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Working from home is powering productivity

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Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#121

Post by waveBidder »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #72
beaconify wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff. What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.

Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.

maybe I'm just super used to it at this point but I don't really notice any friction in 1-1's. larger groups there's some (4+), but tbh it's not that much worse than the friction of that size in person

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#122

Post by SunlitCat »

roland35 wrote: post #110

Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.

Aren't there some companies that consider this (where the employee lives) when calculating their salaries?

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#123

Post by closeparen »

mullingitover wrote: post #65

I would wager that there's a dead sea effect happening at these 'my way or the highway' RTO companies. Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but defi…

I do think there will be significant remote competition in the middle 50% ($101k-$167k) range [0], and at a given price point in this range the best candidates will be able to demand remote. But top talents can only get paid close to their market value at a few dozen companies structurally capable of affording them. These companies are competitive in the sense that they throw around a lot of money, but they tend to make HR decisions as a herd. Partly because they benchmark against each other, partly because they all copy Google and Facebook, partly because they illegally collude [1]. That's why everyone's waiting to see whether Amazon's move to 5 days starts a stampede.

For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#124

Post by hotspot_one »

SunlitCat wrote: post #122
roland35 wrote: post #110

Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.

Aren't there some companies that consider this (where the employee lives) when calculating their salaries?

I see this alot. Has always struck me as very unfair.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#125

Post by from-nibly »

Articles like this are talking past the RTO mandates. Ignore what the mandates say in the emails. They are trying to lay people off without suffering the PR downsides. They do not care how productive you were or are going to be. They need to fix the balance sheet for the next quarter, THEN they can worry about productivity.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#126

Post by master_crab »

ip26 wrote: post #30
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get prom…

Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.

Not really. Command Sergeant Majors technically dont lead anyone. They are just advisors. Plenty of other senior NCO positions in the army are just staff advisors as well.

Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#127

Post by mewpmewp2 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #34
nmstoker wrote: post #16

It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…

> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.

I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#128

Post by master_crab »

l33tbro wrote: post #27

I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter. How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are st…

Bingo! (Mostly, the AI stuff is a bit overblown)

This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.

If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#129

Post by mewpmewp2 »

throwaway918299 wrote: post #52

I am literally at least 10x when I work from home. I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking. Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop. I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives. I l…

Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.

Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".

Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.

Re: Working from home is powering productivity

#130

Post by maxbond »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #94
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #4

Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.

Honestly, that I can't find that bet on polymarket is beyond me.

How would that contract resolve? Who may authoritatively declare a winner?
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