, shut that laptop and get some good sleep. I'm on my way to get
some. Good night and good luck.

------
filleokus
I think the biggest argument for me against near 100% WFH is the space cost of
a dedicated home office. Ideally I would need another room for it to be long
term sustainable. Right now I live in a small 400 sq. feet (≈ 35 m²) studio
apartment in city center, walking distance to everything (including the office
in normal times). Property prices here are at around 1k USD / sq. feet (10 k
USD / m²). An apartment with dedicated space for my home office would cost me
like 100k USD extra.

The only viable option would be to move out from the city, but then I loose
all the other benefits from living here.

(Of course the total cost is the same or higher today, but it's taken by the
employer. It's not compleeetley unthinkable that the employer would compensate
me for it, but it get's really tricky really fast. I would probably have to
pay taxes for the extra salary, and how much "rent" would they pay? Are new
grads supposed to work from their kitchen table, or far away just to afford an
extra room?)

~~~
gen220
One possible outcome of a more normalized WFH culture might be a dramatic
reduction in rent prices for the types of living arrangements you describe,
precisely because their central locations have lost a principal source of
value (proximity to the office), so demand will wane.

Similarly, centralized corporate real estate is not going to be as in demand
as it once was. This will take decades maybe, but it's easy to imagine some of
these buildings getting converted to residences, increasing the supply (and
therefore decreasing the costs of rent).

Instead of 3-4k/month for a downtown studio in NYC, you might see 2k/month.
It'll take us a while to get there.

Conversely, one might reasonably expect suburban rents to jump up, as city-
dwellers move there.

~~~
nutshell89
Rents might come down due to a reduction in demand, but that demand is part of
what makes SF / NYC desirable places to live.

For example, part of what make SF or NYC a desirable location for opening a
restaurant or bar (despite the high rents) are the respective cities proximity
to high income wage earners and companies.

Take those factors away and the superstar cities of the world (NYC, London,
etc.) become as desirable as your average city in the middle of the country.

------
akg_67
I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed
people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And,
people are celebrating how progressive these companies are. Twitter or any
other company is not being benevolent by letting employees work from home,
they figured out that they can shift a lot of their cost of real estate,
utilities, and office furniture and equipment to employees. Will they
compensate employees for allocating area of their home to office work,
spending more on utilities, buying furniture and other tools for work?

Companies used to provide lot of benefit allowances for using personal items,
space and time for company work like, home office, equipment, personal car,
phone, on-call, education and training, etc. Slowly, slowly these benefits
have been discontinued for everyone, except top executives, in the name of
cost savings for the company, and such costs were shifted to employees. Based
on such history of taking away benefits from rank and file and giving to top
corporate executives, I doubt any of the corporate cost savings from WFH will
go to employees.

~~~
eqdw
> I find it interesting how over 20-30 years corporations have reprogrammed
> people to believe working from home (WFH) is a perk and not a burden. And,
> people are celebrating how progressive these companies are.

There are a million and one examples I can think of, of companies repackaging
burdens as perks while cynically using progressive reasoning to convince
people to go along with it. Unlimited PTO, for example. Unlimited PTO is not
unlimited, it's limited by whatever your boss gives you permission for. So say
it's de-facto limited at 3 weeks. If you had explicit PTO of 3 weeks per year:

* It's a lot harder for your boss to arbitrarily stop you from taking it, especially if the year is almost over and you haven't taken it yet * If you don't take, it, they're legally obligated to pay it out

But when it's "unlimited"

* Boss mysteriously rejects it, or puts arbitrary constraints like "no more than 3 days contiguous" * If you don't take it, it's gone

------
2bitencryption
It's odd how HN does not reflect the reality I see.

I'm at a big (Google/Microsoft/Amazon) workplace and WFH has always been a
last-resort thing. I can't even imagine my team moving toward this. Every day
I do too many things in the office that are face-to-face. Drop by the
architect to get an opinion about XYZ, drop by a PM to ask about their
functional spec, drop by a coworker to ask about some comments they left on my
PR. Get three people in a room to go over an ongoing incident that's impacting
a major customer's operations.

All these things could be pings/video calls, but having done that for a few
months now, it's just not as effective as being there.

I wonder if the "WFH" discussion on HN is simply silicon-valley wishful
thinking, if it's only possible for highly independent contractors and
startup-hopping tech bros, and if it will never actually work in a large
workplace environment.

~~~
LanceJones
I wonder how those other folks feel about their own productivity with
teammates always "dropping by". :-)

~~~
dntrkv
I don't mind when people drop by to discuss things. I may take a small
productivity hit in the short term, but I gain a lot of insight into what
others are working on, and get a chance to point someone in the right
direction before they file a PR that I then have to review and ask them to re-
implement things in a different way, which is way more frustrating than just
having a quick in-person conversation.

The added friction of having someone jump on a call vs sending a slack message
and stopping by my desk has resulted in a lot more tedious PR reviews where
you end up having to explain your approach with a wall of text and then still
having to jump on a call and re-explain the same things in more depth.

------
screye
A question.

Do y'all feel that a trend towards remote work benefits mid/senior level
employees at the cost of the development of junior employees ?

IMO, it is the same difference as in-person schooling vs online schools. As
convenient as WFH is, it really isn't conducive to hands on mentorship.

Tech companies might not mind it, since the attrition rate in tech at the
junior level is incredibly high anyway.

~~~
bojo
My company is WFH right now, but my team is distributed across 4 cities
anyways. I've mentored a handful of junior developers and it seems to have
worked well, however, you really need a culture which supports it. Active
video/screen sharing time, solid onboarding documentation, RFCs which describe
processes, etc.

------
bfrog
And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop

~~~
blhack
Don't forget about the commercial real estate bubble pop, and potentially a
massive pump in prices of family homes as a result.

I think that investors are going to be moving their money out of commercial
real estate, and into residential.

Edit: to be clear: I don't live in the Bay Area, and I think the housing
prices there could go either way:

1) People spend more time in their homes and spend an even larger portion of
their income on their home. Having a "good" home becomes even more important
since you spend even more time there, and prices go up even more.

2) People just leave the bay area. Residential prices go down in the bay area.

But there is a whole world out there that doesn't include SF, and I think that
just generally speaking you're going to see an increase in residential home
values as investors look for safe places to place their money outside of
commercial real estate.

