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The thing that nobody realizes is that we are now subsidizing an office at home and those companies are still expecting us onsite once or twice a week so that w

The thing that nobody realizes is that we are now subsidizing an office at home and those companies are still expecting us onsite once or twice a week so that we cannot move to a low rent area. In the meantime, those same companies are going to downsize their offices since not everyone is going to show up the same "days" at the office. I want to move to a model where everyone is expected at the office maybe a week (or a couple days of a week) every two months. That would allow workers to really live wherever they want. It also allows to live close to the office for those that don't want to travel a week every couple of months.

hyder_m29 6y ago
That introduces a host of new problems. Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months. And where will they stay during office-week?
- gundmc 6y ago
  > Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months. Yes, or they could continue to live locally. It's about more flexibility for what is the right choice for each family. I don't see this as a problem. > And where will they stay during office-week? Hotel, AirBnb, corporate short-term housing? People travel for work all the time and it's not an issue. If hotel capacity becomes insufficient other solutions will pop up - like furnished apartment rentals. I don't see this as a large issue either.
  - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
    Well, with all due respect, that doesn't result in me (or I would argue, most workers) being able to live wherever they want. Plus you would still have to live relatively close to a major airport or something (and I don't even know what that's going to look like yet post-covid). MAYBE it makes things better for a handful of relatively rich, highly paid workers/companies who don't mind spending significant time away from their families/homes, are happy to travel and who are willing to spring for regular accommodation for their workers, but I think for most workers springing for an office at home would be widely preferable. And I say that as someone who, pre-covid, had to do a couple of nights per couple-of-months away from my family because my employer's work was already distributed around the nation...(honestly, the travel was personally one of the worst aspects of my job, though I know other people loved it). Now with covid, i'm bitten with the "not enough space at home" problem (though thank god we got an in-built study put in beforehand), but I no longer have to travel long distances or stay overnight at any of the interstate offices, which i personally find a blessing. But i'd take the all-remote or "two days in" model in preference...
    - dheera 6y ago
      > live relatively close to a major airport Also not to mention that flying even ONCE per year round-trip across the country will likely emit more carbon than a full year's worth of local commutes. Now multiply that by 6 for every 2 months. Everything everyone says about greenhouse gas benefits of remote work just went out the window as soon as air travel is mentioned.
      - exdsq 6y ago
        Not sure why you’ve been downvoted, you’re absolutely correct.
        hengri 6y ago
        I'm guessing it's a uncomfortable fact for the hackernews crowd who seem to travel a lot and also claim to care for climate change.
        dheera 6y ago
        Yep, I've noticed that in the past year on HN thre are a lot of people who would rather downvote than face truth. I wonder whether COVID brought in a bunch of low quality participants. Separately though I've noticed lately that pretty much all my comments get downvoted first; some disappear in the process, others get salvaged by upvotes. I wonder whether someone is running a downvote bot on my handle.
        onlydeadheroes 6y ago
        I noticed this a few months back, back when someone kept posting anti-meritocracy articles hoping for a thread that wasn't a train wreck. I started testing their algorithms by repeatedly posting the exact same comment and observing what happened. This triggered changes to the algo itself, and eventually it moved from downvoting to flagging, or maybe a human supervisor did. This was across multiple accounts and many weeks of posts. Eventually dang told me to stop. My current account name is a tribute to this.
- mushbino 6y ago
  In a hotel? Also, a week every couple of months isn't a bad trade off at all. Many people who drive trucks or are in sales or consulting travel every week for the whole work week.
  - dheera 6y ago
    What if you're married? A week every 2 months means that you don't see your partner for likely 25% of the time, since your office weeks will likely not coincide.
    - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
      Do you mean 12.5% ?
      - deathanatos 6y ago
        No, the poster means 25%. 2 months is approximately 8 weeks, and they are presuming that you and your SO's "week" don't overlap, which is likely, so there will be 2 weeks every 2 months where you don't see each other: the week you travel, and the week your SO travels. 2 weeks / 8 weeks is 25%.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      It's obviously personal to each person, but I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time. A bit like working from home helps with "deep work" away from the office, being at home with partner off on some travel helps with "deep home", to really appreciate a quiet place, and be full of love and welcome when they come back.
      - dheera 6y ago
        > I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time. I fully agree with this, though I'd prefer it be more on a voluntary basis, e.g. by travelling alone from time to time, having a couple of hobbies separate from your partner, and friends that you hang out with. Not forced upon you by work. Being forced to be away from your partner 25% of the time by work is a bit much, unless you're a travelling consultant or flight attendant or something.
