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Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

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Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#321

Post by war1025 »

scarface74 wrote: post #316
war1025 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win?? I'm 31 making 3-4x what my father ever did. And I get to sit in an office instead of busting my ass doing repetitive labor on an assembly line day in day out. It's all about perspective I guess.

Well, even inflation adjusted I was making more than my parents did combined when they were 45. But, my mom retired from teaching after 30 years at 55 and my Dad retired from his factory job at 57. When they were 62, they were both getting pensions and social security checks. They’ve been married for 50+ years and retired for 20+ years. I won’t be retiring before 67... Again perspective...

My mom retired a couple years ago from the hospital in town and gets a pension from that. I agree that people with pensions have a completely different outlook on money than those without.

My dad was a member of the steelworker's union for 25 years and then they closed down the plant he worked at and moved the production line to Mexico. He got to train his replacements. Then he delivered propane for a couple years, and ended up getting a job at Cargill on a line that made eggs for McDonald's breakfast burritos and Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches.

He worked there for 5 or 6 years, finally scored a nice job as the custodian at the rec center in town and planned to ride that out until retirement.

Shortly after his 57th birthday he started acting funny and was diagnosed with Glioblastoma [1], probably better known as "that cancer John McCain had". Died a year and a half later.

I don't think either or us is really adding much to the original conversation, but I am enjoying swapping stories nonetheless. Hopefully some of the bystanders are as well...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glioblastoma

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#322

Post by alicemaz »

tomerico wrote: post #48

Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can go back to work from the office safely. The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals). This means that employees would see advantages to com…

>The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person.

it depends what their goals are. having worked in-office and remote for the same company, it's way easier to get shit done in the office. at least if you're reasonably extroverted/persuasive/bold. there are so many times I was able to walk up to someone's desk and spend ten minutes to save multiple weeks of protocol and runaround. partly because it's easier to apply pressure, but also partly because communicating face-to-face is so much higher bandwidth. but if you're remote you're easier to ignore, and a lot of office workers are very good at ignoring people who want to create more work for them

but the flip side is it's way easier for remote workers to fade into the background and hardly do anything. a skilled developer can emulate a mediocre developer while working a fraction of the hours. a skilled manipulator can "work" a fraction of the hours managing expectations and barely produce much of anything. plenty of people will figure out how to automate their jobs and just never tell anyone

there's this idea that remote will benefit introvert/aspie types because it's so word-focused. you have few face-to-face conversations but you write tons and tons. but really, apsie types will produce reams of literal-minded descriptive and often very helpful documentation and discussion, while people-people types will manipulate their image to appear very legibly valuable and come out ahead more often than not

my honest opinion for awhile is that remote is going to a massive efficieny drain on big tech companies and startups doing stuff that's easy to phone in like webdev/saas/whatever, such that if you founded a small committed colo team you could probably outcompete them in whatever domain you want even without any special edge

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#323

Post by mNovak »

tomerico wrote: post #48

Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can go back to work from the office safely. The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let alone individuals). This means that employees would see advantages to com…

But the real game changer would be if the managers stayed remote, evaporating the 'facetime' detriment typically faced by remote workers.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#324

Post by analog31 »

bargle0 wrote: post #258

I feel like permanent WFH is outsourcing real estate costs to the worker. This isn’t a big deal for some, since one may live alone or already have a home office, but it gets burdensome if there is more than one home worker in a household.

I suspect this is one of those cases where there are temporary winners and losers. In places where housing was less expensive, such as much of the Midwest, a lot of people over-bought, so we have space that we didn't really need anyway, and that was idle during the entire work / school day.

I work in hardware development, and moved an entire lab to my house. I could think about what it's costing me to maintain this space and pay taxes on it, or think about the fact that I still have a job. And it would be hard to imagine this work being done in a lower cost region.

We had 4 people working from home until the school year ended. But the kids are old enough to be reasonably self sufficient during the day. It's actually been pretty easy.

Younger colleagues who are living in starter homes, or apartments, and have small kids, are having to figure out more compromises. Places with extremely expensive real estate also have higher salaries, at least for tech workers, so those folks may still be ahead of us Midwesterners.

Even before the COVID, there was a trend towards people buying a bit of extra space to set aside just in case their careers turned towards consulting or other similar work.

It's anybody's guess what the future holds.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#325

Post by war1025 »

smoe wrote: post #320
ryanSrich wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now. Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.

So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to…

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe?

You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#326

Post by kmonsen »

smoe wrote: post #320
ryanSrich wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now. Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.

So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to…

Sure, but what about 300k, or 500k?

Also, not all of those apply to Norway at least and some are provided by the government.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#327

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #298
war1025 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone in the Midwest, this seems pretty biased to me. I make right about $100k, which is pretty competitive for the area from what I can tell. It's possible I'm just getting completely fleeced, but I think that's unlikely. But then again, I guess you can just play the "No true Scotsman" game and argue that I don't count as a truly great developer.

I worked at a company that was officially based in Nebraska because they received some type of grant for hiring locally. They expanded to my larger metropolitan area in the south east to find reasonably priced developers but a larger pool. That being said, I was speaking to my CTO about hiring and I asked him, why doesn’t he hire in the Nebraska office, it would be a lot cheaper. His reply was “not really”. I know in…

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#328

Post by smoe »

war1025 wrote: post #325
smoe wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to…

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

Benefits and regulations vary from country to country. I don't know details about eastern Europe, but all those are fairly common to different degrees in large parts of the continent.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#329

Post by wahern »

war1025 wrote: post #325
smoe wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to…

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

I'm not European, but to a degree it seems so, yes. For example, minimum paid vacation by law is 21 days in almost all of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... And judging by common statements and anecdotes here on HN, I think the number of paid vacation days tend to exceed the legal minimum, especially in Western Europe, just as they do in the U.S.--typically 2 weeks for salaried employees even though Federal law mandates 0.

Likewise, mandatory pension contributions (employee and employer) in most of Western Europe exceed 20% of income (upwards of 30% in some cases), as contrasted to 12% in the U.S.: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/pension_glance-2017-... Who in the U.S. contributes 10-20% to their IRA or 401(k) on top of FICA payments? It's not even legal to make such large contributions pre-tax. (Some of us are privileged enough to make up the difference with higher salaries; a smaller fraction of a higher salary let's us contribute more to retirement.) Note that employer contributions aren't generally reflected in salary figures, and in some European countries employer contributions exceed 20%.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#330

Post by rapnie »

war1025 wrote: post #325
smoe wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to…

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

Not everything standard, but quite common. Varies per country I guess. I'm thinking Netherlands.
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