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I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Sure it could all work out fine for them. Maybe emp

I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Sure it could all work out fine for them. Maybe employees will grumble for a bit, then settle back into office life. But maybe it wont’t. There’s a very real possibility that you lose a non-negligible percent of your staff (disproportionately the most talented who have other options), handicap your ability to recruit replacements, and destroy morale for the remaining. For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take. I get it. Maybe you think WFH is long term unsustainable and it will erode corporate culture and what not. But the point is it’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable. Obviously companies have survived for a year without the train swerving off the tracks. Why would any rational company want to be the first back? Why not just wait six months after the other FANGs go back to see what happens? At worse you lose a half year in the office, which clearly isn’t that bad. At best, you potentially save the entire company from collapsing. Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.

CPLX 5y ago
> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce Yeah no. The core value of these companies is the fact that they’ve managed to establish a monopolistic position within an important high-margin market segment and now find themselves stewards of a massive money printing machine. Yes, eventually, without a competent workforce they’ll start to face threats and crisis, but I think you’re wildly underestimating the usefulness of that money printing machine to solve any problems that crop up in the next year or three if they find they’ve miscalculated slightly.
- glitchc 5y ago
  Reminds me of Research in Motion.
  - bregma 5y ago
    Who are still around, calling themselves BlackBerry, and have not yet declared their return-to-the-office policy.
_red 5y ago
Well...FANG products have largely reached the point in development where new features are incremental and not closely tied to growth or churn in a meaningful way. Not being dismissive, simply pointing out...what fundamental leverage does a developer have against inelastic customer demand? Are customer going to stop using FANG products because advertising feature 3.2.97 isn't added this quarter?
- polynomial 5y ago
  In "theory" yes, as measured at scale. Whether or not such correlations really hold is up to a) your data science group, and b) the complex and political negotiation of optics by stakeholders. I'm sort of kidding here, as I find your point sensible, but it may be a tough sell that demand is inelastic.
- forgetfulness 5y ago
  The market is neither that local nor that global. I don't mean this in a "threat from China" way, but if US companies just look at the offerings of other US companies and the US labor market they might get blindsided again when it turns out that there's good money, good programmers and good designers in Europe and China as well, as it happened with TikTok.
- HelloNurse 5y ago
  It's feature 3.2.97 missed this quarter, but serious general stagnation in the medium and long term: if junior office dwellers replace senior workers from home moving somewhere else very little is invented, let alone implemented.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    And with no one mentoring those juniors, it's very unlikely they will ever reach the same level of experience and knowledge to actually start making those kinds of impacts on the product or company.
alexdias 5y ago
> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Yes, aggressive measures such as: -Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees -Allowing 2 WFH days per week
- gliese1337 5y ago
  ...which policies were only implemented after significant employee pushback over the originally-announced "everyone will be going back to the office full-time" plans.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Google never announced anything like that. The moment they started talking about return to office there was talk of flexibility, lower capacities, and WFH. And in reality WFH at least 1 or 2 days a week was always a possibility, at least in my Google office.
- pc86 5y ago
  Anything but allowing permanent WFH without any approval, never requiring any on-site visits, and never requiring the camera is "aggressive" to a lot of people for some reason.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  > Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees We'll see how this plays out, but I'm expecting this to be just a ploy to keep people from leaving right away and 95%+ requests to be remote will ultimately be denied.
  - nly 5y ago
    The 2 day WFH thing will fade away as well. My company has put those optional 2 days WFH to TLs to arrange amongst their teams, with the expectation that the whole team will have the same schedule. Basically if your TL doesn't care or want you to WFH, or the team can't agree on days, you're done. It'll be a major inconvenience and staff will ultimately not see the benefits of full WFH with 3, so it won't last. I think there will be increased churn once the "wait and see" crowd clears
hnthrowaway2021 5y ago
I work at a FANG (hence the throwaway), and I agree. Frankly, the COVID-19 pandemic is simply not over yet. Not in the whole world, and not even in the U.S. Especially with news about a new variant, it feels like a safety risk to re-open offices so early.
- jstepka 5y ago
  i work in sf. i'm in florida right now for the nhl finals and covid is fake news here, and it's utterly refreshing.
pjc50 5y ago
I suspect it's individual managers who've never quite got past "if you can't see someone how do you know they're working?" Never underestimate human irrationality in these things.
- aikinai 5y ago
  This is the most blatantly ridiculous straw man, I can’t believe people on HN keep trying to make it especially against FAANG. Do you really think these companies are run by middle managers that just want to watch people work? At least at Google, a huge number of employees already work in a different floor, office, city, or even country than their managers that this couldn’t even be a factor for them.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    It’s not hard. It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. He asks the VPs, and the VPs ask their reports and so on and so forth. I have no doubt there’s data from middle management that is getting weighed more than that of the people they manage.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      > It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. They actually send surveys to everyone. They also talk to the VPs, but surveys have weight.
    - throwaways885 5y ago
      No, they do. And you can see the aggregate scores of everyone in the company on a dashboard afterwards.
  - loopz 5y ago
    In Scrum, Scrum Master is a contributing member, just as everyone else. It's a role without power, but servant leadership and can be rotated. This doesn't work in practice, as people are too bogged down in their work to take on this. So the role is left up to the nearest manager, ex-manager, clueless business people who're not contributing or otherwise people who just reports upwards. This defeats the role, and it's very very rare to see a contributing member being scrum master, ie. taking up slack and do the necessary stuff around the team. So you end up with such role, or manager, overseeing the desks in open office, of the servants. Such a one-sided arrangement is both intentional, ignorant and about dominance. Feng Shui explains why it is bad for knowledge workers to have eyes over their shoulders all the time.
gaws 5y ago
> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. A lot of people want to work for FAANG. If a current employee resigns because of WFH policies, those companies can likely find a replacement who is more receptive to returning to the office.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  The pattern I've observed is that younger and more junior people want to work in the office, and older, more senior people with established networks, family life and nice accomodation with a home office are more likely to appreciate working from home. This means that if you lose a lot of people because you start being stricter about working from home, then you'll probably disproportionately lose the senior people who are hard to replace and not lose very many of the young juniors who are easy to replace.
  - tazjin 5y ago
    I'm at a FAANG and for any of these categorisations that I think about I can immediately come up with enough counterexamples (across age, marital status, role, ...) that I don't believe there's any easily pinpointed uniform grouping.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 5y ago
"destroy morale for the remaining" This depends on how you define morale. Morale can be thought of as the willingness of people to make difficult sacrifices to maintain community ties, in the sense offered by the essay "Why Strict Churches Are Strong": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?journalCode=ajs#:~:text=Strict%20churches%20proclaim%20an%20exclusive,and%20repudiate%20the%20outside%20world https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?jou.... In that essay, they make the point that there are no freeloaders in a strict church, and that is what draws people to strict churches. Strict churches will be smaller than non-strict churches, because non-strict churches allow a lot of members who do not participate very much in the life of the church. In a strict church, people obey a large number of rules, and make substantial sacrifices, to belong to a group in which everyone else is also making sacrifices, and therefore, in a sense, everyone earns their place. And by most definitions of "morale" strict churches have better morale than non-strict churches. It's the same with any organization, including the military, and including corporations. Asking people to show up to an office means you're asking people to make a sacrifice to continue being a member in good standing. Such a request can weed some people out, but that is the point of the request. For those who are left behind, morale is higher because everyone is known to be making that sacrifice. There are several qualifiers that are normally added at this point, raising questions over the fairness of the rules, the fairness of the enforcement, and the group perception of the fairness of the enforcement. I'm not going to write all of that out in a comment on Hacker News, I think the essay I linked to above covers most of the details.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  this is an uplifting example, however, in business, it is not sacrifice in the same way. Business is about making profit, and extracting profit is what they do.. I was told by a retired consultant with decades of experience -- fifty percent of companies manage through fear. That is, you work hard there, or require others to work hard, because, you will be punished or terminated. End of story.
- throwaway743 5y ago
  I mean, your examples of organizations are homogeneous in their nature, and borderline cult level communal. Unless you're in management or one of those workers who's an over zealous corporate kool-aid drinking yes-man who screams about company culture and has substituted any outside social life with the office and coworkers, these examples might be extreme and irrelevant. We're all slowly dying, and personally, I value having more control over what little time I have left alive while getting done what needs to get done to make a living, and do it right without being tied down, more or less against my will, to any office.
sam0x17 5y ago
> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Many just built multi-billion-dollar campuses that, in the WFH economy, are big useless pieces of real estate
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  The same can be said of Wall Street banks — they have significant real estate holdings that would be devalued in a scenario where a sizeable percentage of the workforce never goes back to the office. They have a vested interest in driving utilization of physical spaces. Meanwhile in tech, I would say folks have been more productive over the pandemic. I certainly have been. So there’s no big push to go back.
eplanit 5y ago
Handicapping FAANG companies could be beneficial to society, overall. Covid-19 brought a few positive outcomes -- less pollution last year, more WFH, ... Following that up with a decline or temporary slowdown in FAANG would be another.
- klipklop 5y ago
  What slowdown? My FB stock is up 100% since March 2020. Seems to me they are expecting even more power coming out of covid. Their influence on society has grown even stronger in the past year and a half.
klipklop 5y ago
Nobody wants to give up a something once it becomes a part of their life that they enjoy. The FANG workers got a taste of not having a daily long commute and don't want to give this small life improvement back. Getting back several hours of your life is pretty big. FANG companies however have gotten a taste of nearly unlimited power and have not heard "no" in years. They too don't want to give this up. This is why they demand the butts back in the cramped open seating office. Does anyone buy their "we will allow you to apply for remote work" BS? That is just something to get you back in the office. They will quietly deny your request later. People can call these FANGers spoiled, but I really hope they win. It would benefit everybody, but the CEOs of the world.
- philote 5y ago
  Before the pandemic FANGs seemed to want everyone in the office as much as possible. That's why they have their own cafeterias/restaurants, daycare, workout rooms, etc. They wanted employees in the office, working a minimum of 40 hours a week. I'm guessing even though remote work is going fine for now, they're concerned they're not going to be able to keep getting over 40 hours of week out of employees. (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work).
  - brandmeyer 5y ago
    > (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work). Then don't conjecture. Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence, it just spreads a misinformation virus.
    - acituan 5y ago
      Without due speculation we could only talk about fully established facts. That would make a very infertile conversation. Also you should have more trust for your fellows in dialogue here, that they do have some immune function against misinformation viruses.
      - 5y ago
pc86 5y ago
Not directly addressing your point, but how common is it for someone to be a FAANG developer - extremely well compensated and smart by all accounts - and not have other options? An argument like this makes sense for the random dev shops and non-tech company dev departments across the country. For many of those, the top 1 or 2 people are arguably good enough to switch over to FAANG or HFT or some other very highly compensated thing if they really want to. I would expect everyone at a FAANG to basically walk into a comparable or better role at a more "traditional" employer.
- phreeza 5y ago
  As a FAANG employee myself, I think your opinion of the average FAANG developer is perhaps a bit too generous.
  - pc86 5y ago
    That's certainly possible :) Even as someone with over a decade of work experience it's somewhat aspirational to work for a FAANG and get that big paycheck and all those RSUs. But no WFH is a deal-breaker unless they start opening up offices in Milwaukee soon.
    - BooneJS 5y ago
      Google and Amazon are both in Madison.
      - pc86 5y ago
        I actually did look them all up after posting this comment, and you're right. And Microsoft says they have offices in Waukesha and Wauwatosa but it looks like they both point to a sales-only office in downtown Milwaukee.
      - OldHand2018 5y ago
        I doubt a lot of people would commute between Milwaukee and Madison when the Amtrak Hiawatha is 1.5 hours from Milwaukee to Chicago, within walking distance to Google Chicago.
