Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you had to, you know, get the people from work and take them to a place and all that, it involved paying a lot of money for extra security and such. With no offices, it's a lot easier, and you never have to meet the person face to face.
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
Look, you can't have it both ways. People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it's going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.
Which is it?
As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.
I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work (and probably want my next job to be remote too), I still fully believe it's a long term "leading lambs to the slaughter" type of plan. Companies save big on remote in so many ways. No more offices. No more weekly happy hours (just do a company retreat every 6 months). They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose. Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.
It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.
Maybe, but that works both ways. Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.
In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.
> Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.
Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.
I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.
When you’re young maybe, but after ten or fifteen years of “deep social connections”, working remote can be quite peaceful and satisfying. Personally I’ve always been more productive working at home.
I always see this parroted by people on HN and it's such a pathetic stance to take.
Every job I've been at I've formed close friends. My closest friends include people from every job and I don't think it's a coincidence. These friendships are just as real (and I'd argue stronger) than your "real" friends.
Maybe the problem is with you and you are just somebody people don't like? Or you think you shouldn't be making friends at work which is kind of sad.
I have collected work friends since 1998. Most of the time it dwindles to one or two per job, after a few years. But former colleagues now outnumber friends from primary school (1), highschool (0), college (5), sports I used to play (0), bars I drank at (0), places I used to live (3) and where I live now, ie: neighbours (6).
Should you create life-long bonds with people because of accidents of geography, or because you have chosen to spend your working life doing the same thing? Even the incidental friendships you make at the water cooler with people who just happen to be working in the same company are as valid as the ones you make when you're walking your dog.
Why did you jump to assuming people don’t like the parent poster? It’s totally possible that they get on well with everyone but don’t feel the need to go for after work drinks with them.
The reality is outside of work you pick your friends. At work, you're placed on a team with other people and you have no choice but to work with them. Sometimes they're great, but sometimes they're people you want nothing to do with, but they're on your team so you suck it up and make it work to the extent required by the job.
Over my career I've both worked with people that I've voluntarily kept in touch with after our time together ended (we even occasionally float the idea of jumping ship and going into business together) and people that drove me up the wall who I couldn't wait to get out of my life (as people, not even necessarily that they were unproductive employees, although some of them were). If I could just have less of those forced interactions due to physical proximity, then I'd have more social energy to spend on people I actually want to spend it on.
Not really. you can't force anyone to be your friend, and if there is some supericial reason someone doesn't like you, you can't really change that (not without a big change I guess. I'm sure if you got ripped you'd suddenly have a lot more "friends). You're at the mercy of luck in where you meet and who clicks with you. And that gets harder as meetups and socialties become more based around how drunk you get or if you like sports. I like neither.
I don't even know how you find "real friends" these days without being friends since grade school/college. Been trying for years in meetups to make real friends and nothing clicks. I have some good friends but they are as busy as I am and syncing up to meet is hard.
No one is saying they can’t make friends at work. They are saying there is a big difference in quality between work friendships and non-work friendships. The point is that if the main reason you are all associating is because you are being paid to, that the relationship can be severed when someone is fired, and that when you take a new job those relationships are quickly replaced by new ones, then it isn’t actually a strong relationship.
I had friends at the office and even a kind of crush. One month into the pandemic, we just didn't care about trying to keep the non-work banter going. It's a forced situation; romance as a result of shared stressors in particular is well documented, but not necessarily healthier than just meeting someone randomly.
You're young and I agree with your assessment. I also think that working close together is fundamental to start something new quickly, especially if the team doesn't know each other well. Think of new hires in a new company of any kind. However I rather pick something to work from home and keep my social life for the evenings and the weekends. It's so much more convenient than having to commute, from 10 minutes to one hour. And not be bound to 9-18.
While I've not worked fully remotely for my actual job, I've had a "remote" side-project for about a decade now.
Some of the people I've worked with on it, I've made friends with—ranging from "friendly working relationship" to "would totally hang out with IRL if that were an option."
I'm also a member of a small online community that's about the same age, that includes a bunch of people who have never met physically, and probably never will, but who are very close friends, help each other through some pretty rough times, and are generally very supportive of each other.
"Remote" doesn't have to mean "never interact outside of pure work". You can 100% make friends remotely. Granted, it's not exactly the same type of social interaction as hanging out with someone in a physical space, but it's certainly social interaction—and for many people (me included), it's often better, because it doesn't have the same kinds of demands and pressures as physical interaction. As an introvert, it's much less draining for me to interact virtually.
If that's not true of you—if you're both someone who craves genuine physical interaction, and someone for whom the workplace is the primary place you want to get that—no one (or, well, nearly no one) is saying you shouldn't have access to that. We're just saying your experience is not universal, and we want to make sure there are a healthy variety of options for people with different needs and desires.
>Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with.
I would. No sarcasm. With the caveat that I don't have to spend 9 hours a day with them, as I'm not forced into an office space with them.
I've also found that working at companies which push for closer employee social bonds with countless office activities, quarterly teambuilding events, parties, etc. actually diminished my QoL. I realized that what I actually want are deep connections with people I like, not someone someone else hired to work on the same project. All those (imo, meaningless) socializing activities cut into my free time I could have been spending with friends and family. Working remotely also frees up time I would be wasting on commutes.
>Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships
That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.
idk I religiously firewall my work and personal life but still feel a lot of "personal work employment inertia":
- I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
- I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge, or to get something done through unofficial channels
- I know who is more or less competent in specific domains
- I know what kind of work people do and do not enjoy
etc. It's actually the main reason I haven't done the whole salary optimization by job hopping thing, well that and the effort of hyping myself up into extroverted self-pimp mode
This type of knowledge is far more valuable than many people realize. When you see people who get things done, get more raises, or seem to do great work without working so hard... then they know things about how to operate in the organization.
The average tenure at most tech companies are around 3 years. I assure you that most of your “friends” at work won’t keep in touch with you three years after you leave.
Perhaps the UK is different (Im making assumptions obvs) but I’ve kept in touch with quite a few from each job I’ve worked in - potentially 50% of my friends are people Ive worked with.
I also see “acquaintances” keeping in touch with ex-colleagues on some social media sites, so I know Im not an exception.
I appreciate “most” isnt all, but your comment is very different to my decade of experience. Work is a great place to form friendships.
I do think there's a big cultural difference. I've worked over a decade each in the UK, Australia, and now the US. In the UK and Australia, it was very common to hang out with colleagues socially, but I see it rarely in the US. Maybe it has to do with the "pub culture" in the UK and Aus, and a few beers after work being common, which it doesn't seem to be in the US (at least where I've lived - places with a 'bar scene' like New York may be quite different).
I may be biased due to getting older and having a family, so I'd expect to hang out after work less anyway, but I observe that generally amongst younger colleagues too.
When I was younger at my second job between 25-34, we all had more money than sense (not anywhere near what we can make today) and it was a combination of men and women. We were all single, hung out at each others house, went to strip clubs together (yes the women too) went on overnight trips at cabins together. But as we got older, and settle down, we became more of “coworkers”. I keep in touch with a couple of them once or twice a year.
At my third job between 2008-2012, I keep in touch with one guy that followed me across two more jobs until 2015. We try to meet along with one of my coworkers from my third job at least once per quarter.
I also met my second and current wife at my third job. But I can’t honestly say whether I would have tried dating her if I hadn’t known that the company we worked at was about to go under anyway.
I had a Slack group where I kept in touch with 5 of my coworkers from my 5th job between 2014-2016. But that died off.
When I go back to my home state, I am going to try to connect with my former CTO and a couple of other people from my 7th job (2018-2020). My former CTO reaches out to me every now and then and we talk. I owe him, he gave me a chance to lead their “cloud native initiatives” and hired me even though I had never opened the AWS console at the time. But he thought “I had some good ideas” even though he knew I had just watched a video and went through a certification training.
Now that I work remotely at AWS in the consulting department, there isn’t anyone I consider a “friend”, but one person who I worked with from the time they were an intern when I was their mentor.
The “team” I work with changes dynamically based on the project.
Complete opposite experience for me. Worked for a startup a couple of years as a young dev, made some amazing friends including my wife. 12 years later we're all quite a bit older and still meet up every couple of months (and now our kids are best friends).
I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies. Only two of them has anyone heard of. One was a fortune 10 company at the time (ruined by the decisions of Jack Welch) and one is currently a fortune 10 company. I keep in touch in real life with three people. One person followed me between three companies between 2008-2015 and I married the other.
Well the average person only has a few close friends. It sounds like you made at least one (your wife) at work, so having a work place where deep social connections are possible was very valuable to you.
That's fine, then I'll have friends in one place for three years, and then I'll have friends in another place for three years. I don't see the problem here.
A 2080 worker who works 35 years will spend over 8 entire years of their life at their job.
I have plenty of friends in real life and plenty of things to do, but I do value, at least somewhat a good work environment considering how much of my life I'm going to spend in it.
meanwhile all my post college relations have been through work and I've struggled to try and make friends outside of work. Unironic advice seems to be to make friends with co-workers. And meetups, which I have yet to form a signifigant bond at (when most people flake after 1-2 sessions and sessions are monthly, I can't blame them).
I think you misunderstand. It's the opposite; it's that our non-work relationships are more meaningful, not that we are unable to form friendships at work.
Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!
I am not sure why you would say that. I mean it is true, but I am not sure how it is relevant here. If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth. If I don't go to work and WANT to engage with others so badly, I will. And besides, meaningful relations is a meaningless term.
Example. My parent has neighbors. They have lived closely to one another. So closely and long, in fact, they had to sue to resolve some outstanding issues. In other words, neither prolonged proximity or meaningful relationship is a useful metric. I will trade those for a new neighbor every year.
Humans work like they always worked. Their predilections move them. If those are not satisfied, they are channeled.
The big problem these days is age. My neighhbors seem fine but are in different stages in life. I more or less inherited this house but it's a house built for families to be raised. So all my neighbors are 40's+ taking care of at best very young teenage kids, and I'm a 20's tech dude. Not much clicks.
>If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth
I guess all my 20's demograpic in town don't crave socialiation. Or I guess literally all of them are in bars. Not my scene.
This is what I have seen so far. The younger cousins in my extended family consciously opted to live in Chicago-Chicago specifically due to night life. I will admit that I never understood it ( and I moved to suburbs as soon as it became an option for me ). Naturally, all anecdotal, but I doubt people changed that much over 20 or so years.
You have a point and I actually understand that rationale. I have no real argument against it beyond general question of whether individual loneliness should be solved with my forced presence.
My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.
Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.
Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.
I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.
> Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view
I’m a pretty social person, and have great relationships both at work and outside of work: this list you’ve provided made me recoil in disagreement. The first two items are aesthetics and politics!? Even philosophy and world view I cannot strongly agree with.
