8 ms·

Reddit’s crappy ultimatum to remote workers and offices

170 points by livestyle 12y ago

DIVx0 12y ago
I don't know why they just can't focus new hires on being in SF and letting original staff remain where they are while dangling a juicy carrot for them to move. Forcing them to move or leave is really crappy. This is a good way to piss off everyone who has committed time at the same time as soiling their reputation.
anon808 12y ago
assuming the details are true, I cant find any good reason for doing something so heavy handed and corporate. It's the number of people involved (approx half the employees) that makes this an asshole move.
- drawkbox 12y ago
  This is a clear sign reddit is so big that media/big money is taking it, too much focus to not and a source of news/media for the rest of the media world. Beginning of the end for Reddit. Remote workers being removed simply mean it has gone from an engineering/innovative company to a metrics/bean counted/make sure you are in your chair typing in an IDE all day type of place (they might not even allow reddit workers to be on reddit with that type of ultimatum). Even if that is not the intention that is the end result. It is so strange though that business has really concentrated technology so much in the Bay Area, it goes against what networked systems mean. Is it smart that everything has to be in SF? Is that the only way to get the best people?
krallja 12y ago
This is a layoff in disguise. The high-quality employees have better options, and will leave. The clueless ones can be dealt a termination letter after they move, when they're not keeping up with their newer, Bay Area-er, trendier competitors^H^H^H coworkers.
- tdicola 12y ago
  Or maybe a way of clawing back shares of the company now that new money is coming in? Not sure what kind of deal early Redditors got, but getting them to quit in frustration with a move and give up whatever options/ownership/etc. could be a possibility.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
tdicola 12y ago
My conspiracy theory, it's all a move to make Reddit attractive as a major Yahoo acquisition. Yahoo is getting an injection of billions from Alibaba and has been on a tear with acquisitions. Moving everyone to SV makes for an easier acquisition (especially from a company that doesn't want remote workers anymore).
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr has been seen has a flop. http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-flop/ http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-flop/ Mayer may have already played her hip-internet-company-with-no-revenues-acquisition card.
harmegido 12y ago
I just don't understand why people seem to be so worked up about this. It must just hit really close to home on sites like this. Look, I love remote working and I almost always find myself on the side of workers in any management v workers debate. But I find it very difficult to get worked up about the plight of folks who are likely making 60k+/yr. And much more if they are in a tech-focused role. Reddit loses money. Does everyone just expect them to continue on with no changes forever? And where's the HN outrage when a factory closes down?
- owenjones 12y ago
  I don't understand whenever there is a HN article about some injustice being done to Tech Workers somewhere there inevitably be this post > "I can't find sympathy for people making $x/yr." Why not? Where do you draw the line of people deserving sympathy vs. those deserving none? If they made $59,999/yr would you "get worked up about their plight"? Can you point out an article on HN (ostensibly a site related to the Tech Industry, hence the posts about Tech Workers) about a factory closing down where there was explicitly no sympathy?
- cuillevel3 12y ago
  I just wanted to note that 60k/yr is not that much money. I think it more like 'slightly upper' middle class. For example, the average income per person in Germany is at 41k Euro. For the US it is $51,939 per household, already adjusted for inflation. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... Oops: That's not even middle class anymore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class ?
- iopq 12y ago
  60k a year? The median salary in the silicon valley is 80k 60k a year is making less than the average worker
knowaveragejoe 12y ago
No sympathy on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2i5df4/til_that_reddit_is_forcing_all_employees_to_move/ http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2i5df4/til_th...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dang 12y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reddit#!/story/sort_by_date/0/reddit%20relocate https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reddit#!/story/sort_by_date/0/redd...
wwweston 12y ago
"No more Salt Lake City office, responsible for Reddit Gifts. No more New York office, responsible for selling ads." There's a lot of places asking people to move from would be difficult, but from my familiarity with both, those might be two of the harder sells. SLC offers certain outdoor rec opportunities the Bay can't match, and unless the requirement to move to SF comes with a big pay bump, they're effectively asking employees to uproot their lives and take a big pay cut. Cost of living in New York is probably roughly on par, but I'm trying to imagine someone who likes the breadth/depth of cultural/rec opportunities in NYC being happy with SF and guessing it's not going to play well.
