44 ms·

Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

567 points by el_duderino 6y ago

watertrash 6y ago
The article mentions that this will allow the company to recruit from areas where pay is much lower than the Bay Area, but I wonder if this will affect the pay of current workers.
- d357r0y3r 6y ago
  Right away? No, not in most cases. For future hires, how could it not? If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary. Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there before. I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    >I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age. There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      These benefits exist in many big cities that are not also expensive.
    - ornornor 6y ago
      Maybe in North America. In a lot of Europe, you can get pretty fast internet in small cities (fiber speeds)
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        In the US, the bigger and older cities have worse internet. The newer areas in newer cities have fiber.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      You don't need to be paying $2,500 a month for a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco to get good Internet and reasonable delivery times. Sure, you'll get speedier delivery, and that's worth something, but it's a hell of a price to pay for it.
    - d357r0y3r 6y ago
      I'd make a distinction between medium to large cities and expensive cities. I don't think people want to move out to the country, but finding some balance between lifestyle and cost is a lot easier to do when you can pull a higher salary from remote work.
    - xienze 6y ago
      > There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around. Define “big city.” I live in a medium-sized city in a low cost of living area and my house has AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, and cable available to it. I dare say that’s better than most people in the Bay Area have access to. And yes, Amazon delivers here too.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      A big thing for me is being able to walk to a ton of different things, no car or even bike needed. In the US, for practically any area with densities lower than those of cities you're going to need a car. I'm sure that the reduction of CoL opens up plenty of financial room for a car, but it's a whole extra set of things to have to worry about that I personally would rather not.
  - emeerson 6y ago
    Agree. Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area. Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.
    - znpy 6y ago
      But new hubs could emerge, though.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    And if people can increasingly work anywhere in some number of different timezones--and the same is true of most of your competition--what justifies paying a premium because some people want to live in Manhattan or SF any more than because they want to live in an expensive beach or mountain community.
- easde 6y ago
  The common thinking is that it will reduce pay, but it may not be as much as most people think. A good example of this is Facebook's new compensation structure for remote work. For engineers remotely working from low cost of living areas base salaries are only 10-15% lower than in the Bay Area, and stock compensation is the same. So a senior engineer (E5) might go from making $400k to $370k in total compensation, while also substantially saving on California's income taxes.
coldtea 6y ago
I hope those now remote employees have access to some good issue tracking, repo hosting, and collaboration/documentation tools. Else they'll be forced to use something like Jira, Confluence, Bit Bucket, and such, which suck...
- entropea 6y ago
  I am directly responsible for Jira and Confluence admin/infrastructure on an enterprise level and once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I haven't run into many issues except during a migration where we knew we were going to run into issues. Atlassian's documentation isn't that good however.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > its a fairly powerful tool for PM's That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.
    - marmaduke 6y ago
      I use Jira to track issues. It’s not as pretty and dumbed down as Github or as dandy as YouTrack but does the job fine over the last 8 years we used it.
    - entropea 6y ago
      You can set it up to be an issue tracker or you can set it up to be work & developer tracking. It's really dependent on how your PM sets your projects up.
    - lemmsjid 6y ago
      Interesting how perspectives differ. Having used Jira for many years, I think it's straightforward for engineering work, but particularly hard for PMs and managers. Why? On the engineering side, it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a lifecycle. But for PMs and management it's a nightmare because they still haven't gotten their birds-eye-view roadmapping / bulk editing act together. The usual issue I have with Jira is that the engineering team gets it integrated into their workflows, things work ok, but it's a continual challenge getting global rollup views to the business at large. We keep ending up with Excel, Airtable, or what-have-you high level views that then point to particular Jira issues for details (yes, we've used Portfolio). I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
They are resisting the heat death of the universe some how.
- ge96 6y ago
  haha what's better than forever, the past maybe
tus88 6y ago
Lucky they aren't building a new headquarters in Sydney or anything LOL.
simonswords82 6y ago
It's a no brainer. We will look back at offices like we look back on Victorian warehouses. Edit: People seem to be agreeing but I'm getting downvoted. WTF.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Yep, Victorian warehouses but with snacks, slides and peers.
  - anonAndOn 6y ago
    Don't forget the espresso machine! I wonder how it's doing all alone in the big empty office :(...
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      It's probably broken down. That's what they do, right?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      I’ve been looking for one for home, maybe craigslist has some gently used ex-Victorian warehouse ones.
  - simonswords82 6y ago