throwaway6734 5y ago
As a non-fang employee, I will gladly scab any of them that are not willing to go back to the office.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
They could also play the slow game by tempting some people back and then letting social and career pressure take care of many of the rest. You'll have a much easier negotiating position when half the company and half the world are back at their desks.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
You're glossing too quickly over the "corporate culture" part. It's not about sustainability or gaming out disaster scenarios: they're pushing for an end to WFH because they try to cultivate a culture where people want to go to the office. (That's what all the amenities are for!)
dalbasal 5y ago
>>It’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable I wouldn't rush to this conclusion. Robustness and sustainability are related, but not equivalent. Being wrong the other way might be higher consequence, in their estimation.
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
Simply put: It's easier to to restrict WFH policies and then go lax on them later, as opposed to the opposite which would build a workforce accustomed to WFH that would revolt. I think there's a chance we'll see WFH loosening up eventually.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH I think the divide between WFH and return to the office boils down to something surprisingly simple: how much longer does your current lease last and/or how much office property do you own. Companies that are about to have a lease expire, or are growing at a rate that they would need to soon lease an even larger building are going to be surprisingly friendly to WFH. Companies that have 5+ years on their current lease and aren't planning rapid growth, or companies that spend enormous capital building mega-offices that they likely can't recoup the losses from unless people keep working in offices are going to be very resistant to wide spread WFH. The company I currently work for has an office, is not giving it up (so I assume long term lease) but has nearly doubled since the pandemic. They are very WFH friendly. Another company I know had a shorter lease, shrunk considerably and is now too small for there old office: also WFH friendly. I know a few other companies that aren't growing or shrinking and either own or long term lease several large offices in expensive cities. All of them are pushing a return to office. Any company that owns commercial real estate is going to be very aggressive about a return to work, not just for their employees, but for everyone.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I agree with this line of reasoning. Owners of real estate, either directly or indirectly via owning interests in a company with real estate will have an incentive for everyone to return to office. Middle management may also have an incentive to return to office, lest they be found redundant. Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work.
  - jhickok 5y ago
    >Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work. I personally find this true, but I think there are a lot of younger tech people that use the workplace to fill a social gap that is hard to fill otherwise. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence but my company sold quite a few properties-- their leases were either up and they didn't renew or they outright sold commercial properties they owned-- and our younger employees have openly expressed concern that we are full time wfh.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Many of these companies are letting more senior people stay remote while requiring L4 and below to be in office. If they lose a ton of L3's and L4's to other companies its a loss but much less of a loss than losing L5's+
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Of the FAANG companies, aren't Facebook and Netflix saying that people can work from home forever if they like?
long_time_gone 5y ago
==Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.== Maybe the goal is to get the type of expensive, experienced employees that inhabit HN to resign?
Spooky23 5y ago
Your baseline assumption is that everything is peachy with full WFH. It's not always the case. The people who are going to leave are people on the fence anyway. COVID accelerated stuff like retirements mostly, or was the straw the broke the back of people driving from rural Pennsylvania to Manhattan every day. Other than childcare issues that are timing-related, the non-medical objections to this are mostly just noise, and people will show up to work.
Grim-444 5y ago
In my experience the quip about the "train not swerving off the tracks so far" is mainly just because of the momentum we had from years of working closely together in the office. The longer it goes on, the further my group/department/org fall apart. Communication isn't as good, the new hires aren't trained well and aren't integrated with the team well, a percentage of the employees are obviously just slacking off and not getting much work done, etc. Yes you could argue that those things could be fixed/improved but the reality of the situation is that they're real problems that we're really facing. From what I can see of my situation, it isn't sustainable in my org for much longer.
omgwtfbbq 5y ago
It's about power. How will FAANG get 22 year old college grads to stay at work 12 hours a day writing advertising software if they don't have them eating dinner and playing ping pong in the office?
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Can't speak for the others, but Google is not being aggressive about return, frankly. Return will be based on regional case numbers, and the expectation is only for 3/5 days, low office capacity at the start, and I'm sure plenty of flexibility will be given. I personally can't wait to go back, and that's the same sentiment I hear from most people on my team. HN seems to have become a bit of an echo-chamber of people who prefer WFH, but frankly I'm looking forward to the hybrid model.
weezin 5y ago
Having spent so much money creating billion dollar campuses has them in a sunk cost fallacy IMO.
spoonjim 5y ago
FAANGs don’t need that much monster “talent.” They need some, like the Jeff Deans and whatever. But most of the jobs at a place like Google require just basic top 10% software engineering skill which they make too much money to ever have a problem hiring.
outside1234 5y ago
Especially since they are throwing out mask requirements and vaccination verification for folks returning to work - who wants to expose themselves to that?
justapassenger 5y ago
You seem to make very very bold assumptions without any data backing them up: 1. That current WFH isn't degrading company productivity. Some people love WFH, some hate it, and some just don't have space for that. And for FANGs, that are heavily concentrated in high-COL areas, having huge house with extra bedrooms that give you space for work isn't that common. 2. That brining people back to the office is the most horrible thing that can happen to the company. 3. That talented people prefer to WFH. I get it, you like to WFH - that's great. But your anecdotes aren't data.
sg47 5y ago
There are always H1Bs to abuse. They are going to do the employers' bidding. I think FAANGs will be fine.
handrous 5y ago
> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take. Which are those? I'd say e.g. Google's value has more to do with incumbent market position. Google and others (Facebook, for instance) derive a ton of value from access to massive amounts of data and scale-required-as-table-stakes advertising revenue that make it damn near impossible to compete with them unless you're already an enormous corporation, even on some minor product that's not part of their core business. Arguably, exclusive access to and ability to leverage data is much of Amazon's value. Microsoft's, too, increasingly. Granted they need some number of competent people to keep that going in much the same way that any business does, but "entire value" is significantly overstating labor's case here, I'd say. Their historical-data moats and exclusive visibility into valuable data streams are what make them so damn hard to compete with. It'd be more accurate to say that their users are their entire value, than their human capital (though still wrong, I think).
