18 ms·

Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

525 points by theBashShell 6y ago

rich_sasha 6y ago
I wonder how many of these “permanent” WFH positions will be made to return to the office after Covid. It’s nice to say that now when you don’t have the choice anyway. But when the tide turns, it will be easy to force people to return / fire them / make it unattractive for them to avoid the office.
dudul 6y ago
This article seems much more nuanced than the title. Looks like it's mostly part time WFH, modulo specific authorization from one's manager.
- ck425 6y ago
  Is it common for companies not to have this already? Both places I've worked so far have had this. There's an office and everyone has a desk and is presumed to be in the majority of the time but if you want to WFH you just did and let your team know. There was an understanding that for certain events you should try be in the office (big planning/roadmapping meetings, retros and manager 121s) but otherwise it was at will. If for some reason you needed to WFH for an extended period of time that was a conversation they were open to. For example a colleague's partner was ill so he WFH for a month to help with the kids, or another colleague was changing meds and that was easier to cope with if they WFH that week. Maybe I've just been lucky with employers but flexibility around WFH has always been a given for me.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Often you need more than manager approval. At Google, you need VP approval for permanent remote work (hopefully for now - we will see if things change).
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The thing is that many companies are likely open to WFH now and then for appropriate roles and others are open to WFH-mostly. So it may be a difference between WFH one day a week and WFH nine days every fortnight.
  - dudul 6y ago
    I've also mostly been at organizations where it was never a problem. I believe traditionally FANG have been resistant even to the part-time remote model.
ahelwer 6y ago
The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and learning physics. Plus, honestly, I doubt I was doing more than four hours of "real" work a day while full time. If I could be fully remote and work part time, I would consider eventually rejoining Microsoft. There is a lot of hand-wringing over how fully remote workers get left behind but I've never been interested in moving beyond an IC level.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  Roughly 30 hours/week is my personal sweet spot. I did it on a contract for a while. I'm not sure my productivity was significantly impacted. It's really hard to actually sit down and focus for more than 6 hours productively.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Except the most common instance of "part-time" work is actually full-time, just without benefits, and the majority of those jobs are not cushy expensive contracts with large American companies. They just call it part time because they aren't monitoring hours strictly. I probably should not bother trying to describe this here because almost no comes on HN and admits they aren't highly compensated.
- x87678r 6y ago
  health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary. EDIT: I have a family like most people. EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all. This current "we're kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes" is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you're not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you. Example: I once ran into my boss talking to a colleague at a coffee break about a potential project with a new customer and volunteered to work on it as I liked the tech. Months later, I got it. If I would have been remote that day I would have never heard about it as stuff like new projects and new customers is pretty hush-hush until the ink dries on the contract so they're never written about in public slack channels until then, but then it's usually too late to call dibs as the pieces are already in motion. Not to mention, you can't really move far away from the office either since you could at any time be expected to show up in the office for $IMPORTANT_MEETING.
- st1x7 6y ago
  Yes - for someone living in a big city half office, half WFH is the worst of everything. It means that I have to maintain an expensive home office, don't get all the benefits of working in an office with other people (which I prefer) and I can't move out of the big city.
  - lnsru 6y ago
    You’re describing my situation. I have no dedicated room for my home office, just table with my own decent monitor and company’s decent workstation plus some hardware from the office. My place looks ugly with all that equipment, but it’s still better than punching a card daily in the office. Moving to a cheaper area is too good to be true.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Or you get a coworking space (in normal circumstances) and it's just a cost like commuting is for a lot of people.
PeterStuer 6y ago
The nuance you might not get from just the title: "Microsoft will now allow employees to work from home freely for less than 50 percent of their working week, or for managers to approve permanent remote work. " In order for true relocation to be an option, that 'manager approval' must be unequivocal, unrevocable and transferable, when, as happens very frequently at Microsoft, the worker gets a new manager.
- mc32 6y ago
  Remote work is possible, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are good at it; they adapt well and remain productive. But... as Marissa Meier found out, some people are utterly bad at it, or some take advantage of the privilege of self management and milk the system. So they will have to measure and gauge to see the balance of benefits and detriments of permanent change.
  - make3 6y ago
    what's the Marissa Meier thing?
  - dudul 6y ago
    Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results? Also, do you think someone dishonest enough to take advantage of a remote position to spend their time working on their own startup would be a great asset on-site? I'm not saying remote work is for everyone, far from it, but there is a difference between comparing someone that is not as productive when WFH, and someone who milks the practice illegally.
    - mc32 6y ago
      >” Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results?” I don’t think we have public insight into any internal results. We do know that there was evidence that a significant number of people logged in seldom or sporadically for years according to accounts of VPN and other logs. So the skating and slacking was inordinately sufficient for her to pull the plug on that option.
gtirloni 6y ago
Microsoft is essentially already a distributed company and has the technology for it. Why not hire remotely?
gghhjj 6y ago
A lot of info is missed here as well. Sales orgs (quite a large part of Microsoft) must still work from the office (with exceptions) and cannot relocate as they need to meet customers - including the technical sales. Even though they've worked fine from home and were in fact MORE productive. So a lot of nuance is missed, and the application of this isn't as broad as it is suggested.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I can't speak to Microsoft specifically but a lot of outside sales (i.e. people who sell directly to enterprise accounts) are already typically at least mostly remote in practice. They may have a desk somewhere but the typical sales manager is going to start asking questions if they spend too much time in the office instead of meeting with customers.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I recently had to deal with some Azure stuff and a Microsoft sales guy. He is based in North Dakota of all places.
- mad_vill 6y ago
  Friendly with a bunch of people in sales at msft. Most people in those roles were on the road 60% percent of the time before covid. If anything they were the most remote friendly org considering a team for a product will have regional posts, so team meetings were always over the phone.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
For some value of 'permanently'? They made this change in policy; they can make others, later. So who knows.
kethinov 6y ago
Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think that the equal pay for equal work principle should apply here. One should neither receive a big city subsidy nor have their pay cut for choosing to live somewhere else.
- uberduper 6y ago
  Everyone thinks they should be getting SF salaries in this new era of remote work. Nobody thinks they should be getting a Flint salary. Equal pay for equal work doesn't have to mean the bar is raised.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I think there are reasons to make either choice (one global salary vs a localized market salary). The former optimizes for fairness/equality of continuing employees and takes the "what is the value of the work?" as the foremost question. The latter puts the focus on "what is the market price [the next-best-alternative] for this employee?" and tries to ensure that you don't have unhappy employees staying longer than either side would prefer because they are "stuck" with a salary that they can't match in any other opportunity available to them and so do just enough to not get fired.
  - kethinov 6y ago
    The latter seems unlikely to me. If we stigmatized or outlawed geopay, the net effect would be rising wages across the board because companies would not want to be locked out of hiring good people in HCOL areas. That or the cities would empty out and the relative income needed to live well would flatten. Either way, a win for society.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The problem is that if (even just keeping the discussion to the US) a company pays, say, Chicago wages everywhere, that means they effectively probably can't hire anyone in the Bay Area for example. Of course, a lot of companies already basically don't try to salary match the hire who has an offer from Facebook or Google in SV and wants to work there.
marketingPro 6y ago
I like globalism, I think it's good for most humans. However I can't help to think that quickly US workers will be replaced with our lower cost English speaking alternatives. The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing/teaching/leading their counterparts. This is the skill employers are paying the big $$ for. However, this stops now, no new generation of US leadership. Why hire a junior US engineer? They have never been a leader.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  > The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing/teaching/leading their counterparts. Non-US engineers don't manage/teach/lead?
krzyk 6y ago
Taking aside all the deaths (I'm still afraid that my parents and parents-in-law will catch COVID). The pandemic is doing a really great work on shifting minds of a lot of WFH-awerse companies/managers, and is doing an interesting shifts in economies (e.g. at my country a lot, and I mean a lot of people started doing online purchases for things that were normally bought offline - e.g. I was surprised how much I can save of diapers alone). Some services thrive (all online) but others are declining (restaurants, pubs), interesting times.
netcan 6y ago
The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that's the way we're going. It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies. The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don't need to be all that ruthless. This takes off a lot of pressure. But as things go on, "geopay" is going to become an optimizable cost structure. There will be uncomfortable conversations as people move to higher geopay places. False addresses. Optimisations on all sides. Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a mess, as the games play out.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I have a evil theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.
  - netcan 6y ago
