Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 424 posts

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#181

Post by matchagaucho »

aripickar wrote: post #8

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…

Employees that optimize for promotions and comp are far more likely to churn anyway, as 20% increases are available every 18 months by job hopping.

Loyalty of remote workers is probably a metric more orgs should be considering.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#182

Post by dreen »

aripickar wrote: post #8

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…

We had a similar survey. 1000+ people commercial FM radio company (so more media than tech). About 20% want to go back to the office.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#183

Post by viklove »

bhupy wrote: post #153
viklove wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fuck hn

> It's literally just the lowest they can get away with paying you. Um, yes? That's exactly how this works. Google doesn't pay software engineers what they do out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because that's how much it costs for a highly skilled engineer to come live in the Bay Area and work there. Humans aren't necessarily commodities, but labor is ABSOLUTELY a commodity. We have to start decoupling t…

fuck hn

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#184

Post by noodlenotes »

geddy wrote: post #129
tomashertus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a damn shame ... Let people do whatever they want! Adjust the system so people can actually choose how they would like to spend their days. This doesn't have to be a binary option - remote vs office! We have actually an opportunity to adjust the established system and build one that will be more versatile for people with families and folks in the middle class. I'm really curious to know what is your position t…

>Let people do whatever they want Agreed. See, the funny thing here is you're pissed because I'm "pushing my views on every god damn post about remote work", when I see the exact opposite. Every post, everyone is against remote work. Those people do the exact same damn thing as you think I'm doing, which is "we should all be in the office 100%!" First, I never said that everyone should be remote. Never said it once.…

People aren't arguing with you because they despise people who want to work remotely or even because they don't understand it. They're arguing because you're deliberately misinterpreting why people want to work from the office. You think they're crazy because the reasons you made up for them are crazy. (Enjoying traffic? Bored of having fun hobbies? I mean, come on.)

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#185

Post by talmr »

aripickar wrote: post #8

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…

Remote whiteboarding is challenging.

In the office, we can just make a breakout session and grab a whiteboard and jam something out. We're all present, nobody randomly sounds like a cyborg about to wreck the city, and we can actually get something done rather than have another follow up after someone puts all this into "notes".

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#186

Post by dreen »

jandrese wrote: post #59
geddy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a damn shame, really, the slavish devotion to one's car and spending hours a day sitting in traffic apparently is apparently preferred over actually getting time back in your everyday life. It's like people have adapted to having no life outside of work, and now they're just so bored they'd rather lose that time than just find a new hobby or learn something. I don't think I've ever thought about anything more de…

My commute is also my morning and evening cardio routine as a bike 5 miles each way. I've been really missing the every day bike rides this year.

Why not take the ride anyway? Just turn halfway and go back home.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#187

Post by vinay_ys »

For the 20-30 something with no kids who are showing higher productivity working from home, once the outdoor/social life returns to normal, their productivity will drop.

They will want a dedicated office space and discipline of going to an office to reattain that productivity. As a solution to this, we could have lots of satellite offices for people to come in and work but teams are still distributed and remote to each other. This could potentially maintain productivity levels as well as avoid high rents and horrible commutes.

This could work only if everyone is still remote to each other relatively. The moment a few of the team members are co-located in the same office, they start having in-person meetings and can collaborate in person, that stark difference people in office vs people remote will emerge. Then it all falls apart.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#188

Post by jlbnjmn »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #16
aripickar wrote: post #8

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…

> And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much. I'm not sure that follows. It seems to me that people with spouses and especially children would be more interested in working from home, not less.

Mid 30's, married with kids, 100% for working remotely, primarily from home, at least 85% of the time.

In the company I currently work for the people who build and manage things prefer remote, and the people who interrupt them and make them less productive prefer the office.

Makes sense.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#189

Post by panzagl »

zaidf wrote: post #14

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

If people leave SF and NYC rents and COLA should fall.

Or alternatively they could just decrease salary across the board and those who want to stay in expensive areas are out of luck.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#190

Post by cpascal »

sigfubar wrote: post #26
zaidf wrote: post #14

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

There are plenty of people who moved out of NYC/SF and continued making their NYC/SF salary while working remotely from Nowhere, USA. Companies who cut pay based on locale will soon see their workforces dwindle to nothing.

This works if you stay with the company you were working for in NYC/SF and then transition to being remote.
Post reply on HN