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After embracing remote work in 2020 companies face conflicts making it permanent

112 points by alexrustic 6y ago

sunsetSamurai 6y ago
I don't think most companies embraced remote work, they just didn't have any other choice. I'm pretty sure there's tons of managers out there that can't wait to get back to the office so they can keep having stupid meetings and micromanage their subordinates.
- uncledave 6y ago
  They’ve worked out how to do that from home. I’ve grown particularly good at popping their balloons. Zoom meetings are far more visible as they can be recorded and if they aren’t productive I make sure that is known.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
    wow. that's going nuclear. Getting ideas or sure. hat tip to you sir.
  - hn_asker 6y ago
    Can you share tips on how to pop their balloons?
    - uncledave 6y ago
      Accountability, agenda, actions in that order. So start with asking for the meeting to be recorded. Refuse to attend unless it is using the excuse that you may want to review bits of it later. They can’t refuse for accountability reasons. Agenda means they need to set a time window and agenda for the meeting up front. That keeps it in writing and the scope well defined. If there isn’t one there’s no reason to attend so carry on your normal duties. This becomes a virus quickly which trashes junk meetings. If you’re complained at for not attending, there was no agenda. If you don’t attend people see the person’s meetings as not mandatory and this disempowers them slowly. Actions. Make sure recordable actions come from the meeting and make sure they are accountable for tracking them and that they are delivering business value. If they aren’t then they don’t need to exist. Escalate that. Even as a junior a long time ago I asked for concrete actions at the end of a meeting and managed to cause a company wide shit storm :) After doing this a few times, organisers who rule or even just exist in the chaos and distraction are marginalised or made to conform to order and the good of the team. Edit: warning this doesn’t scale down to small companies.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Note that recording conversations without consent of all parties involved is a felony in quite a few jurisdictions.
    - pensatoio 6y ago
      Zoom notifies everyone when a recording starts.
    - uncledave 6y ago
      Good point. If it’s a corporate zoom account then it can likely be included in the IT AUP however. But I usually ask for it to be done.
- thrower123 6y ago
  I'm hoping that this will have gone on long enough that the useless managers will have been exposed...
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  As a manager; no thanks. That sounds like a lot of pointless busy work that I don’t want to do either.
wjossey 6y ago
I’ve started to approach the remote/in-person discussion with the same thought process I use for planning/management, which is to say that it’s best to structure the process around the team, rather the team around the process. What I mean by that is that for sufficiently large organizations, you can have options for folks. Some teams can be remote, hybrid, or in person. But make sure the teams understand what their structure is and have them build their processes and tools around that as appropriate. Then if you have an employee that wants to go remote, have them join one of the remote or hybrid teams. Have someone who wants to go to the office every day? Great, you can still be on a remote team, or here are the in person teams available to you as well (although realistically in person is preferred so you aren’t using up teleconference rooms unnecessarily). For smaller companies, and as someone who started a remote first company in ‘17, it really needs to be an all or nothing. Being mixed creates weird dynamics on small teams, and it takes a lot of diligence to include the remote team members on off the cuff conversations. I, for one, don’t plan on ever going back to an office full time. My wife and I just purchased our first home, and we bought a large enough place for two offices so we could both stay remote. We do multi generational living with my mom providing child care during the day, and a one year old running around like a banshee. It’s a really wonderful setup and I’m thankful to see so much of my son each day during these early years. No in person meetings come even remotely close to being as valuable as the time I get with him. But, as with all things, these are just my $0.02. I get why there are varied opinions on this, and don’t begrudge companies that are going to ask everyone to go back in.
- maest 6y ago
  Sounds like you should be willing to take a pay cut for the lifestyle you're enjoying
  - kilolima 6y ago
    Why should he take a pay cut? His employer no longer has to spend money for his use of office space. The costs associated with having an office have been externalized onto the employee. If anything, he should be paid more for saving his employer those costs.
almost_usual 6y ago
The pay cut discussion is annoying, no one who works in SV makes most of their pay by salary. If you’ve already locked in a Bay Area RSU grant you’re set to work remote in a no income tax state. That alone could make up the salary difference.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  It's also bizarre to watch Silicon Valley engineers complain about taking a 10% salary cut with their 35% cost of living cut. The right way to do this, for what it's worth, is to have standard base salaries and regional CoL increases for the most expensive cities.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Yep, it's a bit precious, annoying too for us people who work for a FAANG but not at the Bay Area HQ. Our salaries have already been adjusted for local conditions for years. If you transfer from, say, Google Mountain View out to Pittsburgh or Waterloo your compensation will be adjusted accordingly, including your RSUs. None of this is new or novel so it's weird to see people complain. In all likelihood these companies will continue to compensate generously relative to everyone else. It's their MO. It's pretty hard to complain as I watch working class people around me struggle to get by, or get sick working in "essential" industries. Friend of mine got COVID (likely) from work, carpenter at a petroleum plant. Mid 50s, but very healthy and fit, no health issues. Had to be rushed to hospital to get oxygen, was on his ass for weeks. Luckily a unionized job, but others not nearly as lucky. Personally I can't wait to be able to go back into the office, at least a couple days a week. Nice that my chronic back pain has improved a lot since I haven't been driving my commute daily though.