    There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right. I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions. Anyway... WFH and outsourcing did have a small boom and bust. On WFH, Marissa Meyer pulled the plug and the WFH reversed. "IT Outsourcing" was imminent circa 2000, but a lot of companies had to reverse out of this strategy. It may be that these were right-but-early. WFH & outsourcing are now ready. I also think they are hard to seperate. Once WFH becomes a norm, the labour market is internationalised by default. Not just tech jobs. If you can work from Montana, you can work from Sophia.
    - freetime2 6y ago
      Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging. There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire within a certain country. For example, government contracts might stipulate that only US citizens are allowed to have access to production servers. So while I definitely think that adoption of remote work will result in more opportunities for people living outside of traditional tech hotspots, I think we will still continue to see individual companies preferring to hire within certain countries and regions.
sushshshsh 6y ago
My wife and I were about to buy a 1.4M house in Redmond but for the past two weeks we've been considering a completely different rural area with beautiful new houses and lots of land
- snegu 6y ago
  This could be such a boon for Redmond. The area is way too expensive and the traffic is horrific, and this is mostly due to Microsoft workers needing to be in the office. We finally quit our jobs and left, but this could certainly help for the future!
MattGaiser 6y ago
I have a nefarious theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.
tomcat27 6y ago
I read few months ago after pandemic started, Microsoft studied productivity of its employees. Wonder this policy is a logical conclusion from the results of that study or they simply want to attract talent like few other ones or both
disease 6y ago
What I'd like to see happen when the pandemic ends is this: if I return to a company's office, I should be able to return to an equivalent of my home office. My home office is a small room in my home, but it has a large window providing natural light and top of the line office furniture including a couch and a really big desk. Most importantly I am the only one that works in this office. Having a setup like this in a company's office would remove any incentive I have to work from home. I wonder how many developers want to work from home just to escape the shitshow of open offices.
- freetime2 6y ago
  After working remote for about 5 years now, I don’t think I could ever work in an open office again. Whenever I do need to visit an office, I don’t even attempt to get any focused work done. I just attend my meetings and try to spend time socializing with coworkers who I haven’t seen in a while. Commutes are a pretty miserable aspect of working in an office, too.
A_non_e-moose 6y ago
Absolute BS with misleading title There is general policy that is passed to each organization and then organizations decide by themselves, overriding policy. Most of them block any country change, which means maybe you change state in US, but anything else is refused In policy written it is vague with mention of exceptions but verbally communicated by management you understand how forbidden it is Microsoft is still holding on to idea of employee in sight is better managed
jdlyga 6y ago
If my wife didn't work for a traditional company who's heavily pushing their tech workers back into the office, I'd be living in a mansion in the woods by now instead of this tiny apartment.
claytongulick 6y ago
Interesting, I just interviewed with them last year and ended up not moving forward because they wanted me to move to Washington. Same with Google, except they wanted me to move to New York. I was pretty surprised at both company's unwillingness to be flexible on that point.
cryptica 6y ago
It's great to see Microsoft jumping on board. I think the reason that Microsoft was hesitant to do this initially was because they have enjoyed high productivity increases over the past few years (especially on the software development side thanks to awesome tools like TypeScript) and so they didn't want to risk losing that momentum. Thankfully it appears that Microsoft employees have been able to adapt to remote work and were able to maintain similar productivity levels. I think it speaks to the high quality of project managers who work at Microsoft. Project managers are the foundation of any solid tech business.
farseer 6y ago
If this works, it would be Indians, Chinese and Eastern European coders who would make up the majority of Microsoft rank and file in a few years. Killing the H1B visa was not going to save American jobs, the corporations are always a step ahead. We are looking at a Microsoft with a truly global workforce. Why pay $150k to a dev when it would buy 5 Romanians instead who are just as good.
- oblio 6y ago
  A good Romanian dev is about $60k. Maybe more.
iammru 6y ago
Working remotely WITH MANAGER approval. This is something that was already in place but the new policy open it up so this is more commonly accepted.
- netcan 6y ago
  The paper policy can stay the same, but the policy policy changes. Call it a norm if you like.
paulpan 6y ago
As with Twitter's announcement back in May for allowing their employees to WFH permanently, this puts pressure on other big software companies to adopt similar policies. Microsoft being as big as they are really pushes other similar-sized companies like Google. We've seen Facebook follow suit to shift their workforce in a similar manner. It makes you wonder when we'll hear something similar from Google, Apple, and even a reverse course for Netflix. If they don't, then recruiting might suffer as a candidate would likely pick the more WFH-flexible company.
deegles 6y ago
Time to install a VPN gateway wherever the top of the geopay scale is!
shironineja__ 6y ago
Permanently. Unless we change our minds later.

