Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#81

Post by reincarnate0x14 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

ma2rten wrote: post #50

popotamonga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come its so expensive? The top top insurance in my european country is $100 and a pretty good is 30.

I think there are two parts to the answer. Firstly, health care in the US is extremely expensive. There are long articles written about this but IMO a main reason is market failure. The US, especially republicans, place a lot of value on free markets but people are willing to pay almost anything not to die. The second part of the story is that the US is richer than Europe. I moved to the US from Western Europe. Befor…

Overly naïve and simplistic rhetoric about "the market" invariably fails to mention that while ideal markets are effectively forced to price commodities as close to the minimal margin of efficient production, it doesn't take much of a barrier to entry for suppliers to silently shift to pricing at the point of pain because they know it makes them all more money.

The recent collapse of movie theatres clearly illustrates that there is no reason they could be getting away with making $10 margins on popcorn, of all things, other than customers were being charged exactly as much as they would tolerate without telling the proprietors where to stick it.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#82

Post by tinyhouse » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all. This current "we're kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes" is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you're not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunitie…

Some good points but I think now things are going better for partially remote companies since most companies shifted their culture to fully remote even if not everyone is remote. Then there's also all the work visas implications. Companies like MS rely heavily on foreign talent and I don't think they can bring them over without an office.

The onsite employees would still have an advantage of forming relationships with more people and knowing more what's going on in the company from informal lunch conversations etc.

Not everyone can work effectively from home. Having an office you can go to whenever you want is a big plus.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#83

Post by kethinov » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #78

kethinov wrote: post #67

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think th…

The problem is that if (even just keeping the discussion to the US) a company pays, say, Chicago wages everywhere, that means they effectively probably can't hire anyone in the Bay Area for example. Of course, a lot of companies already basically don't try to salary match the hire who has an offer from Facebook or Google in SV and wants to work there.

Sounds like a good incentive to just pay SF wages to everyone which any company currently in SF clearly can do.

Those that aren't in SF already can't afford SF talent so it makes little difference.

It's not like there's some glut of companies out there paying Chicago wages to most employees except for their 1 or 2 in SF who get a HCOL bonus. And to the extent that there are companies doing that, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for society if they stopped.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#84

Post by everdrive » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all. This current "we're kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes" is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you're not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunitie…

>the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you

The reality is that merit is only one of many reasons that promotions happen. And often not the primary reason.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#85

Post by Charles808 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

kethinov wrote: post #67

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think th…

Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs. Companies save a fortune by having employees work from home.

"Geopay" scales are exploitation. Employee X should be compensated in relation to the value they bring through their efforts, not at the minimum possible level that the employer can get away with.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#86

Post by ma2rten » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

ahelwer wrote: post #71

ghthor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense meant but, before Obamacare was enacted I had an excellent healthcare premium of $77 per month. Now comparable care is $400 per month. However Obamacare changed the scene, I dont support it.

Well it got rid of insurers denying coverage or charging more for pre-existing conditions, which is obviously the morally right thing to do, but is roughly like being able to buy fire insurance while your house is already half burned down. IMO the conclusion is just that insurance is a bad model for healthcare coverage.

Which is why it had the individual mandate to prevent people from doing that.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#87

Post by ma2rten » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

ghthor wrote: post #61

ma2rten wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two parts to the answer. Firstly, health care in the US is extremely expensive. There are long articles written about this but IMO a main reason is market failure. The US, especially republicans, place a lot of value on free markets but people are willing to pay almost anything not to die. The second part of the story is that the US is richer than Europe. I moved to the US from Western Europe. Befor…

No offense meant but, before Obamacare was enacted I had an excellent healthcare premium of $77 per month. Now comparable care is $400 per month. However Obamacare changed the scene, I dont support it.

Obamacare didn't make healthcare more expensive. It just distributed the cost differently.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#88

Post by kethinov » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #72

kethinov wrote: post #67

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think th…

I think there are reasons to make either choice (one global salary vs a localized market salary). The former optimizes for fairness/equality of continuing employees and takes the "what is the value of the work?" as the foremost question. The latter puts the focus on "what is the market price [the next-best-alternative] for this employee?" and tries to ensure that you don't have unhappy employees staying longer than e…

The latter seems unlikely to me. If we stigmatized or outlawed geopay, the net effect would be rising wages across the board because companies would not want to be locked out of hiring good people in HCOL areas. That or the cities would empty out and the relative income needed to live well would flatten. Either way, a win for society.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#89

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #57

vsareto wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have been milking workers as well. It's not surprising it comes back to them.

?? That’s a total non-sequitur and has no connection to the other. Slackers will slack against themselves (hire a responsible home contractor vs one who slacks off and one who shows up whenever and does things half arsed). So it’s not about revenge or getting something back (that might be a motivation for some malcontents, but most slackers aren’t malcontents.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#90

Post by btrettel » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #49

ahelwer wrote: post #3

The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and lear…

> The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. Part-time work at a big shop, for many returning to work new moms, can be more accurately described as squeeze 5 days of work into 3 days. I'm not saying that Microsoft cannot pull it off, but many other big shops (and even those that rate highly on such magazine prizes for working moms) have been extremely disingenuous with such claims. That b…

In another comment I mentioned the USPTO's part-time program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24729649

I can say unequivocally that at the USPTO as a patent examiner you would not be expected to squeeze 5 days of work into however many days you work per week. You work a certain number of "production" hours and you are expected to get a certain amount of "count" per production hour. So, as the number of production hours you have decreases, your count expectations decrease proportionally as well.