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A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

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Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#171

Post by withinboredom »

psim1 wrote: post #138
standardUser wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a group of coworkers who've taken the initiate to slyly relocate during the pandemic, in some cases signing leases and buying houses. I think their idea is to either stay fully remote indefinitely or find a different remote job if the company won't abide. The remote revolution may be overblown in general, but for programmers, the appeal is particularly strong. They've seen the promised land and it turns out it…

If by "slyly" you mean without notifying their employers, this could backfire on them in small and big ways. In a small way, it would affect local/state taxes that are withheld. In a big way, employers--whether rightly or wrongly--want to know where the employee lives in order to set a cost-of-living salary. If the employer finds out you're taking a SF salary while living in Bend, there are likely to be consequences.

This is easily handled when filing your taxes. Your employer will never know. Where it might impact things is having out-of-state health insurance and finding a doc that will deal with that. I up and moved to another country (not slyly) and I rather like it; my son speaks fluent Dutch. Look up the Dutch American Friendship Treaty.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#172

Post by jcims »

ghaff wrote: post #119
chrisco255 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. My company was remote-first before the pandemic, but we still had about 25% of our staff or so go into an office regularly. The key is to have that remote-first attitude in spite of there being an office. One of the rules we had was "if one person is remote that's supposed to be on a meeting, then everyone has to treat that as a remote meeting and Zoom in". In other words, no one was on unequal foot…

I work with teams that have rules like that. The other thing to consider is that many of us routinely work with people across much of the world on a day-to-day basis. Even if everyone were in office--some are, some aren't--almost every meeting I'd be in would have people from 2 or 3 different offices. One office I work with a lot is in the same time zone. The other is 6 time zones away but that still works pretty wel…

This is my situation as well. My employer has >>100,000 full time folks spread all over the planet, and despite having one of the largest office buildings as my home base, for the most part I didn't work with anyone from it. So even back 3-4 years ago when I went to the office I spent almost all of my day on videoconference calls.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#173

Post by irrational »

sharkweek wrote: post #73

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…

Prior to the pandemic my company was moving to a model where nobody had a fixed desk. You had a backpack and a laptop and plugged is wherever you could find a free place. You were not supposed to stay at the same desk for longer than 3 hours. There was actually a team in each building walking around and enforcing it.

Post-pandemic they have said that is being scrapped since there is too much chance of infecting people from shared work areas. So back to you have a fixed desk. Only, despite adding 2 million more square feet of office space to campus last year, there really isn’t enough room for everyone.

I pity the people who are having to figure this out.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#174

Post by dukeyukey »

irrational wrote: post #173
sharkweek wrote: post #73

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…

Prior to the pandemic my company was moving to a model where nobody had a fixed desk. You had a backpack and a laptop and plugged is wherever you could find a free place. You were not supposed to stay at the same desk for longer than 3 hours. There was actually a team in each building walking around and enforcing it. Post-pandemic they have said that is being scrapped since there is too much chance of infecting peopl…

So I get the idea of hotdesking, even if I think it's bad. But moving every 3 hours? Why tf do they think that's a good idea? Office workers aren't migratory animals that must move on when the good grasses have been depleted.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#175

Post by dukeyukey »

Bakary wrote: post #165
dont__panic wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of like making products out of crappier constituent parts seems really unimportant compared to the cost savings. Does it make sense on the short term balance sheet? Of course. But, to quote Christmas vacation: "Sometimes things look good on paper, but lose their luster when you see how it affects real folks. I guess a healthy bottom line doesn't mean much if to get it, you have to hurt the ones you depend on. It…

This is assuming that programmers from countries with lower salaries are less competent, which is not always the case. It's harder and harder for workers in the developed world to justify that they are more productive than others. For millions of smart people around the world the hurdle to a better life is just the right visa or residence permit.

No, but what should be unequivalently true is:

* Longer distances with more variance in connection quality degrades meetings and shared whiteboarding

* Timezones can destroy productivity if you let them, and need managing to not be a hindrance. If you want to run a complicated bit of SQL past a DB admin first, but your DB admin is 5 hours ahead of you and finished work already, you pay the cost of context switching and picking it up again tomorrow.

* Even if everyone speaks English, having a dozen different dialects and accents in one meeting doesn't help with comprehension, even moreso on dodgy connections.

