15 ms·

Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. And that's not to detract from eith

by mabbo 5y ago

Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. And that's not to detract from either side of that choice. It's just a choice that has to be made. What's going to be more interesting is what this does to the market rate for labor compensation between these two pools. Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent (in the city) or increased time (commuting). Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. If the advantage of face to face is actually significant, then we'll see the remote firms slowly die off. If it's not, then they're going to be here permanently. Or they might just take over.

macintux 5y ago
It will be interesting to see whether companies can make a hybrid model work reliably. I tend to think that combining remote with on-site leads to worse results, because it’s easy to leave the remote people out of the loop.
- murph-almighty 5y ago
  The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
  - krageon 5y ago
    The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.
    - pgwhalen 5y ago
      I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps. I’m sure this varies by company.
    - JackFr 5y ago
      > Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. It is technically trivial. Building business software is fundamentally a communication/knowledge problem with technical aspects.
  - whizzter 5y ago
    Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  That's what the theory says, but my experience disagrees. I find that when the remote workers have to be kept in the loop or the work doesn't get done/get done properly, then managers make sure they are always up to date.
  - macintux 5y ago
    I've not found that to be true in my career. Where remote work is the exception, rather than the rule, the remote employees are frequently in the dark, and often simply fail to work out. Managers can only do so much when you're missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings. I've worked in remote-only environments, and (effectively) local-only, both of which worked pretty well. Local-first/remote-rarely hasn't worked. I've not worked in anything close to 50-50, though, so perhaps that has a better shot at succeeding.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
      > missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings Maybe that's the crux of it. I've never worked in an environment where things like that amounted to much. If one of those meetings started to become important, it would always end up with "let's find a meeting room and include Charlie and Susan and get this hashed out." I'd go so far as to say that if that's the way a team is primarily communicating, there is something structurally wrong.
syshum 5y ago
I think the bigger effect is this will create I believe a new round of Off Shoring for a set of jobs that used to be considered immune or at least resistant to off shoring. I could be wrong but your statement of "if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" will hold true for for the global workforce as well, and I am not just talking the traditional off shore to India or china, but it could be that EU companies find cheaper information workers in US Mid West, or US Companies finding cheaper employees in EU, or Australia , etc The high salaries of NY, LA, Silicon Valley, etc I think will be the first losses in this battle, many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that. It will be interesting but the employees pushing for full time remote should be advised to be careful what they wish for, as they just might get it and not like the consequences
- TrueGeek 5y ago
  The companies I've seen adjusting salaries are adjusting for "market rate" of salaries, not CoL. This can result in moving to an area with a higher cost of living and a lower salary.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    “Cost of living” was always code for “employer bets you will accept lower pay because you will not have a better option “.
  - mrep 5y ago
    Pay is usually max(COL, local market rate). You don't need a super high COL if the local market is very competitive, but COL can raise the pay because you still need to convince people to move to your location and most people won't do that if it has an abnormally higher cost of living without a corresponding pay increase.
- greiskul 5y ago
  > many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that. But at the same time, that makes the company vulnerable to the employee seek another company that will allow the remote work with a better compensation. Unless the ceos get together and conspire to suppress wages like they have done in the past, it is really uncertain how the workforce landscape will shape itself in the near future.
jollybean 5y ago
"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves. There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will. In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace. The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services. I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office. I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen. Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.
- butMyside 5y ago
  If you think they can just write off millions of real people you’re deluded. Only 5% of the US population hunts. Until society as is collapses, we’re reliant on this logistics system. The powers that be know that. Workers have all the power. There’s just a 24/7 media blitz saying otherwise. Look at Linux, Godot, Blender, Jupyter, etc… I was deploying containers as BSD jails in 2005; k8s isn’t new… political corruption obliging us to policing of agency to serve aristocrats is the reason software companies exist, not to produce software. We can do that as a species just fine.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  The context you trimmed off your quoted line completely changes the meaning of what you quoted. It was “Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in,” Companies requiring employees to be in the city 9-6 aren’t off-shoring and probably aren’t out-sourcing that work.
- dymk 5y ago
  Having worked for years with overseas contractors, I’m really not too concerned about my job security
bko 5y ago
> while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around. That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator. The median employee that chooses to live in X may be more productive that the median employee that chooses to live in Y. But that's yet to be seen
- Dyac 5y ago
  Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Playing games with your employer probably isn't the best idea if you're looking for a long term relationship with them.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I wouldn’t be so confident as to think Facebook won’t catch me lying for years.
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    Technology is not always the solution. If your employer asks you to affirm something, and you do that, and then cheat (because, let's say, cheating is technologically trivial), then you take a huge risk. A lot of people will not take that risk. It's enough to make example of 1 or 2 people who are caught, and the rest will fall in line in no time.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Is my opinion, the company is cheating the employee by paying them less for the same work just because they live somewhere else.
jimmytucson 5y ago
> you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent The corollary of what you said is to pay remote employees with the same title less, which they won't all accept... especially the ones living in the same geo area due to the fact that they were commuting before the pandemic or are still occasionally commuting in and haven't moved to a lower COL area yet.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
> Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. It seems a lot of people disagree with you: > In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baseline. https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flattening-but-theres-good-news-for-some/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flatten... I'm one of them. If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less. Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  But what if you turn that around? If you are currently remote but considering an offer from a place that's in-office, wouldn't you want a higher wage to compensate you for the extra hassle of commuting? That's extra free time you're never getting back.
  - randallsquared 5y ago
    There are people who prefer to work in an office, and some who have that preference even if it puts them on a train for an hour or two a day. As long as we don't get legislation to force employers one way or another, I'd expect employees to self-select into those who like being around others all day, and those who prefer to work in a private office. It's a serendipitous solution we've been presented to all those open plan offices that a certain set hate: you can have your own private office with a view, but you'll pay for it yourself.
    - tdfx 5y ago
      But shouldn't the employees that require extra subsidies (office space, commuting reimbursement, office utilities/supplies) receive the same overall compensation as those working from home with lower expense to the company? It seems to me that if being in the office is an optional preference for some, they should carry the cost of it.
paxys 5y ago
Ultimately it's the employees that will make the choice, not the company. My wife works for a large NYC-based bank which has been trying to mandate 100% return to office since October 2020. They keep pushing it back by a month or two at a time due to employee backlash, and a year later still maintain that things will be back to "normal" soon. It's become a running joke among employees.
snicker7 5y ago
At a certain income threshold, rent becomes irrelevant. The difference in top decile salaries between, say, NYC and Pittsburgh is far more significant than the slight difference in a rent.
- 01100011 5y ago
  Rent is only part of it though. I'd gladly pay the equivalent rent in a better city assuming I keep my salary. I'm just trying to get a better quality of life.
- bumby 5y ago
  For many, time is the more important consideration. Working from home allowed me to reduce a 1-1.5 hour commute to nothing, work out on my lunch vs after work…at the end of the day those can easily add up to a couple hours per day that could be spent doing something else.
- jefftk 5y ago
  That doesn't sound right if you're talking about multiple people (ex: family with two kids and you want a room for each).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mullingitover 5y ago
I wonder if the remote firms will be at an advantage because of reduced real estate expenses. Offices aren't cheap, and the past couple decades have seen a downward spiral in square footage per person at offices. Now it's reached its final form, roughly zero square feet per person. Combine that with a drastically expanded recruiting pool and it's easy to see how remote work firms could come to dominate.
vmception 5y ago
I’m considering hiring in person only for tech ventures (software dev, product managers, designers etc, standard affair) My observations are that people that could afford to migrated to a lot of the same areas I think there is a market need for it. Something as simple as going to a local event after work with some of the people you enjoy being around (not company mandated nor suggested) requires nearly zero planning compared to trying to coordinate coming out from home My hunch is that there is an audience for it I bet local businesses (bars, lounges, similar things) would even give discounts to attract that kind of crowd again. The after work and well compensated crowd that acts spontaneously. Its funny to even mention it, but people with bad commutes wont even apply or pretend they dont have a bad commute, and people with a reason to be home (that many other companies now cater to) also wont show up. I still think there is enough talent.
thwarted 5y ago
I think the angle that's not fully communicated here is that the default expectation is 40 hours of work a week at 8 hours per day. At a company that expects you to be in the office for those 8 hours, many people actually spend more than 8 hours in service of the need to be in the office for 8 hours. That is, if it takes you 30 minutes of travel each way to satisfy a mandate to be in an office for 8 hours, you're really spending 9 hours "on company time", but you're only being compensated for 8. People who don't have, because of whatever reason, travel time can roll out of bed and immediately be ready to work (I have the past 18 months). Why should the employee take a hit out of their non-work time to do travel that the company insists on? If you want me to travel, pay me for it and recognize that you're paying for my time to not be productive because its being eaten up with travel (or recognize that some of the 8 hours of company-time is going to be eaten up with travel so you're only getting 7 hours of work time out of it). Someone could choose to move closer to the office, there by reducing the amount of time used for travel, and the unproductive-travel-time compensation should be reduced. Historically, both employers and employees have incongruent and hazy understanding and a polite agreement as to how this kind of time gets accounted for (how much it is and who is accountable/responsible for it), especially in salaried positions/knowledge workers. That's probably going to change. If anything, the work-from-wherever trend will help people get a better understanding of and draw the line between work-time and personal-time, productive time and non-productive time, total compensation, and what, exactly, they are being compensated for, and how this time is grokked and tracked.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  In that model, why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment? You picked where you live and what company you applied to work at; they didn’t pick where you live. If that means that you want to only apply for remote positions, that’s certainly your choice; I don’t blame you in the least for it, but expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you chose to live seems unlikely to happen, to put it mildly.
  - humanwhosits 5y ago
    Many people have purchased a house that they intend to remain in, the friction to move houses is often larger than friction to change jobs. Also, there may be a spouse who just doesn't want to move house.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. I actually wrote more about it in my blog post, "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... To me, it feels like we have people in the industry with wildly different preferences in regards to working, preferences that are oftentimes at odds. For a long time, the trend of working at the office has been set by the folk that are more comfortable with this mode of work and that has been considered "normal", however in the past few years many have also gotten a taste for the remote work alternative. Personally, i wouldn't want to go back to the office, resigning and looking for a remote opportunity (or even starting my own company) being preferable to that. For other folks, the opposite is probably true. Neither is wrong, it's just that they're at odds - some people would feel as uncomfortable with remote work and async communication, as i would with in person work. The long term consequences of this remain to be seen, however.

