291–300 of 332 posts
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I just realized how spoiled us dev folk are. If only my grandmother would know the cushy life I get to live while still complaining about it she would slap me.
I still wonder why I peruse HN for this reason (as a non-SWE). It's incredible how the business world panders to software engineers.
Supply and demand is the only force here, software engineers aren’t special.
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…
- PayPal wants their people in Austin.
- Amazon wants their people at one of the hubs.
- What other large firms are telling applicants they have to reside in a particular city or close to a hub?
Remote is such an overloaded term. Is it US/North America only? Is it equal work for equal pay globally? I was someone who took the opportunity to relocate back to my home country when Covid struck, but had to take a near 50% pay cut to do so, despite doing the same work. I'm surprised this hasn't become more of a hot button issue within the community.
Equal pay globally would mean less pay for Silicon Valley tech workers and more pay for Chinese/Indian/Eastern European devs.
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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…
> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.
* One of your prized developers lives by themself and suffers bad anxiety from being alone all the time instead of in the office
* Your 10 year old production systems are designed from the ground-up to be secure from inside a single network. Sure you could add VPNs but then you get a load of other issues
* There are people who will only focus when in the office, too many distractions at home and they are less productive. There is no objective way to measure productivity and also what drop would be acceptable so how do you fairly appraise people when you can't see how they interact?
* Juniors trying to learn on the job is 100x easier in-person.
* All manner of issues with onboarding, hardware, network problems, unannounced disappearances from people that you need to speak to (as opposed to them being in the office and they tell you they need to go to the doctors).
Not saying that I don't want to fix these since we need to use remote working to survive probably but you can't pretend these are just things that can be fixed.
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School is also child care/babysitting.
Socialization is the word you’re looking for. Kids need to be around other kids.
School is nothing more than a government paid daycare for a significant portion of the people and it’s why there was such anger over school closures.
Is it conceivable that the attraction of the Bay Area will steadily decline as a result? Or most people here still expect it to recover once offices are open again and life is back to normal? I love the climate myself. But on this very forum every other day people from CA discuss things which don't exactly justify 10% of income lost. In addition to the usual RE prices, AP classes, and surge in crime anecdata I see cu…
I don't see that happening. Tech jobs aside, the Bay Area is still a very desirable place to live, and has been so long before Silicon Valley was a thing. Software engineers moving out of the area will create a gap that others will very happily fill in.
Not that desirable. The South Bay was just a place to grow fruit before Silicon Valley.
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> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.
There are lots of reasons why you might suffer a performance hit when working remotely. Sure, most are probably solveable with enough cash but there are plenty of things that are not: * One of your prized developers lives by themself and suffers bad anxiety from being alone all the time instead of in the office * Your 10 year old production systems are designed from the ground-up to be secure from inside a single net…
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…
Ryan from YC here. There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job. While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an…
Once you start to grow significantly, though (series A or later) it's just become much to prohibitively difficult to hire significant numbers of great people if we limit ourselves to the teeny area around our office. This is especially true for some hires where we need specialized expertise.
Companies love to crow about diversity, and one of the primary reasons they give is that diversity is a natural consequence of searching high and low for all the best people. Imagine if you limited your hiring to only brunettes with green eyes. Limiting your company to a teeny geographic monoculture is no less absurd. This is why I think VCs should take a long hard critical look at any growing company that is not willing to expand their geographic diversity.
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And not just for salaries, which can be handled with companies like Deel and Remote. For me equity is the bigger concern. If I join a UK startup, best case scenario is paying 10% tax on the upside of any exit windfalls. If I join any company outside the UK, that immediately jumps to ~55%.
Nobody is going to do that are they, it's insane for tax jurisdictions to want to do this they are just doing themselves out of 10% rather than winning 55%.
2. It's insane for individuals to give up equity just to avoid 55% taxes. They are doing themselves out of 45% rather than winning 90%.
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It's surprisingly hard to consistently find startups willing to pay over $140k - some offers are low key insulting. However, if I cared less about having any semblance of a social life I'd leave new york immediately. $200k+ full remote, I'd never go back.
It's funny you mention staying in New York to have a social life. I found it to be the worst place I've lived in the US for socializing. People are mistrustful of strangers, extremely busy, and often separated by absurd travel times (it can easily take 20 min to travel 1 mile without a car). For those reasons, I wasn't able to make new friends outside of work, couldn't see my friends on weekdays, and generally felt l…
If you don't like your social life or how people interact with you it's always easy just to blame where you live.