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Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

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Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#141

Post by disease »

What I'd like to see happen when the pandemic ends is this: if I return to a company's office, I should be able to return to an equivalent of my home office. My home office is a small room in my home, but it has a large window providing natural light and top of the line office furniture including a couch and a really big desk. Most importantly I am the only one that works in this office.

Having a setup like this in a company's office would remove any incentive I have to work from home. I wonder how many developers want to work from home just to escape the shitshow of open offices.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#142

Post by _qulr »

ptero wrote: post #135
_qulr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the motivation is actually age discrimination. It's often much harder to find a job when you're older, so you have to strike it rich when you're younger.

I do not see this around me at all. There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs (probably because those who want to work 80+ hours a week and get rich quick-er tend to be young folks without major commitments). However, there are plenty of people around me who are in the 40-60 age bracket, who work in tech, are financially comfortable (even though they do not get…

> I do not see this around me at all.

Are you denying the existence of rampant age discrimination in tech, which has been highlighted countless times by many people? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the comment was intending.

> there are plenty of people around me

There's a bit of survivorship bias there. The older people driven out of tech may be invisible to you.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#143

Post by netcan »

MattGaiser wrote: post #109
netcan wrote: post #104

The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that's the way we're going. It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies. The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don't need to be all that ruthless. This takes off a lot of pressure. But as things go on, "geopay" is going to become an optimizable cost structure. There will be uncomfortable conversations as people move to higher geopay places…

I have a evil theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.

There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right.

I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions.

Anyway... WFH and outsourcing did have a small boom and bust. On WFH, Marissa Meyer pulled the plug and the WFH reversed. "IT Outsourcing" was imminent circa 2000, but a lot of companies had to reverse out of this strategy.

It may be that these were right-but-early. WFH & outsourcing are now ready.

I also think they are hard to seperate. Once WFH becomes a norm, the labour market is internationalised by default. Not just tech jobs. If you can work from Montana, you can work from Sophia.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#144

Post by csharptwdec19 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #106
tuna-piano wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for many reasons (good and bad) healthcare is more expensive in the US than any other country. But why is healthcare bought individually more expensive than healthcare an employer buys for all their employees? One is real and one is hidden. The hidden price difference is that most employees think they pay $200 per month in health insurance, but actually their employer is paying $600 and chips in $400 so the empl…

I never thought about that last part, thank you that makes sense.

Pools are interesting to think about.

Quick story. Once upon a time I was in a Contract-to-hire position where the contract house (CH) was paying my salary/etc until I was on-boarded.

However, this was a small shop, they had 3 people running the business and less than 2 dozen contractors under them at a time.

Between the Owner's Knee surgery, and some health issues I had had years prior, the CH's premiums were going to jump by 200$ (both on their end and the employee's). Thankfully they were able to find another insurance provider, but it was a pretty clear cut example of how sick people in the pool can sway costs by a large amount.

That's part of why a lot of US companies now will give you discounts for various wellness tasks. My BIL's company offered an insurance credit just for taking a smoking cessation course (not even STOPPING.)

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#145

Post by awinder »

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…

There’s 2 real world things that I think would need to happen in order for companies to go all-in:

1. Companies need success stories of that kind of ad-hoc innovation happening from within the company remotely. Otherwise someone will 100% kill it. Somewhat a function of how long until return to normalcy if that’s possible.

2. Another uncontrolled viral outbreak in the next decade changes the math on financial sustainability of the large campus and externally forces companies to go all-in.

From what I’ve seen I think companies hedge #2 happening by allowing remote in perpetuity, and it solves gnarly issues with “forcing” people back in. But at this point I don’t think #1 happens with this pandemic.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#146

Post by thebean11 »

marketingPro wrote: post #63
ahelwer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

Since you posted the myth that health insurance is better when you pay more, I highly recommend reading this article explaining why the lowest cost plan is likely the best during the most expensive medical situations https://efficiencyiseverything.com/engineering-conclusions-o... Don't get me wrong, healthcare is the most corrupt industry in the United States (by lobbying dollars). But I give some blame to my peers f…

I came to this conclusion myself a few months ago, that getting the cheapest plan and hitting the max out of pocket every single year is the cheapest course of action if you buy your own insurance plan.

Kind of figured there was a catch though, maybe not!

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#147

Post by A_non_e-moose »

Absolute BS with misleading title

There is general policy that is passed to each organization and then organizations decide by themselves, overriding policy. Most of them block any country change, which means maybe you change state in US, but anything else is refused

In policy written it is vague with mention of exceptions but verbally communicated by management you understand how forbidden it is

Microsoft is still holding on to idea of employee in sight is better managed

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#148

Post by _qulr »

_qulr wrote: post #142
ptero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see this around me at all. There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs (probably because those who want to work 80+ hours a week and get rich quick-er tend to be young folks without major commitments). However, there are plenty of people around me who are in the 40-60 age bracket, who work in tech, are financially comfortable (even though they do not get…

> I do not see this around me at all. Are you denying the existence of rampant age discrimination in tech, which has been highlighted countless times by many people? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the comment was intending. > there are plenty of people around me There's a bit of survivorship bias there. The older people driven out of tech may be invisible to you.

Here's some data from the Stack Overflow 2020 developer survey:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

Only 17% of professional developers surveyed were age 40+. That vastly disproportionate with the age demographics of the overall human population.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#149

Post by meken »

ethanwillis wrote: post #127
Sytten wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this so much. I have been working part time for almost a year now to rebuild a house and it has been very nice. It always seemed weird to me that people make such high salaries in tech but just don't value time as the main commodity of our lives. The reality is that if you move to a low CoL area and work part-time you will almost certainly be happier. But this doesn't mean you are idle the rest of the ti…

I would like to also echo this sentiment. I took a job that lets me work with a much more flexible schedule. I changed from doing straight dev work to software dev support for an API SaaS company to facilitate that. I like software development, but I don't think I'm cut out for it in a SV work hard/play hard sense because I like to tinker too much. That's just not a good fit for deadlines, production environments, et…

Can you elaborate on your dev support role? Seems like this would be less flexible than a dev role.

I’m asking because I’m interested in support roles as well. What’s the company and name of the position?

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#150

Post by danans »

ahelwer wrote: post #14
x87678r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary. EDIT: I have a family like most people. EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.

If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

> Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though.

> Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster...

It's pretty messed up that the lack of universal healthcare throws a huge wrench in the thing that generates the future of society, at least among financially self-aware young people.

It used to be even worse just a few years ago. Before the ACA insurance companies often considered pregnancy a pre-existing condition:

https://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/aca-pregnancy-faq#:~:....

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