* Cultural differences can be managed, but if you've got people from half a dozen different cultures on your team, you're gonna hit differences, some very difficult to surmount. And this is magnified with the lack of body-language communication you'd get in person.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#176

Post by bzbarsky »

Bakary wrote: post #143
bzbarsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of assumptions going into that implication. My experience with working remotely, on globally distributed teams, for about 20 years now is: * Synchronous high-bandwidth communication (read: meeting, ideally with a shared whiteboard) is pretty handy sometimes. * Timezones really do matter. If you want a sync meeting that includes people in Europe, the US, and APAC, someone will have a bad time. If you w…

Most of these hurdles seem really unimportant compared to the salary savings

It depends. If you have to redo the work multiple times because of miscommunications, that can easily eat up salary savings. If you can't hire the best people because of some of the aggravations involved, you may get a worse quality product or it may take a lot more time than you planned, or both.

Again, hiring someone remotely in the way you describe might well make a lot of sense. But it's not nearly the no-brainer you paint it as.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#177

Post by pjettter »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #153
pjettter wrote: post #78

For some, WFH is more attractive and more productive than for others. But why does it have to be an either or? There are advantages with sitting next to colleagues. There are advantages with being able to skip the commute and being able to concentrate at home. Ideally, someone would choose what's most productive, which is probably a mix of WFH and working on site.

> But why does it have to be an either or? In mixed onsite / remote teams, the remote employees can be seriously disadvantaged regarding access to information, participation in decision-making, etc. Some of the comments above mention this effect, and my own personal experience has very painfully confirmed it. It was a truly awful experience for me. I suspect it's what lead to the maxim, "If anyone is remote, then eve…

Thanks. That partly confirms my feelings. Now with Covid here in Sweden at my company, everyone is remote. It works (equally bad and equally good) for everyone.

I think if a company is serious about a mix, there needs to be optimization around this. Like, remote Mondays and Fridays, if you want to be remote. Meetings on Tue/Thu. Something like that.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#178

Post by psim1 »

sedachv wrote: post #169
psim1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "slyly" you mean without notifying their employers, this could backfire on them in small and big ways. In a small way, it would affect local/state taxes that are withheld. In a big way, employers--whether rightly or wrongly--want to know where the employee lives in order to set a cost-of-living salary. If the employer finds out you're taking a SF salary while living in Bend, there are likely to be consequences.

> set a cost-of-living salary This is total nonsense, and you should never put up with this rationalization if HR tries to pull "cost of living" on you. Explain to them that it is called a "labor market" for a reason. Prices in markets are determined by supply and demand; pricing is not driven by cost except as a floor. This is economics 101.

The major tech companies are doing it. Nonsense maybe, but you're not going to win an argument with them. "At-will."

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#179

Post by bzbarsky »

wtetzner wrote: post #99
bzbarsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of assumptions going into that implication. My experience with working remotely, on globally distributed teams, for about 20 years now is: * Synchronous high-bandwidth communication (read: meeting, ideally with a shared whiteboard) is pretty handy sometimes. * Timezones really do matter. If you want a sync meeting that includes people in Europe, the US, and APAC, someone will have a bad time. If you w…

I think companies also need to deal with the tax implications of someone working in another country. Not sure what impact that would have.

Yes, this can be a pain. There are some contracting companies that handle this for you, but that can involve hiring people in other countries as contractors, not employees, having an extra intermediary that handles their payroll and whose incentives in terms of quality service may not align with yours, etc, etc. Plus of course regulations about how long you can have people contracting for you before you have to hire hem as employees and whatnot.

Also, it's not just tax implications. There's also complexity about time off (vacation and leave regulations differ a lot across the globe), conditions under which people can or cannot be fired (or hired), differences in terms of non-salary benefits that must be provided, etc.

A simple example of the hiring/firing thing: under French law, if someone is on maternity leave you can't fire them. You also can't hire someone on an indefinite-term basis to do their job while they are on leave. Hiring someone for the specific term of the leave seems to be OK. See https://www.globalworkplaceinsider.com/2017/05/do-employees-... toward the end, though the whole article is a great illustration of some of the differences in this area between French and US law.

And then there are the fun parts about general regulatory compliance. As a simple example I've run into, the US _requires_ you to collect and report data about the race of your employees (see EEO-1), while the EU _forbids_ collecting this data to start with, last I checked. So you have to have distinct processes for employees in different jurisdictions, your HR database needs to handle these differences in rules, etc.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#180

Post by standardUser »

cudgy wrote: post #167
aspaceman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean ask for forgiveness instead of permission, as the saying goes.

Sounds like a great employer ... asking permission to move. What’s next? Provide them with spousal income figures so the employer can adjust your pay accordingly?

That makes as much sense as basing someone's salary on their zip code, as if living in a less wealthy area make them a less valuable employee.
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