- rainyMammoth 6y ago
  If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office. But the point is that you are now also flexible to go live wherever you want.
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    > If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office. And now, they have to live in a very expensive area and have to work from home except for a week every two monts?
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      No, if you live in the same region then you can make the trip in less time and not need to be away for a while week at once.
  - powersnail 6y ago
    For people who live close, they still have to work from home, thus not avoiding the cost of it (higher utility fee, no company dining, need more space). For them, this is definitely more expensive than work onsite all the time.
maurys 6y ago
Yeah, I think of it the same way :/ This will likely make hot-desking the norm (already is at plenty of places). On a selfish note, I already have a house in a tech hub, so I'd love for things to go back to how they were pre-covid.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Ah hot desking building services wet dream -) only problem is people hate it, the human animal likes its own space and we each have our own preference. And for the near future these desks will need cleaning after each use.
  - touisteur 6y ago
    And you get to do it, in addition to your commute, and anyway you'll also clean it up before you use it. I'm not sure why we all can't seem to jump to the foregone conclusion : COVID-19 will be with us for at least one year, and since many people won't trust vaccines, it's gonna take some time to be safe-safe. Hot desking is another fuck-you to workers, a new low for people as 'interchangeable' cogs. Snowcrash prophecy. Subsidizing for a simple cheap desk at home + electricity + Internet for 1 or 2 years is less expensive than any office redesign or move they'll attempt, just the price of the cardboard boxes and moving company exceeds it... It feels like a psychological trap that no-one wants to switch to 'the new normal' and be done with it...
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Ah a 250,000 a year SWE will be cleaning desks :-) and to hospital standards.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I would assume the grunt developer in SV probably will suffer from it at some point, if they don't already. Glad that it is pretty unusual where I live, apart from sales where it already is quite established. Quite the fluctuation on these positions to be honest, but I don't see it for most engineering professions or even any higher position where organizing your work is more complicated. The only advantage is cost of space and some failure safety for hardware defects, although many have secondary devices already.
hrktb 6y ago
The market hasn’t fully adjusted yet, but once a lot more people are remote, salaries might also fluctuate depending on how far(cheap) you are allowed to live, with a higher price tag if you are required to be close to the office. For now some companies use your local area salary average as a proxy for that adjustment, but I’d expect they come up with a more straight and easy to justify scaling rule in the future.
afastow 6y ago
My initial reaction is that two months is a pretty awkward interval. It's long enough that you still need to fully optimize for remote communication and teamwork, but frequent enough to feel like an unwelcome regular disruption of people's lives.
cblconfederate 6y ago
it looks like the "on-sites" are only relevant in the first weeks when someone is hired. If an employee has learned to work consistently remotely, what's the point of having the burden of flying in every few months.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  The point is for companies that want their employees to grow and invent, not just be consistent in a narrowly scoped role
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Why does this involve the office? It's just my experience, RL meetings are useful for 'breaking the ice' with colleagues, but otherwise remote collaboration = in office collab. This excludes all meta-issues and politics
  - pracer 6y ago
    And how is that not doable remotely? "Learning new technology" can be done at home (or whenever the employee decides) and deployment will happen in a remote server or in the cloud. So, again, how this full remote prevents grow and invent for employees?
silveroriole 6y ago
These “remote but actually not” jobs are my pet hate. They clog up remote job listings and can never offer an actual reason why the employee must appear in person every week/month/quarter. It’s the worst of all possible worlds! No close connection with your coworkers or regular office benefits, no ability to work from anywhere, plus regular expensive/gruelling travel.
- linspace 6y ago
  For the vast majority of people getting rid of the commute is the main benefit. It's also good for the environment, for everyone's health and it reduces transit times for everyone specially during scholar season. If you are only required to travel once a month you can live almost every where, including other countries at least in Europe. If you are required once a week you certainly can afford better housing than the city center. So maybe you will not able to relocate to Thailand and work for Google (which would be great I admit if I were younger) but you are in the 0.01%. Most people I know prefer an hybrid model.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses. I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you. The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through. And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to. It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this. Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.
cyrrus 6y ago
Just do it... I moved 3 hours from the CBD and still did 2 days a week, you just need a friend place to crash at one night a week. No more excuses.
rednerrus 6y ago
The SAFE model of onsites once a quarter seem fine. The company can fly everyone to one spot for 3-4 days.

