Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 461 posts

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#381

Post by McWobbleston »

jimsimmons wrote: post #273

What bothers me more is that these tech companies aren’t even trying to have a conversation with their employees. If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. But the managerial gang knows that and they want to side step it. The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamific…

WFH will happen because firms practicing will be saving significantly on expensive office space that can be used to hire developers, especially in COL areas, and with remote not being the norm they are able to attract talent they would not have otherwise. It will take time but I will be surprised if full time onsite is still the overwhelming norm it was in 10 years

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#382

Post by midrus »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #259
TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does indeed sound like a trivial problem to solve. Pick a local restaurant and treat it as your new cafeteria. Come lunch time, go there. Ideally, your employer would compensate you for the office benefit you're missing (at least when talking about pandemic-induced forced WFH), but WFH is likely already saving you more money, so you can probably afford it anyway.

Any local delivery food costs 2-5 times as much as the office caffeteria and I can only get fast food delivered. Jumping into a car and driving to actual restaurant would take way more time and cost 3-4 times more.

Comments like this make me understand why the world is going to hell. Mankind is doomed.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#383

Post by thorin »

jusssi wrote: post #370
thorin wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this isn't a troll, I guess learning to make a sandwich or a salad is not outside the realm of possibility.

Looks like I to explain the background a little bit more to be not mistaken for a troll. I know how to prepare meals, in fact we make over 90% of our dinners ourselves from ingredients. Having something else for lunch is for me an important escape from our own cooking, for both the effort and the taste. Not that it's bad, just that it also gets repetitive. We also have the small child aspect to consider for the stuff…

Generally 99% of people I worked with in IT (UK) over the last 20 years either make a sandwich for lunch, eat leftovers or eat at the work canteen which isn't free and normally isn't great either. They have their main meal in the evening. Of course people have the occasional lunch out but it's normally once or twice a month. In big cities of course this is often pretty different.

I used to eat lunch at the canteen fairly often out occasionally have leftovers. Since covid I'm at home and normally make a sandwich or salad with whatever is in the fridge.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#384

Post by thorin »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #350
thorin wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this isn't a troll, I guess learning to make a sandwich or a salad is not outside the realm of possibility.

Neither of those are actual meal

??? Generally in the UK people don't have a 3 course catered meal in the middle of the day!

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#385

Post by silicon2401 »

fuzzylama wrote: post #304
woutr_be wrote: post #214

My company (a large multinational bank) (about 100K employees) introduce their "future way of working" back in April. This came after most of our offices in different regions working from home due to covid. Much to my surprise, this was actually pretty well thought out. This new way, would give people the flexibility to choose wether they work from the office or work from home, or even combine both. (They also offere…

What is that 750 USD supposed to cover? - Monitor - PC/ laptop - desk - chair ... either one of those things can cost as much as that

If I were your employer I'd expect you to foot the bill if you want to spend $750 on a monitor or desk alone when there are much cheaper options

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#386

Post by silicon2401 »

grawprog wrote: post #72

I dunno, for a group of people who seem to believe you're worth a ridiculous amount of money per hour, think of what your time is worth. You folks that make a living programming off exceedingly decent wages. You don't break your bodies every day, you're not forced to spend all day moving wood and metal, filling bags full of garbage, hauling shit that weighs 50+ lbs all day every day. You just gotta sit and think and…

In my experience, this is mostly the attitude of people who criticizes a world they're not part of. Not being aggressive about self-benefit only hurts you and helps everybody else. The fact that somebody gets paid 1/100 what I do for 100x the effort I exert isn't my problem, my problem is whether I can get an even better cost/benefit ratio than I have today

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#387

Post by sbacic »

higeorge13 wrote: post #112

Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there. For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.…

What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have greater purchasing power and for gigs with their former employees who can offer the same services but with lower overhead.

The next step will be that these newly minted freelancers will realize they can charge more and raise their rates. Lower CoL is a huge advantage here - you can wait for months for the right gig to come along while your competitor in NYC can't. In the end, I think the rates in the WE and the US will drop all around the board while simultaneously rising in cheaper areas until an equilibrium is reached.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#388

Post by wyclif »

I have been working remote for five years. I'm an American but I'm living in SE Asia with my wife and two kids, plus extended family. I work for a publishing company that is transitioning to online and I take care of all that for them.

Most of the time I deal with PHP/Perl and maintaining news sites. Also, AWS EC2, NGINX, Jenkins, and other issues.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#389

Post by ridaj »

dan-robertson wrote: post #234
ridaj wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants attrition, but it does happens. In the long term competition for WFH jobs is basically by timezone rather than by geo area. That means as an employee you're competing against a bigger talent pool, and as the workforce renews itself, we should expect a trend towards equalization of pay across WFH roles in the same timezone.

Pay in low-COL satellite offices of big companies isn’t massively different from pay in Silicon Valley (averages are more different as more senior people will be in the main office) so it isn’t obvious to me that pay far away from the office should be massively lower. One argument for this to be the case is that an employee could reasonably threaten to move to Silicon Valley for higher pay (at another company.) Obvio…

> Pay in low-COL satellite offices of big companies isn’t massively different from pay in Silicon Valley (averages are more different as more senior people will be in the main office)

Software engineer pay is quite different, between, say, London and Paris, or between Switzerland and any place in Europe... And it has more to do with talent competition than cost of living. France or Germany aren't inexpensive places to live in but there isn't as much software talent competition, so pay is still lower there from what I can tell.

You're right that a bigger pool doesn't necessarily mean more competition or lower wages, just a trend towards equalization: some people's pay could move up from access to a pool with higher competition for talent. But the pay for the people whose location puts them already at the top of the pay ladder has only one way to go relative to others who will WFH in the same timezone.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#390

Post by AntiWFH »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #274
goldenkey wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, you lack the self-discipline to be satisfied with your choices, and prefer to be enlisted in some type of nanny service? Cool, I'll opt out and instead focus on bettering my defecits so I don't need to outsource my mental fortitude.

Lol, seeth more

Based.
Post reply on HN