281–290 of 332 posts
I've been wondering if my employer will eventually need to abandon its 5-tier city cost-of-living scale. For the same exact job titles and functions, those of us living in rural areas are paid up to 12% less than people living in cities. I agree that cities have a higher cost of living, but the people trying to pull me away from my current employer into new remote work don't seem to need to make that distinction!
I honestly don't understand how any startup can even hope to compete if they don't offer remote options. Hiring is incredibly tight right now, and I'm sure glad my options are "anybody within ~2 timezones" over basically only people within a 15 mile radius of my office because traffic is horrendous in my city. Not to mention, how have companies not realized how to build robust remote company cultures over the past 2…
Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the…
I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.
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Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the…
People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. > People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be payi…
But startups [1] (the original context of this thread) aren’t “digitally transforming” themselves, they’re trying to create completely new approaches to outdated ones. The question is: Is the increased friction of remote communication a competitive disadvantage when in the company formation stage? What about the growth stage? If so, does the extra friction overwhelm the company’s other strengths, like market demand?
I suppose we’ll see in ten years or so if any/many unicorns emerge that started as fully remote. [2] (My guess is that we’ll still see most startups were not fully remote.)
[1] The YC definition: Venture-backed, huge growth, winner-takes-all, etc.
[2] Someone please start a spreadsheet/investment fund.
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The more common this becomes the more likely people in the US (where most people are trying to work) take notice and enforce existing labor laws, and push for more regulation. I’ve worked with people doing this in the past and they almost certainly are contractors in name only. That is they are essentially full time employees operating as contractors to skirt legal issues.
askonomm wrote remote worker, not remote employee. A remote worker can be an independent contractor and easily not run afoul of employee/contractor distinctions, especially because a lot of those distinctions have to do with being at a certain place at a certain time, and being locked to one client.
For an example see the response by the OP below.
The remote worker is treated like an employee except for how they are paid.
Few of the distinctions have to do with being in a certain place at a certain time. It’s more about controlling how they work. And in most the examples I’ve seen, remote workers are expected to be available during a certain set of hours, they must do the work in very specific way, they are forbidden from subcontracting, they are provided tools, the work is expected to continue long term, and the level of control generally prohibits them from working for multiple clients at a time.
It’s common for businesses to ignore these guidelines, but the more common it gets for companies to outsource work this way, the more news stories you’ll see and the more likely enforcement will happen.
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Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the…
There’s also the mechanical money aspect behind it, if you pay bay area money to someone who lives in Idaho Falls, at some point they’ll be like “well my house is paid off my retirement money is full and life costs nothing here and I already live here, why would I work here 60 hours a week when I could enjoy life?”. Doesn’t happen the same with your bay area employees.
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There's no reason for the sales staff to be in the same room as eachother. Plenty of B2B deals happen remotely, even pre-covid. I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. Remote workers are equally or better suited to occasional visits to customer locations anyway.
> I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. That sounds odd. Maybe the company was so big you weren't aware of these things or the company wasn't mature and only had low value contracts. But eventually all b2b software goes to enterprise and that means face to face time with clients, expense accounts for thousand dollar dinners & travel budgets la…
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Or, you know, just let your employees choose
Mixed environments (within a team) don't work well. People at the office will have conversations that won't get written down anywhere, so remote workers are in disadvantage all the time. In my experience, either the entire team is in a single place or all of them are remote. Now having teams some teams in the office and some others 100% remote, that could work, but I'm skeptical too.
Even though we are all WFH, I am more out of the loop now. Things that happen that I surely would have known about if I was in the office,I don't find out until much later now. Everyone remote doesn't mean everyone is looped in.
As others have said, ideal for me would be, it's up to my discretion. I go in when it makes sense, I WFH when it makes sense.
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> Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm. No it’s not, it’s just new to you so it seems scary. Companies have been dealing with this for decades with branch offices, contractors, etc.
> branch offices, contractors, etc. Branch offices isnt remote, and contractors are mercenaries. Look, I think there is not "one" answer to this. I personally can't think of anything worse than complete remote. Its isolating, difficult to understand the entire company and everything requires explicit communication. Some companies do this well, Most do not. However I have worked with fully remote workers, and they lov…
Yes they are. Any time you have one or two employees on your team but in a branch office, they are effectively remote. This happens a lot a bit companies and has been happening for a long time.
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Why ? Working remote , never being late to a meeting , never having to commute, vastly outweighs all that. I have an odd feeling many people like in person work so they can socialize. We have bars and concerts for that. We somehow went from COVID will kill us all if we dare step into an office to shut up and get back to work. Stop wasting money on office space. Let people live wherever ( assuming your in the same cou…
> I have an odd feeling many people like in person work so they can socialize. We have bars and concerts for that. The splitting of society like this is awful for humans, we really aren't built for it. There are ways of addressing this and still keeping remote work, but removing socialisation for 8 hours a day is not it.
I personally don't need to be around people all day.
Your not entirely wrong, Tribe is a good book that addresses modern social isolation.
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People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. > People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be payi…
>We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? This is an excellent point that I'd never thought of. It demonstrates that a lot of companies resist change at their own peril, and not because it's the shrewd thing to do.