    Indeed, they are comfortable warehouses but warehouses nonetheless.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  I think it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the office. An awful lot of people still like them. And aside from some big names, how many companies are really looking to give up their office work? I work for a mid-size (10000 employees) software company and we are working from home for the forseeable future, but management has been very clear that they think collaboration works best in an office environment, and they plan on going back to the office once it becomes safe to do so.
dominotw 6y ago
uber laidoff american staff and is hiring in India[1]. This is not an exception, just a sign of things to come. If you do ordinary CRUD coding at work in USA, I would seriously start looking at how to pivot out of that job. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipend-work-from-home-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipen...
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Hasn't this been tried before?
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    The difference these days is that US-based developers are going to be facing most of the same hurdles as the international teams. It's a blow to their competitiveness.
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      > US-based developers no, not all parts of the country will be so hardcore about remote work into the future. For example, I see Utah (which leans heavy into enterprise SaaS and already booming in tech) to continue as normal except with masks or a little more space between desks. If some businesses do better in person, then they will make it happen somehow.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    not really. When were US workers completely remote ?
- davidw 6y ago
  1. stop allowing foreign workers into the US 2. extremely portable work goes abroad
  - dominotw 6y ago
    reversing 1 won't stop 2 though. I don't understand your logic. Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.
znpy 6y ago
The really cool outcome for me would be if all my coworkers get to work from home and I could snatch a whole office just for me (there's a binding rent contract for the next X years still, we might as well use it :P) Edit: this comment was a bit sarcastic, just in case somebody didn't get that.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Somehow I imagine that if I and four other co-workers decided to be the only five to come back into the office, they'd still make the five of us sit next to each other elbow to elbow and leave the rest of the building completely empty.
- ConsiderCrying 6y ago
  Ah yes, the perfect horror movie scenario. Honestly, if the office was pretty close to my home, I wouldn't mind going there every week on one or two days, just to break the routine of sitting at home. But happy to see the 5-day mandatory "go talk to your coworkers and sit in a cubicle" regime slowly being phased out.
  - znpy 6y ago
    I'd love to have my own cubicle. I fu--ing hate open spaces. Btw, currently my job is a 25 minutes subway ride away, so... So and so. Not a lot, to be honest, I don't have to drive and the monthly public transport subscription is fairly cheap (~39€/month).
- serial_dev 6y ago
  I actually do what you described. My office is 12 minutes "run-commuting", there are a couple of good restaurants there, if I make a mess on my desk in the office, my desk at home is still clean, I got four whiteboards, I am not bothered by the neighbor's Amazon package, nor coworkers as they are all working from home. Now granted, if I had to come 2x1 hour by car, I wouldn't do it, but a 30 min walk in the morning is actually pretty nice
errantspark 6y ago
The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh, maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.
- subsubzero 6y ago
  Same boat, founders seem level headed and the company seems heading in the right direction. For me a plus is the office locations in Australia. I wonder what the next companies to do this will be?
  - tomlu 6y ago
    Make sure you visit Sydney specifically though, it's a bit different from the rest of Australia. It's not everyone's cup of tea, though you may well end up loving it.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    Everything I read about the founders makes me think they are great guys, I think they value the same things I do. They are also obviously smart and great business people too because they have very successful business. They also have a habit of acquiring products I like using. I was a user of both source tree and trello when they were acquired. Having said all that, I really hate Jira and Confluence and would not like being a developer working on them. The front end is such a mess, I hate to think what the back end looks like.
    - mbo 6y ago
      Counterpoint: working on infrastructure teams at Atlassian are significantly more pleasant than the product teams.
      - ununoctium87 6y ago
        Hello to you too, fellow Cloud Foundations team member
    - 6y ago
quaffapint 6y ago
I'm noticing we're about 40/60 with more wanting to go back to the office at my midsize company. I'm happily with the 40, but the company is just using this time to spruce up the office just waiting for our return. I find communication and the work being better now then when we're in the office. All the cliques and hallway talk is more online, so I have a better clue what's going on. I wish it would stay that way.
- ram_rar 6y ago
  it depends a lot on company culture. I see more private conversations in slack happening as opposed to group chat. FOMO is as high as stock market.
  - lebski88 6y ago
    I've worked remotely for 4 years now. We try extremely hard to avoid talking in private chats. Each person has their own channel which we try to use over DMs - this works really well although a few people seem to default to DM.
    - eikenberry 6y ago
      Our company has the policy of deleting all DMs after a couple weeks which helps push people towards using the channels as people generally like having a history of their communications for reference.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      I've worked from home for ~6 years and 2 companies. I really miss real whiteboards. The only thing worse that being on a software team that has no whiteboards, is being the only remote person on a team that has whiteboards in the office.
      - jimmaswell 6y ago
        What's wrong with Google docs or any of the myriad online whiteboard apps?
tomerico 6y ago
Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can go back to work from the office safely. The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals). This means that employees would see advantages to coming to work, and those that don’t would fare worse in promo and productivity on average, bringing the equilibrium state back to the office.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I love remote work. But yeah, I have also realized that if I didn’t show up for a few days, nobody would notice. And that presents a long term problem.