thorwasdfasdf 5y ago
it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.
swiley 5y ago
Introspection is very hard for anyone running the world. That's why revolutions happen and there isn't a single dynasty stretching back to ancient times.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Pretty sure if revolution breaks out in the western world... it won't be started by overcompensated engineers upset that they have to go back to attending an office with free snacks/food and on-site massages.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I now see the irony of my comment.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That's a likely class of people to start revolutions - if anything, they might be too low. See elite overproduction theory.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawaynumber 5y ago
Like most of hacker news, I think you vastly underestimate really how replaceable smart and skilled people really are. There are literally millions of them, most with far lower pay and conditions than offered by FANGS.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  You are forgetting how expensive it is to replace smart and skilled people. There sure are millions of them, sure, but not necessarily millions of them available when you post your opening. I know because I am searching for senior Java devs for a stable, global, wealthy corporation and yet it takes months to fill positions. Then to the expense of searching you need to add the expense of the guy having to spend at least a year on the job to really become productive, learn the system, the organization, learn the problem to be able to effectively design quality solutions, etc. If this guy leaves in 2 years on average you have spent most of the time basically searching for him and waiting for him to warm up. Smart and skilled people spend a bunch of time learning your problems, figuring out solutions, only to take all that knowledge and experience with them to be replaced for a green guy who will have to start mostly from scratch.
- rajacombinator 5y ago
  Have you ever tried hiring these people? At FAANG scale? Good luck …
- zerr 5y ago
  Even more, as it is measured, the more replaceable you render yourself in your work the smarter and skillful you are, and the quality of the work is considered higher.
Tycho 5y ago
Maybe their plan is to have all the workers on big-city mega wages, currently working remotely, quit, and then hire replacement workers in remote locations at much lower local labour market rates.
atlgator 5y ago
Also consider that FAANGs (and other firms) likely receive considerable tax incentives from the local or State government for having offices in particular locations and the resulting high-paying jobs it brings. If you suddenly let everyone work from wherever, the government isn't generating the income taxes they bargained for.
jordache 5y ago
>I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. There is a general acceptance that for the vast majority of teams, they are most productive when individuals are collaborating face to face, in realtime. I've found that to be true as well. There is still a gap in remote collaboration tooling that results in this differential. Perhaps if the tooling becomes more robust, the difference can greatly diminish.
notatoad 5y ago
disclaimer that this is completely anecdotal, but what i've heard from a few people in fortune-500 oil&gas companies is that 30-40% attrition is an acceptable side-effect of returning to offices, because productivity has been down by even more than that during WFH. the push to get people back in the offices is because people aren't working from home. there's no point retaining your staff if they aren't actually getting anything done. maybe it's different for software engineers at FAANG companies, but keep in mind that even if software engineers are productive, those companies employ thousands of people in sales, marketing, HR, accounting, and other office jobs. and pushing people back to the office in one department while letting another department continue WFH isn't going to play well.
rajacombinator 5y ago
It seems to mostly be driven by managers who are not part of the productive class and therefore can’t perceive the hit to productivity and WLB the office incurs. If you spend your entire day in pointless meetings anyway, then yes, maximizing your commute time and “random office conversation” time is a rational choice. And it’s not like you can measure the productivity of the code monkeys anyway so who cares?
nr2x 5y ago
I was of the same mind until I saw the iOS/macOS reveal and now I’m fairly certain whatever WFH system Apple is doing isn’t working.
jandrese 5y ago
One dynamic that has become apparent to me recently is that at my company everybody has to justify their building space. If too much sits idle we can be penalized for inefficiency. If half of the employees switch to mostly wfh then the corporation would need to sell off/rent out half of the buildings to avoid this. As a result they announced that everybody has to be in the office at least 3 days a week, and also most people would be losing their permanent offices and only have access to hotel office space. I've heard rumors that employee retention is becoming something of a concern.
fatnoah 5y ago
> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. WARNING: ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE I manage a team of 12 people at a FAANG. One team member just quit working entirely until offices open again. Any information about offices opening is immediately pounced on and celebrated. While most folks have stated that they enjoy working from home, a few others hate it. Interestingly, zero people are interested in being fully remote, even though our org has a stated goal to get more people to go remote. That said, EVERYONE is excited at the formalization of a hybrid policy that allows up to a 50/50 split between home and work. That policy also leaves it up to individual teams to decide what, if any, restrictions they want to place on that. I'm sure it's very different in other teams and companies, which is why I prefaced with the warning.
- tonfa 5y ago
  Same context, same anecdote here.
- freyr 5y ago
  My experience with my teammates is the same. I’m the sole member of my team that moved out of the Bay Area during the pandemic. I can’t imagine moving back, but my teammates (all 10-15 years younger) can’t wait to get back in the office.
breatheoften 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's not largely driven by personal profit motive/asset exposure of the decision maker class ... executives, boards, and upper management at such companies are nearly uniformly composed of wealthy individuals who probably have diversified investment portfolios including tons of commercial and residential real-estate interest in places like the Bay area ... what happens to real estate prices in the bay if tech becomes remote? Personally I can't imagine choosing to live in San Francisco in the first place -- but how many of the folks who did for work, then left during the pandemic to live in more livable places, would really want to go back if given the option not to ...?
holdenk 5y ago
So one of the things to remember about Google is the desire to increase attrition of senior employees (e.g. those with the most flexibility to move elsewhere). It's.... weird, but it would totally match.
baby 5y ago
Fb is going full remote for a lot of positions IIUC
r3trohack3r 5y ago
Taking objection to “FANG” Netflix engineer here. We’ve been hiring remote during the pandemic and have a permanent WFH policy in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted. I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.