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > It's pretty hard to complain as I watch working class people around me struggle to get by, or get sick working in "essential" industries. Now think about the places in the world where a developer gets paid 40k/y or 20, or 10.
32gbsd 6y ago
People who work remote are pretty much put out to pasture when it comes to benefits.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  Which benefits?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  What benefits do you need? You mean they don't get healthcare if they're in the US?
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    A good friend and co-worker of mine went remote several months ago, and no, he does not get healthcare anymore. I am not aware of what his full healthcare situation is but I cannot imagine it's cheap.
- irq 6y ago
  I’ve been full time remote since 2011 across multiple employers and I’ve always received the exact same benefits as office workers. Sure their might be other problems with remote work but having a separate benefits tier for remote workers is something I’ve never seen. Now, for permanent work vs contractor work, there can be separate tiers but... that’s not what we’re talking about here.
  - mech422 6y ago
    I can second this - I've always gotten the same benefits as on-site staff. Closest thing to a difference I've run across is usually not all of the insurance companies/plans are viable in AZ, as opposed to the say 5-6 options for CA (eg Kaiser)
antihero 6y ago
I started my current job remotely, during the pandemic. If they seek to get me to spend two hours a day stuck on the tube, they have another thing coming to be honest.
kodah 6y ago
Asking someone who Silicon Valleys geo-recruiting model worked for what they will want to do in the future yields the expected response. That was unsurprising. To everyone else who has to contend with tight pools of talent that are often fielding multiple offers and using them against each other, the desire for change is much stronger. Many more companies fit this bill. There are some challenges though: Remote workers have historically not worked on premier projects and products at hybrid companies. Effort will have to be made to ensure that remote workers are included in the kind of reports that indicate work distribution. Remote workers get payed less. I can't prescriptively say how much less, but many companies in tech participate in geo-based compensation models while not being geographically locked in sales. I've long told people I would understand if I'm a welder and my product is only sold in one state why you may lazily geo-lock my pay. That stops making sense when my part is sold nationally or internationally. Then I really want my income to reflect what my position contributes to the business. This is why I think RSUs are so great. The compensation model for remote cannot just be padding margins for a business, especially if I'm going from SV to Texas for instance. I'm looking forward to a more remote future, but without these problems sorted out remote work will only create an underclass of developers.
- redisman 6y ago
  > To everyone else who has to contend with tight pools of talent that are often fielding multiple offers This is a very vocal small minority of all engineers. Companies have just grown accustomed to being able to have a huge false negative rate in their interviews. As the remote culture gets propagated through the industry, I’ve so far seen mainly good outcomes. Pretty much every team I’ve worked on in the last 7 or so years has had some remote component. I think the most difficult one is the stereotypical Fortune 500 company where only some employees work from home and the middle manager shakes their head while watching their empty desks.
  - kodah 6y ago
    > This is a very vocal small minority of all engineers. This seems to be the explanation for everything these days, so I doubt it. Just from the recruiters I know, I know this happens often at least at larger firms. My post was mainly to raise some important milestones and objectives remote work will need to hit in order to be viable past COVID.
pyrophane 6y ago
Looking forward to seeing where most tech companies land, as in-person and remote both have benefits. Face-to-face collaboration is easier, especially at fast-changing companies, but remote work is more cost-efficient and helps with hiring. I could see many companies ending up with a hybrid model where core teams are geographically together and in a shared space most of the time (although less than the pre-pandemic M-F 10-6), and other teams are distributed.
gnicholas 6y ago
> remote working also benefits the environment, something that became abundantly clear early in the global lockdown. NASA satellite images revealed an initial decline in pollution in China, but as the country gradually resumed normal operations, pollution levels increased accordingly This may have been the case in China, where many factories were idled, but there was no sizable benefit here in the US. > Air pollution levels in the U.S. have not decreased significantly during the pandemic, despite the concurrent increase in remote work and decrease in travel. https://news.gsu.edu/2020/10/01/current-air-pollution-tied-to-more-severe-covid-19-outcomes-study-finds/ https://news.gsu.edu/2020/10/01/current-air-pollution-tied-t...
- nitrogen 6y ago