  - chronofar 6y ago
    Whether or not you show up shouldn't matter. Whether your work gets done should.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    If you didn't do any work for a few days no one would notice? That does not compute. What do you do for a living? If I didn't show up for even a couple of days they would send out the police and possibly the state militia due to there being a lot of "village knowledge" at my company.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      If I didn't have meetings scheduled or didn't have particular deliverables due? No. No one would notice if I didn't "do any work" for a few days. They would probably start to notice if I wasn't responding to chats or emails. But it probably wouldn't reach critical mass until after a few days.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      We do work in two week sprints, so that is when work is noticed. I am a software engineer.
ram_rar 6y ago
If this trend continues, it should affect bay area housing prices. I dont see any reason to pay such high rent, if I could work anywhere in the pacific north west.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  I don’t know about the US, but there’s more to urban areas than just the commute time. If anything wfh means spending more time in your home neighbourhood, so you’re going to need more amenities closer by - which are generally found in cities.
  - swsieber 6y ago
    But even by city standards, the bay housing prices are atronomicsl, right?
  - pb7 6y ago
    This will be fiercely debated but Bay Area (notably San Francisco) has previously been a mix of {things to do, high paying jobs}. Once you remove high paying jobs (or rather, expand them to other cities by way of remoteness), there are many other equally good or better contenders for things to do with significantly cheaper housing.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Nature is an amenity.
  - baddox 6y ago
    There’s an opposite effect too, because one of the biggest urban amenities is the density of activities which are likely to be closed for some time: night life, concerts, lots of hobbies, etc.
- jasonv 6y ago
  My Bay Area job is letting me WFH permanently, and I'm looking to move to an adjacent area but the rental market is empty, and housing sales seem... targeted to SF expats.
shinyFeature 6y ago
How would they handle remote employees who want to work from countries where Atlassian doesn't have a physical /legal entity? How would thing like taxes work in that situation?
m0zg 6y ago
Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work - remote people will be left out, and disadvantaged in terms of their career progression. So if they are serious about remote, they should commit to being remote only. Yes, some people won't like it, at least initially. But most of them will get used to it over time, same as they got used to the ridiculous proposition of spending a good chunk of their lives in traffic every day without getting paid, or not seeing their spouse and children for more than a few hours a day, or not being able to take a nap when they are tired, or sitting in a distracting noisy environment and being unable to focus, etc, etc.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work Piecemeal is more difficult but it's basically what my company was pre-COVID and presumably will be again (with probably a lot more remote) posy-COVID. It does mean the people who are co-located need to have the discipline to treat decision-making, etc. as if everyone is remote. It probably helps that we're a somewhat larger company so most things are piecemeal anyway--people working together are in multiple offices even if they're not working at home.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Discipline requires upkeep and it will eventually deteriorate. You want to set things up such that discipline is not required: either the "right" outcome is the lowest energy state, or the "wrong" thing is logistically impossible. Fundamentally, this is the secret to successful people management in general. Anything else doesn't really work in the long term.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I should ask if I can start expensing coworking spaces.
daenz 6y ago
Anyone else suspect we are going to see a massive deflation of cities?
- webkike 6y ago
  Not really, cities offer public transportation and a lot of enjoyable things to do. They were a thing before large corporations were seated there.
  - cheez 6y ago
    most people move to cities for work, not for restaurants and things to do. Not all, but most.
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      That's the reason they move there but may not be the reason they stay there. Once you change something in your life that allows you to take advantage of new opportunities, the latter may become the reason to support the change more than whatever initial reason you had.
    - webkike 6y ago
      Okay, but then what would be the incentive for the people who are already there to leave?
      - cheez 6y ago
        Life reasons I suppose
    - matthewowen 6y ago
      Depends on the city. Portland is a good example of a city with an anemic economy that people seem to be drawn to. I mean, even Philly (where I live) has seen somewhat of a resurgence (especially relative to the MSA at large), despite a lot of jobs being outside the city. I think we'll see the hypergrowth of the tech hubs drop off. I think cities more broadly might slow growth as millennials age into parenthood and that might be accelerated by recent events making cities more broadly seem less welcoming. But I'm not sure that jobs will be the main driver here.
NoOneNew 6y ago
I have a feeling this is going to end up similar to the "open office" fad. Lots of companies are going to go 100% on "forever work from home". Then in a year it's going to be not so much. That being said, I do believe "work from home" will become more of an option and far less frowned upon by employers. Then again, this is a white-collar problem. Blue collar and a few other industries still have to go to work. But who cares about them, right? It's only the white collar jobs that matter and should have a form of change and evolution to how they work. Those lowly blue collars and service industry peasants need to get back to work. It's far more vital for the important industries to hide away from the outside world, from its horrors and look down at the rest.