CPLX 5y ago

> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce Yeah no. The core value of these companies is the fact that they’ve managed to establish a monopolistic position within an important high-margin market segment and now find themselves stewards of a massive money printing machine. Yes, eventually, without a competent workforce they’ll start to face threats and crisis, but I think you’re wildly underestimating the usefulness of that money printing machine to solve any problems that crop up in the next year or three if they find they’ve miscalculated slightly.

glitchc 5y ago
Reminds me of Research in Motion.
- bregma 5y ago
  Who are still around, calling themselves BlackBerry, and have not yet declared their return-to-the-office policy.

_red 5y ago

Well...FANG products have largely reached the point in development where new features are incremental and not closely tied to growth or churn in a meaningful way. Not being dismissive, simply pointing out...what fundamental leverage does a developer have against inelastic customer demand? Are customer going to stop using FANG products because advertising feature 3.2.97 isn't added this quarter?

polynomial 5y ago
In "theory" yes, as measured at scale. Whether or not such correlations really hold is up to a) your data science group, and b) the complex and political negotiation of optics by stakeholders. I'm sort of kidding here, as I find your point sensible, but it may be a tough sell that demand is inelastic.
forgetfulness 5y ago
The market is neither that local nor that global. I don't mean this in a "threat from China" way, but if US companies just look at the offerings of other US companies and the US labor market they might get blindsided again when it turns out that there's good money, good programmers and good designers in Europe and China as well, as it happened with TikTok.
HelloNurse 5y ago
It's feature 3.2.97 missed this quarter, but serious general stagnation in the medium and long term: if junior office dwellers replace senior workers from home moving somewhere else very little is invented, let alone implemented.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  And with no one mentoring those juniors, it's very unlikely they will ever reach the same level of experience and knowledge to actually start making those kinds of impacts on the product or company.

alexdias 5y ago

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Yes, aggressive measures such as: -Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees -Allowing 2 WFH days per week

gliese1337 5y ago
...which policies were only implemented after significant employee pushback over the originally-announced "everyone will be going back to the office full-time" plans.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Google never announced anything like that. The moment they started talking about return to office there was talk of flexibility, lower capacities, and WFH. And in reality WFH at least 1 or 2 days a week was always a possibility, at least in my Google office.
pc86 5y ago
Anything but allowing permanent WFH without any approval, never requiring any on-site visits, and never requiring the camera is "aggressive" to a lot of people for some reason.
cableshaft 5y ago
> Allowing employees to apply to be permanent remote employees We'll see how this plays out, but I'm expecting this to be just a ploy to keep people from leaving right away and 95%+ requests to be remote will ultimately be denied.
- nly 5y ago
  The 2 day WFH thing will fade away as well. My company has put those optional 2 days WFH to TLs to arrange amongst their teams, with the expectation that the whole team will have the same schedule. Basically if your TL doesn't care or want you to WFH, or the team can't agree on days, you're done. It'll be a major inconvenience and staff will ultimately not see the benefits of full WFH with 3, so it won't last. I think there will be increased churn once the "wait and see" crowd clears

hnthrowaway2021 5y ago

I work at a FANG (hence the throwaway), and I agree. Frankly, the COVID-19 pandemic is simply not over yet. Not in the whole world, and not even in the U.S. Especially with news about a new variant, it feels like a safety risk to re-open offices so early.

jstepka 5y ago
i work in sf. i'm in florida right now for the nhl finals and covid is fake news here, and it's utterly refreshing.

pjc50 5y ago

I suspect it's individual managers who've never quite got past "if you can't see someone how do you know they're working?" Never underestimate human irrationality in these things.

aikinai 5y ago
This is the most blatantly ridiculous straw man, I can’t believe people on HN keep trying to make it especially against FAANG. Do you really think these companies are run by middle managers that just want to watch people work? At least at Google, a huge number of employees already work in a different floor, office, city, or even country than their managers that this couldn’t even be a factor for them.
- sircastor 5y ago
  It’s not hard. It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. He asks the VPs, and the VPs ask their reports and so on and so forth. I have no doubt there’s data from middle management that is getting weighed more than that of the people they manage.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. They actually send surveys to everyone. They also talk to the VPs, but surveys have weight.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    No, they do. And you can see the aggregate scores of everyone in the company on a dashboard afterwards.
- loopz 5y ago
  In Scrum, Scrum Master is a contributing member, just as everyone else. It's a role without power, but servant leadership and can be rotated. This doesn't work in practice, as people are too bogged down in their work to take on this. So the role is left up to the nearest manager, ex-manager, clueless business people who're not contributing or otherwise people who just reports upwards. This defeats the role, and it's very very rare to see a contributing member being scrum master, ie. taking up slack and do the necessary stuff around the team. So you end up with such role, or manager, overseeing the desks in open office, of the servants. Such a one-sided arrangement is both intentional, ignorant and about dominance. Feng Shui explains why it is bad for knowledge workers to have eyes over their shoulders all the time.

gaws 5y ago

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. A lot of people want to work for FAANG. If a current employee resigns because of WFH policies, those companies can likely find a replacement who is more receptive to returning to the office.

kybernetikos 5y ago
The pattern I've observed is that younger and more junior people want to work in the office, and older, more senior people with established networks, family life and nice accomodation with a home office are more likely to appreciate working from home. This means that if you lose a lot of people because you start being stricter about working from home, then you'll probably disproportionately lose the senior people who are hard to replace and not lose very many of the young juniors who are easy to replace.
- tazjin 5y ago
  I'm at a FAANG and for any of these categorisations that I think about I can immediately come up with enough counterexamples (across age, marital status, role, ...) that I don't believe there's any easily pinpointed uniform grouping.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lkrubner 5y ago

