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Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you ha

Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you had to, you know, get the people from work and take them to a place and all that, it involved paying a lot of money for extra security and such. With no offices, it's a lot easier, and you never have to meet the person face to face. Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

tibbydudeza 4y ago
(WAAS) - work as a service - think contracting is more secure. Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". I never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)
dantyti 4y ago
This is an interesting angle I haven't considered before. I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me. I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip. Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.
geuis 4y ago
Look, you can't have it both ways. People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it's going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that. Which is it? As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.
- giardini 4y ago
  Well, you can have it both (or even more) ways: no matter what companies do, someone will crap on them! This can be universal (all companies) or particular (e.g., the company that overbilled me). And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism). Welcome to the crapnet.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Look, you can’t have it both ways. “You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation. > People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that. You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  You claimed: we must have it one way or the other. This is false. Game theory says you are wrong and has proofs that you are wrong in the form of proofs of mixed strategies being optimal equilibrium strategies. In these strategies we have the assumption of having it both ways - the probabilities have to add one, but they don't have to be binary. Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways. Consider rock paper scissors. If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors. So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations. > People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home. I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer. Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.
CamperBob2 4y ago
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". That's basically how the movie industry has always worked. Why keep people on your books when you're not actively in production? It's one of those cases where organized labor seems to work out well for all sides. The unions provide talent and craft support when/where it's needed, then they go away when the work is done. It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. Similar incentives exist, but a company that makes software or hardware isn't an on-again, off-again concern like film production.
- peoplearepeople 4y ago
  Honestly I couldn't tell you what capacity I needed from my reports on a time horizon of even 1 month. Sure we do planning, but it's always wrong.
- auctoritas 4y ago
  If software worked the way managers and business like to imagine it does - define requirements, build app, step away - then this model could work. But we all know that's almost never the case.
- matwood 4y ago
  > It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. If the US offered some sort universal healthcare this would be much easier to see happen. UH would also be a boon for small business.
dinobones 4y ago
I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take. Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I associate “having a job” with prospect of “being laid off” and plan accordingly.
thefz 4y ago
> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. I don't know. With sufficiently large organizations it's quite easy to lay off people you never crossed eyes with, remote or not.
- billti 4y ago
  Exactly. My impression is that in very large orgs the first couple levels of management normally find out about layoffs a couple hours before they have to deliver them. Both to keep the news under wraps and to avoid personal bias, how many and who is usually a decision taken by directors up and HR.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". I would argue that companies already view their employees this way, in office or remote. Companies do not value employees. We are valued the same way you would value coal. If you need energy, keep buying and if not, stop.
moneywoes 4y ago
The bigger thing I think is offshoring
noodleman 4y ago
I doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will not be any more visible than a remote worker. I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up. Sure we are, and aggregates in fact, not individual figures.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". Good. Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better. (This message was bought to you by a contractor).
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.
  - Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
    Why should a company be forced to continue to pay for employees they aren't in need of?
    - johnnyanmac 4y ago
      Because other countries have decided that "we need to make our quarterly earnings look good" isn't a good enough reason to can half your staff over. If you fire an employee at anytime it's just unpredictable (and inefficient) contract work.
    - Ancalagon 4y ago
      Where did I say companies should be forced to pay for employees they don't need? I didn't say that. What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor? And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers. You as an employee have far more to lose.
reaperducer 4y ago
uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers We are all cattle, not pets.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical offices.
Salgat 4y ago
Sounds more like it's just easier to use favoritism that's not based on job performance when doing layoffs if you are face-to-face with these folks on a regular basis.
karaterobot 4y ago
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.
- svachalek 4y ago
  Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is. You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it. And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.
seydor 4y ago
Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to hide their digital footprints as well
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do your job, usually cheaper. if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    What if I am in Georgia?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarface74 4y ago
    As someone who got my first, current and only job at a FAANG working remotely in GA, I declined the chance to be interviewed for a job that would have required me to relocate. I would have made probably $100K more than I was making as a senior enterprise dev. Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.
  - foobazgt 4y ago
    As someone in Georgia who was both one of the first ten employees for a remote FAANG office and also a co-founder of a remote office for an SV unicorn, who got paid more or less what his contemporaries on the west coast did, I'd say you're about 20 years behind the times and a bit off about compensation.
killingtime74 4y ago
As you said in your example having to say it to your face is not really a barrier to firing anyway. We are virtual servers to them, no matter rank or position.
onion2k 4y ago
Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". This implies that companies that have offices keep people on in order to make sure every desk is being utilized.
zztop44 4y ago
My first instinct was that this model wouldn’t work because employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers. But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless. I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.
- xienze 4y ago
  > but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees. It’s called contract employment.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    It works a bit differently if your servers spend 3 months spinning up to speed.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Dealing with Kubernetes is “painless”? But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.