- herval 6y ago
  The open office “fad” is pretty much the only office arrangement for more than a decade now, so what you’re saying is this will be the de facto going forward?
  - dbish 6y ago
    De-facto, but actually counter to productivity, just like open-office. Companies that choose to not do this, will have a per employee efficiency advantage. Big companies may not care just like in open office because the per employee advantage is outweighed by the ability to reduce costs for the space
    - amiga_500 6y ago
      Open office is the second to last act of desperation. Hot desking is your CEO standing up and saying "I got nothing" when asked how to increase profitability.
    - thingymajig 6y ago
      We don't need to endlessly increase productivity. The US been increasing productivity faster than wages for decades and it hasn't been good for most people.
fallingfrog 6y ago
I feel like it’s the right thing to do at this moment but.. it’s one of those things where the long term consequences are unforeseeable, and it makes me nervous. Like: how can you organize a union if everyone is remote? Does this make outsourcing a lot easier? What about personal connection? Is this a step in the Uber-ification of the office worker? Will we all become independent contractors? It’s impossible to say at this point.
ConcernedCoder 6y ago
Everyone who doesn't get to work from home: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
cblconfederate 6y ago
One thing that is not often mentioned is these threads is how this is particularly beneficial for European workers. They live in cities that are already small and dense, generally don't depend on the office for their socialization, internet speeds are good (due to density probably) and family life is balanced. Plus a lot of them are already accustomed to working remotely. They 'll probably be able to compete for a lot more jobs now.
- contrarianmop 6y ago
  Dang! They’ll take are jobs now and move them over to their low density, high speed internet cities.
- rtweetr 6y ago
  Dang! They’ll take are jobs and move them over to there low density high speed internet cities.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Timezones are challenging between US West Coast and Europe. But, at my company, we do a lot of collaboration between US East Coast and Central Europe--which seems manageable synchronously but is probably approaching the limit where it's fairly straightforward (on a frequent basis).
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    I'm US east coast working for a US west coast client, and that's complicated enough. I've got a few hours before and after work to myself, which is nice, but the workday is smack in the middle. On the upside, I can sleep in and stay up late if I want. On the downside, I often miss family dinners (less of a concern with covid) and there's no long block of time for more than errands during the week. Overall, I like it. A bigger shift would be hard. I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.
    - ghaff 6y ago
jayd16 6y ago
I like the trend but one big hurdle will come when we have a partial return to the office. Everyone at work, or everyone remote works well. Mixing office and WFH communication will have further growing pains.
bargle0 6y ago
I feel like permanent WFH is outsourcing real estate costs to the worker. This isn’t a big deal for some, since one may live alone or already have a home office, but it gets burdensome if there is more than one home worker in a household.
- digianarchist 6y ago
  I'm OK with this. WFH means I can cut my mortgage costs by 50%.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    How?
    - gundmc 6y ago
      Move somewhere cheaper I suspect.
      - IshKebab 6y ago
        Then your pay will be cut too. Lots of people think that is unfair because you are doing the same work, but those people just don't understand that salaries are market based. Also you might think "my company doesn't cut salaries", or "I just won't say I've moved". That might work if you stay at the same company for the rest of your life, but if you move jobs there's no way you'd get the same deal.
        t-writescode 6y ago
        I believe that depends on the company. Facebook? Sure, I think I saw an article about that for Facebook. Other places? Maybe not. Often times, there's plenty of places that are _totally_ within commuting distance, but really aren't. Do you think Facebook would lower someone's wages for living in Davis rather than Palo Alto or San Jose?
sushshshsh 6y ago
Side rant, I'm convinced that companies who say the office helps communication are just really bad at communication. If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are good at communicatimg.
- djohnston 6y ago
  is this irony?
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    No, I'm really being serious. If someone doesn't answer an email, the reason usually isn't "I'm busy", it's "I don't want to help you". If the answer is "I'm busy right now and I am not responsible enough to remember all of the people I need to follow up with to at least give them a pointer of who could actually help", then your company is dysfunctional.
dudeinjapan 6y ago
Atlassian tells employees they can egregiously ignore customer requests from home forever
lloydatkinson 6y ago
Does this mean they will be able to focus on creating products that aren’t as crap?
sfjailbird 6y ago
As much as people like to complain about JIRA and Confluence, the very essence of corporateness, Atlassian is a great company for both customers and employees. Also, I have 'known' Mike Cannon-Brooks since twenty years ago when he was active in developer forums, good dude then, too. So nice to see engineer driven companies succeed and not forget the little guys.
_peeley 6y ago
I'm anxious to see what kind of macro trends arise from this, if it's still a popular policy post-pandemic. I'd predict that most industry jobs being remote by default would inevitably lead to a race to the bottom for wages, due to positions being far more competitive and able to effectively outsource to the lowest COL areas. For example, NPR has already experienced this[1] with its internship program this fall - after going remote, it led to a 10x increase in the number of applicants. [1] https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-pubmedia-job-in-a-pandemic/ https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-pubmedia-job-in-a-...
GhostBih 6y ago
A dream i still have for Telemedicine. I wish I could do telemedicine as long as I wanted, surely it’ll end.

