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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

#291

Post by kbos87 »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #273
Vysero wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bingo. As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the availability of talent in a particular market.

I work for a very pro remote work company, but that’s still how we did things. You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move. People usually weren’t jazzed about it but understood.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#292

Post by rconti »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #273
Vysero wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it won't last forever. If remote work becomes more popular, salaries will become more harmonized, as well costs of living.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#293

Post by chrischen »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #273
Vysero wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same reason they didn’t hire someone from the Texas suburbs rate in the first place.

An employee’s rate depends on how much they would be going for in the market, and living costs are part of the employee’s expenses—not that of the company’s.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#294

Post by ryanwaggoner »

jeffbee wrote: post #39
dumbfoundded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

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.

The hostility that many programmers have towards managers is short-sighted.

If you’ve ever worked somewhere where the manager has way too many direct reports, you know it’s usually a shitshow.

Can you name some companies of more than a few people that don’t have managers? If you think they’re all a waste and a drag, what’s your explanation for why manager-less competitors don’t rise up and eat their lunch? Better yet, why don’t you start your own company staffed with only ICs and take over the world?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#295

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #30
dumbfoundded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

I think there is still a lack of things like white boarding tools. I haven’t seen anything that could replace a big whiteboard. Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that. Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help. I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.

If you have an nVidia GPU, look into RTX voice- you can install it on any CUDA-enabled GPU with a simple tweak, and it's good enough to kill dryer noise and keep your screaming children from being heard.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#297

Post by bhhaskin »

ar_lan wrote: post #64
blhack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget about the commercial real estate bubble pop, and potentially a massive pump in prices of family homes as a result. I think that investors are going to be moving their money out of commercial real estate, and into residential. Edit: to be clear: I don't live in the Bay Area, and I think the housing prices there could go either way: 1) People spend more time in their homes and spend an even larger portion…

I would guess the opposite. If more Bay Area companies allow WFH, there's less demand here.

WFH doesn't necessarily mean remote.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#298

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dkarl wrote: post #264
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…

> work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out The ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm. > Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted In my experience, working at home isn't much different from working at…

The office often has the same low level of productivity -- but without the guilt.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#299

Post by saurik »

What is Twitter even doing? Like I realize they likely have an infinite number of people working for them, but are any of them doing anything important at all? This is not like the usual "I just don't see how a company needs that many people" laments: this is specific to Twitter, as they seem to have at most one engineer working on new features... it took like five years for them to implement "increase size of Tweet to 280 characters", and the only feature of note I can think of since then was adding a half-assed ability to mute replies (which to me is a critical feature that prevents trolls and hate groups from using my audience to spread their hate; but the feature is somehow designed to take a reply that would have maybe been buried in hundreds of people replying to me and "mute" it by giving it a dedicated icon with a pop up dialog reminding people to go look at the content I muted, so in fact more people probably see the thing I muted now than before I muted it... it is ridiculous). Like I frankly feel the decision here is "I guess send all the employees home as it isn't like their productivity could be any lower, right? hell: maybe one of them gets inspired and finally builds something!".

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#300

Post by diob »

mjayhn wrote: post #140
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 wfh and I won't work for a company that bases my pay on my zipcode (Gitlab). I want complete flexibility on where I live. There are plenty of remote companies that don't do that, especially now post-covid. I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.

I'm glad you are principled. Get paid what you're worth folks!
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