~~~
ar_lan
I would guess the opposite. If more Bay Area companies allow WFH, there's less
demand here.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
That only works if companies allow for 100% WFH.

------
chrismarlow9
For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No,
we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired
or lost my home. Does the company plan to let me live in the office if they
let me go? Are we still doing Thanksgiving? What about a family tree, whos
going to keep that up after I die?

But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it
kind of raises the "sleezy car salesman" flags when I hear it now. Like my
emotional triggers (family) are being used to get me to comply (dont quit the
company, sign the offer, work 80 hours with no overtime). It irks me even more
when I see people new to the industry eat it up.

I saw a bunch of it recently in social media from college graduates. Lots of
companies who signed new talent promising the offers are just on pause and
telling candidates they have a start date in 3 months. And then watching
people actually believe it because they've been brainwashed in the interview
by the "family" mentality. It just made me really sad about how manipulative
workplaces can be.

~~~
papito
"We are a family" is bullshit. You need to be a pretty egregious repeat
offender to be ostracized from a real family. A company can fire you on a
whim, simply because someone with a business degree sorted a spreadsheet with
salaries in descending order, and you were in the top 20.

The more correct analogy is a sports team. Everyone works well together to win
the medal, but it's much more pragmatic in that sense.

Perhaps back in the age of B&W TV, when people could spend their entire life
with a company, it was sort of more true. You had that one job, you had your
pension. It was really like a second family, an getting let go was like death.

I am beginning to see that nowadays, even full time jobs are becoming
essentially contract gigs with better benefits. You should treat it as such
anyway. Be professional, be good at what you do, but also be detached and non-
emotional about it. It can end at any second.

What you take from a job is not that you were "like a family". What you take
from it is the experience, what you have learned from your own mistakes, and
most importantly - friendships. The rest is ephemeral like a docker container.
Be ready for it to go POOF.

~~~
dogman144
I recently read Netflix's culture doc, and they outright said they treat
employees like a sports team - welcome to the team, perform at your best, you
may get benched, you may get cut. There's no shame in getting cut, and you
should be proud that you had the talent to perform at our level for the time
you did.

My main takeaway was: fair enough, and when can I get into that interview
pipeline.

I want to be on a meat-eating, high performing team with comp to match, and I
don't want much more. I think most in the industry are the same.

~~~
agd621
Well don’t stop there with the analogy. Give me life changing income, public
exposure to entice lucrative side hustles, a union with 49% of revenue to
employees, and an off-season.

~~~
TulliusCicero
For the average person, the amount of money Netflix pays its engineers is
absolutely life changing. Even if you have to live in the hideously expensive
bay area to get it.

Levels.fyi says the average compensation is...450k. But that's for the entire
software engineer job ladder, so it's probably skewed upwards somewhat. Still,
a median of 250-350k would still be a ton of money.

~~~
dogman144
They pay top-of-band on an annual re-evaluation basis and offer an all cash
<-> all equity choice. So pairing that down to the low end new grad scale at
Big N ($150, $180k?), but getting that TC in all cash vs. the $120k base, $30k
vested equity combos out there, is really life changing.

~~~
TulliusCicero
I don't think the cash vs stock thing changes the calculus much. You could
just sell what stock you get anyway (I have mine at Google set to autosell at
vest).

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
If the big tech companies embraced this, one of the big side-effects would be
easing of the Bay Area housing crunch. If tech workers did not have to commute
to work, they could move to other areas where the housing prices are cheaper
while still working for the tech companies. As the demand eases on the
housing, prices will fall.

~~~
VectorLock
I could see companies not going 100% remote but maybe having 1 day a week in
the office. You might not be able to work from anywhere, but it would allow
expansion into areas that aren't a soul crushing commute 5 days a week.

------
whack
I work at a FANG company. And I would gladly take a significant pay cut and
work at a less prestigious company, if they offered permanent WFH. I'm only in
my 30s, but the grind of sitting in an office from 9-5 everyday, feels
positively revolting.

Before the pandemic started, I was counting down the days to my retirement.
But now, I'm actually enjoying my work a lot more. And during my 20s, I would
have been absolutely ecstatic to be able to travel the world, while still
working a full-time job.

To any non-FANG company: take note. You don't have the same level of prestige,
and you certainly don't offer the same level of compensation. So how do you
stand out in the job market, and attract the best candidates? Giving people
the option to work remotely, is your best bet of ever competing with the
FANGs.

~~~
justinpaulson
There are lots of places that are full remote that will pay you less. Why not
do it? I have been working from home for almost 2 years now and I will never
go back (Didn't have to take a pay cut either, actually a raise).

~~~
whack
Golden handcuffs. People in their 30s at FANG make 250-500k per year. I'd be
willing to take a ~30% pay cut and work remotely. But every remote-working
opportunity I came across while job hunting, required a 50-70% pay cut.

------
albertkoz
The thing I miss the most while WFH is the whiteboard conversations. It's nice
to be able to drag your colleagues for quick tech discussion and go back to
work. Pen is much faster than drawing diagrams online.