567 points by el_duderino 6y ago

The article mentions that this will allow the company to recruit from areas where pay is much lower than the Bay Area, but I wonder if this will affect the pay of current workers.

d357r0y3r 6y ago
Right away? No, not in most cases. For future hires, how could it not? If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary. Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there before. I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age. There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    These benefits exist in many big cities that are not also expensive.
  - ornornor 6y ago
    Maybe in North America. In a lot of Europe, you can get pretty fast internet in small cities (fiber speeds)
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      In the US, the bigger and older cities have worse internet. The newer areas in newer cities have fiber.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    You don't need to be paying $2,500 a month for a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco to get good Internet and reasonable delivery times. Sure, you'll get speedier delivery, and that's worth something, but it's a hell of a price to pay for it.
  - d357r0y3r 6y ago
    I'd make a distinction between medium to large cities and expensive cities. I don't think people want to move out to the country, but finding some balance between lifestyle and cost is a lot easier to do when you can pull a higher salary from remote work.
  - xienze 6y ago
    > There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around. Define “big city.” I live in a medium-sized city in a low cost of living area and my house has AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, and cable available to it. I dare say that’s better than most people in the Bay Area have access to. And yes, Amazon delivers here too.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    A big thing for me is being able to walk to a ton of different things, no car or even bike needed. In the US, for practically any area with densities lower than those of cities you're going to need a car. I'm sure that the reduction of CoL opens up plenty of financial room for a car, but it's a whole extra set of things to have to worry about that I personally would rather not.
- emeerson 6y ago
  Agree. Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area. Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.
  - znpy 6y ago
    But new hubs could emerge, though.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And if people can increasingly work anywhere in some number of different timezones--and the same is true of most of your competition--what justifies paying a premium because some people want to live in Manhattan or SF any more than because they want to live in an expensive beach or mountain community.
easde 6y ago
The common thinking is that it will reduce pay, but it may not be as much as most people think. A good example of this is Facebook's new compensation structure for remote work. For engineers remotely working from low cost of living areas base salaries are only 10-15% lower than in the Bay Area, and stock compensation is the same. So a senior engineer (E5) might go from making $400k to $370k in total compensation, while also substantially saving on California's income taxes.

coldtea 6y ago

I hope those now remote employees have access to some good issue tracking, repo hosting, and collaboration/documentation tools. Else they'll be forced to use something like Jira, Confluence, Bit Bucket, and such, which suck...

entropea 6y ago
I am directly responsible for Jira and Confluence admin/infrastructure on an enterprise level and once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I haven't run into many issues except during a migration where we knew we were going to run into issues. Atlassian's documentation isn't that good however.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > its a fairly powerful tool for PM's That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.
  - marmaduke 6y ago
    I use Jira to track issues. It’s not as pretty and dumbed down as Github or as dandy as YouTrack but does the job fine over the last 8 years we used it.
  - entropea 6y ago
    You can set it up to be an issue tracker or you can set it up to be work & developer tracking. It's really dependent on how your PM sets your projects up.
  - lemmsjid 6y ago
    Interesting how perspectives differ. Having used Jira for many years, I think it's straightforward for engineering work, but particularly hard for PMs and managers. Why? On the engineering side, it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a lifecycle. But for PMs and management it's a nightmare because they still haven't gotten their birds-eye-view roadmapping / bulk editing act together. The usual issue I have with Jira is that the engineering team gets it integrated into their workflows, things work ok, but it's a continual challenge getting global rollup views to the business at large. We keep ending up with Excel, Airtable, or what-have-you high level views that then point to particular Jira issues for details (yes, we've used Portfolio). I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

They are resisting the heat death of the universe some how.

ge96 6y ago
haha what's better than forever, the past maybe

tus88 6y ago

Lucky they aren't building a new headquarters in Sydney or anything LOL.

simonswords82 6y ago

It's a no brainer. We will look back at offices like we look back on Victorian warehouses. Edit: People seem to be agreeing but I'm getting downvoted. WTF.

arcticbull 6y ago
Yep, Victorian warehouses but with snacks, slides and peers.
- anonAndOn 6y ago
  Don't forget the espresso machine! I wonder how it's doing all alone in the big empty office :(...
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    It's probably broken down. That's what they do, right?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I’ve been looking for one for home, maybe craigslist has some gently used ex-Victorian warehouse ones.
- simonswords82 6y ago
  Indeed, they are comfortable warehouses but warehouses nonetheless.
rootusrootus 6y ago
I think it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the office. An awful lot of people still like them. And aside from some big names, how many companies are really looking to give up their office work? I work for a mid-size (10000 employees) software company and we are working from home for the forseeable future, but management has been very clear that they think collaboration works best in an office environment, and they plan on going back to the office once it becomes safe to do so.

dominotw 6y ago

uber laidoff american staff and is hiring in India[1]. This is not an exception, just a sign of things to come. If you do ordinary CRUD coding at work in USA, I would seriously start looking at how to pivot out of that job. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipend-work-from-home-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipen...