wwweston 12y ago
"No more Salt Lake City office, responsible for Reddit Gifts. No more New York office, responsible for selling ads." There's a lot of places asking people to move from would be difficult, but from my familiarity with both, those might be two of the harder sells. SLC offers certain outdoor rec opportunities the Bay can't match, and unless the requirement to move to SF comes with a big pay bump, they're effectively asking employees to uproot their lives and take a big pay cut. Cost of living in New York is probably roughly on par, but I'm trying to imagine someone who likes the breadth/depth of cultural/rec opportunities in NYC being happy with SF and guessing it's not going to play well.
Zweihander 12y ago
And in the distance, a faint chuckle could be heard. Jason Fried was amused.
coralreef 12y ago
A lot of hyperbole and emotion in there, which I personally don't enjoy reading, it takes away from the writer's arguments unfortunately. Also, seems like critics and talking mouths like this one are almost always more upset than the workers themselves. If you want the power to work at home, start your own business or work exclusively on contract with specific remote provisions. Its unfortunate when something gets taken away from you, but who can you really blame unless its written and legally binding?
- Daishiman 12y ago
  It's fairly outrageous because in most of the civilized world, a forced change in working conditions like this is equivalent to being fired and thus requires a certain amount of compensation. From everything that's being shown here, the people being fired will likely be getting nothing. Considering that these people most likely have denied themselves much more lucrative positions for a chance at being in a cool company where there's growth opportunity, it is practically a betrayal of the principles being choosing this sort of place to work. If this were to happen to me you'd be damn sure I'd be lawyering up.
  - okbake 12y ago
    Yishan mentions in his tweets that there is a 3 months severance package for the people who can't make the move. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/517364923320385536 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/517364923320385536
knowaveragejoe 12y ago
Uh... how did this thread get buried so quickly? Submitted an hour ago, 68 points and it's already fallen off the first page? Anyways, here's a detailed response about the issue from the CEO: http://www.quora.com/Is-Reddit-closing-their-NYC-and-Salt-Lake-City-offices?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Is-Reddit-closing-their-NYC-and-Salt-La...
- minimaxir 12y ago
  This was killed as a dupe.
- GuiA 12y ago
  How do you think it got buried so quickly? HN mods typically kill/bury threads that air out dirty laundry (legitimate or not) about YC companies.
  - dang 12y ago
    That is not true. I'm surprised that you would repeat it.
    - GuiA 12y ago
      I've definitely seen it happen, so saying that it isn't true is not very honest. For instance, I distinctly recall a post a year or so ago where someone complained about a YC company that had ripped them off, and PG replied saying he was killing the thread and quoting the penultimate paragraph of "In submissions" from posting guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Maybe you don't enforce it as hardly as you used to, or maybe this thing I saw was a one off, or maybe that guy at the time had crossed a starker line; regardless, saying that it isn't true is misleading.
      - dang 12y ago
        First, you said "typically". That's pretty strong. Second, I know from experience how distorted people's interpretations of these situations can be. You seem sure that you judged one example correctly; I think it's more likely that you jumped to a conclusion. The first thing PG said when teaching me how to moderate HN two years ago was: whatever you do, don't censor stories because they're anti-YC. I think about this every day and try to stick to it. But that doesn't mean that posts like the OP get a free pass just because they say bad things about a YC-funded startup. If we applied the rule that mechanically, we would fail our primary responsibility, which is to keep the quality of HN high. So we do what we can to balance the concerns.
_greim_ 12y ago
The difficulty of remote collaboration is fundamentally a bandwidth problem. People are cramming into the bay area not because they love the congestion and high prices, but because the bandwidth between brains in close proximity is quite high. When you scatter them across the nation, the bandwidth is limited by ISPs who own the last-mile network. Once video conferencing becomes frictionless, maybe remote collab will pick up momentum, but the US has some political obstacles to overcome before that can happen.