hyder_m29 6y ago

That introduces a host of new problems. Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months. And where will they stay during office-week?

gundmc 6y ago
> Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months. Yes, or they could continue to live locally. It's about more flexibility for what is the right choice for each family. I don't see this as a problem. > And where will they stay during office-week? Hotel, AirBnb, corporate short-term housing? People travel for work all the time and it's not an issue. If hotel capacity becomes insufficient other solutions will pop up - like furnished apartment rentals. I don't see this as a large issue either.
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  Well, with all due respect, that doesn't result in me (or I would argue, most workers) being able to live wherever they want. Plus you would still have to live relatively close to a major airport or something (and I don't even know what that's going to look like yet post-covid). MAYBE it makes things better for a handful of relatively rich, highly paid workers/companies who don't mind spending significant time away from their families/homes, are happy to travel and who are willing to spring for regular accommodation for their workers, but I think for most workers springing for an office at home would be widely preferable. And I say that as someone who, pre-covid, had to do a couple of nights per couple-of-months away from my family because my employer's work was already distributed around the nation...(honestly, the travel was personally one of the worst aspects of my job, though I know other people loved it). Now with covid, i'm bitten with the "not enough space at home" problem (though thank god we got an in-built study put in beforehand), but I no longer have to travel long distances or stay overnight at any of the interstate offices, which i personally find a blessing. But i'd take the all-remote or "two days in" model in preference...
  - dheera 6y ago
    > live relatively close to a major airport Also not to mention that flying even ONCE per year round-trip across the country will likely emit more carbon than a full year's worth of local commutes. Now multiply that by 6 for every 2 months. Everything everyone says about greenhouse gas benefits of remote work just went out the window as soon as air travel is mentioned.
    - exdsq 6y ago
      Not sure why you’ve been downvoted, you’re absolutely correct.
      - hengri 6y ago
        I'm guessing it's a uncomfortable fact for the hackernews crowd who seem to travel a lot and also claim to care for climate change.
        dheera 6y ago
        Yep, I've noticed that in the past year on HN thre are a lot of people who would rather downvote than face truth. I wonder whether COVID brought in a bunch of low quality participants. Separately though I've noticed lately that pretty much all my comments get downvoted first; some disappear in the process, others get salvaged by upvotes. I wonder whether someone is running a downvote bot on my handle.
        onlydeadheroes 6y ago
        I noticed this a few months back, back when someone kept posting anti-meritocracy articles hoping for a thread that wasn't a train wreck. I started testing their algorithms by repeatedly posting the exact same comment and observing what happened. This triggered changes to the algo itself, and eventually it moved from downvoting to flagging, or maybe a human supervisor did. This was across multiple accounts and many weeks of posts. Eventually dang told me to stop. My current account name is a tribute to this.
mushbino 6y ago
In a hotel? Also, a week every couple of months isn't a bad trade off at all. Many people who drive trucks or are in sales or consulting travel every week for the whole work week.
- dheera 6y ago
  What if you're married? A week every 2 months means that you don't see your partner for likely 25% of the time, since your office weeks will likely not coincide.
  - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
    Do you mean 12.5% ?
    - deathanatos 6y ago
      No, the poster means 25%. 2 months is approximately 8 weeks, and they are presuming that you and your SO's "week" don't overlap, which is likely, so there will be 2 weeks every 2 months where you don't see each other: the week you travel, and the week your SO travels. 2 weeks / 8 weeks is 25%.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    It's obviously personal to each person, but I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time. A bit like working from home helps with "deep work" away from the office, being at home with partner off on some travel helps with "deep home", to really appreciate a quiet place, and be full of love and welcome when they come back.
    - dheera 6y ago
      > I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time. I fully agree with this, though I'd prefer it be more on a voluntary basis, e.g. by travelling alone from time to time, having a couple of hobbies separate from your partner, and friends that you hang out with. Not forced upon you by work. Being forced to be away from your partner 25% of the time by work is a bit much, unless you're a travelling consultant or flight attendant or something.
rainyMammoth 6y ago
If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office. But the point is that you are now also flexible to go live wherever you want.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office. And now, they have to live in a very expensive area and have to work from home except for a week every two monts?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    No, if you live in the same region then you can make the trip in less time and not need to be away for a while week at once.
- powersnail 6y ago
  For people who live close, they still have to work from home, thus not avoiding the cost of it (higher utility fee, no company dining, need more space). For them, this is definitely more expensive than work onsite all the time.