Hamuko 6y ago
Hasn't this been tried before?
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  The difference these days is that US-based developers are going to be facing most of the same hurdles as the international teams. It's a blow to their competitiveness.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    > US-based developers no, not all parts of the country will be so hardcore about remote work into the future. For example, I see Utah (which leans heavy into enterprise SaaS and already booming in tech) to continue as normal except with masks or a little more space between desks. If some businesses do better in person, then they will make it happen somehow.
- dominotw 6y ago
  not really. When were US workers completely remote ?
davidw 6y ago
1. stop allowing foreign workers into the US 2. extremely portable work goes abroad
- dominotw 6y ago
  reversing 1 won't stop 2 though. I don't understand your logic. Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.

znpy 6y ago

The really cool outcome for me would be if all my coworkers get to work from home and I could snatch a whole office just for me (there's a binding rent contract for the next X years still, we might as well use it :P) Edit: this comment was a bit sarcastic, just in case somebody didn't get that.

commandlinefan 6y ago
Somehow I imagine that if I and four other co-workers decided to be the only five to come back into the office, they'd still make the five of us sit next to each other elbow to elbow and leave the rest of the building completely empty.
ConsiderCrying 6y ago
Ah yes, the perfect horror movie scenario. Honestly, if the office was pretty close to my home, I wouldn't mind going there every week on one or two days, just to break the routine of sitting at home. But happy to see the 5-day mandatory "go talk to your coworkers and sit in a cubicle" regime slowly being phased out.
- znpy 6y ago
  I'd love to have my own cubicle. I fu--ing hate open spaces. Btw, currently my job is a 25 minutes subway ride away, so... So and so. Not a lot, to be honest, I don't have to drive and the monthly public transport subscription is fairly cheap (~39€/month).
serial_dev 6y ago
I actually do what you described. My office is 12 minutes "run-commuting", there are a couple of good restaurants there, if I make a mess on my desk in the office, my desk at home is still clean, I got four whiteboards, I am not bothered by the neighbor's Amazon package, nor coworkers as they are all working from home. Now granted, if I had to come 2x1 hour by car, I wouldn't do it, but a 30 min walk in the morning is actually pretty nice

errantspark 6y ago

The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh, maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.

subsubzero 6y ago
Same boat, founders seem level headed and the company seems heading in the right direction. For me a plus is the office locations in Australia. I wonder what the next companies to do this will be?
- tomlu 6y ago
  Make sure you visit Sydney specifically though, it's a bit different from the rest of Australia. It's not everyone's cup of tea, though you may well end up loving it.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Everything I read about the founders makes me think they are great guys, I think they value the same things I do. They are also obviously smart and great business people too because they have very successful business. They also have a habit of acquiring products I like using. I was a user of both source tree and trello when they were acquired. Having said all that, I really hate Jira and Confluence and would not like being a developer working on them. The front end is such a mess, I hate to think what the back end looks like.
  - mbo 6y ago
    Counterpoint: working on infrastructure teams at Atlassian are significantly more pleasant than the product teams.
    - ununoctium87 6y ago
      Hello to you too, fellow Cloud Foundations team member
  - 6y ago

quaffapint 6y ago

I'm noticing we're about 40/60 with more wanting to go back to the office at my midsize company. I'm happily with the 40, but the company is just using this time to spruce up the office just waiting for our return. I find communication and the work being better now then when we're in the office. All the cliques and hallway talk is more online, so I have a better clue what's going on. I wish it would stay that way.

ram_rar 6y ago
it depends a lot on company culture. I see more private conversations in slack happening as opposed to group chat. FOMO is as high as stock market.
- lebski88 6y ago
  I've worked remotely for 4 years now. We try extremely hard to avoid talking in private chats. Each person has their own channel which we try to use over DMs - this works really well although a few people seem to default to DM.
  - eikenberry 6y ago
    Our company has the policy of deleting all DMs after a couple weeks which helps push people towards using the channels as people generally like having a history of their communications for reference.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    I've worked from home for ~6 years and 2 companies. I really miss real whiteboards. The only thing worse that being on a software team that has no whiteboards, is being the only remote person on a team that has whiteboards in the office.
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      What's wrong with Google docs or any of the myriad online whiteboard apps?

tomerico 6y ago

Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can go back to work from the office safely. The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals). This means that employees would see advantages to coming to work, and those that don’t would fare worse in promo and productivity on average, bringing the equilibrium state back to the office.