  - zztop44 4y ago
    It’s painless compared to trying to do the same thing without it. But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Well, you know before K8s people just connected to shared resources in a dev environment.
jsdwarf 4y ago
Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.
- bagels 4y ago
  This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Yeah, bullshit. Maybe you didn't live through all the panic about offshoring in the 1990's, but all of our jobs would have been sent to Southeast Asia if they could have been by now. Remote changes nothing. They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.
    - hello_moto 4y ago
      Auth0 (Okta) has quite a few Latin American (Argentina) and Spain workers. Don't know if that is growing or not. > They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time. There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.
    - bagels 4y ago
      I did. We'll see.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I am not as optimistic based on recent moves that seem to be intended to rein the employees in and mollify investor class, but I agree that if they could, they would have done it already. Simple reality is that it is genuinely hard to do stuff well across time zones. Add to this kids and demand for work life balance and it gets impossible fast. Companies would love 'tried and ready' person, but.. that tends to come with age and age demands some modicum of consideration; one way or another.
MivLives 4y ago
Makes it easier to find a new job for the employee too if you can interview without leaving your desk.
siftrics 4y ago
> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity Why should I be required to employ you if you cost more than the value you produce? No one owes you anything. If you're so skilled, get another job elsewhere.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Myrmornis 4y ago
Perhaps, but nothing I have ever heard anyone say about the downsides of remote work comes anywhere close to the upsides: e.g. the vastly superior quality of life you get when your job is essentially just a handful of apps on a computer in your house and can be turned on and turned off instantly, and the ability to concentrate on meaningful work tasks in a quiet environment that is under your control and design.
dasil003 4y ago
Elon's response to this comment: "Hold my beer"
hot_gril 4y ago
Remote means they trust their employees to perform without physical eyes on them. "Open office" layout is designed to have eyes on your screen providing constant pressure to actually work, nothing else. Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.
- rswail 4y ago
  Open offices were designed to minimize the space per employee. A "happy side effect" is that it made it easier for micro-managers to micro-manage.
  - Shaggy2000 4y ago
    In my humble opinion open offices were designed so that employees would self police each other in order to minimize the need to micro-manage. If this is unethical is another matter , considering that most people are too lazy to work on hobbies outside of work and they prefer to be slobs watching TV... not much would get done leaving most people to their own devices in private offices.... Regarding the open office ... Everyone can see your computer screen. At any moment someone can be watching what type of face you're making and if you are working hard or dozing off. Everyone is scared of raising their voice or talking in case you disturb others or others hear you. Everyone can see when you arrive and what time you leave, what you wear. Now if we lived in a land of plenty and profit did not matter, then it would be tragic that people are stuck in that hellish environment instead of having their own private office and peace of mind. However.. when you consider why people do not have hobbies and are lazy... it becomes quite tragic in the here and now... because you have to think of Schools in our society and are they really for the benefit of children or to train them to work and to demotivate them towards life itself ? People are forced to regurgitate things in a depressing, boring and oftentimes hostile environment (in the sense of their future being on the line if they do not submit to this torture) and in a place that resembles prison blended with an open office... from the age of five ... starting off fun with plenty of toys and play time in kindergarden club ... for most of their childhood becomes increasingly horrible when they are stuck in the grind. Does your own experience not make you feel rage at the time you lost ? The tragedy of human effort as a whole is that 90% of corporate jobs in their current form are designed to exist in this way simply as a way to put humans into a hellish environment five days a week which they have been trained to accept and even expect all with plausable deniability for the elites who consider us nothing but their cattle. They made us slaves that compete against each other for them and police each other into doing it.
HankB99 4y ago
> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". No! I won't have it. That's the proper realm of the contractor.
replwoacause 4y ago
I'll never work for a "non-remote" company ever again. Period.
Jach 4y ago
If it enables further specialization that can be a good thing, it's often awkward when companies try to wring out some extra utility from people who really aren't well suited for the other task. (Having people do such things occasionally anyway even if poorly, like devs briefly fielding tier 1 support, can be useful for empathy building at least.) The infatuation with combining dev and QE into a combined hybrid role especially comes to mind. (Though I do think it's at least possible there for the majority to be 'good enough' crossing back and forth that it's more or less worked out, and there are enough generalists, but when you see a specialist in one forced to do the other not nearly as well, it feels like a waste.) You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I don’t want my employment to have any nonsense like loyalty or family or whatnot. Pay me to do work and when you don’t want me to do work I’ll find someone else to pay me to do work for them. 100% remote has become a requirement for me.
wnevets 4y ago
Still worth not being stuck in traffic between 5 to 10 hours every week.
daevout 4y ago
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess" Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less. For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border. If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick. Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less. Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.
  - daevout 4y ago
    Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all. In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).
ilaksh 4y ago
With the popularity of GitHub CoPilot, in a way most GitHub employees already are virtual servers.
Shaggy2000 4y ago
The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.
- rswail 4y ago
  Any reason why you saw the need to post this exact comment twice?
japanman425 4y ago
Honestly the latter seems better. Unless it’s my own company I want to turn up do work go home. No more.
moomoo11 4y ago
Totes. I can’t remember a single remote colleague from pre Covid days. Either they were slackers so I didn’t associate with them, or they were usually given the work nobody wanted to do and wasnt high priority (but still needed). And they usually preferred to solo content / play single player, then be part of a raiding party trying to clear challenging content. So it was a different attitude. I’m sure there are excellent remote colleagues but I personally didn’t have that experience. I personally enjoy working from the office. It was a better work environment and there was a clear boundary between work and personal life. The large amount of remote lovers representation on HN are outliers in the real world.
skrebbel 4y ago
> think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down This is called “contracting” and it has been around regardless of whether there’s an office.
flippinburgers 4y ago
Seeing as we are predicting the future, I'm more concerned about AI driven "development" then I am remote work finally becoming a stable, ubiquitous thing.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