Not saying that this isn’t true for you, and that’s genuinely fine. But I wouldn’t agree that you can generalize your preferences in relationships to others if the quoted sentence is genuinely true.
Mutual respect, friendliness, interest, shared experiences come to mind for me, though I admittedly typed that up in a few seconds without thinking very much about it.
I like (and appear to be liked by) many people where our politics are quite different, including my spouse. I value “how interesting are you to interact with?” far more than “how perfect a mirror are you?”
>Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly
I'm not goint to like nor even remember every neightbor, but it gives me OPPORTUNITY. You need some luck to make friends post college, and luck is simply opportunity + preoaration.
Especially post COVID, opportunities are sparse. All I want is a chance. If we don't click, cool. The kind of people that I probably click with aren't going to random meetups I guess.
My dad retired from his factory job last year. Outside of company Xmas events, he met his colleagues exactly 0 times in a social context while he worked there.
I would argue that proximity matters, but there are many different ways of slicing proximity.
Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.
But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.
Yes, and the point is that if you or your coworker is laid off or take a new job, that proximity is immediately nullified and the relationship typically withers and dies.
Spend less time socializing at work, and more time creating that prolonged proximity outside of work, so that relationships of your choosing can be formed that are less subject to the whims of your bosses and the economy.
that's why I show up to my olympic weightlifting club, and music shows, and acroyoga jams regularly.
I do like my co-workers. A lot. But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die. I can't speak for everyone, but personally the time/effort invested into forming meaningful relations by regularly showing up to places where I can engage with others who have similar interests (oly lifting, music, acroyoga) has probably been the best thing I've done for myself.
And being able to work remotely greatly facilitates that.
even if that were the case, the only place you're getting prolonged proximity to a (relatively) fixed group of people is your workplace? that sounds super not good.
Employee and employer are not on equal footing. This is better understood among the workers in other industries. The current situation with supply and demand of CS workers has led some to believe that this trend will never die. It may not stay like this and if/when that day comes, lord help us for we are not prepared.
I'm currently reading Marx Das Kapital and it's amazing how all the narratives are more or less exactly the same. The worker is lazy, society will collapse if every moment of time is not taken from the socialised labour etc.
>In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.
yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.
This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.
That's a really good point. Humans generally don't like big changes, so removing friction to a big change makes it more likely. While remote work might make it a bit easier to fire someone, it totally makes it easier to leave.
Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.
As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.
> because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.
But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting remote work as just your average way of doing business means what I can fire my boss too, without breaking a sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find another, similar, remote work just easily. Oh, I don't need to take the day off for the interview.
it works because high compensation and strength of job market, not "results in". these (high paid) workers have a lot of power individually which balances against the scale power of the organization. Not so for low skill workers. At will employment will not lead to higher wages for low skill workers. It will lead to fuller employment, more overall wages.
I understand why low-skill workers want to form unions, just like I understand how people want to buy gas and drive a 1 ton internal combustion engine around by themselves, it makes their lives better in the short term.
but in that comment I went on to say that the overall (aggregate, total) wages paid by greedy, rapacious capitalists to low-wage workers (taken as a group) will be higher without unions. It's well known that unions get higher wages for their members at the expense of unemployment for their non-members.
I think the right answer is policies that decrease the power of large employers by making sure that they are always competing against other large employers. I don't think there should be 1 Amazon, I think Amazon should be broken into a half dozen Amazons. Bezos would continue to own the same %age of the Amazons as he does of Amazon, so it's fair to him, but Amazon would no longer be a monopsony in the the labor market and the small vendor marketplace, nor have monopoly power for consumers, so fair to everyone else also.
such a hard core market solution as I'm proposing would probably drive wages down, but it would also drive prices down, and driving prices down (or holding back increases, nobody wants deflation) is a really powerful way to increase standards of living
While I understand your argument, and it has some legitimacy, particularly in relation to anti-trust regulation and moving back to actually enforcing the laws, as opposed to what has been happening since the late 1980s.
Low-skill workers only have the power to withdraw their labor (which is their only negotiating leverage) when their labor is required.
As for unions getting higher wages for their members, that's their job (by definition). It's not at the expense of unemployment for their non-members.
The "hard core" market solution you're proposing is what used to be implemented ever since the anti-trust laws and regulations were passed in the early 20th century. Standard Oil was broken up and the companies that exist as a result today (Mobil, Exxon, etc) have all done very well in spite of Standard Oil being split. The same applies to AT&T and IBM (less so, due to their own management) and Microsoft.
no, anti-trust laws talk about abuse of monopoly power, which can only be established after years of said abuse and which leave many of the negative patterns untouched. I'm talking about using market share itself as the metric
> "hard core" market solution
I call it hard-core because most of the arguments for "free market" solutions wind up protecting large businesses. I'm talking about making sure to subject large businesses to market forces for the benefit of consumers, whose jobs I'm not willing to protect. To put it in vulgar political terms, neither the socialist Democrats nor the capitalist Republicans would support what I'm talking about, that's how you know it's good. And it's more of a thought experiment, it's like saying "I know the answer, carbon capture!" when carbon capture is the unknown hard part, but you have to think this way to achieve a breakthrough. I'm focusing attention on the parts of the market that are failing.
> not at the expense of unemployment
you're writing patiently as if you're teaching me something (which i don't mind, i'm pedantic af, welcome friend), but unions getting higher wages at the cost of higher unemployment is standard econ 101, taught in every class everywhere, except maybe Political Economy where they talk about workers's feelings.