170 points by livestyle 12y ago

DIVx0 12y ago

I don't know why they just can't focus new hires on being in SF and letting original staff remain where they are while dangling a juicy carrot for them to move. Forcing them to move or leave is really crappy. This is a good way to piss off everyone who has committed time at the same time as soiling their reputation.

anon808 12y ago

assuming the details are true, I cant find any good reason for doing something so heavy handed and corporate. It's the number of people involved (approx half the employees) that makes this an asshole move.

drawkbox 12y ago
This is a clear sign reddit is so big that media/big money is taking it, too much focus to not and a source of news/media for the rest of the media world. Beginning of the end for Reddit. Remote workers being removed simply mean it has gone from an engineering/innovative company to a metrics/bean counted/make sure you are in your chair typing in an IDE all day type of place (they might not even allow reddit workers to be on reddit with that type of ultimatum). Even if that is not the intention that is the end result. It is so strange though that business has really concentrated technology so much in the Bay Area, it goes against what networked systems mean. Is it smart that everything has to be in SF? Is that the only way to get the best people?

krallja 12y ago

This is a layoff in disguise. The high-quality employees have better options, and will leave. The clueless ones can be dealt a termination letter after they move, when they're not keeping up with their newer, Bay Area-er, trendier competitors^H^H^H coworkers.

tdicola 12y ago
Or maybe a way of clawing back shares of the company now that new money is coming in? Not sure what kind of deal early Redditors got, but getting them to quit in frustration with a move and give up whatever options/ownership/etc. could be a possibility.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

tdicola 12y ago

My conspiracy theory, it's all a move to make Reddit attractive as a major Yahoo acquisition. Yahoo is getting an injection of billions from Alibaba and has been on a tear with acquisitions. Moving everyone to SV makes for an easier acquisition (especially from a company that doesn't want remote workers anymore).

minimaxir 12y ago
Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr has been seen has a flop. http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-flop/ http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/yahoo-tumblr-acquisition-flop/ Mayer may have already played her hip-internet-company-with-no-revenues-acquisition card.

harmegido 12y ago

I just don't understand why people seem to be so worked up about this. It must just hit really close to home on sites like this. Look, I love remote working and I almost always find myself on the side of workers in any management v workers debate. But I find it very difficult to get worked up about the plight of folks who are likely making 60k+/yr. And much more if they are in a tech-focused role. Reddit loses money. Does everyone just expect them to continue on with no changes forever? And where's the HN outrage when a factory closes down?

owenjones 12y ago
I don't understand whenever there is a HN article about some injustice being done to Tech Workers somewhere there inevitably be this post > "I can't find sympathy for people making $x/yr." Why not? Where do you draw the line of people deserving sympathy vs. those deserving none? If they made $59,999/yr would you "get worked up about their plight"? Can you point out an article on HN (ostensibly a site related to the Tech Industry, hence the posts about Tech Workers) about a factory closing down where there was explicitly no sympathy?
cuillevel3 12y ago
I just wanted to note that 60k/yr is not that much money. I think it more like 'slightly upper' middle class. For example, the average income per person in Germany is at 41k Euro. For the US it is $51,939 per household, already adjusted for inflation. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... Oops: That's not even middle class anymore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class ?
iopq 12y ago
60k a year? The median salary in the silicon valley is 80k 60k a year is making less than the average worker

knowaveragejoe 12y ago

No sympathy on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2i5df4/til_that_reddit_is_forcing_all_employees_to_move/ http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2i5df4/til_th...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dang 12y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reddit#!/story/sort_by_date/0/reddit%20relocate https://hn.algolia.com/?q=reddit#!/story/sort_by_date/0/redd...