MattGaiser 6y ago
I love remote work. But yeah, I have also realized that if I didn’t show up for a few days, nobody would notice. And that presents a long term problem.
- chronofar 6y ago
  Whether or not you show up shouldn't matter. Whether your work gets done should.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  If you didn't do any work for a few days no one would notice? That does not compute. What do you do for a living? If I didn't show up for even a couple of days they would send out the police and possibly the state militia due to there being a lot of "village knowledge" at my company.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    If I didn't have meetings scheduled or didn't have particular deliverables due? No. No one would notice if I didn't "do any work" for a few days. They would probably start to notice if I wasn't responding to chats or emails. But it probably wouldn't reach critical mass until after a few days.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    We do work in two week sprints, so that is when work is noticed. I am a software engineer.

ram_rar 6y ago

If this trend continues, it should affect bay area housing prices. I dont see any reason to pay such high rent, if I could work anywhere in the pacific north west.

crispyporkbites 6y ago
I don’t know about the US, but there’s more to urban areas than just the commute time. If anything wfh means spending more time in your home neighbourhood, so you’re going to need more amenities closer by - which are generally found in cities.
- swsieber 6y ago
  But even by city standards, the bay housing prices are atronomicsl, right?
- pb7 6y ago
  This will be fiercely debated but Bay Area (notably San Francisco) has previously been a mix of {things to do, high paying jobs}. Once you remove high paying jobs (or rather, expand them to other cities by way of remoteness), there are many other equally good or better contenders for things to do with significantly cheaper housing.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Nature is an amenity.
- baddox 6y ago
  There’s an opposite effect too, because one of the biggest urban amenities is the density of activities which are likely to be closed for some time: night life, concerts, lots of hobbies, etc.
jasonv 6y ago
My Bay Area job is letting me WFH permanently, and I'm looking to move to an adjacent area but the rental market is empty, and housing sales seem... targeted to SF expats.

shinyFeature 6y ago

How would they handle remote employees who want to work from countries where Atlassian doesn't have a physical /legal entity? How would thing like taxes work in that situation?

m0zg 6y ago

Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work - remote people will be left out, and disadvantaged in terms of their career progression. So if they are serious about remote, they should commit to being remote only. Yes, some people won't like it, at least initially. But most of them will get used to it over time, same as they got used to the ridiculous proposition of spending a good chunk of their lives in traffic every day without getting paid, or not seeing their spouse and children for more than a few hours a day, or not being able to take a nap when they are tired, or sitting in a distracting noisy environment and being unable to focus, etc, etc.

ghaff 6y ago
>Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office. "Piecemeal" situation does not work Piecemeal is more difficult but it's basically what my company was pre-COVID and presumably will be again (with probably a lot more remote) posy-COVID. It does mean the people who are co-located need to have the discipline to treat decision-making, etc. as if everyone is remote. It probably helps that we're a somewhat larger company so most things are piecemeal anyway--people working together are in multiple offices even if they're not working at home.
- m0zg 6y ago
  Discipline requires upkeep and it will eventually deteriorate. You want to set things up such that discipline is not required: either the "right" outcome is the lowest energy state, or the "wrong" thing is logistically impossible. Fundamentally, this is the secret to successful people management in general. Anything else doesn't really work in the long term.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I should ask if I can start expensing coworking spaces.

daenz 6y ago

Anyone else suspect we are going to see a massive deflation of cities?

webkike 6y ago
Not really, cities offer public transportation and a lot of enjoyable things to do. They were a thing before large corporations were seated there.
- cheez 6y ago
  most people move to cities for work, not for restaurants and things to do. Not all, but most.
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    That's the reason they move there but may not be the reason they stay there. Once you change something in your life that allows you to take advantage of new opportunities, the latter may become the reason to support the change more than whatever initial reason you had.
  - webkike 6y ago
    Okay, but then what would be the incentive for the people who are already there to leave?
    - cheez 6y ago
      Life reasons I suppose
  - matthewowen 6y ago
    Depends on the city. Portland is a good example of a city with an anemic economy that people seem to be drawn to. I mean, even Philly (where I live) has seen somewhat of a resurgence (especially relative to the MSA at large), despite a lot of jobs being outside the city. I think we'll see the hypergrowth of the tech hubs drop off. I think cities more broadly might slow growth as millennials age into parenthood and that might be accelerated by recent events making cities more broadly seem less welcoming. But I'm not sure that jobs will be the main driver here.

NoOneNew 6y ago

I have a feeling this is going to end up similar to the "open office" fad. Lots of companies are going to go 100% on "forever work from home". Then in a year it's going to be not so much. That being said, I do believe "work from home" will become more of an option and far less frowned upon by employers. Then again, this is a white-collar problem. Blue collar and a few other industries still have to go to work. But who cares about them, right? It's only the white collar jobs that matter and should have a form of change and evolution to how they work. Those lowly blue collars and service industry peasants need to get back to work. It's far more vital for the important industries to hide away from the outside world, from its horrors and look down at the rest.

herval 6y ago
The open office “fad” is pretty much the only office arrangement for more than a decade now, so what you’re saying is this will be the de facto going forward?
- dbish 6y ago
  De-facto, but actually counter to productivity, just like open-office. Companies that choose to not do this, will have a per employee efficiency advantage. Big companies may not care just like in open office because the per employee advantage is outweighed by the ability to reduce costs for the space
  - amiga_500 6y ago
    Open office is the second to last act of desperation. Hot desking is your CEO standing up and saying "I got nothing" when asked how to increase profitability.
  - thingymajig 6y ago
    We don't need to endlessly increase productivity. The US been increasing productivity faster than wages for decades and it hasn't been good for most people.

fallingfrog 6y ago

I feel like it’s the right thing to do at this moment but.. it’s one of those things where the long term consequences are unforeseeable, and it makes me nervous. Like: how can you organize a union if everyone is remote? Does this make outsourcing a lot easier? What about personal connection? Is this a step in the Uber-ification of the office worker? Will we all become independent contractors? It’s impossible to say at this point.