~~~
AlexITC
Shameless plug, I'm pretty bad at drawing on the computer, which is one of the
reasons I launched [https://collabuml.com/](https://collabuml.com/)

~~~
whynaut
friendly suggestion, when sharing the URL it's helpful for the reader if you
stylize it like the site does (collabUML). Otherwise it's hard not to see a
misspelling of "collab album".

------
bartread
They aren't the only ones. We've always been supportive of people working from
home anyway, but from here on out I'll be actively encouraging my team to work
from home as much as possible. Apart from anything else coronavirus hasn't
magically gone away just because we've passed the peak of infection.

------
tantalor
Permanent and forever are different things! Twitter could change this policy
when conditions return back to normal.

permanent: lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.

indefinitely: for an unlimited or _unspecified_ period of time.

forever: for all future time; for always.

Permanent just means we don't know when some condition will change; contrast
with temporary where we do know when it will change.

Forever means it won't ever change under any circumstances.

For example: a magnetized iron nail is a temporary magnet and will lose its
magnetism over a predictable amount of time; a permanent magnet can be
demagnetized, but otherwise should continue to be magnetic indefinitely; a
forever magnet is not a real thing.

------
arexxbifs
Turns out I dislike working from home more than I thought I would. Video calls
and screen sharing is a poor substitute for real life, spontaneous back-and-
forths in front of a large screen with no lag, compression artefacts and frame
drops.

------
ubermonkey
I've posted about this here before, but since the end of the dot-com era (for
me, 10/2001), I've ONLY worked at home except for travel, and a brief period
early in one startup when we had an office in a tech incubator about a mile
from my house.

(We realized it wasn't worth the rent, and gave it up after about 6 months.)

Some of those years were very travel heavy -- fullish time on the road -- but
for the last 10 client travel has vanished in favor of GoToMeeting
conferences.

I love it. I love the flexibility of it, I love not having a commute, and I
love not having dry cleaning bills anymore. The music in my office is whatever
I want. If I feel like it, I can catch a nap. And I love being able to eat at
home, where one can make MUCH healthier choices.

People SAY they'd miss the water cooler, but in my whole career I've only had
co-workers I really really liked on a social level in one company. It's rare.

My current employer -- where I've been for almost 13 years, which shocks me --
is entirely virtual. We have no office space anywhere, and the closest other
employee to me is about 4 hours away by car. I have colleagues that, until
recently, I'd never even seen a picture of.

I get that not everyone is constitutionally able to do this. I came to it from
heavy travel (even pre-2001), so I was used to working in weird places (hotel
rooms or lobbies; airport bars; frequent-flier clubs; taxis) already, and I
think that made it easier.

I also get that it's not even appropriate for everyone, and that our success
at my current company is tied to the fact that we have never had "entry level"
developers. I think it'd be super hard to mentor and acculturate and teach
this way.

But as for me, at this point I'd have a very hard time going back to an
office.

------
kabacha
I've been lucky enough to work remotely since the inception of my career (10
years now) and I was afraid I might miss the whole office culture if I
continue on untill the covid pandemic happened.

Companies showed that it's possible to have great office culture even
remotely. My company started food/drinks tasting events, small pockets of
communities developed around hobbies like video-games and slack got a complete
revamp. It has been a real joy!

Right now I'm not sure I don't see any benefits of working in an office other
than:

* Sense of inherit accomplishment: I sat here for 8 hours == I did things. Which is of course kinda silly but remote suffers from accomplishment perception issues since you don't have that office sacrifice that you can always fall back to.

* People are fun, and people are more fun in person! Especially in modern offices with ping-pong tables, bean bags and taco tuesdays.

------
teddyuk
Ding ding, we have a winner now for the remaining 99.9% of corporations to
follow suit and society will be positively impacted.

Remote working as a norm is the breakthrough that society needs.

Time spent with family, commuting cancelled, train, roads, busses, tubes
reduced - if it doesn’t happen now, the next pandemic will.

------
saurik
What is Twitter even doing? Like I realize they likely have an infinite number
of people working for them, but are any of them doing anything important at
all? This is not like the usual "I just don't see how a company needs that
many people" laments: this is specific to Twitter, as they seem to have at
most one engineer working on new features... it took like five years for them
to implement "increase size of Tweet to 280 characters", and the only feature
of note I can think of since then was adding a half-assed ability to mute
replies (which to me is a critical feature that prevents trolls and hate
groups from using _my_ audience to spread their hate; but the feature is
somehow designed to take a reply that would have maybe been buried in hundreds
of people replying to me and "mute" it by giving it a dedicated icon with a
pop up dialog reminding people to go look at the content I muted, so in fact
more people probably see the thing I muted now than before I muted it... it is
ridiculous). Like I frankly feel the decision here is "I guess send all the
employees home as it isn't like their productivity could be any lower, right?
hell: maybe one of them gets inspired and finally builds something!".

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
I've hung out a bunch at Twitter's offices (in both SF and NYC). It's pretty
eye-opening and a good lens into why Twitter the company is so fucked up.

The vibe that comes off is more of a social hangout club than a serious tech
company. You meet your friend for lunch and there's professional chefs cooking
gourmet meals, you hang out in the social area while the celebrity of the day
comes into the office and everyone takes pictures with them. There's breakout
rooms where people are filming marketing videos. The people that are hanging
out talking to celebrities all day are making $200,000+ somehow. Anyone with
right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no
recourse, because it's a "cool social hangout platform" not a serious
technology product with mature guidelines of what acceptable speech is and
formalized appeals processes. There won't be any productivity loss from
everyone going remote because nobody is doing real work anyway.

~~~
esoterica
> Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the
> platform with no recourse

You have a persecution complex. Almost every conservative political figure and
media personality has a twitter account that they post regularly on. Only a
small number of abusive psychos (e.g. Milo) have been banned for breaking
Twitter rules.

------
amateurdev
I have a feeling a lot of companies will follow suit. It saves up huge costs
in real-estate by not having to provide seats to people. It also might just
open up more companies to hire from any time zone.

~~~
poulsbohemian
The interesting question is, why now? I mean on the surface sure - because we
have a pandemic and state ordered quarantine. But the more interesting
question is - why is this finally provoking companies and why do we think they
will continue the trend in the future post-quarantine? I've been a remote
worker since 2006. It's been obvious to me for a long time that companies
_could_ go all remote or some version of remote, and it would have all the
positive effects we all know about:

\-- Reduction of commute, which is good for the environment and good for
people's stress levels.

\-- Reduction/elimination of the cost of office space

\-- Ability to recruit across a wider geographic area

\-- Greater employee satisfaction as people can live where they choose

And so on and so on. And yet in the face of this information, plus studies
that show higher rates of productivity when employees / workers control their
work environment (and schedule), companies have been resistant. I can
speculate on the reasons for this (read: control, stuck in industrial era
management practices, etc), but the question remains: why do we think
companies will suddenly become enlightened and embrace this long-term?

~~~
BryantD
I don't think all of them will -- it's probably significant that Twitter was
already thinking about this. However, I know my CEO never would have run this
experiment without the pandemic. Now, he has data he didn't have before, and
he's publicly said that this changed his mind.

The trigger event was the forced experiment. Studies convinced me, but I don't
have to take responsibility for the health of a whole company so it's easier
for me to advocate for risks. Seeing how your company actually behaves in a
100% WFH world is better evidence than a study.

~~~
mgkimsal
counterpoint - everyone's company is competing against every other competitor
who is also doing WFH. they're all on the same playing field. if folks think
F2F helps productivity, they'll force that, especially if they know that some
competition will stay with WFH.