wwweston 12y ago

"No more Salt Lake City office, responsible for Reddit Gifts. No more New York office, responsible for selling ads." There's a lot of places asking people to move from would be difficult, but from my familiarity with both, those might be two of the harder sells. SLC offers certain outdoor rec opportunities the Bay can't match, and unless the requirement to move to SF comes with a big pay bump, they're effectively asking employees to uproot their lives and take a big pay cut. Cost of living in New York is probably roughly on par, but I'm trying to imagine someone who likes the breadth/depth of cultural/rec opportunities in NYC being happy with SF and guessing it's not going to play well.

wwweston 12y ago

Zweihander 12y ago

And in the distance, a faint chuckle could be heard. Jason Fried was amused.

coralreef 12y ago

A lot of hyperbole and emotion in there, which I personally don't enjoy reading, it takes away from the writer's arguments unfortunately. Also, seems like critics and talking mouths like this one are almost always more upset than the workers themselves. If you want the power to work at home, start your own business or work exclusively on contract with specific remote provisions. Its unfortunate when something gets taken away from you, but who can you really blame unless its written and legally binding?

Daishiman 12y ago
It's fairly outrageous because in most of the civilized world, a forced change in working conditions like this is equivalent to being fired and thus requires a certain amount of compensation. From everything that's being shown here, the people being fired will likely be getting nothing. Considering that these people most likely have denied themselves much more lucrative positions for a chance at being in a cool company where there's growth opportunity, it is practically a betrayal of the principles being choosing this sort of place to work. If this were to happen to me you'd be damn sure I'd be lawyering up.
- okbake 12y ago
  Yishan mentions in his tweets that there is a 3 months severance package for the people who can't make the move. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/517364923320385536 https://twitter.com/yishan/status/517364923320385536

knowaveragejoe 12y ago

Uh... how did this thread get buried so quickly? Submitted an hour ago, 68 points and it's already fallen off the first page? Anyways, here's a detailed response about the issue from the CEO: http://www.quora.com/Is-Reddit-closing-their-NYC-and-Salt-Lake-City-offices?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Is-Reddit-closing-their-NYC-and-Salt-La...

minimaxir 12y ago
This was killed as a dupe.
GuiA 12y ago
How do you think it got buried so quickly? HN mods typically kill/bury threads that air out dirty laundry (legitimate or not) about YC companies.
- dang 12y ago
  That is not true. I'm surprised that you would repeat it.
  - GuiA 12y ago
    I've definitely seen it happen, so saying that it isn't true is not very honest. For instance, I distinctly recall a post a year or so ago where someone complained about a YC company that had ripped them off, and PG replied saying he was killing the thread and quoting the penultimate paragraph of "In submissions" from posting guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Maybe you don't enforce it as hardly as you used to, or maybe this thing I saw was a one off, or maybe that guy at the time had crossed a starker line; regardless, saying that it isn't true is misleading.
    - dang 12y ago
      First, you said "typically". That's pretty strong. Second, I know from experience how distorted people's interpretations of these situations can be. You seem sure that you judged one example correctly; I think it's more likely that you jumped to a conclusion. The first thing PG said when teaching me how to moderate HN two years ago was: whatever you do, don't censor stories because they're anti-YC. I think about this every day and try to stick to it. But that doesn't mean that posts like the OP get a free pass just because they say bad things about a YC-funded startup. If we applied the rule that mechanically, we would fail our primary responsibility, which is to keep the quality of HN high. So we do what we can to balance the concerns.

_greim_ 12y ago

The difficulty of remote collaboration is fundamentally a bandwidth problem. People are cramming into the bay area not because they love the congestion and high prices, but because the bandwidth between brains in close proximity is quite high. When you scatter them across the nation, the bandwidth is limited by ISPs who own the last-mile network. Once video conferencing becomes frictionless, maybe remote collab will pick up momentum, but the US has some political obstacles to overcome before that can happen.