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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

#241

Post by jjav »

ryandrake wrote: post #207
lastofthemojito wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we'll see a lot of people try to game it: * Not updating their address with their company after moving to a new, lower-cost location * Using the address of family or friends in a higher-cost area * Renting a PO Box or cheap room or studio in a high-cost area, but spending most time elsewhere I'd imagine we'll see companies pop up offering address verification services - physically and/or digitally tailing emp…

I'd expect to see this too, but I think anyone planning to do these tactics is walking an extremely thin line between "gaming the system" and fraud. Not to be Debbie Downer, but if someone is thinking about getting a PO box in SF and funneling all their work connections through a silicon valley VPN, they should think about how it will look in front of a judge when their company goes after them.

It's not so much the company, as it is the state tax agencies.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#242

Post by brainbag »

wayne_skylar wrote: post #122
brainbag wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of IC dev work in my career of 20+ years, and I've moved cities often, so I had to frequently "start over" with reputation and networking. What I found to work best was that any time I entered a new market, I would find a local contractor organization (that already has a lot of contacts), and do short-term high-skill jobs for them for 3-6 months (for example, spending two weeks at a bank helping optim…

What would be an example of a "contractor organization"? I am interested working on contract but I live in NYC and here it seems like it's always contract-to-hire situation where they want someone long-term but are using the contract as a way to limit the damage if the hire doesn't work out. I'd love to find a series of 3-6 month contracts like you mention but have had little success.

I've worked with all kinds and sizes, often a couple at the same time. Any temp or contract-to-hire agency that is willing to work with developers should work in my experience. If they're not used to working with developers, sometimes it can take a week or two of checking in regularly for them to find something. My experience was that they want to make money from your skills (and tech tends to bring in more money than something like extra hands for doing inventory) which creates motivation for them to find work for you. Friendly persistence can go a long way. Good luck!

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#243

Post by nec4b »

ghaff wrote: post #219
nwienert wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If women on average prefer to work less hours isn’t the concerning thing the people who seem to want to force them to work more? Especially when it’s oftentimes men that call this a “problem”? It seems unless you have some data showing their preference is to work more but they are limited by something externally forced on them, and you’d need data not opinion, you shouldn’t be concern-trolling. Women buy more dresses…

In general, I think the concern is whether it's a gender role that women are being forced into as opposed to something that they really are choosing voluntarily. Those two things can be hard to separate though. During the current pandemic, the data I've seen suggests that women are disproportionately dropping out of the workforce for childcare and other reasons. Of course if someone has to drop out of the workforce i…

Do you think taking care of children is a low status work that people have to do and not want to do? Do you think there is something wrong with a woman preferring raising children instead of pursuing a boring career?

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#244

Post by davidf560 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #204
davidf560 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should be paid according to the value you create for the company, and nothing else But, you need to subtract your pay from the value you create. If you create $1MM value but cost $500K, and someone in the Midwest can create that same $1MM value for only $150K, it's pretty obvious what most companies will choose. FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if t…

> FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less Could they? The market for 500K engineers is very different than 60K or 100K. With remote work, you'll see a handful of organizations getting the top talent across all locales, and the local companies who won't be able to compete be stuck with th…

My point is there is no such thing as a "$500K engineer" anywhere but SV (and maybe Seattle), and thus no such market exists elsewhere. Honestly even writing "$500K engineer" sounds so absurd to me because it's so far away from "normal"... I doubt anyone who lives within 500 miles of me doing software development as an individual contributor makes even half that. Maybe I'm badly misinformed though.

Believe it or not, there's plenty of smart, even brilliant people who do not live (and choose not to live) in California. I myself may not be FAANG-caliber, but I've known known a number of people who used to work where I do and now work for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They moved to the west coast, but obviously prior to taking those jobs they were just as good and living in the Midwest working for a Midwest salary.

It's honestly rather shocking to me that people seemingly genuinely believe that there can't possibly exist smart engineers who live somewhere other than SV.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#245

Post by ghaff »

nec4b wrote: post #243
ghaff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, I think the concern is whether it's a gender role that women are being forced into as opposed to something that they really are choosing voluntarily. Those two things can be hard to separate though. During the current pandemic, the data I've seen suggests that women are disproportionately dropping out of the workforce for childcare and other reasons. Of course if someone has to drop out of the workforce i…

Do you think taking care of children is a low status work that people have to do and not want to do? Do you think there is something wrong with a woman preferring raising children instead of pursuing a boring career?