by mabbo 5y ago

macintux 5y ago

It will be interesting to see whether companies can make a hybrid model work reliably. I tend to think that combining remote with on-site leads to worse results, because it’s easy to leave the remote people out of the loop.

murph-almighty 5y ago
The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
- krageon 5y ago
  The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.
  - pgwhalen 5y ago
    I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps. I’m sure this varies by company.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. It is technically trivial. Building business software is fundamentally a communication/knowledge problem with technical aspects.
- whizzter 5y ago
  Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
That's what the theory says, but my experience disagrees. I find that when the remote workers have to be kept in the loop or the work doesn't get done/get done properly, then managers make sure they are always up to date.
- macintux 5y ago
  I've not found that to be true in my career. Where remote work is the exception, rather than the rule, the remote employees are frequently in the dark, and often simply fail to work out. Managers can only do so much when you're missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings. I've worked in remote-only environments, and (effectively) local-only, both of which worked pretty well. Local-first/remote-rarely hasn't worked. I've not worked in anything close to 50-50, though, so perhaps that has a better shot at succeeding.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    > missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings Maybe that's the crux of it. I've never worked in an environment where things like that amounted to much. If one of those meetings started to become important, it would always end up with "let's find a meeting room and include Charlie and Susan and get this hashed out." I'd go so far as to say that if that's the way a team is primarily communicating, there is something structurally wrong.

syshum 5y ago

I think the bigger effect is this will create I believe a new round of Off Shoring for a set of jobs that used to be considered immune or at least resistant to off shoring. I could be wrong but your statement of "if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" will hold true for for the global workforce as well, and I am not just talking the traditional off shore to India or china, but it could be that EU companies find cheaper information workers in US Mid West, or US Companies finding cheaper employees in EU, or Australia , etc The high salaries of NY, LA, Silicon Valley, etc I think will be the first losses in this battle, many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that. It will be interesting but the employees pushing for full time remote should be advised to be careful what they wish for, as they just might get it and not like the consequences

