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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

#591
post #155

A question. Do y'all feel that a trend towards remote work benefits mid/senior level employees at the cost of the development of junior employees ? IMO, it is the same difference as in-person schooling vs online schools. As convenient as WFH is, it really isn't conducive to hands on mentorship. Tech companies might not mind it, since the attrition rate in tech at the junior level is incredibly high anyway.

Good technical mentorship relies on organizational will to dedicate the time and resources needed to make it happen. Documentation(wikis) and tutorials need to be up to date, junior engineers need properly scoped tasks with clear success criteria and access to senior engineers to provide guidance. I don't think being physically adjacent is necessary.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#592
post #518

For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home. Does the company plan to let me live in the office if they let me go? Are we still doing Thanksgiving? What about a family tree, whos going to keep that up after I die? But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it kind…

> "For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. " I'm not sure if I'm in total agreement or in total opposition. Family is an analogy... At the scale of many of our workplaces "tribe" might be more fitting. I'm also note convinced people quite believe it... It's more that they're learning the language of their new social structure, whether that's "team," or "family" or whatnot. In any case, i…

I enjoyed the Office UK version, where Tim kind of muses on this pint at the end. Offices are a unique social structure, where we spend a huge amount of time interacting with others that we never choose to be with. It seems to me there is definitely some overall benefit there, and I would hesitate to say it can be replaced by spending more times on one’s hobbies.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#593
post #259

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…

One possible outcome of a more normalized WFH culture might be a dramatic reduction in rent prices for the types of living arrangements you describe, precisely because their central locations have lost a principal source of value (proximity to the office), so demand will wane. Similarly, centralized corporate real estate is not going to be as in demand as it once was. This will take decades maybe, but it's easy to im…

Rents might come down due to a reduction in demand, but that demand is part of what makes SF / NYC desirable places to live.

For example, part of what make SF or NYC a desirable location for opening a restaurant or bar (despite the high rents) are the respective cities proximity to high income wage earners and companies.

Take those factors away and the superstar cities of the world (NYC, London, etc.) become as desirable as your average city in the middle of the country.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#594

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…

Life is complex, hence most things have advantages and disadvantages.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#595
post #11
post #4

And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop

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…

There are a whole lot of folks who would love to get away from the Bay Area if possible. The infrastructure is crap, the geography impedes growth and transit, the natives don't seem to like us, tax burden is high, real estate is expensive, and it's a major fault zone. I don't see how paying $1M+ for a 60 year old house makes sense, especially when there are still gang shootouts and high property crime.

If investors want to move into that market, they are nuts. I don't think you can extract any more money from residents than the current market is already doing. It's one more reason not to buy a house here - how much more do you think prices will rise? Will that $1.5M, 1400 sq ft house full of lead paint, asbestos and aluminum wiring go for $2M next year? Probably not.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#596

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.

> when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary What makes you think this is true and not just a post-hoc rationalization? Let me put it this way: offer that salary worldwide and you will still have difficulty finding top-tier talent, as many remote-first companies are finding out the hard way. Having been a hiring manager in such a position before, I will tell you that you…

I wasn’t asserting or claiming one way or the other. I’m asking the question. Your response assumes some stance I might have - I don’t. I found your response pretty unpleasant and combative even though there is truth in what you’re saying.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#598
post #330
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.

With COVID-19 it depends on your family situation though. People without kids are probably working more, but people with kids (and who don't have a live-in nanny) are really struggling to juggle their work with child care. I imagine many people in that situation are less productive.

Right, good point there. People without kids definitely have way more time and energy to devote to work than those with.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#600

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 would be good if AWS and GCE were leveraged by workers at home as generic data centers to store their private data Working on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collection Sell or donate access to specific dat…

What about https://blockstack.org/? With this approach you own the data
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