Thanks for that longer (and gracious) explanation.
Upon a more careful re-reading, your post is more clear; I chalk up my misreading to reading and replying while commuting back home from the airport. The fault is in my reading not your writing.
How are Unions "organized Mafia" (btw, Mafia, by definition is "organized crime") yet organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and other "business associations" are not?
Why are businesses allowed to "organize" and "influence politics" (Citizens United decision anyone?) yet when a union does it, it's considered somehow theft from workers and "socialist".
If capitalism is about regulated free markets, then why is a regulated labor market not "free"? Unregulated markets are both anarchic and lead to oligarchic and monopolistic behavior, as can be seen in areas like big tech etc.
Capital "vs" labor is by definition about labor attempting to extract as much of the profit of their labor as they can, while capital will be working to achieve the opposite. To ensure that this is at least managed, a regulated market, with an impartial regulator and legitimate market laws is required.
> I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work ...
I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.
I took it as a double entendre. We took advantage of the WFH policy and the company also took advantage of us, coz more work got done, since we had nowhere to go.
> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.
This is only a negative for people who were already making absurdly high incomes in HCOL areas. For many people away from the coasts, salaries are now higher because they have access to the kinds of jobs and companies they didn’t before.
> Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.
Has this every not been the case? Besides, there are only two kinds of layoffs. Massive ones that do not take performance into account, and rarely take input from your direct manager about who is going and who is staying. On the other hand, for layoffs in which performance is taken into account, I’m sure many prefer the criteria to be more about their work than how chummy they are with the boss and how well they politick.
I can see how these might be disadvantages for a certain kind of worker, but for other kinds they are huge wins.
Maybe the HN fear of "depress salaries" isn't someone from Nebraska taking Cali tech jobs, but could be most likely a dog whistle for foreigners from abroad taking US tech jobs.
I don't live there anymore but in my home county in Eastern Europe, the WFH boom from 2020 brought in thousands of well paying tech jobs from US companies which might have never arrived if not for Covid. Tech workers there are making bank now, relative to local CoL.
Who knows, maybe this trend will accelerate now that the tap of zero interest money which enabled companie to out-bid each other for SV labor has dried out and many start-up and scale-ups need to actually be profitable for a change, they might look towards skilled remote workers abroad to fill their ranks till the next bull run.
I 100% think this is the long term play. Once we figure out how to really have "remote only" companies, the "remote" part won't be "remote in the USA" but "remote in some cheap part of the world". We tried this with outsourcing but it failed because we didn't have the "remote" part down... now we do...
As someone that has dealt with local (Australia) and remote (Slovakia, Mumbai, Phillipines, Thailand) outsourcing, the problem is not the individual workers, or even language, time zones etc.
The problem is more about the company/organization that is doing the outsourcing than the outsourced work itself. You have to have a clear definition of what you are trying to outsource. Is it "just coding"? Is it "some design, but not analysis"? Is it "do everything below a certain level of management" (the worst)?
If you don't know what you want other than "cheap" then you won't get either of the other two qualities of "good" or "quick".
Developers aren't fungible, neither are designers, or analysts or architects. About the only people that are fungible and easily replaceable are project managers (sorry, buzzword compliant "product owners" and "SAFe scaled Agile practitioners").
Yes. Agree. The only thing preventing this going all the way is the friction in timezones and difficulty in co-ordination (i.e. still requires someone local to the remote people to manage their work).
Well for my line of work (app dev/cloud consulting) there is lot of face time, video conferencing with clients, travel to client sites, etc.
But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.
I don’t think it’s a dog whistle at all (nor does it need to be).
Drawing from a worldwide pool of capable technologists is pretty obviously the end state and, unless global demand picks up by a factor of over 10x, that will inevitably depress tech salaries in the currently most highly compensated markets (while raising salaries on the other end of the distribution).
Oh hey this is literally me. Started working remote in 2015 and really upped my salary in 2020 working for AWS remotely and then moved to an actual good company. Never had to move to California or Washington.
Sorry to hear that. Haha. Nah, it's very org dependent. A bunch of my team all quit around the same time last year. One of my buddies had been happily there for 6 years.
I think this is true: employees will be able to choose from far more options, and they will have more competition. The first phase of this is competing with anyone in the US, but soon enough companies will be hiring abroad for zoom-based jobs. If a foreign employee can work in a reasonable time-zone, and has great english language skills, what's the difference?
I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc.
Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.
You might find someone with 80% of the ability for 60% of the price, or 50% for 25%, and in some cases companies could save a lot that way. But obviously two 50% developers != one 100% developer in output. And just to reiterate, I'm not saying excellent developers don't exist in other countries; they of course do, but you can't generally expect to get them for a fraction of the price. Maybe a slight discount, which would obviously be worth companies pursuing, but not enough to suddenly put US developers out of work en masse. That's already mostly true, and will become entirely true as remote work becomes more the norm. So it will be somewhat good for developers outside the US, and for US companies; I just don't think the change there will be as massive as it might appear.
I also expect on net it will be great for most domestic US developers as well; there may be added competition, but there will also be more flexibility. The one group that I guess will likely lose out are those who really want to live somewhere like San Francisco, as you'll still have the disadvantage of cost of living, but lose the advantage of privileged access to high-paying companies. (Though as a result, those property values will probably come down over time.)
> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.
I know. This is going to sound crazy.
The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.
A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.
Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.
Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?