  there was no sizable benefit here in the US. There was a huge benefit where I have been waiting out the pandemic. I hiked a peak in April, and because almost nobody was driving and work was significantly reduced, visibility was the best it has ever been in my lifetime. I saw very distant mountain ranges I didn't even know would be visible from that peak. The views of the intervening valleys were absolutely stunning, once in a lifetime clarity.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Being able to clearly see the Hollywood sign from the 405 was a shock to us early in the pandemic. Air quality in LA went from regularly bad to good, at least for a while.
liquidify 6y ago
Hybrid approach worked great at Anthem. 2 or 3 days a week in office on days that the team chose together, and the rest of the week at home. Some heavy coding weeks, you could skip the in office if the team agreed. But Friday's usually included lunch and learn's and were a pretty light day for the team as we spend a lot of time in meetings and talking about what we accomplished and intended to accomplish. Those kinds of days were a great part of the week and boosted productivity as well as enhanced our cohesion.
- redisman 6y ago
  That has some good (team can still hang out) but cuts out any true remote options out. ie. you’re still forced to live in the metro area. It’s what we do for our core tech team in one of our locations and it’s pretty good.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I think in some ways, much of the benefits of the pandemic will be captured by distributed, rather than remote teams. I kinda like Stripe's idea that remote people are attached to a hub, because it's important that people have some ownership around projects and a cultural context within the company. To be honest though, a lot of the benefits of offices are through social connections of weak-ties, and I have a hard time seeing that replicated in a remote fashion. I think it would be great, I'm just not sure how to manage it.
didibus 6y ago
Coming from a tech background, I think some of the resistance I've seen is caused by a mismatch in roles. As a developer (non game), work from home works well, you save yourself a commute but lose out on launch with your co-workers. The rest is pretty much the same. As a manager, director or exec though, where your role is to review the work of developers, and plan their next move, you feel an added challenge from work from home. The distance makes it harder to have a grasp on what work is being done and how well/fast, and what impact. You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews. And it's not as engaging or easy for you to understand and ask questions in those meetings either. Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality. This becomes truer and truer the higher up the chain. So a dev manager might still enjoy the freedom of work from home, less commute time, able to do home chors while they work and all. But a VP will feel less benefits, since they already have a lot of luxuries, maybe they have a Nani, a nice home closer to work, etc. And a CEO will feel even less, maybe they have a helicopter, a chef, and they already chose where the office was based on where they want to live.
- Volundr 6y ago
  > The distance makes it harder to have a grasp on what work is being done and how well/fast, and what impact. I don't think this is true though. I can review code or a product just as effectively remotely as I can sitting in an office chair. What I can't do is walk the cubes and see who is sitting in front of their computer at the moment, and at least in my experience running IT for a moderately sized organization, this is what managers seem to have a problem with. Over the past several months I've had to fend off requests to pull reports on how many e-mails people have sent, setup mail forwards to their managers, line up VPN times to timecards, or find monitoring software for PCs, all in the name of making sure employees are "working enough". Fortunately so far I've been able to fend these off by pointing out that none of these are real metrics for what's being actually being accomplished and that's what's really being exposed here is that the manager doesn't know how to tell if an employee is doing a good job and/or pulling their weight, and is trying to use butt-in-seat time as a proxy rather than figuring out what actually matters. > You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews. I can hit the call button on teams at any time. Sure it "feels" disruptive in a way walking into their cube didn't, but in actuality I think their about equally disruptive. Managers tend to underestimate the impact of "just swinging by". > Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality. I suspect most people would agree with you on preferring in-person meetings to Zoom. If we'e doing cameras I agree with you too, but... just don't. I spent most of my meetings this summer out on my front lawn with a notepad watching the bees work the clover. Made them infinitely more tolerable than being stuck in a conference room.
quaffapint 6y ago
I feel guilty thinking it, but 2020 was good for me because it allowed me to work remotely. I enjoy my job, but the office is open layout and very social especially with people that have been there awhile, unlike myself. So it's headphones on most of the time. Now with all communications online through slack it's been so much better. I now know what's going on in my larger team and we have a much better 'synergy'. Unfortunately we will be going back and I'll be back to the 90 minute commute, open layout and my headphones on. I really think a hybrid is the what to go. They already own the buildings and they are tight on space. So it works for them and for us it let's us get together and plan things out and then go do the work remotely without the distractions.
- Volundr 6y ago
  I don't think there is anything to feel guilty about. Just recognize you have good fortune not everyone has, and help those who don't if you can. I'm like you, I'm fortunate enough to work for a company who took Covid seriously and has gone 100% remote, in a market sector that's actually up due to Covid (grocery), so no fear of layoffs. When this is over, I hope we'll remember that those essential "low value" employees that we spend so much time arguing if they deserve a minimum wage or not were the ones out there every day exposing themselves cleaning the stores and restaurants, stocking our toilet paper, packing our Amazon orders, and generally keeping society functioning while "high value" employees like you and I got to hide away in our houses with minimal risk. Hopefully we as a society can see and that and reconsider if maybe, just maybe we're undervaluing these people.