525 points by theBashShell 6y ago

I wonder how many of these “permanent” WFH positions will be made to return to the office after Covid. It’s nice to say that now when you don’t have the choice anyway. But when the tide turns, it will be easy to force people to return / fire them / make it unattractive for them to avoid the office.

dudul 6y ago

This article seems much more nuanced than the title. Looks like it's mostly part time WFH, modulo specific authorization from one's manager.

ck425 6y ago
Is it common for companies not to have this already? Both places I've worked so far have had this. There's an office and everyone has a desk and is presumed to be in the majority of the time but if you want to WFH you just did and let your team know. There was an understanding that for certain events you should try be in the office (big planning/roadmapping meetings, retros and manager 121s) but otherwise it was at will. If for some reason you needed to WFH for an extended period of time that was a conversation they were open to. For example a colleague's partner was ill so he WFH for a month to help with the kids, or another colleague was changing meds and that was easier to cope with if they WFH that week. Maybe I've just been lucky with employers but flexibility around WFH has always been a given for me.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Often you need more than manager approval. At Google, you need VP approval for permanent remote work (hopefully for now - we will see if things change).
- ghaff 6y ago
  The thing is that many companies are likely open to WFH now and then for appropriate roles and others are open to WFH-mostly. So it may be a difference between WFH one day a week and WFH nine days every fortnight.
- dudul 6y ago
  I've also mostly been at organizations where it was never a problem. I believe traditionally FANG have been resistant even to the part-time remote model.

ahelwer 6y ago

The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and learning physics. Plus, honestly, I doubt I was doing more than four hours of "real" work a day while full time. If I could be fully remote and work part time, I would consider eventually rejoining Microsoft. There is a lot of hand-wringing over how fully remote workers get left behind but I've never been interested in moving beyond an IC level.

SkyPuncher 6y ago
Roughly 30 hours/week is my personal sweet spot. I did it on a contract for a while. I'm not sure my productivity was significantly impacted. It's really hard to actually sit down and focus for more than 6 hours productively.
ilaksh 6y ago
Except the most common instance of "part-time" work is actually full-time, just without benefits, and the majority of those jobs are not cushy expensive contracts with large American companies. They just call it part time because they aren't monitoring hours strictly. I probably should not bother trying to describe this here because almost no comes on HN and admits they aren't highly compensated.
x87678r 6y ago
health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary. EDIT: I have a family like most people. EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all. This current "we're kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes" is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you're not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you. Example: I once ran into my boss talking to a colleague at a coffee break about a potential project with a new customer and volunteered to work on it as I liked the tech. Months later, I got it. If I would have been remote that day I would have never heard about it as stuff like new projects and new customers is pretty hush-hush until the ink dries on the contract so they're never written about in public slack channels until then, but then it's usually too late to call dibs as the pieces are already in motion. Not to mention, you can't really move far away from the office either since you could at any time be expected to show up in the office for $IMPORTANT_MEETING.

st1x7 6y ago
Yes - for someone living in a big city half office, half WFH is the worst of everything. It means that I have to maintain an expensive home office, don't get all the benefits of working in an office with other people (which I prefer) and I can't move out of the big city.
- lnsru 6y ago
  You’re describing my situation. I have no dedicated room for my home office, just table with my own decent monitor and company’s decent workstation plus some hardware from the office. My place looks ugly with all that equipment, but it’s still better than punching a card daily in the office. Moving to a cheaper area is too good to be true.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Or you get a coworking space (in normal circumstances) and it's just a cost like commuting is for a lot of people.

PeterStuer 6y ago

The nuance you might not get from just the title: "Microsoft will now allow employees to work from home freely for less than 50 percent of their working week, or for managers to approve permanent remote work. " In order for true relocation to be an option, that 'manager approval' must be unequivocal, unrevocable and transferable, when, as happens very frequently at Microsoft, the worker gets a new manager.

mc32 6y ago
Remote work is possible, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are good at it; they adapt well and remain productive. But... as Marissa Meier found out, some people are utterly bad at it, or some take advantage of the privilege of self management and milk the system. So they will have to measure and gauge to see the balance of benefits and detriments of permanent change.
- make3 6y ago
  what's the Marissa Meier thing?
- dudul 6y ago
  Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results? Also, do you think someone dishonest enough to take advantage of a remote position to spend their time working on their own startup would be a great asset on-site? I'm not saying remote work is for everyone, far from it, but there is a difference between comparing someone that is not as productive when WFH, and someone who milks the practice illegally.
  - mc32 6y ago
    >” Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results?” I don’t think we have public insight into any internal results. We do know that there was evidence that a significant number of people logged in seldom or sporadically for years according to accounts of VPN and other logs. So the skating and slacking was inordinately sufficient for her to pull the plug on that option.

