7 ms·
Just 2% of workers at VMware showed up for the first day of in-person work
- Tempest1981 5y agoHoping we can go as long as possible before returning to 6am-8pm rush hour traffic.
- notwhereyouare 5y agoCrazy that people accepted a pay cut to move.
- TylerE 5y agoWhy is it crazy if, say, a 30% paycut lowers your CoL by 50%?
- rognjen 5y agoAnd improves your quality of life as well.
- refurb 5y agoDoesn’t your net savings at the end matter? For me at least the added COL is more than offset by the higher pay. Edit: This is more a pre-Covid comment. No idea the math for remote post-Covid.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoIt's not what you make, it's what you keep.
- tengbretson 5y agoDoes your company adjust the price it charges its customers based on their geographical "cost of living"?
- prepend 5y agoYes. Google ads are much cheaper in my rural area than a large metro area. Food, gas, plumbing, etc are also cheaper.
- austhrow743 5y agoTons of companies do. I forget the exact number but I was paying like $3/month for Spotify when I was registered as living in Indonesia and paying with an Indonesian bank card.
- foxpurple 5y agoSteam also does this. Massively different prices for different countries.
- aliyfarah 5y agoNBA also does this for League Pass. A simple work around is to use a VPN to connect from India and buy with rupees. You have to sign in again with VPN each time though when loading a video, disconnect from VPN and then refresh.
- Kranar 5y agoOf course, that's the very meaning of cost of living.
- foxpurple 5y agoThat’s irrelevant. It’s up to you to make a choice about what is the best value and suits you best. Rather than paying a high CoL on principal even though you would be better off somewhere else and on a pay cut.
- gnu8 5y agoWhy on earth should you take the pay cut? That savings is yours, not the company's. If you take a pay cut for relocating to a lower CoL area, you are being stolen from.
- austhrow743 5y agoDid you not read the part where their cost of living dramatically dropped? You know, the entire comment you replied to?
- gnu8 5y agoDid you not read the part where the salary dramatically dropped? Why is it justifiable to pay someone less for the same work, just because of where they live? If I find a way to produce the same output but with lower expenses, the difference is my profit. I don't share that with the party purchasing my output so they can fucking steal it.
- austhrow743 5y agoWhat does amount of work have to do with anything? Justifiable? What? This isn’t unicef. There’s no moral question here. It’s a bunch of tech assholes divvying up the spoils from further computerising the modern human experience. Then the notion that anyone is being stolen from is just completely ridiculous.
- freyr 5y agoThinking that they’re paying you some intrinsically fair rate for a quantifiable unit of work is nice, but not true. They pay the minimum they feel is required to retain you and prevent you from going to a competitor. And if that amount exceeds the cost to hire someone who can do your job as good as you, they want you gone. That’s it. They know that working remotely from a place with a lower cost of living is a perk. They know even if you take a pay cut, you’ll come out ahead. They know the minimum they need to pay you to retain you has gone down.
- medvezhenok 5y ago
- staticassertion 5y agoNot really, not to mention they can just leave later.
- freyr 5y agoOr they did the math and it was worth it. Maybe they don’t already own a home in the Bay Area? The article mentions a 10% cut at a company where the average senior engineer makes $450k a year according to levels.fyi. In most of the country, you’re living very, very well on $405k a year. In the Bay Area, you’ll make a 11% more and be house poor or spend your life in traffic. For most people, that’s a bad deal. I’d put it this way: if a recruiter called me and suggested I quit my job and move back to the Bay Area for an 11% pay increase, I would be laughing as I hung up the phone.
- ojhughes 5y agoI work there and I’m pretty sure 450k average is wildly exaggerated
- beebmam 5y agoGiven that it seems to be the case that the delta variant has had (at least partial) vaccine breakthrough ( https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1408582695794483204?s=19 https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1408582695794483204?s=1... ), this sounds about what I'd expect
- yumraj 5y agoAnd the CDC in the US allowed unmasked vaccinated people indoors, but no one wants to, or is allowed to, verify. I guess we’re just waiting for a 2nd wave in the US.
- sixothree 5y agoI wish we could be more like Australia. I'm straight up jealous whenever I talk to one of them.
- donavanm 5y agoUh, what? I’m in Sydney and as I write this it looks like we’re going in to full on metro outbreak and lockdown this weekend. For the third time, IIRC. The country’s vaccinated approximately no one, there’s been near zero entry or exits of the country for anyone who’s not rich/famous/a politician, it seems like half of the past year has had internal travel restrictions between states and metro areas. There appears to be no plan to systemically improve our situation before next year. Yes, we haven’t had mass deaths and hospitalizations. I’m very thankful I’ve been here instead of the US, or many other places. But dont pretend it’s some utopia that’s escaped the troubles of the last year.
- rorykoehler 5y agoThe thing is you treat it seriously. We have triple the daily cases here in Berlin and are celebrating like it’s over.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago> Yes, we haven’t had mass deaths and hospitalizations. I wouldn’t expect so. You have 2/3 the population of California and almost the size of the USA (although populated all along the coasts). I also don’t agree with dude it’s some Covid utopia. But, just density-wise it was never going to be very bad there.
