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From the blog post > At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a

• taurath 5y ago
  Really curious why only within country? Security reasons? Also why 4 weeks? Just to be available for meetings? I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment.
  • jandrewrogers 5y ago
    Tax, visa, and regulatory reasons. Other jurisdictions will impute residency for all legal purposes if you spend too much time there or work from there. They are trying to avoid myriad very messy legal edge cases.
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    > I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment. It's not. BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.
    • vineyardmike 5y ago
      Maybe you live in a cold climate and want to spend winter somewhere warm, but still work.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Or support your kid in that overseas one month study program. There are a lot of interesting things you can do here with flexible working arrangements.
  • mimischi 5y ago
    Likely tax?
    • metagame 5y ago
      Almost certainly. Taxation is hard enough between states, for both the employer and the employee. Adding another country in the mix and it gets really hard, especially when (as is common with tech employees) people go to other countries to work without paying the slightest attention to how incredibly many immigration and labor laws they're breaking in their target nations.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    There's really no such concept as an employee in another country. You need a subsidiary incorporated in that country and then they become an employee of that entity. So...huge paperwork hassle at the very least.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    There's different tax, visa and HR regulatory implications they probably don't want to deal with. For example if Amazon has an American worker who decides to work remotely in France (where Amazon is also established) can Amazon fire the American "at will" or are they subjected to French regulations that make terminating workers extremely difficult?
    • cutenewt 5y ago
      Speaking of tax, allowing employees to work from home may allow them to avoid the newly created Seattle payroll tax: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/tax/articles/city-of-seattle-city-council-approves-the-payroll-expense-tax.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/tax/articles/city-of-s...
    • paulez 5y ago
      To be able to legally work in France, an American citizen would need a work visa which requires to have a local work contract. So they would have to follow French regulations. It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!
      • rsj_hn 5y ago
        Sorry if I misunderstood -- the 5 weeks isn't paid? If it is, what is the difference between the 5 weeks and the 2 weeks?
        • CRConrad 5y ago
          Yeah, I think you misunderstood. In Europe, "vacation" pretty much universally means "paid vacation". Otherwise, we'd call it "unpaid leave" or something. I've only recently -- in threads here on HN in the last few weeks, in fact -- encountered the acronym "PTO", and concluded from context that it must mean "personal time off". (Right?) I also didn't quite grok what the GP meant by including those "two weeks of PTO"; WTF are those, in a European context? Can't be sick days, because AFAIK at least in most of Europe there's no quantitive limit on those: When you're sick, you're sick. Have I understood correctly that Americans who happen not to be ill for more than the "sickday limit" in a given year usually take the opportunity to "use up their sick days" even if they're healthy? (To repeat what is rapidly becoming my refrain on here: God, America is weird.)
  • arnvald 5y ago
    There are a number of reasons, first is that by working from another location you might be breaking the law, second is taxes - if you stay somewhere long enough they might argue you need to pay income tax there. Lastly, data protection laws vary per country and there's a chance you have to give your laptop with company data to authorities in another country, which might be a security issue.
    • alasdair_ 5y ago
      >second is taxes - if you stay somewhere long enough they might argue you need to pay income tax there This is true even if you work a single day in a state. Consultants at Accenture, PWC, Bain etc. end up having to file in dozens of states a year sometimes. Fortunately their employer almost universally handles all the paperwork.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        It depends on the state but some states, as you say, want you to file for even working a single day and states are apparently really starting to crack down.
  • wonder_er 5y ago
    It's likely that this is the Official Policy, but then people will just not mention to HR where they happen to be traveling to. > Hey [team], I'll be in [foreign country] for the next 3 weeks! and no one outside of that team ever knows anything except someone's zoom background has changed. If it gets mentioned once in a press release, and HR forgets to work hard to implement this in an ongoing way, it becomes a non-rule. Useful for lawyers and when talking to compliance people, but not a meaningful barrier for anyone actually going anywhere.