(WAAS) - work as a service - think contracting is more secure. Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". I never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)

dantyti 4y ago

This is an interesting angle I haven't considered before. I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me. I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip. Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.

geuis 4y ago

Look, you can't have it both ways. People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it's going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that. Which is it? As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.

giardini 4y ago
Well, you can have it both (or even more) ways: no matter what companies do, someone will crap on them! This can be universal (all companies) or particular (e.g., the company that overbilled me). And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism). Welcome to the crapnet.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Look, you can’t have it both ways. “You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation. > People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that. You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.
JoshCole 4y ago
You claimed: we must have it one way or the other. This is false. Game theory says you are wrong and has proofs that you are wrong in the form of proofs of mixed strategies being optimal equilibrium strategies. In these strategies we have the assumption of having it both ways - the probabilities have to add one, but they don't have to be binary. Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways. Consider rock paper scissors. If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors. So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations. > People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home. I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer. Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.

CamperBob2 4y ago

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". That's basically how the movie industry has always worked. Why keep people on your books when you're not actively in production? It's one of those cases where organized labor seems to work out well for all sides. The unions provide talent and craft support when/where it's needed, then they go away when the work is done. It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. Similar incentives exist, but a company that makes software or hardware isn't an on-again, off-again concern like film production.

peoplearepeople 4y ago
Honestly I couldn't tell you what capacity I needed from my reports on a time horizon of even 1 month. Sure we do planning, but it's always wrong.
auctoritas 4y ago
If software worked the way managers and business like to imagine it does - define requirements, build app, step away - then this model could work. But we all know that's almost never the case.
matwood 4y ago
> It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. If the US offered some sort universal healthcare this would be much easier to see happen. UH would also be a boon for small business.

dinobones 4y ago

I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take. Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.

scarface74 4y ago
I associate “having a job” with prospect of “being laid off” and plan accordingly.

thefz 4y ago

> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. I don't know. With sufficiently large organizations it's quite easy to lay off people you never crossed eyes with, remote or not.

billti 4y ago
Exactly. My impression is that in very large orgs the first couple levels of management normally find out about layoffs a couple hours before they have to deliver them. Both to keep the news under wraps and to avoid personal bias, how many and who is usually a decision taken by directors up and HR.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

moneywoes 4y ago

The bigger thing I think is offshoring

noodleman 4y ago

I doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will not be any more visible than a remote worker. I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.