chrisweekly 6y ago
The biggest problem companies face in adapting to remote work is failure to embrace async. The rest is details.
pdimitar 6y ago
I feel like most managers and shareholders had this illusion of having tight control. And that remote / async work proved that illusion to be untrue. This misalignment with reality comes with a cognitive shock and many deal with it the worst way possible -- f.ex. insisting on a very micro time tracking software. I agree it was nice to chat with colleagues face to face. But all said and done -- it's work, not your family's house. I dealt with it quite fine back when I moved to remote work 10 years ago. I miss it sometimes still. But the perks of working from home far outweigh this drawback. Plus, remote work encourages you to have an actual social life outside of work, which I view as a very good thing.
someonehere 6y ago
What works for me as a manager overseeing a few direct reports: - Stand ups for 15-30 minutes in the morning. - I screen share a Google form I made that asks three questions and I fill out for the team to see what each response is. - What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you? - The answers get put into a spreadsheet that myself or upper management can review progress on performance and services. - If I’m unavailable to hold the daily check in, my team fills out the form on their own. If they don’t fill it out for the day, there’s a record they didn’t spend the five minutes to fill it out. - I have weekly 1 to 1 meetings with the individuals to check in on how they’re doing with work, career development, anything they want to talk about, and how personal life is going. It’s working out well for me. I also schedule a once a week meeting on Jira tickets to see where status is at on any lingering issues the team can’t address. Overall I put enough in front of my team that I can track progress and ensure they’re doing their part while working from home. This way I avoid needing to be on zoom all day. I do leave the option open for my team to Zoom me if they urgently need me to help.
- laingc 6y ago
  We use a Slack plugin called Geekbot [0], which asks "What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you?" by default, but can also have a range of other questions. It posts the responses in our "standups" channel and gives me a daily summary. We find it very handy! [0]: https://geekbot.com/ https://geekbot.com/
  - dugmartin 6y ago
    We have been using DailyBot at work on our “async” standup days (2 days a week) - seems to work well. https://www.dailybot.com https://www.dailybot.com Having 2 days a week without meetings is great for deep work.
rzz3 6y ago
If we’re forced back into the office, myself and many of my coworkers I’ve talked to might find another company. I think companies will experience significant turnover if they roll back remote work.
steveBK123 6y ago
I’m in a hybrid senior engineer / project lead role with no direct people management responsibility. I’ve enjoyed working remotely as my wife & I each have space for our own offices. I save 90min commuting, plus have quick access to food/coffee/restroom unlike in my crowded office which is in an upscale food dessert despite being Manhattan. There’s been a lot of managerial meeting bloat which has only been tolerable because of savings on above time sucks and really being able to multi task through BS during zoom calls you cannot in a conference room. I find zoom has also been a great leveler as 30% of the team works in other countries. So pre-covid 70% of us would be in a conference room the other 30% were dialed in through zoom and not participating nearly as much. The issue is clear at the middle management level. Firms are making broad vague commitments to not forcing anyone back to office anytime soon. Senior leaders themselves seem to be enjoying the benefits of working from their vacation homes instead of their pied-a-terre. More family time, no commute time. Sadly some middle management layers above me have willingly gone back into basically empty (10% capacity) offices for no reason. Sick of their kids & face time & workaholics basically. One team lead has actually bought a home closer to office while 15% of his team has actually gone the other direction and moved further away. If you are already in an organization doing daily stand ups, bi-weekly sprints/closing/retro/planning, project backlog reviews, post mortems, (easily 10+ hours/week total).. plus tracking everything in Jira, with multiple active & lively Slack channels .. it’s unclear to me how middle management can’t do their job at home. They probably feel unable to APPEAR to be doing their job to the same extent, however as you can’t see them huffing&puffing across the floor from one conference room to another back to back to back..... Anyway I like it enough that if the pendulum swings all the way back at the end of 2021 to year-round, 5-day/week in-office 100% then I’ll answer some of those recruiter emails that have been piling up.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  Dare I say it: maybe many of these managers just don't have enough potential work outside meetings and are unable or unwilling to pivot into a different type of work, therefore insisting on pushing meetings on meetings on meetings to the point of micromanagement and will prefer going back to the office to appear busy once more, as you put it? I always figured this was an extremely obvious weakness we took for granted. Full-time managers who either won't or can't do anything but manage. Which eventually yields different problems (once the work is gone they become overhead, and if they manage too many teams they'll spread too thin to follow everything). Comparatively, hybrid leads still getting their own hands dirty seem much stronger and desirable.
deleted 6y ago
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112 points by alexrustic 6y ago

