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

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#371

Post by philjohn » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #333

saurik wrote: post #299

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…

I've hung out a bunch at Twitter's offices (in both SF and NYC). It's pretty eye-opening and a good lens into why Twitter the company is so fucked up. The vibe that comes off is more of a social hangout club than a serious tech company. You meet your friend for lunch and there's professional chefs cooking gourmet meals, you hang out in the social area while the celebrity of the day comes into the office and everyone…

"Anyone with right of center political views is casually censored from the platform with no recourse"

That's just not true - Donald Trump hasn't been "casually censored", neither have any of the GOP representatives who have Twitter accounts.

If you say abhorrent stuff, then yes, their platform, and they can say "you're not welcome here", but just look at the cesspit of comments on the recent "gate" hashtag and you'll see there are MANY right of center (some cases miles right of center) voices on there.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#372

Post by m0zg » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

HenryKissinger wrote: post #325

m0zg wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point though. You're not going to be able to "keep your current compensation" if companies embrace this in earnest.

Top talent will. The trick is to be good enough to be top talent.

Top talent from Canada is less than one third the price of the US top talent though.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#373

Post by wtetzner » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #360

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

The office distractions and chitchat are never going to go away regardless of format

They're easier to ignore in async forms of digital communication.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

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Post by caymanjim » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

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 with you. GitLab would be near the top of my employer targets if not for their bizarre location-based salaries. I want a remote-work job in large part so that I can move around. I relocate every 2-3 years, all over the US and internationally. If I get hired in the NYC area I'm not willing to take a 50% paycut because I want to spend a year living somewhere else.

Their calculations and reasoning are completely irrational. Rent is more a lot more in NYC, but utilities are the same; medical costs are the same; groceries are roughly the same (I found them cheaper in Manhattan than in nearby suburbs); you don't own a car (or two, as a couple); you don't have the expense of maintaining a large home and yard; etc. It costs a lot to live in NYC, but you can't compare the rent on a 1BR NYC apartment with a 1BR suburban apartment and say it's three times as expensive. It's a completely different lifestyle, and the choice for people like me is between a shoebox in the city with the perks of city life, or a comfortable 3BR home with a yard in the suburbs and a car and maybe a swimming pool or a boat or something. It's not a cheaper life, it's just a different life.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#375

Post by jedberg » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

The "chit chat" is a basic part of human interaction. Even for remote companies it still happens.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#376

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#377

Post by jedberg » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

> I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial"

Not all cultures are like this. I had a German coworker who would always complain about how much time we spend socializing at work (while socializing with us).

He would tell us, "In Germany, we come to work, we put our heads down for seven hours and work, then we all go out and spend two hours drinking beer together before we go home to our families".

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#378

Post by wikwocket » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #299

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…

Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it.

As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.

Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#379

Post by _bxg1 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

The flipside is that it takes a lot more intentional effort, which many of us may struggle to put forth. The vast majority of friendships are made in incidental contexts: people you just happen to be around and interact with through the normal course of life. Many adults struggle to make and maintain friendships when they no longer have school forcing them to be around peers, and become very isolated. I think your interpretation is quite overly-optimistic.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#380

Post by jeffbee » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #294

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.

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…

I hate to tell you but one of the reasons why google ate the world was their hands-off management and peer-to-peer project management and feedback schemes, which are efficient and effective. I know experiences at large organizations can vary, but for years at that company I had managers who existed, yes, but never showed their faces and were there chiefly to make sure that everybody had desks and chairs and computers. This style scales extremely well. I also had managers who were just other ICs to whom I reported, because there had to be a path from Larry to everyone in the org chart, but who were otherwise peers. Not every large organization is choked with weekly/daily meetings and org charts full of useless functionaries.