- superflit 5y agoWe are not going back. There is a huge demand for IT people. And we all learn and know we can do it remotely as we are doing for almost 2 years. I do get some people Want to go to the Office. But the majority of tech scene is Introvert. We are not going back. We have better machines, espresso, coffee food and gym at our own house. Now we are "saving the climate" not doing commute. It works both ways /s
- lowkey 5y ago> Now we are "saving the climate" not doing commute. It works both ways /s I’m not sure why the /s as this is a legitimate argument in favor of WFH. It is objectively better for the environment and reduces climate-impact so governments and corporations who have been green-washing should be embracing the new reality. Instead we get unsubstantiated claims of better water-cooler conversations driving innovation and other baseless claims.
- albatross13 5y agojinx
- prepend 5y agoI think the /s is because the reason isn’t saving the climate but is presented as the reason as it’s virtuous and hard to argue against.
- Apocryphon 5y agoCalling out (tech) corporate hypocrisy will never get old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
- lowkey 5y agoI see now. That makes sense. It is similar to how the anti-Bitcoin crowd in HN constantly smear Bitcoin as an environmental disaster while ignoring facts like: - 100% of gold is strip mined literally raping the planet and leaving the mined earth completely unusable, while polluting water supplies. - The primary alternative to Bitcoin is the US Petrodollar system which relies on proof of violence backed by the most powerful military industrial complex in the history of the world to ‘liberate’ oil-rich nations who dare trade oil for anything other than USD. (See Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc.) - Gladly ignore things like Blood diamonds, the environmental and social costs of mining Lithium and other rare earth elements used to build the so-called green economy. - Bitcoin uses mostly clean energy and increasingly so over time thanks to incentives while Gold, Platinum, Copper, etc are never held to the same ESG standards. - Bitcoin gets demonized for its energy consumption while using half the energy of YouTube, an ad-infested spyware-ridden cat video site and less energy than the world’s hair-dryers /s Edit: downvotes but no comments, sad.
- rognjen 5y agoThe amount of noise on this website if you're not using an ad blocker is just incredible.
- state_less 5y agoYou can just barely make our an article knitted between all those ads.
- bdcravens 5y agoNo offense to the writer, but it's a relatively light piece given the amount of ads. 7 of the 9 "paragraphs" are only one sentence. If this was a newspaper, the entire thing would take up maybe 3 inches of a single column.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y agoScab here, ill take 85% of their 150k and will be there at 8am ready to learn.
- refurb 5y agoLet me guess, masks still required and other precautions? My workplace did that and everyone agreed they would rather work at home than wear a mask all day. Once that’s gone? Plenty of people want to come back - part time at least.
- larrymyers 5y agoA lot of people probably won't be able to go back in office full time until the fall. Remember that the whole child care situation is still not great. Summer camps may be operating at partial capacity, or not open at all. Parents didn't have time to line up child care this summer due to the uncertain nature of the pandemic. I suspect it'll be a bit different when schools resume in the fall, but even then I doubt people will want to go back full time.
- xwdv 5y agoIf you don’t want to go to the office and you’re being forced to, quit. There’s WAY too many jobs out there being offered fully remote and at the same salaries for you to accept that shit.
- twright 5y agoThere was a "Office Reopening" lunch a few weeks ago. You could come in if you wanted or you could join over zoom while the CEO did their spiel. Since I was hired remote I went hoping to meet in-person the others on the engineering team. Only one other team member showed up of about 15. Got to meet a lot of the product and marketing people instead if that's any indication of who is going back to the office (Non-coastal, East of Missisippi but not Chicago).
- thewhitetulip 5y agoI don't like WFH. Maybe it's because this is the 1st time I did it during the pandemic. So here are my questions to those loving it 1. How do you form connections if you do 10p% WFH? many of my friends and casual acquaintance are from meeting people in pantry area. Or meeting someone who is with someone I know. That's not possible now. I am an introvert so pre pandemic itself it was difficult for me. 2. Company doesn't pay for buying furniture or electricity used at my house. I am depreciating my house without any benefit. Company ain't paying enough to offset internet charges 3. I miss going out. But that's a pandemic thing 4. Do you think office politics will reduce if we WFH? I mean it's difficult to be managers pet when everyone is wfh As an environmentalist I like that my travel has reduced and carbon footprint has decreased. So that's a plus. I've also planted around 20 plants this year. Benefit of WFH
- jaredcwhite 5y agoAsk your work for a stipend so you can purchase a co-working space membership. (Assuming you have one or more nearby.) Remote work most certainly doesn't have to mean only work from home. I also highly recommend finding local meetups (perhaps still online-only at present) centered on technologies or industries you care about. In short, I think it's important to seek out ways to get what you need out of life without expecting your immediate job description to somehow meet those needs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pintxo 5y agoRegarding 2, your company also does not pay for your commute, so this should equal out.
- thewhitetulip 5y agoSo company doesn't pay for my commute And company doesn't pay for anything depreciating at my house except laptop How does that even out? On the contrary it 'odds out'. Everything odds out.
- canada_dry 5y agoA friend's firm introduced a 3 phased return-to-the-office plan: 1 - volunteer (for those dying to come back) 2 - request (we'd really like you to come back now) 3 - require (come back or you're fired) Each phase is spread a couple months apart beginning now. Seems like a reasonable approach.