6 ms·

If I start a company tomorrow, this is what I would want to do: 1. Hire within a general metropolitan area (2 hour commute max). 2. WFH for 28 days a month.

• some_furry 3y ago
  That would work great for people that want to live in a single metro area. As a remote worker, I'm perfectly happy travelling every so often for in-person meetings and offsites. That's not a problem for me. There are no large tech companies within 30 minutes of where I live. I don't want to move away from my house or the people I share it with (whose jobs are not portable).
• blitzar 3y ago
  Offer a work location as well, give people the option to have somewhere to go to work if / when they want.
• virtuous_sloth 3y ago
  You'd require people to work 30 days per month?
  • freedomben 3y ago
    Even in February
    • SpaceNoodled 3y ago
      Especially in February.
      • peterleiser 3y ago
        We work, on average, 365.25 days per year. But we're not heartless, leap seconds are always PTO.
        • KMag 3y ago
          Tell me you use the Julian calendar, without telling me you use the Julian calendar.
          • Kye 3y ago
            I prefer the julienne calendar where entire years run in parallel.
        • cozzyd 3y ago
          Leap seconds are gone now, no?
      • MenhirMike 3y ago
        If you put your employees on an airplane flying westwards, you can have people work up to 36 hours per day.
        • vsareto 3y ago
          We just need to slow Earth’s rotation or migrate to Venus for more hours in a day! Think of the profits!
  • giancarlostoro 3y ago
    I think they meant, if you're going to work at all throughout the entire month, only 2 days would be onsite, the rest are WFH.
• morsecodist 3y ago
  To me this gives you the disadvantages of remote work without the key advantage: ability to hire from a bigger pool.
• ledauphin 3y ago
  critique: (almost) no one wants to work 30 days a month. ;) more seriously: I assume you plan to pay for hotel rooms? also: why 2 hours max? If you're paying for one night in a hotel, then surely you could pay for 2 nights, making 3 or more hours feasible.
  • function_seven 3y ago
    The 2 hours max is so no hotel room is needed. Two hours would be a hellish commute if it were every day, but it’s no big deal only two days a month.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      It sort of is with the inevitable team dinner and social activity etc. Although I have a closer office I literally never go into, I do go into our urban office now and then for customer meetings. It's 90 minutes each way, it's barely doable, and if I have 2 days of meetings in a row, especially with a dinner in-between, I book a hotel room if at all possible. 2 hours each way is doable I guess. But I'd probably end up coming in late and passing on any after-5 activities.
  • giancarlostoro 3y ago
    So you don't have to fly people in.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    I don’t see why a hotel would be a problem, 2 hour range so if someone wants to go back to family they still can.. I personally see no real good coming from trying to make people socialize late at night anyway.
• ckbishop 3y ago
  Yeah, as soon as I see that 2 days a month thing, I'm not applying for the position. That's my only critique.
  • olah_1 3y ago
    And no one would care. It's been an employers market for a year and will continue that way for the foreseeable future.
    • KerrAvon 3y ago
      They've created artificial scarcity through overhiring and bullshit layoffs. The total pool of workers is shrinking thanks to the pandemic and we still haven't seen the full impact of that. Future COVID waves will shrink it further. The employers are massively fucking up right now in thinking they have the upper hand. They're just igniting the kindling for tech unions, which they _really_ won't like. Also, India didn't replace you in the 90's and AI isn't replacing you now.
    • spacemadness 3y ago
      Wouldn’t they though? We’ll see how this attitude shapes up in a year I guess.
    • ckbishop 3y ago
      I don't know. I just got hired on somewhere using this criteria, and I leave behind a remote-only position that I excelled in for the past four years. And I excelled in several more remote-only positions before that one. I don't have a degree or any certifications either, due to the same disability that prevents me from going into an office. It is an employers' market and the employers that create arbitrary barriers of entry for talent will find themselves recruiting from a pool of desperate talent, which may be by design because desperate talent also costs less. However, I'm not desperate and the managers that hire me find out why that is pretty quickly.
      • olah_1 3y ago
        > I don't have a degree or any certifications either, due to the same disability that prevents me from going into an office. What experience do you have that is so in demand? Or is the disability attractive to employers because of DEI reasons?
• paxys 3y ago
  If you are building a remote-first company why would you restrict your talent pool to a single metropolitan area?
  • mperham 3y ago
    Reasons: language, culture, legal, accounting, taxes...
    • mceachen 3y ago
      ...timezones
      • cm2012 3y ago
        1-3 hour Timezone difference is nothing
        • mceachen 3y ago
          Absolutely agreed. It's 10+ hour differences that can be rough for everyone involved--async communication is low bandwidth, and it can be brutal and erosive for either party to get up early or stay up late just to have some common work hours.
    • paxys 3y ago
      You can get all of those slightly outside a 100 mile radius from you. Remote doesn't mean you have to hire on the opposite side of the planet.
• idkyall 3y ago
  This is somewhat similar to the model we do at my current employer: ~4-5 days in office every 4 months. I would say it's definitely way preferable for me vs having been fully remote without yearly gatherings.
• UncleMeat 3y ago
  To me, the key component of remote work is that I can choose where to live according to the needs of my family. If I need to come in to work every month then I still need to live within commuting distance. Some people can tolerate taking a work trip 12 times a year, I suppose, but that'd be a huge downside for me. I actually prefer to be in the office if I live near the office. But being able to live in the city that lets me support my spouse's career is non-negotiable for me.
• Racing0461 3y ago
  Why pay sf/nyc salaries when you can hire utah/atlanta sde's and have them work in the same timezone +- 3 hrs and speak english?
  • vel0city 3y ago
    There are metropolitan areas in Utah and Atlanta literally is a metropolitan area. They didn't say SF/NYC in that comment.