gtirloni 6y ago

Microsoft is essentially already a distributed company and has the technology for it. Why not hire remotely?

gghhjj 6y ago

A lot of info is missed here as well. Sales orgs (quite a large part of Microsoft) must still work from the office (with exceptions) and cannot relocate as they need to meet customers - including the technical sales. Even though they've worked fine from home and were in fact MORE productive. So a lot of nuance is missed, and the application of this isn't as broad as it is suggested.

ghaff 6y ago
I can't speak to Microsoft specifically but a lot of outside sales (i.e. people who sell directly to enterprise accounts) are already typically at least mostly remote in practice. They may have a desk somewhere but the typical sales manager is going to start asking questions if they spend too much time in the office instead of meeting with customers.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I recently had to deal with some Azure stuff and a Microsoft sales guy. He is based in North Dakota of all places.
mad_vill 6y ago
Friendly with a bunch of people in sales at msft. Most people in those roles were on the road 60% percent of the time before covid. If anything they were the most remote friendly org considering a team for a product will have regional posts, so team meetings were always over the phone.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

For some value of 'permanently'? They made this change in policy; they can make others, later. So who knows.

kethinov 6y ago

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think that the equal pay for equal work principle should apply here. One should neither receive a big city subsidy nor have their pay cut for choosing to live somewhere else.

uberduper 6y ago
Everyone thinks they should be getting SF salaries in this new era of remote work. Nobody thinks they should be getting a Flint salary. Equal pay for equal work doesn't have to mean the bar is raised.
sokoloff 6y ago
I think there are reasons to make either choice (one global salary vs a localized market salary). The former optimizes for fairness/equality of continuing employees and takes the "what is the value of the work?" as the foremost question. The latter puts the focus on "what is the market price [the next-best-alternative] for this employee?" and tries to ensure that you don't have unhappy employees staying longer than either side would prefer because they are "stuck" with a salary that they can't match in any other opportunity available to them and so do just enough to not get fired.
- kethinov 6y ago
  The latter seems unlikely to me. If we stigmatized or outlawed geopay, the net effect would be rising wages across the board because companies would not want to be locked out of hiring good people in HCOL areas. That or the cities would empty out and the relative income needed to live well would flatten. Either way, a win for society.
ghaff 6y ago
The problem is that if (even just keeping the discussion to the US) a company pays, say, Chicago wages everywhere, that means they effectively probably can't hire anyone in the Bay Area for example. Of course, a lot of companies already basically don't try to salary match the hire who has an offer from Facebook or Google in SV and wants to work there.

marketingPro 6y ago

I like globalism, I think it's good for most humans. However I can't help to think that quickly US workers will be replaced with our lower cost English speaking alternatives. The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing/teaching/leading their counterparts. This is the skill employers are paying the big $$ for. However, this stops now, no new generation of US leadership. Why hire a junior US engineer? They have never been a leader.

balfirevic 6y ago
> The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing/teaching/leading their counterparts. Non-US engineers don't manage/teach/lead?

krzyk 6y ago

Taking aside all the deaths (I'm still afraid that my parents and parents-in-law will catch COVID). The pandemic is doing a really great work on shifting minds of a lot of WFH-awerse companies/managers, and is doing an interesting shifts in economies (e.g. at my country a lot, and I mean a lot of people started doing online purchases for things that were normally bought offline - e.g. I was surprised how much I can save of diapers alone). Some services thrive (all online) but others are declining (restaurants, pubs), interesting times.

netcan 6y ago

The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that's the way we're going. It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies. The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don't need to be all that ruthless. This takes off a lot of pressure. But as things go on, "geopay" is going to become an optimizable cost structure. There will be uncomfortable conversations as people move to higher geopay places. False addresses. Optimisations on all sides. Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a mess, as the games play out.

