4 ms·

At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office

At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
Yes; unfortunately the counter to that is economies of scale, network effects, and cost of financing, all of which big established companies like Amazon have. If you're going to compete against Amazon, you can't be merely their equal.
QwertyPi 3y ago
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  I agree. It's hard to wade through the headwinds of Scrooge McDuck piles of money working counter to you.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  > they'll just buy you out That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired? Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
- fishtoaster 3y ago
  You say "buy out" like it's a bad thing. Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
  - the_svd_doctor 3y ago
    Yes but the idea is that competition should help the economy in surfacing "good ideas". If competition leads to acquisition all the time, then really there isn't much benefit to the overall economy.
  - QwertyPi 3y ago
    > Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer? The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
- deadeye 3y ago
  Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Yeah, that’s why NBA players have them. Because they can’t compete on skill.
    - deadeye 3y ago
      I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one. Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance. Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
      - Ironchefpython 3y ago
        Yeah, you handwave some of the most visible and effective unions in the United States (SAG-AFTRA, WGA), you're also ignoring education unions, healthcare unions, and many other careers where pay is not just about seniority, but also education, certification, specialization, and other factors. Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
      - jmopp 3y ago
        I would put a hypothetical software engineer's union in the same category as a sports union/actor's guild. Just as an actor has brand recognition and can leverage this or start their own productions, so can a skilled software engineer start their own company/be recognised in their craft. And beyond that, can you imagine what would happen if software engineers decided to strike? It has the potential to have a far greater impact than pretty much any other industrial action. If factory workers down tools for a week, production is delayed. If Google SREs down tools for a week, it might break the internet.
- gwright 3y ago
  > Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this. This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union". How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example: ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes) * make health insurance independent from your employer * reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states * simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.) * allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
  - QwertyPi 3y ago
    > You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace Yes, it's called "representing the needs of the worker". > every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union". No, it's always a fight. The company is perfectly capable of using the piss-poor labor protections in this country to fight back.
georgemcbay 3y ago
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Only if the competitive advantage of remote work is large enough to overcome all the other moats a company of Amazon's age and size has built. Which seems wildly unlikely (but this says very little about the competitive advantage of remote work one way or the other).
bcrosby95 3y ago
Yeah, in the long term, all else being equal. I don't think either is such an advantage/disadvantage that it moves the needle either way, especially against a company like Amazon.
happytoexplain 3y ago
>If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. This is an oversimplification in three different ways: 1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing. 2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement). 3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".
- Propelloni 3y ago
  While I agree in the macro perspective, the micro perspective shows a different picture. There is no need for a company to be all-in in one way or the other, but smaller units, eg. teams, should coordinate when they are remote and when on-site. Like a senior dev once told my young and unexperienced self: "If one is remote, we are all remote". Meetings with 3 people at a table and 3 remote are miserable. You are better off being completely remote, even if this is worse than all on-site. I have yet to see a remote meeting that offers the same bandwidth as a face-to-face on-site meeting. That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.
rewmie 3y ago
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. This is a stupid take, and one that is based on a simplistic idea that the success or failure of a business are determined solely on whether random workers working on random projects for random industries with random business models will work from home or from a random office in a random city. Truly stupid. It sounds like a desperate attempt to extend "might makes right" towards employee relations.
crowcroft 3y ago
I think about this quite a bit. If the WFH evangelists are right in saying that it is absolutely better to enable WFH then surely we will see those companies pull away from their peer group at some point. My sense is that companies are highly complex and there are too many factors to weigh to say that WFH is 'better'. It's a bit of a truism, but a 'well run' company is going to perform better than a 'not well run' company, regardless of whether it's in-office, remote, or hybrid. Being clear that the company is going to prioritize in-office and build the way they operate around that seems like a good signal that the company is 'well run'. Especially when the alternative I see are companies that hop around various 'hybrid' work policies that make no one happy, or worse yet avoid making any proper policy because they don't want to make a hard decision.
rurp 3y ago
That is happening to some degree, but is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. Much of the tech economy is dominated by one or a few large companies that have huge advantages over a newer entrant and that act in all kinds of anti-competitive ways, to great effect.
herbstein 3y ago
> At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. You'd think so. CrowdStrike, a self-proclaimed remote-first company, instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year. Despite never requiring office presence before the pandemic. They still have blog posts like [1] on their website. [1]: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

Yes; unfortunately the counter to that is economies of scale, network effects, and cost of financing, all of which big established companies like Amazon have. If you're going to compete against Amazon, you can't be merely their equal.