~~~
mediaman
I don't think that's a counterpoint. It depends on executives continuing to
believe F2F is superior.

The evidence already existed that WFH is, generally, better. See Stanford's
Bloom 2013.

But executives are afraid to take big risks like that. They doubt studies.
They overindex on personal experience. Which this gave them.

Now that they see what WFH actually produces, their worldview shifts to what
was already true. You get talent that's more productive. Lower costs so you
can afford more talent, or, alternatively, more expensive talent. Fewer
geographic restrictions so you can recruit a bigger pool of talent.

Once you're convinced WFH works, these advantages can give competition an
edge. An executive doesn't want to be on the wrong side of that edge.

But they have to see it first.

There's no reason they go back to thinking F2F is better, unless it actually
is, and currently no evidence suggests that is true.

~~~
mgkimsal
possibly shouldn't have used the word 'counterpoint'.

c19 has given people an experience of "almost everyone WFH and the company
didn't end".

"There's no reason they go back to thinking F2F is better, unless it actually
is". It _IS_ better for some people individually - we see it here on HN in
comments from people who prefer to be able to go to an office. There isn't a
"one size fits all" approach.

To the extent that we see more WFH across the board, I think it'll be driven
far more by "get rid of the office expense" \- hard $ savings - vs "everyone's
more productive!". They'll be "productive enough", relative to the cost
savings of less (or no) office space.

Just my 2c, obviously.

------
gdubs
I’m very in favor of remote work, but I think it remains unfair to compare
this current situation with working in the office. The more extroverted types
already prefer the social interactions of the office — but right now, most
people can’t get social interaction outside the office even if they wanted to.
They can’t go to a cafe a couple of times a week for the atmosphere.

A lot of us have small kids at home, so now we’re (mediocre) teachers on top
of our work.

But most importantly, this is a national — no, a global — trauma. People might
not realize it, but that trauma is there, and it will have to be addressed at
some point. It’s another factor which makes it impossible to fairly evaluate
the efficacy or desirability of working remotely.

Climate change is another reason work will likely have to change over the next
decade. This pandemic has forced us to confront the types of changes we might
need to make to adapt to a world of less flying, commuting, etc. Those changes
seemed impossible, but we’ve been forced into a trial run. If we can get
through it in these incredibly difficult circumstances, it gives us time to
design a future of work that’s a bit more balanced. Perhaps a mix of remote
and in-office. Perhaps an office that is less crowded. Perhaps a more
distributed, regional world, where we can revitalize the lost cities in
America rather than crowd into overpriced hubs.

Is it convenient? No. Will we lose certain bits of magic? Maybe. But we’ve
ignored problems for a long time that we now need to confront.

It’s time to put on our design thinking hats. We’re the innovators — so let’s
innovate the future. It doesn’t have to suck.

------
satysin
I have worked remotely (from home) for several years now. Almost everyone I
work with also work remotely.

While companies can save money with smaller offices by allowing working from
home the biggest factor imho is you open the potential employee pool to the
whole country, if not the content or the world.

You are no longer restricted to the best person you can get within an hour or
two commute of an office.

Find someone perfect for the role who lives 5 hours away? It doesn't matter
anymore!

You no longer have to convince them to relocate (and put forward cash to cover
the relocation as a condition of the contract).

You don't have to throw away the perfect candidate because a decade ago your
company decided this is where you office should be but now you can't find
local talent.

I hope when my son starts working (if he works in an office) he says to me
"Dad, did you seriously have to go to the same place an hour away _every day_
to sit at a desk and do the same work you can do on any computer with an
internet connection? That's crazy!"

So much needless commuting could end if more companies embraced remote
working. Not being forced to live within commuting distance of an office would
mean more people can live further from "the office" easing pressure on
housing, roads, public transport systems, save energy (fuel), reduce commuter
accidents (vehicular and public transport), reduce pollution and give everyone
more time in their day not mindlessly traveling from A to B back to A again
every day.

------
nsoonhui
You can call me cynical, but Yahoo ( anyone still remembers that?) tried work
from home, and failed. It simply didn't work out so well so the then-CEO
Marissa Mayer had to ban it
[outright]([https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-
chi...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chief-bans-
working-home))

~~~
neurotrace
That was a number of years ago. There's been a lot more investment in tools
and practices for a WFH situation since then

~~~
nsoonhui
Technology changes, but human nature doesn't.

The temptation to slack off is ever present at home, I doubt will there ever
be any technology that can solve this problem.

------
xwdv
Thank God. Hopefully more companies will follow this example and my company as
well, and then I can finally move away from this wretched place and buy a nice
mansion size home somewhere quiet and with great internet connectivity. Tired
of paying too much for a shoebox apartment living like some kind of pauper.
And not to mention the piles of shit everyday in the street. Maybe then I
would finally be able to settle down and have a child as well.

------
AlchemistCamp
I don't regret working in an office, especially early on since it lead to
faster learning.

That said, it's _fantastic_ to see Twitter do this. Especially given the
commutes some are making in the bay area, this is a huge quality of life
increase.

------
dxbydt
Never been more proud of my former employer. This is amazing. Kudos, Twitter!
Hope more Bay Area companies follow your lead. The last project I worked on at
Twitter was a 3 person affair - me in SF, front end guy in Seattle, our
manager in the sky, flying between usa & asia. Manager sent out specs on
google doc, I video-confed the Seattle dev, we agreed upon the breakdown of
work, I did the backend statistics stuff with apache math & finagle, he did
the frontend in mustache.js, then we got code reviews & lgtm. That was one of
the very few things that actually shipped with zero friction, because none of
us ever saw each other in person. Everything was email & gdocs & git. Really
enjoyed that experience.

------
heelix
I've really come to miss the whiteboard walls. While we have digital tools,
getting a couple people together and white boarding was super effective. The
quality of my office at home is way better - large screens, comfortable chair,
and no 'open office' acoustics. Nice to only put on the headset when on a call
now.

I had a good bit of December off and did WFH most of January/February because
the scrum team I was working with was distributed. Our primary location ..
would go into the office once or twice a week to sort/connect on the larger
issues (and not plan to get my stuff done, but rather help others). I do miss
that.

------
throwaway713
Any news on how/if compensation will change at Twitter as a function of
location? I know many tech companies have fractional multipliers depending on
the COL of the area you plan to live in.

------
znpy
cool news, but "forever" is a big word, nonetheless

~~~
danso
I wonder if it’ll come to have the same meaning as “unlimited vacation”, a
vague policy that in practice, is used unofficially in job evaluations to
implicitly punish employees who take advantage of the policy.

~~~
thelean12
This has about as much truth to it as people who say "perks are just to make
you stay at the office longer!".

i.e. it's typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.