I don't think most companies embraced remote work, they just didn't have any other choice. I'm pretty sure there's tons of managers out there that can't wait to get back to the office so they can keep having stupid meetings and micromanage their subordinates.

uncledave 6y ago
They’ve worked out how to do that from home. I’ve grown particularly good at popping their balloons. Zoom meetings are far more visible as they can be recorded and if they aren’t productive I make sure that is known.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  wow. that's going nuclear. Getting ideas or sure. hat tip to you sir.
- hn_asker 6y ago
  Can you share tips on how to pop their balloons?
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Accountability, agenda, actions in that order. So start with asking for the meeting to be recorded. Refuse to attend unless it is using the excuse that you may want to review bits of it later. They can’t refuse for accountability reasons. Agenda means they need to set a time window and agenda for the meeting up front. That keeps it in writing and the scope well defined. If there isn’t one there’s no reason to attend so carry on your normal duties. This becomes a virus quickly which trashes junk meetings. If you’re complained at for not attending, there was no agenda. If you don’t attend people see the person’s meetings as not mandatory and this disempowers them slowly. Actions. Make sure recordable actions come from the meeting and make sure they are accountable for tracking them and that they are delivering business value. If they aren’t then they don’t need to exist. Escalate that. Even as a junior a long time ago I asked for concrete actions at the end of a meeting and managed to cause a company wide shit storm :) After doing this a few times, organisers who rule or even just exist in the chaos and distraction are marginalised or made to conform to order and the good of the team. Edit: warning this doesn’t scale down to small companies.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Note that recording conversations without consent of all parties involved is a felony in quite a few jurisdictions.
  - pensatoio 6y ago
    Zoom notifies everyone when a recording starts.
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Good point. If it’s a corporate zoom account then it can likely be included in the IT AUP however. But I usually ask for it to be done.
thrower123 6y ago
I'm hoping that this will have gone on long enough that the useless managers will have been exposed...
ashtonkem 6y ago
As a manager; no thanks. That sounds like a lot of pointless busy work that I don’t want to do either.

wjossey 6y ago

I’ve started to approach the remote/in-person discussion with the same thought process I use for planning/management, which is to say that it’s best to structure the process around the team, rather the team around the process. What I mean by that is that for sufficiently large organizations, you can have options for folks. Some teams can be remote, hybrid, or in person. But make sure the teams understand what their structure is and have them build their processes and tools around that as appropriate. Then if you have an employee that wants to go remote, have them join one of the remote or hybrid teams. Have someone who wants to go to the office every day? Great, you can still be on a remote team, or here are the in person teams available to you as well (although realistically in person is preferred so you aren’t using up teleconference rooms unnecessarily). For smaller companies, and as someone who started a remote first company in ‘17, it really needs to be an all or nothing. Being mixed creates weird dynamics on small teams, and it takes a lot of diligence to include the remote team members on off the cuff conversations. I, for one, don’t plan on ever going back to an office full time. My wife and I just purchased our first home, and we bought a large enough place for two offices so we could both stay remote. We do multi generational living with my mom providing child care during the day, and a one year old running around like a banshee. It’s a really wonderful setup and I’m thankful to see so much of my son each day during these early years. No in person meetings come even remotely close to being as valuable as the time I get with him. But, as with all things, these are just my $0.02. I get why there are varied opinions on this, and don’t begrudge companies that are going to ask everyone to go back in.

maest 6y ago
Sounds like you should be willing to take a pay cut for the lifestyle you're enjoying
- kilolima 6y ago
  Why should he take a pay cut? His employer no longer has to spend money for his use of office space. The costs associated with having an office have been externalized onto the employee. If anything, he should be paid more for saving his employer those costs.

almost_usual 6y ago

The pay cut discussion is annoying, no one who works in SV makes most of their pay by salary. If you’ve already locked in a Bay Area RSU grant you’re set to work remote in a no income tax state. That alone could make up the salary difference.

coffeefirst 6y ago
It's also bizarre to watch Silicon Valley engineers complain about taking a 10% salary cut with their 35% cost of living cut. The right way to do this, for what it's worth, is to have standard base salaries and regional CoL increases for the most expensive cities.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Yep, it's a bit precious, annoying too for us people who work for a FAANG but not at the Bay Area HQ. Our salaries have already been adjusted for local conditions for years. If you transfer from, say, Google Mountain View out to Pittsburgh or Waterloo your compensation will be adjusted accordingly, including your RSUs. None of this is new or novel so it's weird to see people complain. In all likelihood these companies will continue to compensate generously relative to everyone else. It's their MO. It's pretty hard to complain as I watch working class people around me struggle to get by, or get sick working in "essential" industries. Friend of mine got COVID (likely) from work, carpenter at a petroleum plant. Mid 50s, but very healthy and fit, no health issues. Had to be rushed to hospital to get oxygen, was on his ass for weeks. Luckily a unionized job, but others not nearly as lucky. Personally I can't wait to be able to go back into the office, at least a couple days a week. Nice that my chronic back pain has improved a lot since I haven't been driving my commute daily though.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > It's pretty hard to complain as I watch working class people around me struggle to get by, or get sick working in "essential" industries. Now think about the places in the world where a developer gets paid 40k/y or 20, or 10.