  • Seattle3503 5y ago
    You can visit family and take care of them. I could imagine some doing this the entire month of December for the holidays.
  • neonbones 5y ago
    There is an insightful summary of all the issues from HashiCorp founder when trying to establish an international remote-first company. I can agree on almost everything from his post because my employer (startup) is trying to do the same, we are a US-company, in the process of acquiring by one of the giants, and I'm working and living in Ukraine with a US-based contract. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
  • 8note 5y ago
    What you can do is be working while travelling, extending your vacation by 2 days. One on the way to the location, and one on the way back.
• kreeben 5y ago
  >> work up to four weeks per year fully remote Wow, that's really something. Personally, having spent a pandemic working fully remote I wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right, didn't frown upon it, didn't consider it to be "a way to refresh my sense of duty" and didn't think of it as a privilege. I'm never going back to the open landscape of hell.
  • lolsal 5y ago
    > I wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right, I don't think things you prefer automatically get elevated to 'unquestionable human rights'.
    • kreeben 5y ago
      Then you must think of it as a privilege. And I shall not work for you.
      • lolsal 5y ago
        I understand and that's fine. I don't actually care about where you work in this context. Human Rights are special things. They aren't preferences. The more you conflate the two, the more you erode your position and the term 'human right' in general. I would urge you to stop doing that.
        • kreeben 5y ago
          >> Human Rights are special things Very true and my point would have been made without me presenting it as such. My apologies.
        • filomeno 5y ago
          Well, at least the right to life is a human right. It turned out that having to work in a crowded space with many others can be a real threat for your life.
• jon-wood 5y ago
  How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? This isn’t a genuine business requirement, it’s just management wanting to remind everyone that they’re on a leash which can be yanked whenever they like.
  • andrewjf 5y ago
    I've found this really depends on seniority. Higher seniorities like principle engineers, senior managers, directors, vp meetings are much different than a normal stand up, strategy session or engineering discussion and physical presence does have an advantage. But I admit this isn't likely to be the target audience for the original policy.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements. Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. Everyone else must choose between accommodating that person or quietly doing the thing without them. It's ultimately not a great experience for the employee who gets left out of things because their schedule has become difficult to accomodate. It also sets appropriate expectations. Some people interview for flexible WFH positions when they really want full-remote positions, then spend a lot of energy trying to shut down any in-person meetings no matter how much the rest of the team wants them. This is a good way of signaling that in-person meetings are a requirement for the job.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone. The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Seattle would be penny wise and pound foolish. > Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. This doesn't sound like you're actually running a "WFH" team then. You just can't demand short notice in person meetings with a remote team; that's an unreasonable ask. Hold remote meetings and schedule in-person meetups far in advance, or don't call it a "WFH" team.
• boulos 5y ago
  I wonder about the definition of "easily travel [...] within a day's notice". I've hopped on a plane to LA in the afternoon from San Francisco same day... is this just about "how willing are you to book a last-minute flight?" or is it "do you live near enough a major airport?" (Plus the usual "travel and abandon your family at a moment's notice"). I feel like if you're committed to "I wish to live in Toronto, while my team is in Seattle" that's tough (one flight and not every day currently!) but you could probably easily live ~anywhere along the West Coast or even SLC / Boulder / Denver no problem.
  • 8note 5y ago
    We(seattle team) had an SLC team member for a bit, and it was pretty rough. Even Phoenix partner teams are a huge pain since lunch time overlaps so much
• 8note 5y ago
  The common pattern across various L8 all hands ive been in is that we all want to have fairly regular planning and design sessions in person, then go home to get the implementation done. I think the "withing a day's notice" mirrors that, and that the fully remote days will keep growing and growing and growing to match being in the office for ~3 days every 2 weeks. Occasionally more if you need to do lots of in office work, and said in office work could come up at random. Before the pandemic most of my team at amazon was already WFH about half time, answer were trying to work out how to make sure the right people are in at the same time together