161–170 of 424 posts
If even a smallish fraction—say 15 or 20 percent— of the workers who could move and work remotely do so, that could have a pretty significant impact on local economies. Even if wages adjust some, you’d still see essentially a redistribution of wealth from highly concentrated areas to those less so. A shift of say, 2 percent in apartment vacancy rates is nontrivial. On the whole it could be a net positive, for individ…
People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state
I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/y…
Keep in mind: that asset your company is paying for can be sold and the difference will be kept by the employee, which will let them set themselves up for a much better retirement in a lower cost of living area.
It reminds me a bit of the SF Giants. They couldn't pay high salaries because they had to pay for their ballpark. But the value of that ballpark is part of the value of the club, which would be realized if the owner ever sold it. So it still was a lot like the owners pocketing the money. But not exactly.
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I've seen/heard different numbers from elsewhere: 20% want to work from home permanently 20% want to get back to the office full time 60% want flexibility somewhere in between Personally, I think the specific breakdown is less important than companies realizing that letting people be remote can improve work/life balance, reduces office space needs, and they have most of the infrastructure to support it. As an industr…
==reduces office space needs== While increasing their employees home-space needs. People will need bigger houses and apartments if everyone is going to work from home long-term.
Being able to work from home long term means not being tied to ultra-premium land for your private space. Not eating up the externality of your company deciding to hire 10s of thousands more workers in your already crammed city, not being forced to choose between the externality of longer commute time or inflated, subpar housing services.
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Good call, I should just go get a new job in the middle of the worst destruction of jobs in history. After I do that, my one-time $1,000 stipend won't make my house bigger. The point is that if more people are going to work from their houses, then houses will need to be bigger in the medium- to long-term.
Should you live near your job if it's expensive? Your choice. Should your employer pay you more if they can pay someone less who lives somewhere cheaper? Their choice. If you want to live in a small place in the city, there is a cost. If it's not pleasant to work from there because there isn't enough space, that is part of the cost. You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so…
A lot has changed in a matter of 3 months. Decisions are constantly being re-evaluated with new information. I was simply opining on how something like "an increase in working from home" might actually have larger societal impacts.
This article suggests people might move away from expensive places like Silicon Valley. I am suggesting there is another angle, the amount of space people have available at home to actually perform work. It shifts the burden of finding a work station off employers and onto employees. Does a one-time stipend of $1,000 cover that? Probably not for many people.
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I get where you are coming from, but my intuition is that we have actually created a massive bubble in land prices by restricting use so much. Land would get a hell of a lot cheaper if we massively decreased demand by letting people live in ways that use less land.
Land values in urban areas always increase in response to upzoning and loosening of development restrictions.
Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary.
Very few big tech companies will update salary for a intra country move. It seems to happen most often when an employee relocates to a new country rather than a new state. This is because the new country requires a different work agreement and must follow different labor laws.
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What's the rationale for this?
Currently, the market for location-based labor is deeper than the market for location-agnostic labor, so employers assume that their competition is local - and often it is. That's less true for the top 20% or so of tech candidates. A person with known skills and a good network can obtain offers from multiple remote-friendly companies today. There's already a location-ignorant market for their skills (probably not at…
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While working from home, kids can often be a major distraction. Not insurmountable, but especially given that most people have been forced into some variety of home-schooling at the same time they were pushed into working from home, I could understand many people with kids choosing to go to an office.
People with kids often have different priorities. Having a slam dunk, distraction free, high productivity work day tends to be lower on the priority list. Spending time with your partner, taking care of the kids, cooking and eating dinner with the family; these all tend to be higher on the priority list. There are exceptions. Some people don’t respond well to the stresses of family life and want to escape to the offi…
People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state
Salary based on your locale even though everyone is remote: hilarious. "Oh you live in Alabama you get 60k" "Oh you live in Manhattan on 65th street that is 150k". This will backfire into a political hell.
I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home duri…
> young, no kids, etc There is your major reason for that survey result. Companies with median-older workforces will see more enthusiasm for remote work.