32gbsd 6y ago

People who work remote are pretty much put out to pasture when it comes to benefits.

almost_usual 6y ago
Which benefits?
chrisseaton 6y ago
What benefits do you need? You mean they don't get healthcare if they're in the US?
- chucky_z 6y ago
  A good friend and co-worker of mine went remote several months ago, and no, he does not get healthcare anymore. I am not aware of what his full healthcare situation is but I cannot imagine it's cheap.
irq 6y ago
I’ve been full time remote since 2011 across multiple employers and I’ve always received the exact same benefits as office workers. Sure their might be other problems with remote work but having a separate benefits tier for remote workers is something I’ve never seen. Now, for permanent work vs contractor work, there can be separate tiers but... that’s not what we’re talking about here.
- mech422 6y ago
  I can second this - I've always gotten the same benefits as on-site staff. Closest thing to a difference I've run across is usually not all of the insurance companies/plans are viable in AZ, as opposed to the say 5-6 options for CA (eg Kaiser)

antihero 6y ago

I started my current job remotely, during the pandemic. If they seek to get me to spend two hours a day stuck on the tube, they have another thing coming to be honest.

kodah 6y ago

Asking someone who Silicon Valleys geo-recruiting model worked for what they will want to do in the future yields the expected response. That was unsurprising. To everyone else who has to contend with tight pools of talent that are often fielding multiple offers and using them against each other, the desire for change is much stronger. Many more companies fit this bill. There are some challenges though: Remote workers have historically not worked on premier projects and products at hybrid companies. Effort will have to be made to ensure that remote workers are included in the kind of reports that indicate work distribution. Remote workers get payed less. I can't prescriptively say how much less, but many companies in tech participate in geo-based compensation models while not being geographically locked in sales. I've long told people I would understand if I'm a welder and my product is only sold in one state why you may lazily geo-lock my pay. That stops making sense when my part is sold nationally or internationally. Then I really want my income to reflect what my position contributes to the business. This is why I think RSUs are so great. The compensation model for remote cannot just be padding margins for a business, especially if I'm going from SV to Texas for instance. I'm looking forward to a more remote future, but without these problems sorted out remote work will only create an underclass of developers.

redisman 6y ago
> To everyone else who has to contend with tight pools of talent that are often fielding multiple offers This is a very vocal small minority of all engineers. Companies have just grown accustomed to being able to have a huge false negative rate in their interviews. As the remote culture gets propagated through the industry, I’ve so far seen mainly good outcomes. Pretty much every team I’ve worked on in the last 7 or so years has had some remote component. I think the most difficult one is the stereotypical Fortune 500 company where only some employees work from home and the middle manager shakes their head while watching their empty desks.
- kodah 6y ago
  > This is a very vocal small minority of all engineers. This seems to be the explanation for everything these days, so I doubt it. Just from the recruiters I know, I know this happens often at least at larger firms. My post was mainly to raise some important milestones and objectives remote work will need to hit in order to be viable past COVID.

pyrophane 6y ago

Looking forward to seeing where most tech companies land, as in-person and remote both have benefits. Face-to-face collaboration is easier, especially at fast-changing companies, but remote work is more cost-efficient and helps with hiring. I could see many companies ending up with a hybrid model where core teams are geographically together and in a shared space most of the time (although less than the pre-pandemic M-F 10-6), and other teams are distributed.

gnicholas 6y ago

> remote working also benefits the environment, something that became abundantly clear early in the global lockdown. NASA satellite images revealed an initial decline in pollution in China, but as the country gradually resumed normal operations, pollution levels increased accordingly This may have been the case in China, where many factories were idled, but there was no sizable benefit here in the US. > Air pollution levels in the U.S. have not decreased significantly during the pandemic, despite the concurrent increase in remote work and decrease in travel. https://news.gsu.edu/2020/10/01/current-air-pollution-tied-to-more-severe-covid-19-outcomes-study-finds/ https://news.gsu.edu/2020/10/01/current-air-pollution-tied-t...

