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Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#241

Post by dubcanada »

dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

Have you told them (or have they been told) that they can work from somewhere besides there home?

Obviously there is an exception right now, but normally "working from home" means you can work from anywhere you want (different country, parents cottage, coffee shop, outside, where ever).

I work for a tech company and we have people who regularly go to Europe/other places for months and work from there just getting up/working later depending on timezone.

Most people assume that working from home or working remotely means sitting at home at a desk and working the exact same as you would an office. In which case you lose the office communication. But that's wrong.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#242

Post by tlbsofware »

Why is everyone here so dogmatic about this? Work from home is a choice here and just because you really like your choice and think it’s the best choice that’s ever been chosen, does not mean it’s the best for everyone else and that you should aggressively impose your choice onto others. This is how holy wars happen

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#243

Post by cvlasdkv »

andarleen wrote: post #138
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #61

It's strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100% remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike open offices, they're noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack, and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team. I'd be happy if we just go back to offic…

I will have to shamelessly try and sway you. Get a large house, a swimming pool, a home office room with all the games and gadgets you ever wanted, a nice surround 5.1 system optically connected to a gaming pc, a nice couch to rest now and then and plan your code ahead. See if you still miss your cubicle (nothing wrong with that, but just what i wrote a thought). Thats my lifestyle since i starting working remotely.…

Is your answer: "try being rich"? People with what you have are rarely sitting in cubicles or open offices any way.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#244

Post by WilliamEdward »

apengwin wrote: post #107
fermienrico wrote: post #85

Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

It's the rate the market dictates.

This is essentially the same as saying "the sky is blue because it just is"

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#245

Post by crocodiletears »

deeblering4 wrote: post #167
dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

Why would people fitting this description not prefer the flexibility of working remotely? As an aside -- I prefer not to use the term "work from home", as the ideal (for me) is the ability to work from anywhere at my option. Also, for what it's worth, co-working spaces can be a workable alternative to a traditional office.

The workplace is one of the last places where you're forced to interact face-to-face with a diverse range of people multiple times, on a regular basis. If you're young, and from out of town, you get a lot from that.

Certainly, there are different clubs and groups out there, but the people they attract are fairly homogenous, and monofocused on their topic of interest. There are coffee-houses and bars, but you'd be lucky to interact with anyone there repeatedly in such a way as to form any durable social bond.

The only other quick option for gaining automatic access to a well-rounded social environment that I can think of is a church, but educated young people tend to enter the workforce with a contempt of organized religion that ranges from passive to visceral.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#246

Post by WorldMaker »

dudul wrote: post #20
moneil971 wrote: post #13

I’m not sure why it took a pandemic to make this a real option for major tech companies. At my previous company, the bulk of my team was in NY and I would commute an hour plus each way to sit on endless video chats and conference calls with people in other time zones. But working from home was frowned upon...unless you were a contractor, in which case you had to work from home bc there weren’t enough desks.

Your anecdote reminds me of the time a company I was interviewing at flew me half way across the country for their "onsite interview", and 75% of the sessions were me, seating in one of their offices, zooming/skyping with the interviewer.

One company did that to me twice, the whole while telling me that they never allow remote work and I had to relocate to Mountain View, especially despite neither team I was interviewing with was based in Mountain View.

The team I had the most face-to-face interaction with was because I managed to talk the recruiter into to allowing me to interview in the SF office, where some of the team actually worked, despite continuing to insist I'd have to move to Mountain View if I got the job, that "no one" works in the SF office (despite the closest thing to a majority of the team I interviewed with did), and that remote work was also not an option. That trip the worst interview I had in the day was remotely with someone with "regularly works from home" seniority despite "it's not generally allowed". So much about that interview I suffocated in dumb mistakes because I was angry about a lot of details about that interaction given conversations I had had with the recruiters immediately before and after.

The second time the team was mostly based on the East Coast (closer to my home than Mountain View, lol), the recruiter insisted I had to interview in Mountain View, and the only person I interacted face to face with that entire cycle was a different recruiter (terrible flights and bad traffic included).

I had a very hard time not feeling very personally insulted at how much they wasted my time with remote interviews I could have done from home without needing to fly most of the way across the country, continuing to insist that remote work wasn't possible for the positions I was interviewing when very clearly remote work was already the default if they expected people to be in Mountain View working for teams in other cities. It was not a great way to sell Mountain View to me as an option, and I was already quite clear with them that Mountain View wasn't a city I find interesting to live in, if I could avoid it. (Not that I could probably afford SF or even East Bay, but very specifically if I want to live in the Exurbs of an American city, I don't have to leave home to find equally carbon copied wastelands of strip malls, parking lots, and bad traffic just like Mountain View.)

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#247

Post by daenz »

fermienrico wrote: post #85

Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

I've had a related thought: is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live? I understand that there are different cost of living factors for different places, but that's on the employee's side and should be none of the employer's business. If they employer can pay $200k/yr for a remote employee, it shouldn't matter where they live, and so scaling that value seems discriminatory to me.

Anyone have thoughts about this?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#248

Post by enjo »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR's, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools.

It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There's something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.

Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.

Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we're just sort of feeling our way though it...

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#249

Post by lhorie »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #237
lhorie wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand, you're allowed to (but not required to) work from home. So it seems like a win-win for both groups?

The tools and processes for remote work are completely different than co-located though. This will force the in-office folks to essentially adopt all of the remote protocols. IME blended teams are by far the hardest to make work.

If by "adopting remote protocols" we mean "writing things down instead of verbal tribal knowledge", I think I'm actually ok with that.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#250

Post by joshuamorton »

downerending wrote: post #77
chrisseaton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why? Salaries are high because you're competing for the same small group of talented people. They aren't high due to the location.

A lot of us would disagree with that. Housing is so expensive that lots of talented people simply cannot afford to move to the BA. Looked at another way, "talented people" are often smart enough to realize that if they do get the same salary, they net a lot more if they live elsewhere.

I'll bite, where, other than the usual suspects (similarly high CoL areas like NYC and arguably Seattle), or Chicago for the slim group of people working at the finance companies there, are making the same take home compensation as someone in the bay at one of the better paying companies (Google, Facebook, unicorns, etc.)?

You're looking at 160K gross for a new grad + the value of the various perks, and that doubles for someone with 5 years of experience. You're correct that for someone who wishes to own a home right out of school/within a year, the bay may not be the best choice (although working there for a year or two and then moving elsewhere probably is), but there are basically no other places where a SWE in their mid twenties can bank 100K a year after expenses.

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