Not at all. However, the fact that they're now doing so during a pandemic whereas they weren't before suggests that it's not entirely voluntary.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#246

Post by hintymad »

Sytten wrote: post #74
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…

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…

That's partly because high-paying salaries can be a stepwise function with respect to one's time. If you make $500K a year, it does not mean you can make $300K a year by working three days a week. I'm sure many people are capable of pulling that off, but I guess more can't. Software engineering work in corporate requires certain level of continuity. You may be called upon for a meeting. You may need to jump into a conference call for a system outage. You may need to do an in-depth research to debunk your co-worker's design. You may be able to pace yourself, but your teams won't be able to wait, which disproportionally diminish your value. Again, we can argue how to practice essentialism, but the reality is that many people can't or are not capable of doing so. Otherwise, we wouldn't have books about essentialism.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#247

Post by davidf560 »

deegles wrote: post #191
davidf560 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will s…

It's a big assumption that SV wages are inflated given the value that sector has generated for the economy. Facebook made around $600k in profits per employee . I will agree that they are inflated relative to other professions, but that just means for them the earnings gap is even greater. ( https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/if-worker-pay-... ) https://insights.dice.com/2019/07/10/how-much-tech-companies.…

Software developers simply do not get offered pay anything close to SV wages pretty much anywhere else in the US (maybe NYC? not sure on that one) - as far as I can tell. It's not really in dispute that SV software wages are significantly higher than elsewhere in the country, is it?

Now, we all know there's many reasons for that, including competition and housing costs. My point is that salaries are so much lower almost anywhere else that FAANG could offer half of what they do in SV and get the best of the best in an area because it would still be a huge premium over local rates. The question becomes: if Facebook could hypothetically switch all its employees to other parts of the US and pay them top dollar relative to the area, would they still be earning $600K profit per employee while spending considerably less on salaries? Prior to C19, FB needed to pay those rates to be able to attract the best to the high COL area in SV because they felt a strong need to have their employees co-located. If FB has proven to themselves that they can have their employees WFH permanently without any significant productivity loss, then naturally they will no longer care about having to attract people to the Bay (and by extension they wouldn't need to offer those kinds of salaries anymore).

But maybe I'm all wrong on this. Who knows.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#248

Post by pault »

_qulr wrote: post #148
_qulr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're assuming that the ratio is disproportionate because people are being pushed out of the industry against their will. Some people get burned out, some people retire early, and some transition into management or start their own company. The industry has grown exponentially in the 20-40 years those people have been working. If the industry now is 10x the size it was in 2000 (arbitrary number), then 40 year old developers should be 10% of the workforce, even discounting any other factors.

I don't see anything alarming here. I am a 40+ year old developer, and I've never seen anyone my age leave the industry because they were victims of age discrimination. The opposite in fact. I have never had so much clout during job hunting than I do now, with 20 years of on the job experience. Anecdata sure, but that survey is not sound, and it does not attempt to discover whether older developers are actually unable to find work, or what other factors (other than the obvious massive industry growth) might contribute to the imbalance.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#249

Post by 908B64B197 »

davidf560 wrote: post #244
908B64B197 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less Could they? The market for 500K engineers is very different than 60K or 100K. With remote work, you'll see a handful of organizations getting the top talent across all locales, and the local companies who won't be able to compete be stuck with th…

My point is there is no such thing as a "$500K engineer" anywhere but SV (and maybe Seattle), and thus no such market exists elsewhere. Honestly even writing "$500K engineer" sounds so absurd to me because it's so far away from "normal"... I doubt anyone who lives within 500 miles of me doing software development as an individual contributor makes even half that. Maybe I'm badly misinformed though. Believe it or not,…

I don't think people are doubting their existence, but rather if they could staff a whole floor with engineers of that caliber anywhere but in these cities.

Partly because, as you said it yourself, a lot of great engineers simply move there.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#250

Post by davidf560 »

qes wrote: post #213
davidf560 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will s…

> Maybe this is overly simplistic... eventually the COL in SV will start to equalize with other places in the country like Chicago, won't it? Chicago with an actual winter will likely never have the demand that California with it's year-round outdoor weather will have. If costs were completely identical, would you rather live in Illinois or the Bay? How many other people you know would say the Bay?

Believe it or not, I have no interest in living in the bay area - even if the costs were the same. I personally would like somewhere that didn't get quite so cold in the winter but still has 4 seasons.

I can honestly tell you that out of all the people I know, I can't think of a single one who would move to the bay area even if the costs were the same. Weather isn't everything.

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