MonkeyClub 4y ago
> I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up. Sure we are, and aggregates in fact, not individual figures.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Ancalagon 4y ago
This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.
- Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
  Why should a company be forced to continue to pay for employees they aren't in need of?
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    Because other countries have decided that "we need to make our quarterly earnings look good" isn't a good enough reason to can half your staff over. If you fire an employee at anytime it's just unpredictable (and inefficient) contract work.
  - Ancalagon 4y ago
    Where did I say companies should be forced to pay for employees they don't need? I didn't say that. What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor? And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers. You as an employee have far more to lose.

reaperducer 4y ago

uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers We are all cattle, not pets.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical offices.

Salgat 4y ago

Sounds more like it's just easier to use favoritism that's not based on job performance when doing layoffs if you are face-to-face with these folks on a regular basis.

karaterobot 4y ago

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.

svachalek 4y ago
Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is. You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it. And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.

seydor 4y ago

Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to hide their digital footprints as well

red-iron-pine 4y ago
disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do your job, usually cheaper. if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  What if I am in Georgia?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface74 4y ago
  As someone who got my first, current and only job at a FAANG working remotely in GA, I declined the chance to be interviewed for a job that would have required me to relocate. I would have made probably $100K more than I was making as a senior enterprise dev. Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.
- foobazgt 4y ago
  As someone in Georgia who was both one of the first ten employees for a remote FAANG office and also a co-founder of a remote office for an SV unicorn, who got paid more or less what his contemporaries on the west coast did, I'd say you're about 20 years behind the times and a bit off about compensation.

killingtime74 4y ago

As you said in your example having to say it to your face is not really a barrier to firing anyway. We are virtual servers to them, no matter rank or position.

onion2k 4y ago

zztop44 4y ago

My first instinct was that this model wouldn’t work because employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers. But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless. I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.

xienze 4y ago
> but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees. It’s called contract employment.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  It works a bit differently if your servers spend 3 months spinning up to speed.
scarface74 4y ago
Dealing with Kubernetes is “painless”? But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.
- zztop44 4y ago
  It’s painless compared to trying to do the same thing without it. But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Well, you know before K8s people just connected to shared resources in a dev environment.

jsdwarf 4y ago

Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.

bagels 4y ago
This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Yeah, bullshit. Maybe you didn't live through all the panic about offshoring in the 1990's, but all of our jobs would have been sent to Southeast Asia if they could have been by now. Remote changes nothing. They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.
  - hello_moto 4y ago
    Auth0 (Okta) has quite a few Latin American (Argentina) and Spain workers. Don't know if that is growing or not. > They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time. There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.
  - bagels 4y ago
    I did. We'll see.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I am not as optimistic based on recent moves that seem to be intended to rein the employees in and mollify investor class, but I agree that if they could, they would have done it already. Simple reality is that it is genuinely hard to do stuff well across time zones. Add to this kids and demand for work life balance and it gets impossible fast. Companies would love 'tried and ready' person, but.. that tends to come with age and age demands some modicum of consideration; one way or another.

MivLives 4y ago

Makes it easier to find a new job for the employee too if you can interview without leaving your desk.

siftrics 4y ago

> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity Why should I be required to employ you if you cost more than the value you produce? No one owes you anything. If you're so skilled, get another job elsewhere.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Myrmornis 4y ago

Perhaps, but nothing I have ever heard anyone say about the downsides of remote work comes anywhere close to the upsides: e.g. the vastly superior quality of life you get when your job is essentially just a handful of apps on a computer in your house and can be turned on and turned off instantly, and the ability to concentrate on meaningful work tasks in a quiet environment that is under your control and design.