~~~
danso
Kickstarter cut its unlimited/flexible vacation policy because "it's typically
not a problem" still can be too much ambiguity:

> _" It's always been important to us to ensure that our team is able to enjoy
> a quality work/life balance," the Kickstarter spokesperson told BuzzFeed
> News. "What we found was that by setting specific parameters around the
> number of days, there was no question about how much time was appropriate to
> take from work to engage in personal, creative, and family activities."_

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/at-
kic...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/at-kickstarter-
flexible-vacation-time-is-no-more)

~~~
thelean12
Set a minimum if they're so concerned.

------
echelon
So many companies see their offices as a cost center. Why do you think we have
so many open office plans despite our hate for them?

Prior to the Covid situation, we already had examples of successful remote-
only companies (eg. GitLab). Now companies are using the circumstances to
experiment with existing hypotheses of going remote-only or remote-mostly. I
know my company was already wanting to experiment, and I think we would have
done so even in the absence of the virus. Now we know it works.

Why pay rent when you can offload the cost to your engineers? Many already
have a home office, and the cost of furnishing their home environment is
negligible. Employees may even get a tax write off.

This may be the new norm for everyone.

I shudder to think about what's about to happen with the corporate real estate
market, REIT stocks, etc. It's certainly yet another death knell for WeWork.

I also wonder if this will begin making cities with low cost of living and
affordable real estate attractive. Who wants to work out of their tiny New
York apartment every day when they can have a dedicated room for their office
in another city?

------
megaframe
I personally love this idea and I hope it spreads to other bay area companies,
but I also worry we'll see a repeat of IBM [https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-
work-pioneer-is-calling-tho...](https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-
is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/)

------
tytso
One challenge about hiring new employees to work remotely. I think many tech
companies have managed to make work from home work mostly (modulo issues with
kids who can't go to school, etc.) have been successful because the team
building that had already taken place pre-COVID-19. With new employees, it
will be much harder to build cohesive teames, as opposed to maintaining the
cohesion of an existing team.

There are solutions, once it's safe again. You can fly everyone to a common
location once or twice a year, but that's not cheap. And so far at least for
me, attempts to do team social video conferences have had at least mixed
success. It does help with reconnecting socially, but video conferences are
tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not.

------
seemslegit
A blurred distinction between the home and the workplace could also have legal
implications for side projects, 'everything you make during employment period
belongs to us' clauses can sometimes be punched through or voided but it's
harder to do if you can't show a clear work time and resources vs. personal
time and resources boundary.

~~~
MattGaiser
Or equipment. Am I now liable for preventing my home network from being
hacked?

~~~
detaro
Some companies make "home office access points" for that use case: a WLAN
access point that the employee has at home, which provides a WLAN just for the
work devices, tunnels everything back to the company VPN and can be remotely
managed.

------
yumraj
All this may have a rather interesting impact on SF business real estate, and
other trickle down effects.

Twitter will no longer need the large office building that it has.

It will no longer need to run the shuttles, both routes and frequency, that it
does today.

Some employees may not want to live in SF anymore. Some may decide to move out
of BA and even CA.

Now multiply with other companies that may do that...

------
lemax
I work for a small distributed company (~600 employees) that compensates
everyone based on their location. I live in NYC and receive a pretty solid
salary given my experience / region. When I was hired, HR made it clear that
if I move around or relocate, my salary will be adjusted based on the living
costs. The company has roots in Argentina, and about 30% of our engineers live
there. We are all paid enough to live comfortably wherever we are located, but
I imagine that the engineers in Argentina are making significantly less than
the ones in SF. Hiring globally is extremely complex, and colleagues I have
spoken to who live in countries where we do not have a physical presence
(office location) incorporate an entity and contract with a Caribbean firm
that the company contracts through. Day to day those folks are operating as
normal permanent employees.

------
fataliss
I really like the current forced WFH experiment but I have one major issue:
How do you emulate serendipity in work remote. Finding it hard to have ad-hoc
engineering conversations when you have to book a 30min cal window to talk
about anything : /. Personal productivity is up, creativity, down.

------
0n0n0m0uz
I never used to mind working from the office when I had a private space
(cubicle) where I could retreat to when the task commanded deep focus.
Somewhere around 2010 however the dreadful 'open office' took over and I found
myself at a long table in the middle of an open room with little separation
between other employees. This is an absolute nightmare and productivity killer
for me. I was glad to read the opposite end of the spectrum in many of these
comments and it is now even more apparent to me that great flexibility for the
individual is needed to maximize their own style/situation/productivity.

------
ryandvm
So... does this mean Twitter is going to transition to a globally dispersed
workforce? Or are they still going to hire mostly Bay Area folks?

The latter would seem insane if they are going to allow teams to be 100%
remote. Why pay SF rates if you're getting a WFH employee?

~~~
esoterica
You have to pay SF rates if you want to hire SF level talent, even if you are
hiring outside of SF. The average engineer is cheaper outside of SF because
the average engineer is worse, not because you are getting the same quality of
employee for the less money. Most of the good engineers move to SF to get
access to better career opportunities.

I'm not saying all engineers outside SF are mediocre, but if you want the ones
that aren't mediocre you have to pay them the same salaries the SF engineers
are getting, so you're not saving any money.

If the average engineer in a non tech hub was just as competent as the average
SF engineer at half the price, no one would bother paying through the nose to
operate an SF office (but clearly many companies feel the compensation premium
is worth the access to better talent).

~~~
newfeatureok
I'd be curious to see if you have any evidence at all to suggest that the
average engineer outside of SF is more competent than the average engineer in
SF.

The simpler explanation is simply that Bay Area companies have more money to
spend. There is a lot of evidence to suggest this, including the fact that Bay
Area headquartered companies pay more in their remote offices compared to
other companies.

~~~
esoterica
> the fact that Bay Area headquartered companies pay more in their remote
> offices compared to other companies.