It will be less stable, but I think I agree with your analysis ( and in real terms, when was it really stable .. 50s? ). Oddly, I think it may only add to the 'Previous team didn't know what they were doing. Fix it.' vicious cycle. In a sense, companies will be re-inventing the big 3 consulting companies.
It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise really smart data guy, who was giving me something that clearly did not make sense in the business context - not everything can reasonably be placed in a requirement ( assume earth is not flat ).
They were also 100% cost driven and not value driven. A lot of companies have opened offices in other countries and hired great people, but they focused exclusively on value.
Most companies just looked at the direct cost and went with it. Of course they picked the absolute worst workers and so the whole scheme collapsed.
I would definitely argue a loss of productivity. But those costs are far outweighed by the benefits, such as less overhead, greater hiring radius, and flexibility. Plus a lot of the weaknesses are more managerial than technical, like synchronous vs async tasks and finding more effective ways to measure productivity.
Once you decide to go to "Europe" then the question becomes why the UK and not somewhere vastly cheaper like Romania or Poland. Wages in the UK are lower but wages in eastern Europe are much lower still.
Not as true now as it was even 2 years ago. Slovakian wages are reaching parity with the "West" of Europe, and Romania is climbing as well.
Until the war, Ukraine was also climbing that same ladder. And when the war is over, they will soar. Their skills are at least the equivalent of any developer I've worked with, their language skills are impressive, and their analysis and design skills are as well.
The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.
This is nonsense. What they're saying is that we need to start designing habitation to be more localized and less dependent on commuting and endlessly expanding suburbia. Suburbs, particularly the US variety (and Australia) are terrible because of the lack of local facilities, hospitality and retail.
Cities need to downsize but at the same time regionalize. Smaller cities with HSR and equivalent will work to reduce the need for individual vehicles, which saves on costs, environment, energy consumption, and people's overall health.
Working in a local community is much better for everyone involved than people spending 1+ hours each way every day to get from their home to their work and back again.
The same applies to retail, hospitality and most other service industries.
Manufacturing (particularly heavy industry) is better to be localized to transport hubs (rail, river, sea ports) because of the tonnage that has to be moved in and out, as well as localizing the polluting and environmental degradation (no one really wants to live next to a steel mill).
The latest CT is that the WEF is trying to somehow lock people into their suburb and restrict freedom of travel. That's complete and utter nonsense.
Everything you said is correct and I would agree with - but under the presumption that the climate emergency is genuine and that the individual contributors in the agencies responsible for the models and predictions have not been compromised, coerced, baited, led by funding into agreeing with corporate and governmental agendas, interests.
Is it not odd that we have traditional liberal activists and corporate/government on the same side also?
I agree wholly with you regarding how it is better for everything to be community based, with people working in a local community, that cities need to downsize, that manufacturing is better to be localized, all of these things move us closer to a much better world and I would even be happy if the government used its power to force the change on the population ... but if you study the groups behind this they are international socialists, the presentations they have given quite clearly outline malicious intentions when you look at other movements and ideas the same groups are lobbying for.
Regarding the WEF point you made. I point you towards the case of Oxford City in the UK , which as of last month has already implemented a 15 minute city without any dialogue with its citizens.
The communist china style tracking camera and permit system has been created in their city and it is likely by next year its citizens will start to be fined 70 pounds sterling whenever they go to a neighboring zone without a permit.
It was reported this week 100 councils (local governmental planning agencies) have signed up to implement this in the UK in their jurisdictions own cities. This is without any dialogue or permission with their citizens.
Does the speed of this being rolled out not frighten you enough to question what is going on? It is such a drastic change. Taking a trip in a car from one part of the city to another is such a small journey, such a small cost to the environment. It is not like a cross country trip, I understand the distances between points in the USA is larger but they are planning this for the cities in the USA too, not longer journeys, but god knows where this will end.
And we can even have somewhat contradictory opinions about things.
E.g. the option for remote work is really nice for many and may be required to be viable in the future... but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?
>"but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?"
I do not believe I am special in any way but I am remote since 2000 and while working with the clients I often work with teams. At no point I felt like I am loosing some "fundamental part". Maybe because work team is work team and nothing more. I do not consider work as a source of friends even though I have acquired couple this way. Mostly I have friends outside of work.
>but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office?
In some ways yes. It is much harder to brainstorm through conference calls for example.
>And does it really just make us more expendable?
technically yes. It's very easy to be "forgotten" in a remote setting if your job is isolated out. They won't even have a face to place on someone when it comes to re-orgs.
There are a bunch of different people reacting to a stressful change in economy and its effects on the job market. That's all.
It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to clean house).
Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison their valued contributors just to have their competition scoop them up.
The emphasis here is on Good. Bad companies likely will jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction because they aren't paying attention. Remote work is one of those factors that some companies are struggling to set policies for.
Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many people on HN work for them.
Some companies laying off, the common issue is the appearance of over-hiring like facebook. I know two small companies that are hiring, so what can you conclude? Nothing in general. I think it's mostly just following the herd.
Different types of workers need different levels of face-to-face interaction.
Marketing teams, creatives and other similar groups need more face-to-face interaction because what they're creating is all about interaction, with the company's customers, their consumers (if not B2C), etc.
Those building the product after the marketing and other designers have created their designs don't require as much F2F time. They need whiteboards and C4 diagrams (in IT at least) when architecting systems, as well as some team F2F for thrashing out system level functionality and how it will be implemented (shared services etc).
But an individual developer, writing code, doesn't need F2F time with anyone. They need the capability to be available (video calls, text chat etc), but it's not an inherent requirement.
