Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#271

Post by CodeSheikh » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

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…

The higher you go up the older they get. It is a culture shift and lets be honest no one wants to leave their comfort zone.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#272

Post by bradlys » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #204

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional / mental health stress due to the current scenario. I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now. In short I hop…

I’m really starting to resent my childless co-workers and their ability to just work happily all day long. My day is basically split up into maybe 20m at a time where I can do something before being distracted. I end up working during the night to catch up (just got done), but this is unsustainable long term.

Personally - I'm thankful for you. The parents with kids at home are dragging down the average amount of work done. So - the rest of us look good in comparison - or my preferred choice - I get to work less. :) I just blame corona for lower productivity - not the fact that I hate my employer and am actively looking for a new job.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#273

Post by CodeSheikh » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

Vysero wrote: post #229

throwaway713 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.

I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or small house, and settle in. Currently, where I live, despite the fact that I make almost 30k/year more than the medium average income I still can only just afford a one bedroom apartment spending the suggested 30% of my income. Imagine being able to buy a house!!!…

What's the guarantee that say your San Francisco/NYC employer will keep paying you city rates when you are living in a small town in mid-west. At some point they will catch up and start saving money this way. Everyone at a tech company is not a crucial employee. Don't get me wrong, I am all in for getting paid SF rates while living in a cheap Texas suburb.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#274

Post by lhorie » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #233

lhorie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this has big tax implications (since presumably said low cost of living areas are outside of California). I would love to understand better what sorts of complications WFH bring to the table for those cases (and how they can be mitigated).

The company needs to do payroll in a different state and you, as an individual, now pay taxes in your state of residence which isn't where company HQ is. From a tax perspective it's mostly no different than if they had a small office in that state. For big companies, in particular, it's not that big a deal as they're probably using a payroll service like ADP anyway. There may be some paperwork--and certainly more so…

I had two different scenarios in mind: one happened to an acquaintance, where they negotiated a pay cut (because presumably the company doesn't want to pay Bay Area salary to a remote worker in a location in an area w/ lower salary base), and there was the question of taxes involving part of the year in one state and part in another (plus the math for RSUs and options, of which the person had vested both in both states).

The other scenario involves visa workers. The I-140 is predicated on not being able to find local candidates that match a criteria. More broadly, the H1-B visa grant pertains to foreigners being able to work in the US at all in the first place. I'd imagine that if you had everything setup to be remote from the beginning it'd probably be fine to keep things humming along, but I imagine that switching surely must pose some sort of logistic challenge?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#275

Post by luckydata » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

It's more about being effective managers. There's tons of writing and proper follow up and prep work necessary to make remote work happen and most people aren't just that diligent to do it regularly.

Most managers especially at the top are also not the most diligent people, they have employees to do the stuff that they dislike doing so when they are faced with having to do more prep work and move at what they consider a slower speed (they are wrong, all that prep work and due diligence pays off, Bezos and Amazon are a great example of that) they recoil.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#276

Post by jonahrd » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #258

deeblering4 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine you're 22. For the last 17 years you've showed up every day for an institution. It provided a schedule, a routine, social interaction with a community of peers who share common ground, even explicitly structured extracurricular events. One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now? Of course it's possible t…

I'm basically in this situation but I'm very confused about your assumption that my friends have scattered and that I need to build a life from scratch.

I have plenty of friends and family around me, from the various communities I've been apart of before my current workplace, and I'm loving being able to spend more time with them (online) during my less-packed days than when I had to commute to and from an office full of people in different stages of their lives than me, hence less likely to become actual friends of mine.

I don't see why turning 22 should hit the reset on your entire social life.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#277

Post by ryanwaggoner » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #139

jeffbee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.

I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0 though.

What are the functions of HR that you imagine them doing such that they’ll all be made obsolete by WFH?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#278

Post by dudul » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

filleokus wrote: post #239

I think the biggest argument for me against near 100% WFH is the space cost of a dedicated home office. Ideally I would need another room for it to be long term sustainable. Right now I live in a small 400 sq. feet (≈ 35 m²) studio apartment in city center, walking distance to everything (including the office in normal times). Property prices here are at around 1k USD / sq. feet (10 k USD / m²). An apartment with ded…

How about your employer just paying for a coworking space? I worked for a company that was doing that for remote worker who didn't want to stay home.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#279

Post by papaf » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #44

robbyking wrote: post #18

I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office. I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be j…

I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.

still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance

If you don't have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#280

Post by cdjk » Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #233

lhorie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this has big tax implications (since presumably said low cost of living areas are outside of California). I would love to understand better what sorts of complications WFH bring to the table for those cases (and how they can be mitigated).

The company needs to do payroll in a different state and you, as an individual, now pay taxes in your state of residence which isn't where company HQ is. From a tax perspective it's mostly no different than if they had a small office in that state. For big companies, in particular, it's not that big a deal as they're probably using a payroll service like ADP anyway. There may be some paperwork--and certainly more so…

Unemployment insurance, family/medical leave, workers comp, and health insurance are all different by state. That can be a lot of overhead for the first employee in a new state, but then the second is trivial.