That just proves my point that companies pay a premium for Bay Area employees
because that's where talented employees who can demand a premium congregate,
and when they want to hire similarly talented employees in other areas they
also have to pay a similar premium instead of downgrading their compensation
packages to the local market rate.

~~~
newfeatureok
I disagree that it proves your point that Bay Area engineers are somehow more
talented than engineers outside of the bay Area.

~~~
esoterica
Let's say the typical comp in the Bay Area is $200k/year and the typical comp
in Nowhere, OH is $100k/year. The fact that companies continue to pay their
bay area employees $200k when cheaper options are available means that either:

1\. They are willing to pay a huge premium for geographic proximity to their
HQ

2\. The average developer in Nowhere, OH is not as good as the average
developer in the bay area. Not because Ohioans can't code, but because a large
fraction of the ones who can have already moved to the bay area to make twice
as much money. The ones that are as good make as much as the ones in the bay
area, but most are not and drag the average down.

If 1 were the case, then companies would cut people's pay by half if they
moved out of the bay area, or offer half as much money to people working in
their satellite offices. But many companies don't, so clearly option 2 is more
plausible than option 1.

~~~
newfeatureok
Again, you are making a lot of unsubstantiated claims here. Also, there are
more options than the two you have presented.

The only thing you can definitely say about Bay Area developers vs others is
that they’re paid more money - a result of there being companies with more
money located there.

Finally, your entire premise is faulty as you perfectly correlate developer
quality and compensation.

------
dcftoapv
I've seen this movie before. The title should really be: "Twitter will allow
employees to work from home until a hedge fund forces Jack Dorsey to step down
as CEO and Marissa Meyers fires everyone who hasn't been coming into the
office"

------
jedberg
This is great. I've always been an advocate for companies to set themselves up
as remote first, even if they have an office, so that people who _are_ remote
can still be just as involved.

One thing I predict happening if this becomes widespread is a reversion to the
mean on salaries. I think the pay for people outside the Bay Area will go up
and inside the Bay Area it will go down, as being in the Bay Area will no
longer be nearly as essential.

This will have a nice second order effect on Bay Area real estate prices,
bringing them closer in line to reality (but we will still have all the
problems of massive undersupply, because it's just a nice place to live, tech
employee or not).

------
bpyne
Our organization has been working remotely for nearly 2 months. Last week I
received an organization-wide email that we'll start to transition back to the
office in mid-June. Chances are that my team will be one of the last brought
back but I still felt sick about it.

My organization operates culturally at the pace of an insurance company.
Despite the benefits of a semi-remote organization to my employer and the
opportunity this pandemic provided for proof that productivity can remain high
when working remotely, it will choose to have people on-site.

Now I'm searching for remote-only work.

[EDIT: Added "sick" in the last sentence of the first paragraph.]

------
seemslegit
After trying to make tech workers spend as much time as possible at the
workplace with expensive perks became frowned upon - a much cheaper
alternative is to have work spend as much time as possible at employee's home.

------
jhunter1016
It should not have taken a pandemic for this to be the new normal for some
companies. But at least we're seeing companies that were previously hesitant
to allow remote work making things permanent after COVID19. Relationships with
co-workers are important, but the truth is, if more people were able to work
from home, neighborhoods could be the places where individuals end up
socializing. Neighborhoods could be completely transformed thanks to a
reduction in the need to commute.

Obviously, this can't apply for all workers, but for a big chunk of the
working population, it can.

------
hinkley
I want to know how to run a 24/7 company with senior employees spread around
the world a few timezones apart.

I just don't think we have the communication tools to support productive
collaboration between people who hardly ever meet.

(I think what I may be saying is that while yes, there are Open Source
projects that overcome these same sorts of problems, I don't think it's tools
or process that are the reason they work. I suspect the psychology of
volunteer work - performed and received - lets people overlook some pain
points that they don't in a more mercenary setting)

~~~
city41
There are successful, fully remote, companies, such as Automattic (Wordpress),
Gitlab and more. If they can figure it out, seems more companies can as well.

~~~
TacoToni
I love how Automattic refers to their work not as remote, but decentralized.
Remote work indicates there is a central location, but there isn't one at
Automattic.

------
dillonmckay
What about square.com?

This isn’t about declining ad revenue and SF real estate costs, right?

------
Spearchucker
Playing devils advocate - if I were Google or Twitter or x or y other Valley-
based company I'd do what Twitter did and have everyone work remote. I'd hire
the untapped talent in the wider US. And then why not globally? I could get
the smartest brains from Russia, India, Indonesia and so on and pay them just
10% or 20% more than they make locally.

If every other FAANG, in fact every other IT shop in the US or Europe did the
same the wage bill would still crater in comaprison to hiring exclusively from
the valley.

------
dntbnmpls
A lot of people seem to support this, but what if the headline was "Twitter
Will Allow Employees to Live at Work Forever"?

Isn't living at work and working at home two sides of the same coin? Is the
merging of work and home really something we should aspire to? One of the
basis of a healthy work/life balance is the separation of work and home.

In an era of mass surveillance and privacy loss, the home is the last private
space we have. Is it wise to let work invade that space? Just things to think
about.

------
joubert
From anywhere in the US or from anywhere in the world?

I wonder how they're thinking about setting comp ($400k will go a long way in
Kansas, but also in Thailand).

And how are they going to manage the tax implications?

------
aripickar
I think being allowed to work from home doesn't mean that people actually will
all suddenly start doing that. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago
among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the
office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully
remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to
working from home (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will
change much.

------
Bella-Xiang
I will go back to my office next week from WFH status. After almost 4 months
WFH, I feel excited to work at the office because it's really hard to separate
my work from life which made me more tired, although to be honest, sometimes I
feel freer to work from home. And when you work from home , it seems like you
are always online because the time you get off work is not so clear to your
colleagues unless you strictly set your time.

------
rubicon33
Awesome. So happy to hear that. I've worked from home for 7 years straight.
And although I recently went back to work in an office, I still think WFH
should be allowed to any employee.

Sometimes, I just wanna wake up early, slam out my work, and have the rest of
the afternoon to myself. I've done it many times over the 7 years of WFH.
Enforcing everyone to be in an office for 8 hours is just silly. It should
always be about how much work you get done.

------
mola
Always working from home is NOT a benefit for the worker. It screws up work
life balance and basically makes you a drone with no personal life.

------
pdovy
Great move by Twitter. It's a big lift to move from mostly in-office to 100%
work from home, so if you've done it successfully it seems like a no-brainer
to retain that option as a perk post-pandemic.

Personally cutting out ~90 minutes of daily commuting has been fantastic. The
lack of childcare .. not so much, but when that inevitably resolves I don't
see myself going back 5 days a week in the office.

------
alex_young
The last sale of Twitter's HQ in 2015 valued the building at $937 million [0].
I assume this will have some impact on that valuation.

[0] [http://www.crenews.com/general_news/general/barclays-
lent-%2...](http://www.crenews.com/general_news/general/barclays-
lent-%24450mln-for-market-squares-recap.html)

------
someonehere
Honestly, the tools to remotely onboard employees from anywhere in the world
is possible now.

Virtual machines that live in the cloud. Apple DEP. Microsoft InTune. All of
these tools allow companies to drop ship computers to employees from a
warehouse or reseller to the employees doorstep. Turn it on and the IT tools
take over and set the machine up.

------
hindsightbias
I would be wary of all this freedom. Once you are WFH, the variable of
expendability will increase. Those companies who have been doing it for
decades know how hard it is, I doubt twitter does.

I’ll predict this announcement is step 1 in realignment of staff sizing.
Perhaps Disney can buy the FB building and turn it into something productive.

------
und3rth3iP
I wonder what this trend -- if it takes -- will mean for all these giant
office buildings in downtown areas. How many companies simply won't be
returning?

I've also seen the takes re: social distancing requiring larger office space,
but why wouldn't companies just send their employees in in smaller, rotating
groups?

------
tlbsofware
Why is everyone here so dogmatic about this? Work from home is a choice here
and just because you really like your choice and think it’s the best choice
that’s ever been chosen, does not mean it’s the best for everyone else and
that you should aggressively impose your choice onto others. This is how holy
wars happen