nitrogen 6y ago
there was no sizable benefit here in the US. There was a huge benefit where I have been waiting out the pandemic. I hiked a peak in April, and because almost nobody was driving and work was significantly reduced, visibility was the best it has ever been in my lifetime. I saw very distant mountain ranges I didn't even know would be visible from that peak. The views of the intervening valleys were absolutely stunning, once in a lifetime clarity.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Being able to clearly see the Hollywood sign from the 405 was a shock to us early in the pandemic. Air quality in LA went from regularly bad to good, at least for a while.

liquidify 6y ago

Hybrid approach worked great at Anthem. 2 or 3 days a week in office on days that the team chose together, and the rest of the week at home. Some heavy coding weeks, you could skip the in office if the team agreed. But Friday's usually included lunch and learn's and were a pretty light day for the team as we spend a lot of time in meetings and talking about what we accomplished and intended to accomplish. Those kinds of days were a great part of the week and boosted productivity as well as enhanced our cohesion.

redisman 6y ago
That has some good (team can still hang out) but cuts out any true remote options out. ie. you’re still forced to live in the metro area. It’s what we do for our core tech team in one of our locations and it’s pretty good.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I think in some ways, much of the benefits of the pandemic will be captured by distributed, rather than remote teams. I kinda like Stripe's idea that remote people are attached to a hub, because it's important that people have some ownership around projects and a cultural context within the company. To be honest though, a lot of the benefits of offices are through social connections of weak-ties, and I have a hard time seeing that replicated in a remote fashion. I think it would be great, I'm just not sure how to manage it.

didibus 6y ago

Coming from a tech background, I think some of the resistance I've seen is caused by a mismatch in roles. As a developer (non game), work from home works well, you save yourself a commute but lose out on launch with your co-workers. The rest is pretty much the same. As a manager, director or exec though, where your role is to review the work of developers, and plan their next move, you feel an added challenge from work from home. The distance makes it harder to have a grasp on what work is being done and how well/fast, and what impact. You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews. And it's not as engaging or easy for you to understand and ask questions in those meetings either. Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality. This becomes truer and truer the higher up the chain. So a dev manager might still enjoy the freedom of work from home, less commute time, able to do home chors while they work and all. But a VP will feel less benefits, since they already have a lot of luxuries, maybe they have a Nani, a nice home closer to work, etc. And a CEO will feel even less, maybe they have a helicopter, a chef, and they already chose where the office was based on where they want to live.

Volundr 6y ago
> The distance makes it harder to have a grasp on what work is being done and how well/fast, and what impact. I don't think this is true though. I can review code or a product just as effectively remotely as I can sitting in an office chair. What I can't do is walk the cubes and see who is sitting in front of their computer at the moment, and at least in my experience running IT for a moderately sized organization, this is what managers seem to have a problem with. Over the past several months I've had to fend off requests to pull reports on how many e-mails people have sent, setup mail forwards to their managers, line up VPN times to timecards, or find monitoring software for PCs, all in the name of making sure employees are "working enough". Fortunately so far I've been able to fend these off by pointing out that none of these are real metrics for what's being actually being accomplished and that's what's really being exposed here is that the manager doesn't know how to tell if an employee is doing a good job and/or pulling their weight, and is trying to use butt-in-seat time as a proxy rather than figuring out what actually matters. > You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews. I can hit the call button on teams at any time. Sure it "feels" disruptive in a way walking into their cube didn't, but in actuality I think their about equally disruptive. Managers tend to underestimate the impact of "just swinging by". > Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality. I suspect most people would agree with you on preferring in-person meetings to Zoom. If we'e doing cameras I agree with you too, but... just don't. I spent most of my meetings this summer out on my front lawn with a notepad watching the bees work the clover. Made them infinitely more tolerable than being stuck in a conference room.

quaffapint 6y ago

I feel guilty thinking it, but 2020 was good for me because it allowed me to work remotely. I enjoy my job, but the office is open layout and very social especially with people that have been there awhile, unlike myself. So it's headphones on most of the time. Now with all communications online through slack it's been so much better. I now know what's going on in my larger team and we have a much better 'synergy'. Unfortunately we will be going back and I'll be back to the 90 minute commute, open layout and my headphones on. I really think a hybrid is the what to go. They already own the buildings and they are tight on space. So it works for them and for us it let's us get together and plan things out and then go do the work remotely without the distractions.