> doubt [that lack of physical presence] factors much into the decision overall.
Having done an in-office RIF and a remote-in-COVID RIF, I can confirm that the decisions are made in Spreadsheetville and the actual notifications are different but not different enough to detectably feedback into the plan.
I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet.
An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-drone.
That's never going to happen. Most people (maybe not you, you savant) need someone's physical presence to see them as a real person. The phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" did not become irrelevant just because I can email someone across the world.
For the older generation, maybe. For the generation that grew up with online friends who they rarely or never met physically, it's completely normal. Sadly we'll have to wait a while for that generation to reach management age.
The hackernews zeitgeist assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains, despite being in an industry that is highly privileged at the expense of other possible businesses due to economic policy.
> assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains
Then took a moment to do a quick mental check, recall faces and dress codes and behaviours, and I could hardly disagree, they are run by cartoon villains!
Both ex bosses of mine and pop CEOs fit the bill to such a degree that it's scary.
I've found "At your own discretion" jobs are great. The downside is they can be hard for a company to justify unless the space is being used for other means than just "the occasional office space". I'm "100% remote" but can head in to our main office (just under 2 hours away) any time and if it's a multi-day engagement there is a hotel across the street. Far enough away that I never feel like I have to come in for anything but close enough that if something is better done in person/a fun event I can go there without coordinating flights and a rental or driving all day.
My last job had a similar structure but the office was ~15 minutes away so it was harder to push back on some "well let's just all work on this here together for the next 3 weeks since we're local" type asks and didn't work out as well. I don't mind collaborating but after years of not being used to coming in every day coming in is honestly not much better to me than the idea of "my job requires me to fly out for weeks at a time" type travel (which I've also done before).
Is the expectation here that "people on HN" are a monolith and only capable of singular thought? Are you suggesting there can't or shouldn't be any room for diversity of thought and debate?
I think comments like yours are interesting. You say people on HN shit on both, pretending you caught the hive-mind in some kind of hypocrisy. I'd bet there are more than two people here that can hold more than two opinions. Why would you expect everyone to be of the same opinion?
And the two extremes don't even cover the whole spectrum of opinions you can have.
I personally like working in the office, I believe humans are social animals that need more than just interaction through voice and crappy video with a bad angle, yet I hate the commute. So I'm completely fine with the hybrid approach we have right now at my company. Although I would understand if for cost-savings they'd make us 100% remote.
Working from home where I'm mostly independent is great, I can concentrate much better. Working from home on something that needs collaboration is hard. Meetings in Teams are psychologically exhausting. You can't see the reactions of people when you present something. This feedback is necessary.
Maybe if we had some kind of VR/metaverse kind of thing it would help, but it would need to convey facial micro-expressions in real-time. Audio would need to be placed appropriately in the room.
Like for VR meetings to make sense it shouldn't be necessary to mute your microphone. The app would need to make it sound like you're in a room together and multiple people can be distinguished properly by ear.
You know that crowds can have multiple different opinions that are conflicting at the same time.
Wait for it… even single person can hold 2 or more conflicting opinions or views at the same time. Fun part is they also can and will use them in discussions as they see fit.
“You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation.
> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.
You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.
It's not a contradiction to say I want to work remotely and I don't want the company to use it against me. A company can choose to go remote for good and bad reasons. If they do it for bad reasons, they get shit on. In the context of layoffs, it's not irrational to consider the motive might be bad.
why can't it be both ways? neither of those things is absolutes. you can have shitty companies that want to treat employees like temporary resources and may use remote work to streamline the facilitation of that. you can also have companies that treat employees well and don't see the need to force them into the office unnecessarily. both can happen. we don't have to think about things singularly.
Well, you can have it both (or even more) ways: no matter what companies do, someone will crap on them! This can be universal (all companies) or particular (e.g., the company that overbilled me).
And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism).
You claimed: we must have it one way or the other. This is false. Game theory says you are wrong and has proofs that you are wrong in the form of proofs of mixed strategies being optimal equilibrium strategies. In these strategies we have the assumption of having it both ways - the probabilities have to add one, but they don't have to be binary.
Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways.
Consider rock paper scissors.
If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors.
So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations.
> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home
This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home.
I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer.
Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.
Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is.
You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it.
And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.
This really resonates with me. I had a solid team of what you’d call B-grade engineers for years, but for various reasons most of the team left over the past couple years and were replaced with C’s.
Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.
Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.
Yes, exactly, employees may not actually be like virtual servers that you can spin up and shut down at will, but some employers will think of them that way.
Some employers? That seems to be the norm from what I've seen. Team leaders usually know full well how hard it is to find good new people and get them trained, just like the previous comments here say, but somehow upper management never seems to understand this at all. I guess they think that's lower-level management's and HR's problem to solve.
Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.
This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.
Yeah, bullshit. Maybe you didn't live through all the panic about offshoring in the 1990's, but all of our jobs would have been sent to Southeast Asia if they could have been by now. Remote changes nothing. They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.
I am not as optimistic based on recent moves that seem to be intended to rein the employees in and mollify investor class, but I agree that if they could, they would have done it already. Simple reality is that it is genuinely hard to do stuff well across time zones. Add to this kids and demand for work life balance and it gets impossible fast. Companies would love 'tried and ready' person, but.. that tends to come with age and age demands some modicum of consideration; one way or another.
Auth0 (Okta) has quite a few Latin American (Argentina) and Spain workers. Don't know if that is growing or not.
