131–140 of 147 posts
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How does moving get me a flatmate?
You move to a shared flat?
Sounds rather rare. I don't deny it but from just talking to work mates it seems more want to come back.
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I think they might. And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. Overwhelmingly the developers in my organisation are happy to work remote forever. Deliver people, product people, design people all seem to want to be back in the office. Upper management as well.
> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers? Do you really think the average pers…
The suburbs only make sense if you're commuting. Who would want to live there otherwise? Not remote enough to be cheap or have real land, not city enough to be a fun place to live. Who would willingly spend all there time in the suburbs?
I do live in the suburbs because it used to offer a convenient commute and have me close enough to still go into town for bars, museums, concerts, etc. But with all that stuff out of the picture, what is the point of this place?
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It's incredibly easy to compete with "top paying" companies once you offer remote work, due to huge gaps in taxation and cost-of-living. Let's do the math: $400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net. Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From…
By the same process, you can also hire a 15 year of experience software engineer from europe or south america for 80k a year, and doing it as a contractor would also mean no payroll taxes. In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe. But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were full…
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Try organizing a meeting with attendees from Beijing, Redmond, and Cambridge. Ya...it doesn’t work. India is the absolute worst for the USA because they are almost 12 hours off.
From my experience working with global teams, as soon as you have Asia & EMEA, you need to go to two meetings if you actually want to retain said staff. This is annoying, but it's much better than people taking meetings at midnight, which is what happens otherwise.
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How is the international remote scene? Does it exist in big (top paying?) companies in the US? To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies?
> To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies? It's often called 'offshoring', I think. I know plenty of US companies large and small that hire remote workers. It also doesn't seem like it's a net win in most cases that I've seen, but people generally don't set themselves up to re-evaluate their decisions 3, 6 and 12 months later, nor have the willpower to reverse the decision if…
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I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?
Is it "fair" for many workers to work in hostile and dangerous environments like oil rigs or policing high-crime streets, while SWEs sit in comfortable climate-controlled offices? Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?
Also: Not every country is the US... some can safely go back to work. Or others, like Taiwan, never stopped.
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I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?
In general, less people using the infrastructure around cities means that traveling is more safer, is generally better for the environment, and also supports small business growth in local communities instead of in a few blocks in the big city. Even people that don't get to work from home still benefit from work from home. At the very least there's one less person to get annoyed with on the commute.
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By the same process, you can also hire a 15 year of experience software engineer from europe or south america for 80k a year, and doing it as a contractor would also mean no payroll taxes. In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe. But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were full…
How many software engineers with 15 years of experience, perfect English, strong up-to-date skills, and ability to work seamlessly with an American team, do you think exist in South America or Europe (very different timezone)? If it was so easy to reduce payroll cost (the biggest cost in the budget of all tech companies) then it would have been done years ago, COVID or no COVID.