The Remote Manifesto

As someone whose primary experience from going between jobs in IT is that almost the singularly most important factor is the social life of interacting with your colleagues, it strikes me as odd that this "Disadvantages" section is so brief. My experience is that a horrible job is bearable when your colleagues are great, and an extremely interesting and challenging job is horrible when your colleagues aren't a match.

You're asking someone to sell a large part of their life to you as labor, and there are no disadvantages beyond "a more independent onboarding"? It's almost insulting that this is even spun as an advantage: "Onboarding may be less stressful socially". First of all, onboarding is probably one of the most important things about a position period, but beyond that it feels like there are so many issues with not being accountable for your employees social well-being that it's hard to know where to start.

I would expect that a significant portion of the money that a corporation saves by having a "remote only" policy would go into alleviating the social issues caused by that same policy. I'm not seeing any of that here, which indicates to me a company that does not prioritize the well-being of their employees.

I personally believe that human interaction is a key to our well being since humans are not designed to stay in a remote room/office somewhere by themselves. I am not quite on the 100% remote thing to be honest and of course I hate employers who provide absolutely no flexibility.

Why not offer the best of both ? I don't have a job and run my own company where we are remote (multiple locations) but I try my best to have people in office as well and ensure that we are not going crazy sitting in some room/hotel/beach/co-working space by ourselves without any interaction with other team members in person. If employers start offering flexibility with work schedules, most people won't care if the job is fully remote or not. We just want flexibility. Most employers don't get this. It is always a binary game. Let's go fully remote OR let's not go anywhere.Why is it like that ?

I recently thought about it, and was wondering if this could create some bias / unfair preferential treatment when interviewing and competing with other candidates. If candidate A is in SF, and another candidate, B, is in another cheaper area, and Gitlab is trying to decide between the 2 candidates, won't they be leaning toward hiring candidate B because of lower salary? All else being equal. I wonder if there can be some legal things into this.

I do wonder how they manage payroll and taxes in fifty countries though. Also how they set salaries. Is there a link to that I may have missed?

I'm fairly sure the gitlab ceo commented before that they don't want to pay people way way over the local average because it could cause them to have people who don't want to be working there staying because they could never find a new job thats competitive where they are.