dasil003 4y ago

Elon's response to this comment: "Hold my beer"

hot_gril 4y ago

Remote means they trust their employees to perform without physical eyes on them. "Open office" layout is designed to have eyes on your screen providing constant pressure to actually work, nothing else. Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.

rswail 4y ago
Open offices were designed to minimize the space per employee. A "happy side effect" is that it made it easier for micro-managers to micro-manage.
- Shaggy2000 4y ago
  In my humble opinion open offices were designed so that employees would self police each other in order to minimize the need to micro-manage. If this is unethical is another matter , considering that most people are too lazy to work on hobbies outside of work and they prefer to be slobs watching TV... not much would get done leaving most people to their own devices in private offices.... Regarding the open office ... Everyone can see your computer screen. At any moment someone can be watching what type of face you're making and if you are working hard or dozing off. Everyone is scared of raising their voice or talking in case you disturb others or others hear you. Everyone can see when you arrive and what time you leave, what you wear. Now if we lived in a land of plenty and profit did not matter, then it would be tragic that people are stuck in that hellish environment instead of having their own private office and peace of mind. However.. when you consider why people do not have hobbies and are lazy... it becomes quite tragic in the here and now... because you have to think of Schools in our society and are they really for the benefit of children or to train them to work and to demotivate them towards life itself ? People are forced to regurgitate things in a depressing, boring and oftentimes hostile environment (in the sense of their future being on the line if they do not submit to this torture) and in a place that resembles prison blended with an open office... from the age of five ... starting off fun with plenty of toys and play time in kindergarden club ... for most of their childhood becomes increasingly horrible when they are stuck in the grind. Does your own experience not make you feel rage at the time you lost ? The tragedy of human effort as a whole is that 90% of corporate jobs in their current form are designed to exist in this way simply as a way to put humans into a hellish environment five days a week which they have been trained to accept and even expect all with plausable deniability for the elites who consider us nothing but their cattle. They made us slaves that compete against each other for them and police each other into doing it.

HankB99 4y ago

> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". No! I won't have it. That's the proper realm of the contractor.

replwoacause 4y ago

I'll never work for a "non-remote" company ever again. Period.

Jach 4y ago

If it enables further specialization that can be a good thing, it's often awkward when companies try to wring out some extra utility from people who really aren't well suited for the other task. (Having people do such things occasionally anyway even if poorly, like devs briefly fielding tier 1 support, can be useful for empathy building at least.) The infatuation with combining dev and QE into a combined hybrid role especially comes to mind. (Though I do think it's at least possible there for the majority to be 'good enough' crossing back and forth that it's more or less worked out, and there are enough generalists, but when you see a specialist in one forced to do the other not nearly as well, it feels like a waste.) You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I don’t want my employment to have any nonsense like loyalty or family or whatnot. Pay me to do work and when you don’t want me to do work I’ll find someone else to pay me to do work for them. 100% remote has become a requirement for me.

wnevets 4y ago

Still worth not being stuck in traffic between 5 to 10 hours every week.

daevout 4y ago

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess" Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less. For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border. If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick. Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.

sokoloff 4y ago
> If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less. Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.
- daevout 4y ago
  Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all. In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).

ilaksh 4y ago

With the popularity of GitHub CoPilot, in a way most GitHub employees already are virtual servers.

Shaggy2000 4y ago

The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.

rswail 4y ago
Any reason why you saw the need to post this exact comment twice?

japanman425 4y ago

Honestly the latter seems better. Unless it’s my own company I want to turn up do work go home. No more.

moomoo11 4y ago

Totes. I can’t remember a single remote colleague from pre Covid days. Either they were slackers so I didn’t associate with them, or they were usually given the work nobody wanted to do and wasnt high priority (but still needed). And they usually preferred to solo content / play single player, then be part of a raiding party trying to clear challenging content. So it was a different attitude. I’m sure there are excellent remote colleagues but I personally didn’t have that experience. I personally enjoy working from the office. It was a better work environment and there was a clear boundary between work and personal life. The large amount of remote lovers representation on HN are outliers in the real world.

skrebbel 4y ago

> think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down This is called “contracting” and it has been around regardless of whether there’s an office.

flippinburgers 4y ago

Seeing as we are predicting the future, I'm more concerned about AI driven "development" then I am remote work finally becoming a stable, ubiquitous thing.