Volundr 6y ago
I don't think there is anything to feel guilty about. Just recognize you have good fortune not everyone has, and help those who don't if you can. I'm like you, I'm fortunate enough to work for a company who took Covid seriously and has gone 100% remote, in a market sector that's actually up due to Covid (grocery), so no fear of layoffs. When this is over, I hope we'll remember that those essential "low value" employees that we spend so much time arguing if they deserve a minimum wage or not were the ones out there every day exposing themselves cleaning the stores and restaurants, stocking our toilet paper, packing our Amazon orders, and generally keeping society functioning while "high value" employees like you and I got to hide away in our houses with minimal risk. Hopefully we as a society can see and that and reconsider if maybe, just maybe we're undervaluing these people.

chrisweekly 6y ago

The biggest problem companies face in adapting to remote work is failure to embrace async. The rest is details.

pdimitar 6y ago

I feel like most managers and shareholders had this illusion of having tight control. And that remote / async work proved that illusion to be untrue. This misalignment with reality comes with a cognitive shock and many deal with it the worst way possible -- f.ex. insisting on a very micro time tracking software. I agree it was nice to chat with colleagues face to face. But all said and done -- it's work, not your family's house. I dealt with it quite fine back when I moved to remote work 10 years ago. I miss it sometimes still. But the perks of working from home far outweigh this drawback. Plus, remote work encourages you to have an actual social life outside of work, which I view as a very good thing.

someonehere 6y ago

What works for me as a manager overseeing a few direct reports: - Stand ups for 15-30 minutes in the morning. - I screen share a Google form I made that asks three questions and I fill out for the team to see what each response is. - What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you? - The answers get put into a spreadsheet that myself or upper management can review progress on performance and services. - If I’m unavailable to hold the daily check in, my team fills out the form on their own. If they don’t fill it out for the day, there’s a record they didn’t spend the five minutes to fill it out. - I have weekly 1 to 1 meetings with the individuals to check in on how they’re doing with work, career development, anything they want to talk about, and how personal life is going. It’s working out well for me. I also schedule a once a week meeting on Jira tickets to see where status is at on any lingering issues the team can’t address. Overall I put enough in front of my team that I can track progress and ensure they’re doing their part while working from home. This way I avoid needing to be on zoom all day. I do leave the option open for my team to Zoom me if they urgently need me to help.

laingc 6y ago
We use a Slack plugin called Geekbot [0], which asks "What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you?" by default, but can also have a range of other questions. It posts the responses in our "standups" channel and gives me a daily summary. We find it very handy! [0]: https://geekbot.com/ https://geekbot.com/
- dugmartin 6y ago
  We have been using DailyBot at work on our “async” standup days (2 days a week) - seems to work well. https://www.dailybot.com https://www.dailybot.com Having 2 days a week without meetings is great for deep work.

rzz3 6y ago

If we’re forced back into the office, myself and many of my coworkers I’ve talked to might find another company. I think companies will experience significant turnover if they roll back remote work.

steveBK123 6y ago

I’m in a hybrid senior engineer / project lead role with no direct people management responsibility. I’ve enjoyed working remotely as my wife & I each have space for our own offices. I save 90min commuting, plus have quick access to food/coffee/restroom unlike in my crowded office which is in an upscale food dessert despite being Manhattan. There’s been a lot of managerial meeting bloat which has only been tolerable because of savings on above time sucks and really being able to multi task through BS during zoom calls you cannot in a conference room. I find zoom has also been a great leveler as 30% of the team works in other countries. So pre-covid 70% of us would be in a conference room the other 30% were dialed in through zoom and not participating nearly as much. The issue is clear at the middle management level. Firms are making broad vague commitments to not forcing anyone back to office anytime soon. Senior leaders themselves seem to be enjoying the benefits of working from their vacation homes instead of their pied-a-terre. More family time, no commute time. Sadly some middle management layers above me have willingly gone back into basically empty (10% capacity) offices for no reason. Sick of their kids & face time & workaholics basically. One team lead has actually bought a home closer to office while 15% of his team has actually gone the other direction and moved further away. If you are already in an organization doing daily stand ups, bi-weekly sprints/closing/retro/planning, project backlog reviews, post mortems, (easily 10+ hours/week total).. plus tracking everything in Jira, with multiple active & lively Slack channels .. it’s unclear to me how middle management can’t do their job at home. They probably feel unable to APPEAR to be doing their job to the same extent, however as you can’t see them huffing&puffing across the floor from one conference room to another back to back to back..... Anyway I like it enough that if the pendulum swings all the way back at the end of 2021 to year-round, 5-day/week in-office 100% then I’ll answer some of those recruiter emails that have been piling up.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
Dare I say it: maybe many of these managers just don't have enough potential work outside meetings and are unable or unwilling to pivot into a different type of work, therefore insisting on pushing meetings on meetings on meetings to the point of micromanagement and will prefer going back to the office to appear busy once more, as you put it? I always figured this was an extremely obvious weakness we took for granted. Full-time managers who either won't or can't do anything but manage. Which eventually yields different problems (once the work is gone they become overhead, and if they manage too many teams they'll spread too thin to follow everything). Comparatively, hybrid leads still getting their own hands dirty seem much stronger and desirable.

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