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Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

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Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#141

Post by ghaff »

bobthepanda wrote: post #135
ghaff wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, companies have had this option and many have engineering offices in lower cost of living countries long before the current situation. There are a lot of reasons for companies to hire in the US. What wouldn't surprise me though if/when remote becomes a bigger chunk of certain types of jobs, is if salaries across US regions equalize more given that local labor market rates become less of a factor for setting salari…

IMO FAANG is doing its best to try and hoover up all the tech talent that wants to work for them. Which is to say that while they won't necessarily have to pay people an arm and a leg to attract them to overcrowded high-COL areas, they do still want to hoover up people who happen to already live in high-COL areas. COVID has shown us that remote work is feasible, but it still introduces frictions that employers/employ…

I don't really disagree. I'd also say that FAANGs specifically distort the overall salary picture a bit. My observation is that a fair number of non-FAANG companies, especially those who don't have a significant presence in the Bay Area, already don't try particularly hard to out-compete (on the basis of compensation) local Bay Area employers.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#142

Post by throwaway894345 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #114
throwaway894345 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fun…

> You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted ove…

> I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.

I agree with this assessment to the extent that we keep electing poor officials, but I don't think it's a "one party is amazing and the other is terrible". In particular, the CDC's issues were around a long time before the prior administration (again, SARS was in 2003 and we scarcely made preparations in the intervening years). To the extent that the problem is the officials we elect, I think that's partially true--I think the government is an emergent property of the health of our body politic, but our body politic is highly partisan (as evidenced by your comment). This is partly due to a divisive media but also probably to our two party system. We will keep electing worse officials because those officials can make a plausible argument that they are at least marginally better than the officials in the other party. The bar keeps getting lower; it's a race to the bottom.

> We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.

The pandemic response team wasn't part of the CDC, but yes, disposing of that team was a bad idea in hindsight. It doesn't absolve the CDC; however, and it misses the point in the same way that the "but the government didn't properly fund the CDC!" argument misses the point.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#143

Post by ikiris »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #106
claudeganon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment. As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in m…

This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fun…

The party in power runs on a slogon of "government is never the solution, I'll prove it" and people act surprised that this is the result.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#144

Post by jedberg »

momokoko wrote: post #109

Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months. Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work…

Time zones are still a thing. No matter how remote someone is, if they're more than a few times zones away it becomes problematic. More than nine timezones across the company is nearly impossible to do well.

So if we're talking about a US company, if you want anyone on the west coast, hiring continental Europeans will be tough, unless one of those groups is willing to work outside normal hours.

Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.

The most likely outcome of remote work is a lowering of salaries in the big cities and a raising of salaries in more rural areas, as salaries tend towards the national median.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#146

Post by majormajor »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #72
nicoburns wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.

I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful…

> I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state.

Which direction are you picturing this going?

I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net.

So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#147

Post by TulliusCicero »

ghaff wrote: post #131
momokoko wrote: post #109

Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months. Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work…

Eh, companies have had this option and many have engineering offices in lower cost of living countries long before the current situation. There are a lot of reasons for companies to hire in the US. What wouldn't surprise me though if/when remote becomes a bigger chunk of certain types of jobs, is if salaries across US regions equalize more given that local labor market rates become less of a factor for setting salari…

> your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.

That's certainly possible.

Of course, that would incentivize people to move out to cheaper areas, which would reduce the demand on expensive big cities, with the end result being that the price delta would become somewhat reduced.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#148

Post by Consultant32452 »

duxup wrote: post #10
Loughla wrote: post #5

Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely. So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope. It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.

The implication being going into the office sucks and everyone has to do it to be fair. I wonder if they're aware of that subtext....

I wonder how long it will take for some fortune 500 company to get sued by their white collar office workers who catch COVID.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#149

Post by Florin_Andrei »

timewasted wrote: post #75
Loughla wrote: post #5

Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely. So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope. It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.

I'm in a similar situation, except with a worse reason for requiring everyone to come back to the office. We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company. I can assure you that NO ONE is going to say "well I was going to spend money with these people but they're not in the office, so I'll go elsewhere". Further, we are being given less than 24 hours…

> We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company.

Wherein "optics" means the millions that the top shareholders and decision makers may or may not make in the future. That's what's at stake, and that's why your families need to be put at risk.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#150

Post by Consultant32452 »

protonimitate wrote: post #140
momokoko wrote: post #109

Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months. Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work…

Ah yes, the outsourcing FUD train is ramping up. Remote work has been a possibility for employers for a few decades now. Nothing has drastically changed since the new wave of WFH to change that, other than its more widely discussed. > 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) is there a source for this? I'm not convinced that the only reason "everything gets outsourced" hasn't happened yet is because employers are lazy.

I have an anecdata. I work for a fortune 500 financial company. I am personally acquainted with someone who transitioned from our offshore (India) team to the US. His salary went up 3x doing the same job with the same title, and all he changed was geography.
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