> They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.
There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.
Yeah, no kidding. First job I had, worked there 2007-2010, we had an office in India where a huge amount of our engineering staff was based (most of the time I was there, fully half of our entire headcount were in the India office, and the India office only had engineering people while the US had every department).
In 2016-2021, I worked at another company that had an office in the Philippines where most of our junior employees worked. In fact, at one point before covid, they started rapidly hiring Tier 1 NOC staff in the Philippines and announced they would no longer hire Tier 1 positions elsewhere and would phase out the US-based Tier 1 staff via attrition... and then a few months later (still before covid) all the remaining US-based Tier 1 staff got unceremoniously laid off out of nowhere.
Mass outsourcing has been happening since long before covid and remote work took off.
Y'know, some time I'd really like to see a poll about where people on HN are located, because honestly, I doubt more than a modest plurality are actually in the Bay Area, or working for FAANG.
And yet, it's generally so easy to detect the ones that are, because so many of them have the same attitude you do: that you're the only ones who matter on this site, or even the only ones who matter at all.
It gets to be pretty disgusting at times.
- A programmer who's never come anywhere near San Francisco
YCombinator was founded here. Many VCs are here. Google, Facebook, others are headquartered here or Seattle. There's definitely a Bay Area bias.
Regardless, I'm sorry you find it disgusting, and that you drew the inference that I think nobody else matters. I was simply pointing out that not returning to bay area offices is not consequence free.
I have been hiring very capable people in other countries at my startup. It's not just hypothetical to me that people in other regions will be the beneficiaries of this movement.
I will take “getting paid less” in exchange for me living where I want to live over having to live on the west coast any day.
I couldn’t have had the 3200 square foot house built in the burbs in 2016 (when I was making $135K) in any place close to a tech hub.
Now I work remotely for $BigTech and I can live anywhere. I live in a resort area in Florida half the year and fly around the US the other half and rent my place out (professionally managed). I actually downsized and paid about the same for where I live now as I did in 2016 and no state income taxes.
I wouldn’t go that far. My goal was to still live as if I was making the same thing I made before I came to BigTech
And for context: my budget at 49 years old could easily be supported by what a returning intern got at my current company. We aren’t talking about a lot of money by tech standards.
Housing: we were paying around $3500 a month all in - mortgage, utilities, yard, pest control etc. When we stay in our “Condotel” between October and mid March we are paying less than $3000 all in, the mortgage + HOA (CDD) thst covers everything else including utilities, access to three pools, a lake, a gym, three restaurants onsite, a running trail etc all included.
Our budget for hotels is about $3500/month - midrange Hilton extended stays also with gyms and pools.
-ground transportation - we had one car with a car note, that and maintenance, gas and car insurance for two cars came up to around $1000/month. We sold both of our cars. That’s now our Uber/occasional rental car budget.
- flights - before our “vacation budget” was around $8000 a year. Now that’s our domestic one way plane budget for the year.
I looked at a budget from 2016 when I was making $135K (less than a returning intern offer at my current job and I was 43 at the time), and my yearly spend has only increased by the $8000 flight budget.
Now “my“ budget does include my wife’s “allowance” that she was providing for herself when she was working part time in the school system. We agreed for her to stop working post Covid and when I got my current job.
Also, I give myself an “allowance” too that’s actually less than hers.
>This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.
This wont happen in the united states because of timezones. UK time is 8 hours off PST Indian is 13 off.
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
Good.
Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.
This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.
Because other countries have decided that "we need to make our quarterly earnings look good" isn't a good enough reason to can half your staff over. If you fire an employee at anytime it's just unpredictable (and inefficient) contract work.
Where did I say companies should be forced to pay for employees they don't need? I didn't say that.
What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor?
And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers.
I want to work for a company that’s financially strong (or at least profitable). If that means they sometimes fire people, that’s ok. I want my “don’t fire them” to be based on a premise that I’m creating much more value for them than I cost. That’s a stable situation for all parties, short and long term.
It doesn’t work like that though for publicly traded companies. Even if you bring in more revenue that they be are paying you, it can be attractive to fire you to juice the stock price on Wall Street.
I guess you never worked for a company that got record earnings after laying off 10000 employees.
I don't want my company in the red, but I also don't want to feel like I'm dangling on a cliff. There's a reason most companies stopped doing stack rankings.
> Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.
Exactly, which is why labour of all classes and types should organize and gain power against businesses. Too bad the labour movement was killed decades ago.
You missed part of the idea: "if you accept to work for free".
The parent was saying (if I understood correctly): "stop complaining, you should accept the business decision, because that's what a company does: optimize the profit without caring about how the employees feel".
I was just saying that as an employee, you have the right to negotiate your working conditions. If you accept all the "business decisions" because they help the company make more profit, then they will stop paying you. That would be completely rational as a business decision.
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
I would argue that companies already view their employees this way, in office or remote. Companies do not value employees. We are valued the same way you would value coal. If you need energy, keep buying and if not, stop.
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
That's basically how the movie industry has always worked. Why keep people on your books when you're not actively in production? It's one of those cases where organized labor seems to work out well for all sides. The unions provide talent and craft support when/where it's needed, then they go away when the work is done.
It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. Similar incentives exist, but a company that makes software or hardware isn't an on-again, off-again concern like film production.
If software worked the way managers and business like to imagine it does - define requirements, build app, step away - then this model could work. But we all know that's almost never the case.