QwertyPi 3y ago

> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.

sonicanatidae 3y ago
I agree. It's hard to wade through the headwinds of Scrooge McDuck piles of money working counter to you.
maerF0x0 3y ago
> they'll just buy you out That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired? Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
fishtoaster 3y ago
You say "buy out" like it's a bad thing. Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
- the_svd_doctor 3y ago
  Yes but the idea is that competition should help the economy in surfacing "good ideas". If competition leads to acquisition all the time, then really there isn't much benefit to the overall economy.
- QwertyPi 3y ago
  > Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer? The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
deadeye 3y ago
Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Yeah, that’s why NBA players have them. Because they can’t compete on skill.
  - deadeye 3y ago
    I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one. Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance. Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
    - Ironchefpython 3y ago
      Yeah, you handwave some of the most visible and effective unions in the United States (SAG-AFTRA, WGA), you're also ignoring education unions, healthcare unions, and many other careers where pay is not just about seniority, but also education, certification, specialization, and other factors. Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
    - jmopp 3y ago
      I would put a hypothetical software engineer's union in the same category as a sports union/actor's guild. Just as an actor has brand recognition and can leverage this or start their own productions, so can a skilled software engineer start their own company/be recognised in their craft. And beyond that, can you imagine what would happen if software engineers decided to strike? It has the potential to have a far greater impact than pretty much any other industrial action. If factory workers down tools for a week, production is delayed. If Google SREs down tools for a week, it might break the internet.
gwright 3y ago
> Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this. This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union". How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example: ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes) * make health insurance independent from your employer * reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states * simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.) * allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
- QwertyPi 3y ago
  > You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace Yes, it's called "representing the needs of the worker". > every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union". No, it's always a fight. The company is perfectly capable of using the piss-poor labor protections in this country to fight back.

georgemcbay 3y ago

> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Only if the competitive advantage of remote work is large enough to overcome all the other moats a company of Amazon's age and size has built. Which seems wildly unlikely (but this says very little about the competitive advantage of remote work one way or the other).

bcrosby95 3y ago

Yeah, in the long term, all else being equal. I don't think either is such an advantage/disadvantage that it moves the needle either way, especially against a company like Amazon.

happytoexplain 3y ago

>If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. This is an oversimplification in three different ways: 1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing. 2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement). 3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".

Propelloni 3y ago
While I agree in the macro perspective, the micro perspective shows a different picture. There is no need for a company to be all-in in one way or the other, but smaller units, eg. teams, should coordinate when they are remote and when on-site. Like a senior dev once told my young and unexperienced self: "If one is remote, we are all remote". Meetings with 3 people at a table and 3 remote are miserable. You are better off being completely remote, even if this is worse than all on-site. I have yet to see a remote meeting that offers the same bandwidth as a face-to-face on-site meeting. That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.

rewmie 3y ago

> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. This is a stupid take, and one that is based on a simplistic idea that the success or failure of a business are determined solely on whether random workers working on random projects for random industries with random business models will work from home or from a random office in a random city. Truly stupid. It sounds like a desperate attempt to extend "might makes right" towards employee relations.

crowcroft 3y ago

I think about this quite a bit. If the WFH evangelists are right in saying that it is absolutely better to enable WFH then surely we will see those companies pull away from their peer group at some point. My sense is that companies are highly complex and there are too many factors to weigh to say that WFH is 'better'. It's a bit of a truism, but a 'well run' company is going to perform better than a 'not well run' company, regardless of whether it's in-office, remote, or hybrid. Being clear that the company is going to prioritize in-office and build the way they operate around that seems like a good signal that the company is 'well run'. Especially when the alternative I see are companies that hop around various 'hybrid' work policies that make no one happy, or worse yet avoid making any proper policy because they don't want to make a hard decision.

rurp 3y ago

That is happening to some degree, but is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. Much of the tech economy is dominated by one or a few large companies that have huge advantages over a newer entrant and that act in all kinds of anti-competitive ways, to great effect.

herbstein 3y ago

> At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. You'd think so. CrowdStrike, a self-proclaimed remote-first company, instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year. Despite never requiring office presence before the pandemic. They still have blog posts like [1] on their website. [1]: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/