TrueGeek 5y ago
The companies I've seen adjusting salaries are adjusting for "market rate" of salaries, not CoL. This can result in moving to an area with a higher cost of living and a lower salary.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  “Cost of living” was always code for “employer bets you will accept lower pay because you will not have a better option “.
- mrep 5y ago
  Pay is usually max(COL, local market rate). You don't need a super high COL if the local market is very competitive, but COL can raise the pay because you still need to convince people to move to your location and most people won't do that if it has an abnormally higher cost of living without a corresponding pay increase.
greiskul 5y ago
> many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that. But at the same time, that makes the company vulnerable to the employee seek another company that will allow the remote work with a better compensation. Unless the ceos get together and conspire to suppress wages like they have done in the past, it is really uncertain how the workforce landscape will shape itself in the near future.

jollybean 5y ago

"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves. There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will. In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace. The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services. I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office. I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen. Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.

butMyside 5y ago
If you think they can just write off millions of real people you’re deluded. Only 5% of the US population hunts. Until society as is collapses, we’re reliant on this logistics system. The powers that be know that. Workers have all the power. There’s just a 24/7 media blitz saying otherwise. Look at Linux, Godot, Blender, Jupyter, etc… I was deploying containers as BSD jails in 2005; k8s isn’t new… political corruption obliging us to policing of agency to serve aristocrats is the reason software companies exist, not to produce software. We can do that as a species just fine.
sokoloff 5y ago
The context you trimmed off your quoted line completely changes the meaning of what you quoted. It was “Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in,” Companies requiring employees to be in the city 9-6 aren’t off-shoring and probably aren’t out-sourcing that work.
dymk 5y ago
Having worked for years with overseas contractors, I’m really not too concerned about my job security

bko 5y ago

> while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around. That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator. The median employee that chooses to live in X may be more productive that the median employee that chooses to live in Y. But that's yet to be seen

Dyac 5y ago
Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.
- selectodude 5y ago
  Playing games with your employer probably isn't the best idea if you're looking for a long term relationship with them.
- numpad0 5y ago
  I wouldn’t be so confident as to think Facebook won’t catch me lying for years.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  Technology is not always the solution. If your employer asks you to affirm something, and you do that, and then cheat (because, let's say, cheating is technologically trivial), then you take a huge risk. A lot of people will not take that risk. It's enough to make example of 1 or 2 people who are caught, and the rest will fall in line in no time.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Is my opinion, the company is cheating the employee by paying them less for the same work just because they live somewhere else.

jimmytucson 5y ago

> you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent The corollary of what you said is to pay remote employees with the same title less, which they won't all accept... especially the ones living in the same geo area due to the fact that they were commuting before the pandemic or are still occasionally commuting in and haven't moved to a lower COL area yet.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

> Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. It seems a lot of people disagree with you: > In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baseline. https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flattening-but-theres-good-news-for-some/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flatten... I'm one of them. If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less. Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
But what if you turn that around? If you are currently remote but considering an offer from a place that's in-office, wouldn't you want a higher wage to compensate you for the extra hassle of commuting? That's extra free time you're never getting back.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  There are people who prefer to work in an office, and some who have that preference even if it puts them on a train for an hour or two a day. As long as we don't get legislation to force employers one way or another, I'd expect employees to self-select into those who like being around others all day, and those who prefer to work in a private office. It's a serendipitous solution we've been presented to all those open plan offices that a certain set hate: you can have your own private office with a view, but you'll pay for it yourself.
  - tdfx 5y ago
    But shouldn't the employees that require extra subsidies (office space, commuting reimbursement, office utilities/supplies) receive the same overall compensation as those working from home with lower expense to the company? It seems to me that if being in the office is an optional preference for some, they should carry the cost of it.

paxys 5y ago

Ultimately it's the employees that will make the choice, not the company. My wife works for a large NYC-based bank which has been trying to mandate 100% return to office since October 2020. They keep pushing it back by a month or two at a time due to employee backlash, and a year later still maintain that things will be back to "normal" soon. It's become a running joke among employees.

snicker7 5y ago

At a certain income threshold, rent becomes irrelevant. The difference in top decile salaries between, say, NYC and Pittsburgh is far more significant than the slight difference in a rent.