"destroy morale for the remaining" This depends on how you define morale. Morale can be thought of as the willingness of people to make difficult sacrifices to maintain community ties, in the sense offered by the essay "Why Strict Churches Are Strong": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?journalCode=ajs#:~:text=Strict%20churches%20proclaim%20an%20exclusive,and%20repudiate%20the%20outside%20world https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409?jou.... In that essay, they make the point that there are no freeloaders in a strict church, and that is what draws people to strict churches. Strict churches will be smaller than non-strict churches, because non-strict churches allow a lot of members who do not participate very much in the life of the church. In a strict church, people obey a large number of rules, and make substantial sacrifices, to belong to a group in which everyone else is also making sacrifices, and therefore, in a sense, everyone earns their place. And by most definitions of "morale" strict churches have better morale than non-strict churches. It's the same with any organization, including the military, and including corporations. Asking people to show up to an office means you're asking people to make a sacrifice to continue being a member in good standing. Such a request can weed some people out, but that is the point of the request. For those who are left behind, morale is higher because everyone is known to be making that sacrifice. There are several qualifiers that are normally added at this point, raising questions over the fairness of the rules, the fairness of the enforcement, and the group perception of the fairness of the enforcement. I'm not going to write all of that out in a comment on Hacker News, I think the essay I linked to above covers most of the details.

mistrial9 5y ago
this is an uplifting example, however, in business, it is not sacrifice in the same way. Business is about making profit, and extracting profit is what they do.. I was told by a retired consultant with decades of experience -- fifty percent of companies manage through fear. That is, you work hard there, or require others to work hard, because, you will be punished or terminated. End of story.
throwaway743 5y ago
I mean, your examples of organizations are homogeneous in their nature, and borderline cult level communal. Unless you're in management or one of those workers who's an over zealous corporate kool-aid drinking yes-man who screams about company culture and has substituted any outside social life with the office and coworkers, these examples might be extreme and irrelevant. We're all slowly dying, and personally, I value having more control over what little time I have left alive while getting done what needs to get done to make a living, and do it right without being tied down, more or less against my will, to any office.

sam0x17 5y ago

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. Many just built multi-billion-dollar campuses that, in the WFH economy, are big useless pieces of real estate

wayoutthere 5y ago
The same can be said of Wall Street banks — they have significant real estate holdings that would be devalued in a scenario where a sizeable percentage of the workforce never goes back to the office. They have a vested interest in driving utilization of physical spaces. Meanwhile in tech, I would say folks have been more productive over the pandemic. I certainly have been. So there’s no big push to go back.

eplanit 5y ago

Handicapping FAANG companies could be beneficial to society, overall. Covid-19 brought a few positive outcomes -- less pollution last year, more WFH, ... Following that up with a decline or temporary slowdown in FAANG would be another.

klipklop 5y ago
What slowdown? My FB stock is up 100% since March 2020. Seems to me they are expecting even more power coming out of covid. Their influence on society has grown even stronger in the past year and a half.

klipklop 5y ago

Nobody wants to give up a something once it becomes a part of their life that they enjoy. The FANG workers got a taste of not having a daily long commute and don't want to give this small life improvement back. Getting back several hours of your life is pretty big. FANG companies however have gotten a taste of nearly unlimited power and have not heard "no" in years. They too don't want to give this up. This is why they demand the butts back in the cramped open seating office. Does anyone buy their "we will allow you to apply for remote work" BS? That is just something to get you back in the office. They will quietly deny your request later. People can call these FANGers spoiled, but I really hope they win. It would benefit everybody, but the CEOs of the world.

philote 5y ago
Before the pandemic FANGs seemed to want everyone in the office as much as possible. That's why they have their own cafeterias/restaurants, daycare, workout rooms, etc. They wanted employees in the office, working a minimum of 40 hours a week. I'm guessing even though remote work is going fine for now, they're concerned they're not going to be able to keep getting over 40 hours of week out of employees. (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work).
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  > (This is conjecture on my part, I have no idea how many hours FANG employees tend to work). Then don't conjecture. Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence, it just spreads a misinformation virus.
  - acituan 5y ago
    Without due speculation we could only talk about fully established facts. That would make a very infertile conversation. Also you should have more trust for your fellows in dialogue here, that they do have some immune function against misinformation viruses.
    - 5y ago

pc86 5y ago

Not directly addressing your point, but how common is it for someone to be a FAANG developer - extremely well compensated and smart by all accounts - and not have other options? An argument like this makes sense for the random dev shops and non-tech company dev departments across the country. For many of those, the top 1 or 2 people are arguably good enough to switch over to FAANG or HFT or some other very highly compensated thing if they really want to. I would expect everyone at a FAANG to basically walk into a comparable or better role at a more "traditional" employer.

phreeza 5y ago
As a FAANG employee myself, I think your opinion of the average FAANG developer is perhaps a bit too generous.
- pc86 5y ago
  That's certainly possible :) Even as someone with over a decade of work experience it's somewhat aspirational to work for a FAANG and get that big paycheck and all those RSUs. But no WFH is a deal-breaker unless they start opening up offices in Milwaukee soon.
  - BooneJS 5y ago
    Google and Amazon are both in Madison.
    - pc86 5y ago
      I actually did look them all up after posting this comment, and you're right. And Microsoft says they have offices in Waukesha and Wauwatosa but it looks like they both point to a sales-only office in downtown Milwaukee.
    - OldHand2018 5y ago
      I doubt a lot of people would commute between Milwaukee and Madison when the Amtrak Hiawatha is 1.5 hours from Milwaukee to Chicago, within walking distance to Google Chicago.

throwaway6734 5y ago

As a non-fang employee, I will gladly scab any of them that are not willing to go back to the office.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

They could also play the slow game by tempting some people back and then letting social and career pressure take care of many of the rest. You'll have a much easier negotiating position when half the company and half the world are back at their desks.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