~~~
beefalo
Our company did a recent survey that asked if people wanted to be able to wfh
permanently. I'm really interested in seeing how small the loud minority of
"everyone should wfh" crowd is

~~~
tlbsofware
They should do a survey after several months from the first survey to see how
people’s views may change after they own personally experience it. Would be
interesting to see what people’s personal takes are on it compared to their
assumptions.

~~~
beefalo
We have been WFH for over 2 months so I think it should be somewhat
representative. Although "WFH during a pandemic" is never going to be a truly
representative time for this survey.

------
growlist
It would take a heart of stone not to smile at the thought of all those
employers that stubbornly refused to contemplate WFH suddenly discovering that
they had no other choice. My hope is this turns into a wider trend, and those
that want to be are allowed to be unshackled from the office for good.

------
perseusprime11
Smart Move! Twitter employees will be more healthier than others if they
utilize this time to focus on health and socializing differently. Local
communities will become stronger and will help employees work from anywhere.
Personally, I would love to work in a warm place during peak winters.

------
chvid
If I was told to work from home forever, the first thing I would do would be
go and find a co-working space.

------
throwaway743
Fingers crossed that this option becomes a normal offering. Personally, I've
been loving WFH. I've been much happier and productive.

But I can totally understand those who have young children who can distract
them and hinder productivity.

------
throwawaysea
I look forward to the geographic decentralization this enables. People can
move to places that best suit their lifestyle, whether that is low or medium
or high density. They can forego commutes. They can have lower costs of
living. They can potentially even move away from rigid work hours to a
lifestyle that allows them more time and involvement with family.

This move also allows employees to choose locations that better suit their
politics. I've always found it highly dangerous to have large tech platforms,
which are defacto digital public squares (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Medium,
etc.), aggregate in just one or two cities that all share the same culture and
politics. This is a risk especially because these platforms have increasingly
taken steps to ramp up their censorship. If diversity actually matters to
these companies, the diversity of thought introduced by decentralized
geographic distribution will be a benefit to society.

------
cleandreams
I think this will make the extremely expensive cities (e.g. SF, NYC) less
attractive. Why not live in a quiet pretty place to raise kids and save on the
commute. Life in SF has been kind of crazy over the last 5 years. It could use
a downgrade.

------
bcrosby95
I have a friend that works at a mid-sized tech company. He said the CEO was
expecting work from home to be disastrous. It has actually proved a time and
cost saver. Going forward they're going to do work from home 4 of 5 days out
of the week.

------
yoz-y
Well, as long as going to the office is still an option this is a positive
change. However the worst deal is when you are the only one working remote, so
I guess the situation will depend on what the majority team preference will be
in the end.

------
gorgoiler
This feels like a positive story for Twitter. Especially with the early action
in March and the $1000 equipment stipend to help home workers get set up, in
addition to their regular IT equipment.

It’s odd therefore to see this announcement come via Buzzfeed.

------
kalado
I'm honestly suprised that home office is as beloved as it seems to be.

While I 100% support it, I'm also on the far side of introverted. I would have
thought that half or more would hate not having their social interactions
daily.

------
thorwasdfasdf
I'm just guessing, but I think Twitter isn't going to have any trouble finding
talent anymore, if it ever needed more. Once you break down the walls of
location, you now have access to orders of magnitude more talent.

------
christiansakai
This is the one of the hugest news of 2020 now.... Imagine all the
implications!!

------
mk89
I truly hope that more and more companies will follow this example. Working
from home should not be something to ask or beg for, exactly like having a
desk or a laptop shouldn't be a big deal.

------
Apocryphon
Balaji Srinivasan's take (thread):

[https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1260254271578107904](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1260254271578107904)

------
irrational
My work said today we should probably expect to work from home through the
summer. But haven’t medical professionals said that there might be a new
outbreak next Fall? Maybe I’ll never go back to the office.

------
HABytes
I think that twitter allows employees to work from home ia great for twitter
and his employees. keep it up.But amazon did not do that. I hope you were all
agree that amazon no work for his employees.

------
raminf
One of the interesting side-effects of everyone working from home has been
that group videoconference meetings have been more equitable, instead of those
in a physical meeting room vs. those calling in.

------
mrfusion
The real advantage of remote working isn’t even making your employees happier.
It’s that you can hire world class talent from anywhere in the world.

Will twitter be opening to hiring from other states and countries?