01100011 5y ago
Rent is only part of it though. I'd gladly pay the equivalent rent in a better city assuming I keep my salary. I'm just trying to get a better quality of life.
bumby 5y ago
For many, time is the more important consideration. Working from home allowed me to reduce a 1-1.5 hour commute to nothing, work out on my lunch vs after work…at the end of the day those can easily add up to a couple hours per day that could be spent doing something else.
jefftk 5y ago
That doesn't sound right if you're talking about multiple people (ex: family with two kids and you want a room for each).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mullingitover 5y ago

I wonder if the remote firms will be at an advantage because of reduced real estate expenses. Offices aren't cheap, and the past couple decades have seen a downward spiral in square footage per person at offices. Now it's reached its final form, roughly zero square feet per person. Combine that with a drastically expanded recruiting pool and it's easy to see how remote work firms could come to dominate.

vmception 5y ago

I’m considering hiring in person only for tech ventures (software dev, product managers, designers etc, standard affair) My observations are that people that could afford to migrated to a lot of the same areas I think there is a market need for it. Something as simple as going to a local event after work with some of the people you enjoy being around (not company mandated nor suggested) requires nearly zero planning compared to trying to coordinate coming out from home My hunch is that there is an audience for it I bet local businesses (bars, lounges, similar things) would even give discounts to attract that kind of crowd again. The after work and well compensated crowd that acts spontaneously. Its funny to even mention it, but people with bad commutes wont even apply or pretend they dont have a bad commute, and people with a reason to be home (that many other companies now cater to) also wont show up. I still think there is enough talent.

thwarted 5y ago

I think the angle that's not fully communicated here is that the default expectation is 40 hours of work a week at 8 hours per day. At a company that expects you to be in the office for those 8 hours, many people actually spend more than 8 hours in service of the need to be in the office for 8 hours. That is, if it takes you 30 minutes of travel each way to satisfy a mandate to be in an office for 8 hours, you're really spending 9 hours "on company time", but you're only being compensated for 8. People who don't have, because of whatever reason, travel time can roll out of bed and immediately be ready to work (I have the past 18 months). Why should the employee take a hit out of their non-work time to do travel that the company insists on? If you want me to travel, pay me for it and recognize that you're paying for my time to not be productive because its being eaten up with travel (or recognize that some of the 8 hours of company-time is going to be eaten up with travel so you're only getting 7 hours of work time out of it). Someone could choose to move closer to the office, there by reducing the amount of time used for travel, and the unproductive-travel-time compensation should be reduced. Historically, both employers and employees have incongruent and hazy understanding and a polite agreement as to how this kind of time gets accounted for (how much it is and who is accountable/responsible for it), especially in salaried positions/knowledge workers. That's probably going to change. If anything, the work-from-wherever trend will help people get a better understanding of and draw the line between work-time and personal-time, productive time and non-productive time, total compensation, and what, exactly, they are being compensated for, and how this time is grokked and tracked.

sokoloff 5y ago
In that model, why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment? You picked where you live and what company you applied to work at; they didn’t pick where you live. If that means that you want to only apply for remote positions, that’s certainly your choice; I don’t blame you in the least for it, but expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you chose to live seems unlikely to happen, to put it mildly.
- humanwhosits 5y ago
  Many people have purchased a house that they intend to remain in, the friction to move houses is often larger than friction to change jobs. Also, there may be a spouse who just doesn't want to move house.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. I actually wrote more about it in my blog post, "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... To me, it feels like we have people in the industry with wildly different preferences in regards to working, preferences that are oftentimes at odds. For a long time, the trend of working at the office has been set by the folk that are more comfortable with this mode of work and that has been considered "normal", however in the past few years many have also gotten a taste for the remote work alternative. Personally, i wouldn't want to go back to the office, resigning and looking for a remote opportunity (or even starting my own company) being preferable to that. For other folks, the opposite is probably true. Neither is wrong, it's just that they're at odds - some people would feel as uncomfortable with remote work and async communication, as i would with in person work. The long term consequences of this remain to be seen, however.