You're glossing too quickly over the "corporate culture" part. It's not about sustainability or gaming out disaster scenarios: they're pushing for an end to WFH because they try to cultivate a culture where people want to go to the office. (That's what all the amenities are for!)

dalbasal 5y ago

>>It’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable I wouldn't rush to this conclusion. Robustness and sustainability are related, but not equivalent. Being wrong the other way might be higher consequence, in their estimation.

minsc__and__boo 5y ago

Simply put: It's easier to to restrict WFH policies and then go lax on them later, as opposed to the opposite which would build a workforce accustomed to WFH that would revolt. I think there's a chance we'll see WFH loosening up eventually.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH I think the divide between WFH and return to the office boils down to something surprisingly simple: how much longer does your current lease last and/or how much office property do you own. Companies that are about to have a lease expire, or are growing at a rate that they would need to soon lease an even larger building are going to be surprisingly friendly to WFH. Companies that have 5+ years on their current lease and aren't planning rapid growth, or companies that spend enormous capital building mega-offices that they likely can't recoup the losses from unless people keep working in offices are going to be very resistant to wide spread WFH. The company I currently work for has an office, is not giving it up (so I assume long term lease) but has nearly doubled since the pandemic. They are very WFH friendly. Another company I know had a shorter lease, shrunk considerably and is now too small for there old office: also WFH friendly. I know a few other companies that aren't growing or shrinking and either own or long term lease several large offices in expensive cities. All of them are pushing a return to office. Any company that owns commercial real estate is going to be very aggressive about a return to work, not just for their employees, but for everyone.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I agree with this line of reasoning. Owners of real estate, either directly or indirectly via owning interests in a company with real estate will have an incentive for everyone to return to office. Middle management may also have an incentive to return to office, lest they be found redundant. Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work.
- jhickok 5y ago
  >Otherwise, I am sure most people by and large would enjoy would enjoy not wasting their life transiting back and forth to work. I personally find this true, but I think there are a lot of younger tech people that use the workplace to fill a social gap that is hard to fill otherwise. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence but my company sold quite a few properties-- their leases were either up and they didn't renew or they outright sold commercial properties they owned-- and our younger employees have openly expressed concern that we are full time wfh.

Taylor_OD 5y ago

Many of these companies are letting more senior people stay remote while requiring L4 and below to be in office. If they lose a ton of L3's and L4's to other companies its a loss but much less of a loss than losing L5's+

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Of the FAANG companies, aren't Facebook and Netflix saying that people can work from home forever if they like?

long_time_gone 5y ago

==Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.== Maybe the goal is to get the type of expensive, experienced employees that inhabit HN to resign?

Spooky23 5y ago

Your baseline assumption is that everything is peachy with full WFH. It's not always the case. The people who are going to leave are people on the fence anyway. COVID accelerated stuff like retirements mostly, or was the straw the broke the back of people driving from rural Pennsylvania to Manhattan every day. Other than childcare issues that are timing-related, the non-medical objections to this are mostly just noise, and people will show up to work.

Grim-444 5y ago

In my experience the quip about the "train not swerving off the tracks so far" is mainly just because of the momentum we had from years of working closely together in the office. The longer it goes on, the further my group/department/org fall apart. Communication isn't as good, the new hires aren't trained well and aren't integrated with the team well, a percentage of the employees are obviously just slacking off and not getting much work done, etc. Yes you could argue that those things could be fixed/improved but the reality of the situation is that they're real problems that we're really facing. From what I can see of my situation, it isn't sustainable in my org for much longer.

omgwtfbbq 5y ago

It's about power. How will FAANG get 22 year old college grads to stay at work 12 hours a day writing advertising software if they don't have them eating dinner and playing ping pong in the office?

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Can't speak for the others, but Google is not being aggressive about return, frankly. Return will be based on regional case numbers, and the expectation is only for 3/5 days, low office capacity at the start, and I'm sure plenty of flexibility will be given. I personally can't wait to go back, and that's the same sentiment I hear from most people on my team. HN seems to have become a bit of an echo-chamber of people who prefer WFH, but frankly I'm looking forward to the hybrid model.

weezin 5y ago

Having spent so much money creating billion dollar campuses has them in a sunk cost fallacy IMO.

spoonjim 5y ago

FAANGs don’t need that much monster “talent.” They need some, like the Jeff Deans and whatever. But most of the jobs at a place like Google require just basic top 10% software engineering skill which they make too much money to ever have a problem hiring.

outside1234 5y ago

Especially since they are throwing out mask requirements and vaccination verification for folks returning to work - who wants to expose themselves to that?

justapassenger 5y ago

You seem to make very very bold assumptions without any data backing them up: 1. That current WFH isn't degrading company productivity. Some people love WFH, some hate it, and some just don't have space for that. And for FANGs, that are heavily concentrated in high-COL areas, having huge house with extra bedrooms that give you space for work isn't that common. 2. That brining people back to the office is the most horrible thing that can happen to the company. 3. That talented people prefer to WFH. I get it, you like to WFH - that's great. But your anecdotes aren't data.

sg47 5y ago

There are always H1Bs to abuse. They are going to do the employers' bidding. I think FAANGs will be fine.

handrous 5y ago

> For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take. Which are those? I'd say e.g. Google's value has more to do with incumbent market position. Google and others (Facebook, for instance) derive a ton of value from access to massive amounts of data and scale-required-as-table-stakes advertising revenue that make it damn near impossible to compete with them unless you're already an enormous corporation, even on some minor product that's not part of their core business. Arguably, exclusive access to and ability to leverage data is much of Amazon's value. Microsoft's, too, increasingly. Granted they need some number of competent people to keep that going in much the same way that any business does, but "entire value" is significantly overstating labor's case here, I'd say. Their historical-data moats and exclusive visibility into valuable data streams are what make them so damn hard to compete with. It'd be more accurate to say that their users are their entire value, than their human capital (though still wrong, I think).