MattGaiser 6y ago
I have a evil theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.
- netcan 6y ago
  There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right. I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions. Anyway... WFH and outsourcing did have a small boom and bust. On WFH, Marissa Meyer pulled the plug and the WFH reversed. "IT Outsourcing" was imminent circa 2000, but a lot of companies had to reverse out of this strategy. It may be that these were right-but-early. WFH & outsourcing are now ready. I also think they are hard to seperate. Once WFH becomes a norm, the labour market is internationalised by default. Not just tech jobs. If you can work from Montana, you can work from Sophia.
  - freetime2 6y ago
    Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging. There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire within a certain country. For example, government contracts might stipulate that only US citizens are allowed to have access to production servers. So while I definitely think that adoption of remote work will result in more opportunities for people living outside of traditional tech hotspots, I think we will still continue to see individual companies preferring to hire within certain countries and regions.

sushshshsh 6y ago

My wife and I were about to buy a 1.4M house in Redmond but for the past two weeks we've been considering a completely different rural area with beautiful new houses and lots of land

snegu 6y ago
This could be such a boon for Redmond. The area is way too expensive and the traffic is horrific, and this is mostly due to Microsoft workers needing to be in the office. We finally quit our jobs and left, but this could certainly help for the future!

MattGaiser 6y ago

I have a nefarious theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.

tomcat27 6y ago

I read few months ago after pandemic started, Microsoft studied productivity of its employees. Wonder this policy is a logical conclusion from the results of that study or they simply want to attract talent like few other ones or both

disease 6y ago

What I'd like to see happen when the pandemic ends is this: if I return to a company's office, I should be able to return to an equivalent of my home office. My home office is a small room in my home, but it has a large window providing natural light and top of the line office furniture including a couch and a really big desk. Most importantly I am the only one that works in this office. Having a setup like this in a company's office would remove any incentive I have to work from home. I wonder how many developers want to work from home just to escape the shitshow of open offices.

freetime2 6y ago
After working remote for about 5 years now, I don’t think I could ever work in an open office again. Whenever I do need to visit an office, I don’t even attempt to get any focused work done. I just attend my meetings and try to spend time socializing with coworkers who I haven’t seen in a while. Commutes are a pretty miserable aspect of working in an office, too.

A_non_e-moose 6y ago

Absolute BS with misleading title There is general policy that is passed to each organization and then organizations decide by themselves, overriding policy. Most of them block any country change, which means maybe you change state in US, but anything else is refused In policy written it is vague with mention of exceptions but verbally communicated by management you understand how forbidden it is Microsoft is still holding on to idea of employee in sight is better managed

jdlyga 6y ago

If my wife didn't work for a traditional company who's heavily pushing their tech workers back into the office, I'd be living in a mansion in the woods by now instead of this tiny apartment.

claytongulick 6y ago

Interesting, I just interviewed with them last year and ended up not moving forward because they wanted me to move to Washington. Same with Google, except they wanted me to move to New York. I was pretty surprised at both company's unwillingness to be flexible on that point.

cryptica 6y ago

It's great to see Microsoft jumping on board. I think the reason that Microsoft was hesitant to do this initially was because they have enjoyed high productivity increases over the past few years (especially on the software development side thanks to awesome tools like TypeScript) and so they didn't want to risk losing that momentum. Thankfully it appears that Microsoft employees have been able to adapt to remote work and were able to maintain similar productivity levels. I think it speaks to the high quality of project managers who work at Microsoft. Project managers are the foundation of any solid tech business.

farseer 6y ago

If this works, it would be Indians, Chinese and Eastern European coders who would make up the majority of Microsoft rank and file in a few years. Killing the H1B visa was not going to save American jobs, the corporations are always a step ahead. We are looking at a Microsoft with a truly global workforce. Why pay $150k to a dev when it would buy 5 Romanians instead who are just as good.

oblio 6y ago
A good Romanian dev is about $60k. Maybe more.

iammru 6y ago

Working remotely WITH MANAGER approval. This is something that was already in place but the new policy open it up so this is more commonly accepted.

netcan 6y ago
The paper policy can stay the same, but the policy policy changes. Call it a norm if you like.

paulpan 6y ago

As with Twitter's announcement back in May for allowing their employees to WFH permanently, this puts pressure on other big software companies to adopt similar policies. Microsoft being as big as they are really pushes other similar-sized companies like Google. We've seen Facebook follow suit to shift their workforce in a similar manner. It makes you wonder when we'll hear something similar from Google, Apple, and even a reverse course for Netflix. If they don't, then recruiting might suffer as a candidate would likely pick the more WFH-flexible company.

deegles 6y ago

Time to install a VPN gateway wherever the top of the geopay scale is!

shironineja__ 6y ago

Permanently. Unless we change our minds later.