maurys 6y ago

Yeah, I think of it the same way :/ This will likely make hot-desking the norm (already is at plenty of places). On a selfish note, I already have a house in a tech hub, so I'd love for things to go back to how they were pre-covid.

C1sc0cat 6y ago
Ah hot desking building services wet dream -) only problem is people hate it, the human animal likes its own space and we each have our own preference. And for the near future these desks will need cleaning after each use.
- touisteur 6y ago
  And you get to do it, in addition to your commute, and anyway you'll also clean it up before you use it. I'm not sure why we all can't seem to jump to the foregone conclusion : COVID-19 will be with us for at least one year, and since many people won't trust vaccines, it's gonna take some time to be safe-safe. Hot desking is another fuck-you to workers, a new low for people as 'interchangeable' cogs. Snowcrash prophecy. Subsidizing for a simple cheap desk at home + electricity + Internet for 1 or 2 years is less expensive than any office redesign or move they'll attempt, just the price of the cardboard boxes and moving company exceeds it... It feels like a psychological trap that no-one wants to switch to 'the new normal' and be done with it...
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Ah a 250,000 a year SWE will be cleaning desks :-) and to hospital standards.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I would assume the grunt developer in SV probably will suffer from it at some point, if they don't already. Glad that it is pretty unusual where I live, apart from sales where it already is quite established. Quite the fluctuation on these positions to be honest, but I don't see it for most engineering professions or even any higher position where organizing your work is more complicated. The only advantage is cost of space and some failure safety for hardware defects, although many have secondary devices already.

hrktb 6y ago

The market hasn’t fully adjusted yet, but once a lot more people are remote, salaries might also fluctuate depending on how far(cheap) you are allowed to live, with a higher price tag if you are required to be close to the office. For now some companies use your local area salary average as a proxy for that adjustment, but I’d expect they come up with a more straight and easy to justify scaling rule in the future.

afastow 6y ago

My initial reaction is that two months is a pretty awkward interval. It's long enough that you still need to fully optimize for remote communication and teamwork, but frequent enough to feel like an unwelcome regular disruption of people's lives.

cblconfederate 6y ago

it looks like the "on-sites" are only relevant in the first weeks when someone is hired. If an employee has learned to work consistently remotely, what's the point of having the burden of flying in every few months.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
The point is for companies that want their employees to grow and invent, not just be consistent in a narrowly scoped role
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Why does this involve the office? It's just my experience, RL meetings are useful for 'breaking the ice' with colleagues, but otherwise remote collaboration = in office collab. This excludes all meta-issues and politics
- pracer 6y ago
  And how is that not doable remotely? "Learning new technology" can be done at home (or whenever the employee decides) and deployment will happen in a remote server or in the cloud. So, again, how this full remote prevents grow and invent for employees?

silveroriole 6y ago

These “remote but actually not” jobs are my pet hate. They clog up remote job listings and can never offer an actual reason why the employee must appear in person every week/month/quarter. It’s the worst of all possible worlds! No close connection with your coworkers or regular office benefits, no ability to work from anywhere, plus regular expensive/gruelling travel.

linspace 6y ago
For the vast majority of people getting rid of the commute is the main benefit. It's also good for the environment, for everyone's health and it reduces transit times for everyone specially during scholar season. If you are only required to travel once a month you can live almost every where, including other countries at least in Europe. If you are required once a week you certainly can afford better housing than the city center. So maybe you will not able to relocate to Thailand and work for Google (which would be great I admit if I were younger) but you are in the 0.01%. Most people I know prefer an hybrid model.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses. I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you. The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through. And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to. It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this. Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

cyrrus 6y ago

Just do it... I moved 3 hours from the CBD and still did 2 days a week, you just need a friend place to crash at one night a week. No more excuses.

rednerrus 6y ago

The SAFE model of onsites once a quarter seem fine. The company can fly everyone to one spot for 3-4 days.