thorwasdfasdf 5y ago

it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.

swiley 5y ago

Introspection is very hard for anyone running the world. That's why revolutions happen and there isn't a single dynasty stretching back to ancient times.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Pretty sure if revolution breaks out in the western world... it won't be started by overcompensated engineers upset that they have to go back to attending an office with free snacks/food and on-site massages.
- swiley 5y ago
  I now see the irony of my comment.
- astrange 5y ago
  That's a likely class of people to start revolutions - if anything, they might be too low. See elite overproduction theory.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwawaynumber 5y ago

Like most of hacker news, I think you vastly underestimate really how replaceable smart and skilled people really are. There are literally millions of them, most with far lower pay and conditions than offered by FANGS.

lmilcin 5y ago
You are forgetting how expensive it is to replace smart and skilled people. There sure are millions of them, sure, but not necessarily millions of them available when you post your opening. I know because I am searching for senior Java devs for a stable, global, wealthy corporation and yet it takes months to fill positions. Then to the expense of searching you need to add the expense of the guy having to spend at least a year on the job to really become productive, learn the system, the organization, learn the problem to be able to effectively design quality solutions, etc. If this guy leaves in 2 years on average you have spent most of the time basically searching for him and waiting for him to warm up. Smart and skilled people spend a bunch of time learning your problems, figuring out solutions, only to take all that knowledge and experience with them to be replaced for a green guy who will have to start mostly from scratch.
rajacombinator 5y ago
Have you ever tried hiring these people? At FAANG scale? Good luck …
zerr 5y ago
Even more, as it is measured, the more replaceable you render yourself in your work the smarter and skillful you are, and the quality of the work is considered higher.

Tycho 5y ago

Maybe their plan is to have all the workers on big-city mega wages, currently working remotely, quit, and then hire replacement workers in remote locations at much lower local labour market rates.

atlgator 5y ago

Also consider that FAANGs (and other firms) likely receive considerable tax incentives from the local or State government for having offices in particular locations and the resulting high-paying jobs it brings. If you suddenly let everyone work from wherever, the government isn't generating the income taxes they bargained for.

jordache 5y ago

>I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. There is a general acceptance that for the vast majority of teams, they are most productive when individuals are collaborating face to face, in realtime. I've found that to be true as well. There is still a gap in remote collaboration tooling that results in this differential. Perhaps if the tooling becomes more robust, the difference can greatly diminish.

notatoad 5y ago

disclaimer that this is completely anecdotal, but what i've heard from a few people in fortune-500 oil&gas companies is that 30-40% attrition is an acceptable side-effect of returning to offices, because productivity has been down by even more than that during WFH. the push to get people back in the offices is because people aren't working from home. there's no point retaining your staff if they aren't actually getting anything done. maybe it's different for software engineers at FAANG companies, but keep in mind that even if software engineers are productive, those companies employ thousands of people in sales, marketing, HR, accounting, and other office jobs. and pushing people back to the office in one department while letting another department continue WFH isn't going to play well.

rajacombinator 5y ago

It seems to mostly be driven by managers who are not part of the productive class and therefore can’t perceive the hit to productivity and WLB the office incurs. If you spend your entire day in pointless meetings anyway, then yes, maximizing your commute time and “random office conversation” time is a rational choice. And it’s not like you can measure the productivity of the code monkeys anyway so who cares?

nr2x 5y ago

I was of the same mind until I saw the iOS/macOS reveal and now I’m fairly certain whatever WFH system Apple is doing isn’t working.

jandrese 5y ago

One dynamic that has become apparent to me recently is that at my company everybody has to justify their building space. If too much sits idle we can be penalized for inefficiency. If half of the employees switch to mostly wfh then the corporation would need to sell off/rent out half of the buildings to avoid this. As a result they announced that everybody has to be in the office at least 3 days a week, and also most people would be losing their permanent offices and only have access to hotel office space. I've heard rumors that employee retention is becoming something of a concern.

fatnoah 5y ago

> I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH. WARNING: ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE I manage a team of 12 people at a FAANG. One team member just quit working entirely until offices open again. Any information about offices opening is immediately pounced on and celebrated. While most folks have stated that they enjoy working from home, a few others hate it. Interestingly, zero people are interested in being fully remote, even though our org has a stated goal to get more people to go remote. That said, EVERYONE is excited at the formalization of a hybrid policy that allows up to a 50/50 split between home and work. That policy also leaves it up to individual teams to decide what, if any, restrictions they want to place on that. I'm sure it's very different in other teams and companies, which is why I prefaced with the warning.

tonfa 5y ago
Same context, same anecdote here.
freyr 5y ago
My experience with my teammates is the same. I’m the sole member of my team that moved out of the Bay Area during the pandemic. I can’t imagine moving back, but my teammates (all 10-15 years younger) can’t wait to get back in the office.

breatheoften 5y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not largely driven by personal profit motive/asset exposure of the decision maker class ... executives, boards, and upper management at such companies are nearly uniformly composed of wealthy individuals who probably have diversified investment portfolios including tons of commercial and residential real-estate interest in places like the Bay area ... what happens to real estate prices in the bay if tech becomes remote? Personally I can't imagine choosing to live in San Francisco in the first place -- but how many of the folks who did for work, then left during the pandemic to live in more livable places, would really want to go back if given the option not to ...?

holdenk 5y ago

So one of the things to remember about Google is the desire to increase attrition of senior employees (e.g. those with the most flexibility to move elsewhere). It's.... weird, but it would totally match.

baby 5y ago

Fb is going full remote for a lot of positions IIUC

r3trohack3r 5y ago

Taking objection to “FANG” Netflix engineer here. We’ve been hiring remote during the pandemic and have a permanent WFH policy in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted. I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.