• jedberg 3y ago
  You're throwing away the biggest advantage for the company allowing remote work -- hiring talent from anywhere. WFH has a lot of advantages for employees, but also for the employer. The main one being a diverse workforce. What I've seen work, which I think still hits your goals of occasional face time, is to have a quarterly offsite for the whole company. Everyone works remotely, but once a quarter you find a nice location that is easy for everyone to get to, pay for their flights and hotels (and if you're really nice, their family too, or at least child care at home while they are gone), and then have a couple of days of quarterly planning, hacking sprints, and general social activities that don't involve alcohol or strenuous physical activity (but if people want to organize that for themselves they are welcome to do so).
  • rednerrus 3y ago
    You could probably have people travel for what an office in a major metro area costs.
    • kortex 3y ago
      My friend did the math for a high-falutin position at a San Fran tech company requiring 3 days a week in office, and flying from New York to Cali every week was cost competitive.
  • cm2012 3y ago
    I even think a quarterly off site is too much. Yearly is fine. Organizing flights, pet care, etc every 3 months is such a damn hassle, and I don't even have kids.
  • paulcole 3y ago
    Remember that for a US-based startup, the "hiring talent from anywhere" is easier said than done. You've got to register your business in every state you have somebody working, get unemployment insurance and workers comp set up there, make sure you understand the local labor laws, etc., etc., etc. That's not even considering hiring outside the US. It's a total pain in the butt and may not be worth it for a small company with limited person-power.
• graypegg 3y ago
  Honestly, as someone that actually likes in-office work, I would hate this. Nothing I care about with in-office will happen in those 2 days. I like the fun of being able to just joke around with coworkers around you. I obviously don’t want to bother anyone that prefers uninterrupted focus though. The ability to choose WFH or office self selects for people like me to come in. Makes for a much more fun office environment post-COVID IMO. Forcing everyone into the office, even for 2 days, means you’re going to have 75% of people just annoyed they have to come in for 2 days. What have you gained? Everyone is unhappy.
• randomdata 3y ago
  Are you planning on hiring low quality applicants that need their hand held every step of the way? If not, I question why you've already planned #3 instead of letting team figure out what actually works for them. Offer a budget that can be used to help enhance the team dynamic, perhaps, but that's all you need to do. You have hired other people so you don't have to worry about such things; so that you can focus on the business.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    I personally believe that people need to collaborate in person for truly innovative ideas to come out. I also acknowledge that most no one truly wants to come into office every day and that they are actually more productive working from their home most times. This is the compromise I can think of. If the job is merely finishing tickets in a jira board you’re right it can just be a fully remote org. I believe if you want to do cool shit then this is not sufficient. In fact I’m yet to see a truly innovative successful company that was fully remote from start.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      > I personally believe that people need to collaborate in person for truly innovative ideas to come out. Understood, but why do you already think the rest of the team disagrees? You haven't even hired them yet. After all, if they did agree, then they would plan collaboration excursions using the budget you've given them as they find most beneficial. And their solutions will almost certainly be better than yours as they will live and breathe it, not just watch it from afar while working on things like marketing, customer acquisition, bookkeeping, and business development.
• tfehring 3y ago
  This is very close to what I’d do, but with the addition of enough office space for anyone who wants it, and less frequent “required” gatherings rather than once a month. It’s really counterintuitive, as suggested by all the other replies so far, but I really think it’s the best setup: 1. Individuals and teams can work in whatever way is most productive for them. 2. On a day to day basis, everyone who’s in the office is there because they want to be there, not because their boss requires them to be there. Speaking from experience, this leads to way better energy at the office. 3. Yes, you’re restricting hiring to a single geographical area. But for a small startup in a tech hub that’s not an issue, there’s plenty of talent around, you just have to convince them they should work for you. 4. People will want to work for you, because they’ll appreciate not only the flexibility, but the fact that you’re treating them like adults who can manage their own working practices. I’ve told several recruiters this year something to the effect of “I’d only be looking to move for a role with more scope and autonomy, and if I can’t be trusted with a decision as simple as where to work from, this role probably doesn’t offer the level of autonomy I’d be looking for.” At a larger scale you might have to branch out to multiple hubs, but I think having departments or at least functional teams colocated but with flexible work arrangements is a huge advantage over the alternatives.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    Thanks, the most constructive feedback I have gotten. Will keep all in mind!
• spacemadness 3y ago
  Critique is technically everyone isn’t happy since it’s not fully remote. In addition, I don’t really want to give up two entire days including my evenings to the company every month which is what “hackathon and happy hours” means to me.
• m4rtink 3y ago
  Many remote only companies like Collabora work kinda like that - I think they hire over a larger area and meet less often, but otherwise its the same.
• api 3y ago
  I think you're in an uncanny valley here. Single metro area destroys a lot of the benefit to workers of WFH. It's not about not going to the office. It's about breaking real state. You're also losing a big benefit to the employer: the ability to hire the best talent from a pool of 300+ million people instead of those in just one metro area. This plan gets you the downsides of WFH, namely that it's harder to casually communicate, without the upsides to either yourself or the employee. Go all-in on remote or don't. BTW the difference in real estate cost between say the SF Bay Area and most of the rest of the USA is so great it'd be cheaper to fly everyone to SF every 30-60 days than to pay the salary premium to afford housing there. (... and it's not like employees are pocketing that salary... it all goes to real estate.)
• t0mas88 3y ago
  This is roughly what we have now. Twice a month we organise a company wide update/demo session on Friday afternoon with drinks and food afterwards. Most work in the office that day and use the day for larger in-person meetings. Some people come in a few days a week in other weeks as well. Some really only come in those two days. A small number of people nearly never come in (always dial in). It doesn't seam related to travel time, more to personal preference for being out of the house / in an office.