Exactly. My impression is that in very large orgs the first couple levels of management normally find out about layoffs a couple hours before they have to deliver them. Both to keep the news under wraps and to avoid personal bias, how many and who is usually a decision taken by directors up and HR.
My first instinct was that this model wouldn’t work because employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers.
But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless.
I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.
But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.
It’s painless compared to trying to do the same thing without it.
But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.
I don’t want my employment to have any nonsense like loyalty or family or whatnot. Pay me to do work and when you don’t want me to do work I’ll find someone else to pay me to do work for them.
I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take.
Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.
If it enables further specialization that can be a good thing, it's often awkward when companies try to wring out some extra utility from people who really aren't well suited for the other task. (Having people do such things occasionally anyway even if poorly, like devs briefly fielding tier 1 support, can be useful for empathy building at least.) The infatuation with combining dev and QE into a combined hybrid role especially comes to mind. (Though I do think it's at least possible there for the majority to be 'good enough' crossing back and forth that it's more or less worked out, and there are enough generalists, but when you see a specialist in one forced to do the other not nearly as well, it feels like a waste.)
You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.
This is an interesting angle I haven't considered before.
I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me.
I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip.
Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.
Totes. I can’t remember a single remote colleague from pre Covid days. Either they were slackers so I didn’t associate with them, or they were usually given the work nobody wanted to do and wasnt high priority (but still needed). And they usually preferred to solo content / play single player, then be part of a raiding party trying to clear challenging content. So it was a different attitude. I’m sure there are excellent remote colleagues but I personally didn’t have that experience.
I personally enjoy working from the office. It was a better work environment and there was a clear boundary between work and personal life. The large amount of remote lovers representation on HN are outliers in the real world.
I doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will not be any more visible than a remote worker.
I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.
> I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
I never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)
Remote means they trust their employees to perform without physical eyes on them. "Open office" layout is designed to have eyes on your screen providing constant pressure to actually work, nothing else.
Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.
In my humble opinion open offices were designed so that employees would self police each other in order to minimize the need to micro-manage. If this is unethical is another matter , considering that most people are too lazy to work on hobbies outside of work and they prefer to be slobs watching TV... not much would get done leaving most people to their own devices in private offices....
Regarding the open office ... Everyone can see your computer screen. At any moment someone can be watching what type of face you're making and if you are working hard or dozing off.
Everyone is scared of raising their voice or talking in case you disturb others or others hear you.
Everyone can see when you arrive and what time you leave, what you wear.
Now if we lived in a land of plenty and profit did not matter, then it would be tragic that people are stuck in that hellish environment instead of having their own private office and peace of mind.
However.. when you consider why people do not have hobbies and are lazy... it becomes quite tragic in the here and now... because you have to think of Schools in our society and are they really for the benefit of children or to train them to work and to demotivate them towards life itself ?
People are forced to regurgitate things in a depressing, boring and oftentimes hostile environment (in the sense of their future being on the line if they do not submit to this torture) and in a place that resembles prison blended with an open office... from the age of five ... starting off fun with plenty of toys and play time in kindergarden club ... for most of their childhood becomes increasingly horrible when they are stuck in the grind. Does your own experience not make you feel rage at the time you lost ?
The tragedy of human effort as a whole is that 90% of corporate jobs in their current form are designed to exist in this way simply as a way to put humans into a hellish environment five days a week which they have been trained to accept and even expect all with plausable deniability for the elites who consider us nothing but their cattle. They made us slaves that compete against each other for them and police each other into doing it.
Our open office shows that it's not about space. There's still a lot of space between desks, enough to have cubicles. There are several empty seats even. The rest of the office has tons of barely-used employee space, like big table tennis rooms and open seating. The desks are always arranged in a way that the screens are facing everyone walking by.
To put it another way, I can just take my laptop and work in a common area with a wall behind me, and I get more space and privacy. That's what I do. I'm not slacking, I just don't like eyes on my screen at all hours and people constantly interrupting me.
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".
This implies that companies that have offices keep people on in order to make sure every desk is being utilized.
Perhaps, but nothing I have ever heard anyone say about the downsides of remote work comes anywhere close to the upsides: e.g. the vastly superior quality of life you get when your job is essentially just a handful of apps on a computer in your house and can be turned on and turned off instantly, and the ability to concentrate on meaningful work tasks in a quiet environment that is under your control and design.
(WAAS) - work as a service - think contracting is more secure.
Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.
Seeing as we are predicting the future, I'm more concerned about AI driven "development" then I am remote work finally becoming a stable, ubiquitous thing.
Sounds more like it's just easier to use favoritism that's not based on job performance when doing layoffs if you are face-to-face with these folks on a regular basis.
Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to hide their digital footprints as well
disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do your job, usually cheaper.
if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.
As someone who got my first, current and only job at a FAANG working remotely in GA, I declined the chance to be interviewed for a job that would have required me to relocate. I would have made probably $100K more than I was making as a senior enterprise dev.
Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.
As someone in Georgia who was both one of the first ten employees for a remote FAANG office and also a co-founder of a remote office for an SV unicorn, who got paid more or less what his contemporaries on the west coast did, I'd say you're about 20 years behind the times and a bit off about compensation.
As you said in your example having to say it to your face is not really a barrier to firing anyway. We are virtual servers to them, no matter rank or position.
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess"
Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.
For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.
If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.
Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.
Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.
In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.
If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).
> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity
Why should I be required to employ you if you cost more than the value you produce? No one owes you anything. If you're so skilled, get another job elsewhere.
The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".