------
Mandatum
Work for one of the big ones. Our founder likes building hospitals.

We're following suit, just haven't announced officially.

This won't be good for me. Competition with regions is going to be tough.

------
jb775
And by "Forever", Twitter means that it will require employees to upload their
brains into cyborg host bodies and dispose of their human bodies.

------
Irishsteve
Is there any mention of them making internal shifts to support people working
from home forever or will the practicalities of it mean people still need to
work near the Twitter HQ

------
itsmefaz
This is a really bad idea..

Firstly, home is not an effective place of work. I come home mostly to be with
my family and not take my problems from work to home.. Aren't there many
studies done on the same, why work shouldn't be brought to home and stuff..

Secondly, if the employer provides all the required setup (monitors, webcams,
speakers) and support for electricity backups and stuff then I might be
willing. The point about electricity backup is very true especially for
developing countries.

Thirdly, I'm actually working more (double time) compared to only working 8
hours. This also has to do with my time management but people are actually
lazy at home and very hard to be dependent on them..

~~~
jsight
[begin tongue in cheek rant] As someone who has worked from home for years,
I'm really intrigued by your reasoning behind making blanket statements like
this. I had no idea that my company should be providing free backup
electricity for me. Should they provide free snacks and coffee too? [end rant]

Seriously, working from home is a great privilege for some and a tremendous
burden for others. It is wonderful that companies are realizing that there are
tremendous benefits to giving employees freedom and choices.

One size (or approach) does not fit all.

------
rb808
Any reason why they would continue to hire American Developers? Our shops in
Moscow and Bangalore probably have better developers than our US office at
<10% of the salary.

~~~
exolymph
> Our shops in Moscow and Bangalore probably have better developers than our
> US office at <10% of the salary.

Easy answer: No they don't. Foreigners do not funge for Americans for myriad
reasons (cultural). Offshoring won't replace USA teams just like it hasn't for
the past several decades.

------
dqpb
I'm curious if there have been any models of the economic impact if high
salary remote workers were to disperse themselves across the US to lower cost-
of-living cities.

------
sakofchit
This is pretty cool! I think being in quarantine made a lot of (tech)
companies are starting to realize that they can support WFH efficiently.

Hopefully other companies will follow.

------
thom
Dunno if this is good or bad news for designing new ways to put stuff I don't
want in my timeline, but good luck with it, whatever you all do during the
day.

------
briandear
Some great tax benefits to this. I bet there will be more than a few Twitter
folks that will discover states without high taxes or cost of living.

------
papin
I hope more companies allow this WFH rule to some of its employees. I've seen
some employees gets better performance when working from home

------
thuruv
How do you guys cope with non distracted part of being in a office space and
compartmentalize the work thoughts and personal one. Curious to know.

------
oknoorap
Nice move! WordPress did this years ago by close their office. Their
Developers never come to office instead working remote from home.

------
TLightful
Office Chit Chat vs Home Procastination

Same thing.

Same productive outcome.

Hence, working from the office or working from home is ... the ...same ...
gawd ... damn ... thing.

Well done to Twitter for growing a set.

------
Endlessly
At some point, unless working onsite is (really) essential — employees &
employers that have onsite unnecessary office space should have to pay tax to
do so, otherwise, them having an office space just paid for by those who are
willing not to have an office.

Having non-essential spaces for people is complete unnecessary — and it:
contributes in less health eating habits, traffic, cars, HVAC related energy
costs, wasted time commuting, rising real estate costs, economic lost during
pandemics due to downtime, etc.

Same principle holds true for non-essential travel.

------
sabujp
WFH works when schools are also open and or your kids aren't bothering you
every 10 minutes. What I would give to be back in my 20s

------
ken47
I want to see the text of Dorsey's email itself. It would have been nice if
the text was included in the article at some point.

------
ghostpepper
Is this really breaking news? Tons of tech companies allow this. If anything
it's news that they didn't allow it before.

~~~
MattGaiser
Any big name ones allow it? Twitter is the largest that I know of.

------
jb775
And by "Home", Twitter means that it expects all employees to move into the
office.

------
emptychombu
I suspect at some point, if there is a larger adoption, this is going to
lessen the need for work visas etc.

------
5etho
Nozbe, polish to-do app are home office only, check their culture and blogs,
they are very interesting

------
mrfusion
I’m guessing they still won’t hire anyone who doesn’t live nearby though..
just cuz. (Anyone know?)

------
pacija
"Forever"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~
Inigo Montoya

------
bg24
Thank you Twitter. I will send my resume for your consideration.

Love it how the next 10 years will turn out.

------
greatwhitenorth
I hope this opens up more remote opportunities in Canada. Also, the whole of
Americas.

------
cryptica
Do Twitter employees actually work? The thing looks the same as it always has.

------
thrownaway954
there is no reason in this day and age for a tech company to have a physical
location. if your servers are up in the cloud, there is no reason for your
programmers, or any other staff for that matter, to be in an office.

------
fasteddie31003
Can I move from CA to Reno NV, work remote, and pay no state income tax in NV?

------
socrates1998
For now... Didn't Yahoo say this as well like 8 years ago?

------
hanaq
Does anyone know how their product team will handle this?

------
yalogin
Which area’s salary will they pay for new hires though?

------
sabersei2
In other words, doubled fucked/enslaved!

------
yepthatsreality
Marissa Mayer is rolling in her pile of Yahoo! money.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Immortality deserves a better headline than this.

------
koolhead17
Sounds like Yahoo pre Marissa Mayer era. :)

------
Hoasi
Plot twist: forever, does not exist.

------
swyx
i think this is the busting of the SF Real Estate bubble. if you own SF Real
Estate... well.. too late.

------
jefflombardjr
The remote cat is out of the bag.

------
SupriseAnxiety
This is actually beautiful

------
lihaciudaniel
Not unusual gitlab, etc...

------
0binbrain
Finally getting it.

------
xtat
ITS HAPPENING GUYS

------
aloukissas
It starts.

------
wintorez
Good!

------
nitsky
perhaps twitter discovered vscode live share

------
freepor
Yikes. My Silicon Valley home price is likely to suffer.

~~~
535188B17C93743
Boo hoo

~~~
freepor
Not asking for any sympathy — not asking anyone to care about my problems any
more than I care about theirs.

