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

Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 278 posts

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#151

Post by jsjohnst »

neogodless wrote: post #121
x87678r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary. EDIT: I have a family like most people. EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.

When I contracted in 2018, I paid $650-700/month for a pretty good "silver" insurance plan covering my wife (34 then) and I (39 then). Definitely varies by state and availability of insurers. But it was by choice... 1099 rate easily covered all taxes and insurance with room to spare and allowed be to set up a solo LLC and dump a buttload of pre-tax money into a 401(k)... About $53k in one year. Taking time off was ha…

> dump a buttload of pre-tax money into a 401(k)... About $53k in one year.

That’s like double the IRS allowed maximum for pre-tax 401k deferral in a year, no? This is not my area of expertise so I could easily be unaware of something. Can you explain how you did this as I’m genuinely curious and want to do the same.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#152

Post by JauntTrooper »

popotamonga wrote: post #17
ahelwer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

How come its so expensive? The top top insurance in my european country is $100 and a pretty good is 30.

To add another US data point, for my family of 4 I pay $770 per month for health insurance and my employer pays an additional $1,370 per month.

My health insurance is through my employer, a large publicly-traded company. My insurer is one of the large well known providers.

Our insurance is very mediocre. We pay the first $3,000 out of pocket and 20% of the cost beyond that, but that's only if a doctor is "in network" (which is sometimes hard to find). Out of network doctors have a separate deductible.

I also pay 1.45% of my paycheck to Medicare, and my employer pays another 1.45% on my behalf. Plus my wife and I pay an extra 0.9% of our paychecks for all combined wages above $250,000. But I won't be eligible for Medicare until I'm 65 years old.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#153

Post by digaozao »

wrs wrote: post #136
ethanwillis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even 30 and I was told in a reply to a comment where I suggested a research paper from the 70s, "This is what's wrong with you old people, you just want us to read all of this irrelevant stuff". The irony is the replier was 10 years older than me. So the age discrimination bias is so prevalent even older people buy into it.

Yeesh, that’s a doubly-stupid comment...thinking not only that “old people” must be wrong but that “old papers” must be irrelevant.

Só true. Usually, paraphrasing taleb here, the "old papers" are more important. They resisted the test of time, and the ones that are still talked about (survivors) are the most relevant, and better insights. While the thousands of papers that appear every year, most of them will be irrelevant.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#154

Post by ryandrake »

ptero wrote: post #135
_qulr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the motivation is actually age discrimination. It's often much harder to find a job when you're older, so you have to strike it rich when you're younger.

I do not see this around me at all. There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs (probably because those who want to work 80+ hours a week and get rich quick-er tend to be young folks without major commitments). However, there are plenty of people around me who are in the 40-60 age bracket, who work in tech, are financially comfortable (even though they do not get…

> There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs

If you are at a FAANG company and working 80 hours a week, you're earning the same compensation as you would if you were working 40 hours a week. It's not like you're going to get richer working 80 hours. Come review time, nobody looks and says, "oh hey, you worked lots and lots of hours. You get a promotion!" It makes no sense.

Now if you owned 10% of your startup and those 40 extra hours meant the difference between a big exit and running out of runway, that makes more sense.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#155

Post by jakupovic »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #113
everdrive wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you The reality is that merit is only one of many reasons that promotions happen. And often not the primary reason.

Not sure about other peoples experiences but all the best and smoothest projects of my career were done with groups who had good social cohesion, got on with each other, supported each other and most importantly socialized with each other. There is close to zero opportunity for free creative brainstorming in the workplace and all the true innovation we made came out of discussions outside of work at the pub. Definite…

The group ideas are only as good as the smartest member. All this chit chat talk is bullshit

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#156

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

hackbinary wrote: post #125
x87678r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary. EDIT: I have a family like most people. EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.

Or, you know, vote in a government that will do single payer insurance.

Yeah, just let him do that real quick...

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#157

Post by agumonkey »

ahelwer wrote: post #3

The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and lear…

What I'd do to have this balance.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#158

Post by x87678r »

marketingPro wrote: post #63
ahelwer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA. Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.

Since you posted the myth that health insurance is better when you pay more, I highly recommend reading this article explaining why the lowest cost plan is likely the best during the most expensive medical situations https://efficiencyiseverything.com/engineering-conclusions-o... Don't get me wrong, healthcare is the most corrupt industry in the United States (by lobbying dollars). But I give some blame to my peers f…

Yeah maybe its where the chronic conditions comes in. A normal healthy person can pay their way for regular stuff that comes along. You need the insurance for car accidents, cancer etc. Its the people with Chronic diseases that really need those gold plans.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#159

Post by redler »

satya71 wrote: post #47
popotamonga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come its so expensive? The top top insurance in my european country is $100 and a pretty good is 30.

Many many reasons. Health care in the US is very expensive because providers have monopolies in most markets. Pharmaceuticals are also the most expensive in the world. The govt spends a lot of money, but in a way that makes market efficiencies impossible to achieve. Ultimately, that results in very high prices. Essentially, no participant in the market has an interest in reducing costs.

Furthermore, the business goal of health insurance companies is to not pay for health care, to the greatest extent possible, given regulations and market dynamics. They even call it "medical loss". It's right on the tin.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#160

Post by ryandrake »

meken wrote: post #149
ethanwillis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to also echo this sentiment. I took a job that lets me work with a much more flexible schedule. I changed from doing straight dev work to software dev support for an API SaaS company to facilitate that. I like software development, but I don't think I'm cut out for it in a SV work hard/play hard sense because I like to tinker too much. That's just not a good fit for deadlines, production environments, et…

Can you elaborate on your dev support role? Seems like this would be less flexible than a dev role. I’m asking because I’m interested in support roles as well. What’s the company and name of the position?

Not OP but I did something similar. Used to do the code/eat/sleep/code/eat/sleep lifestyle but realized I liked to refactor, polish and perfect too much and that was incompatible with the industry's demand to "ship barely working garbage on time". So I became a product manager, then project manager, and instead do coding on my free time. It's great because it lets me stay in software, but in a supporting role and I don't feel the pressure to get on the code/eat/sleep treadmill. The down side is it's a little harder to find jobs. Companies hire software developers by the truck load, but usually only require 1 PM or PJM for every 50 engineers they hire.

I keep my skills up and could still pass your company's C++ interview, but honestly I don't really want to.

Post reply on HN