ConcernedCoder 6y ago

Everyone who doesn't get to work from home: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

cblconfederate 6y ago

One thing that is not often mentioned is these threads is how this is particularly beneficial for European workers. They live in cities that are already small and dense, generally don't depend on the office for their socialization, internet speeds are good (due to density probably) and family life is balanced. Plus a lot of them are already accustomed to working remotely. They 'll probably be able to compete for a lot more jobs now.

contrarianmop 6y ago
Dang! They’ll take are jobs now and move them over to their low density, high speed internet cities.
rtweetr 6y ago
Dang! They’ll take are jobs and move them over to there low density high speed internet cities.
ghaff 6y ago
Timezones are challenging between US West Coast and Europe. But, at my company, we do a lot of collaboration between US East Coast and Central Europe--which seems manageable synchronously but is probably approaching the limit where it's fairly straightforward (on a frequent basis).
- caymanjim 6y ago
  I'm US east coast working for a US west coast client, and that's complicated enough. I've got a few hours before and after work to myself, which is nice, but the workday is smack in the middle. On the upside, I can sleep in and stay up late if I want. On the downside, I often miss family dinners (less of a concern with covid) and there's no long block of time for more than errands during the week. Overall, I like it. A bigger shift would be hard. I may move to Hawaii when the plague passes, and then my day would start at 6am. That'd be rough.
  - ghaff 6y ago

jayd16 6y ago

I like the trend but one big hurdle will come when we have a partial return to the office. Everyone at work, or everyone remote works well. Mixing office and WFH communication will have further growing pains.

bargle0 6y ago

I feel like permanent WFH is outsourcing real estate costs to the worker. This isn’t a big deal for some, since one may live alone or already have a home office, but it gets burdensome if there is more than one home worker in a household.

digianarchist 6y ago
I'm OK with this. WFH means I can cut my mortgage costs by 50%.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  How?
  - gundmc 6y ago
    Move somewhere cheaper I suspect.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      Then your pay will be cut too. Lots of people think that is unfair because you are doing the same work, but those people just don't understand that salaries are market based. Also you might think "my company doesn't cut salaries", or "I just won't say I've moved". That might work if you stay at the same company for the rest of your life, but if you move jobs there's no way you'd get the same deal.
      - t-writescode 6y ago
        I believe that depends on the company. Facebook? Sure, I think I saw an article about that for Facebook. Other places? Maybe not. Often times, there's plenty of places that are _totally_ within commuting distance, but really aren't. Do you think Facebook would lower someone's wages for living in Davis rather than Palo Alto or San Jose?

sushshshsh 6y ago

Side rant, I'm convinced that companies who say the office helps communication are just really bad at communication. If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are good at communicatimg.

djohnston 6y ago
is this irony?
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  No, I'm really being serious. If someone doesn't answer an email, the reason usually isn't "I'm busy", it's "I don't want to help you". If the answer is "I'm busy right now and I am not responsible enough to remember all of the people I need to follow up with to at least give them a pointer of who could actually help", then your company is dysfunctional.

dudeinjapan 6y ago

Atlassian tells employees they can egregiously ignore customer requests from home forever

lloydatkinson 6y ago

Does this mean they will be able to focus on creating products that aren’t as crap?

sfjailbird 6y ago

As much as people like to complain about JIRA and Confluence, the very essence of corporateness, Atlassian is a great company for both customers and employees. Also, I have 'known' Mike Cannon-Brooks since twenty years ago when he was active in developer forums, good dude then, too. So nice to see engineer driven companies succeed and not forget the little guys.

_peeley 6y ago

I'm anxious to see what kind of macro trends arise from this, if it's still a popular policy post-pandemic. I'd predict that most industry jobs being remote by default would inevitably lead to a race to the bottom for wages, due to positions being far more competitive and able to effectively outsource to the lowest COL areas. For example, NPR has already experienced this[1] with its internship program this fall - after going remote, it led to a 10x increase in the number of applicants. [1] https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-pubmedia-job-in-a-pandemic/ https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-pubmedia-job-in-a-...

GhostBih 6y ago

A dream i still have for Telemedicine. I wish I could do telemedicine as long as I wanted, surely it’ll end.