Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
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Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#2“ok, no more dorms, everyone just go study at those cool, full of freedom off campus apartments!”
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#3Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would.
A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk their employees getting COVID-19, but not for the reason he states but instead because that people worried about getting sick at the office are less productive, and 3) they want their precious little cash cow employees back producing milk at full speed as soon as they can.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#4Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would. A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk the…
> A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving.
Really? Three years working remote and I'm still more productive.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#5Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would. A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk the…
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Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#6It is a huge bet that productivity in the long run is equal to or greater than the savings in rent. When you do the math on the occupancy cost per square foot relative to the labour cost on a per square foot basis (using a company’s occupancy numbers divided by square footage of the office), it works out to 4 - 7%. If you increase employee turnover slightly or decrease productivity in the long run by a small amount, you’ve erased the gains and destroyed your company culture in the long run. Oh, and if you give your employees a bunch of money to fit out their home offices and start paying for their internet at home and give them money for lunches and whatnot, you’ve just erased a portion of the savings in rent and further reduced the odds against you as employer will be net positive.
It is a hugely levered bet and to see all of these companies making this bet on the basis of a 3 month experiment with, to say the least, confounding factors, seems irresponsible.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#7Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would. A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk the…
I think there's truth both in the incentives listed in the article and in this explanation, and there is a complex and varied set of cynical reasons that explain any large move across many employers like this. The real lesson is not to be a vulgar cynic.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#8Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would. A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk the…
> A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. Really? Three years working remote and I'm still more productive.
N = 1. The fact is no one knows how it shakes out across teams and organizations and whether it heightens the learning curve for new employees who do not benefit from the informal chatter around them, or whether it increases employee turnover in the long run.
Seems irresponsible to make organization wide bets like this without proper testing. “Move fast and break things” applies to culture too I suppose.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#9Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would. A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk the…
> A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. Really? Three years working remote and I'm still more productive.
There are some who are adapting well to remote work, like yourself, there are some who would be adapting well to work but other disruptions from COVID-19 reduce their effectiveness when remote, and there are quite a few who are just not effective when remote. At my employer, for example, effectiveness reduction estimates by department range from -20% to over -50% for particularly hardware dependent teams.
Re: Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”
#10At least in Amazon's case they used their massive hiring power to force everyone into a small region of the city owned by Paul Allen, developed by Vulcan Inc. Then Amazon payed four times the market rate for the properties from Allen.