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Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#191

Post by almost_usual »

throwaway713 wrote: post #182
dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.

Or even have the funds to start your own company rather than spend it on rent / housing.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#192

Post by the_gipsy »

jeffbee wrote: post #39
dumbfoundded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.

Reminds of that Office Space clip, "What is it exactly, that you DO here?".

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#193

Post by CodeCube »

nsnick wrote: post #166
dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

Except that a lot of tech companies are out in the suburbs...

lol, imagine wanting to have a 2 hour public transit commute (one way) from SF to the googleplex

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#194

Post by Frost1x »

Aeolun wrote: post #173
dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

Why would work from home in the suburbs be better than work from home in the city?

Average commute travel time per day?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#195

Post by icebraining »

jekriro7 wrote: post #78
Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

It would be good if AWS and GCE were leveraged by workers at home as generic data centers to store their private data Working on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collection Sell or donate access to specific dat…

Yeah, I get what you mean. Native applications store your data locally, which is privacy-friendly, but sharing is hard. SaaS brought easy sharing of data, but it also brought data mining. So the goal is to have data in the cloud, but isolated, rather than in a big shared database in some SaaS provider.

If you trust the privacy of cloud providers, you can spin up a server and use https://sandstorm.io/, which is designed around that: private infra, with granular sharing of data.

If you don't, you need local compute and encryption. Keybase would be a decent example - while you can't use your own cloud account, they only see encrypted data.

That said, there's a reason a lot of people deleted their Keybase accounts when they got acquired by Zoom. Data mining is very enticing, so outside of projects ran by idealist volunteers - which will always have a hard time competing with funded companies -, how do you keep developers from adding mining abilities even to the native/self-hosted applications?

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#196

Post by brlewis »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

The body language thing is important. I think it helps to position the camera and your hands in a way that lets people see your gestures.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#197

Post by jrockway »

redisman wrote: post #129
fermienrico wrote: post #85

Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

Isn't this a win-win-win though? Salaries become more normalized across the country so people can work from where they choose, SF rents will go down as techies start streaming out of the Bay Area, hiring pools for companies become inclusive of people who don't want to move to the Bay Area (or the other 2-3 tech cities). The rest of the country also certainly doesn't pay 1/3rd of your salary.

Will people start streaming out of the Bay Area, though? The thing that always interested me about the Bay Area was that my friends in Mountain View would be posting long bike rides throughout the winter. Where it's snowy and below freezing in New York, it's 55 degrees and sunny there. I imagine people like that a lot, and is part of the reason it's a popular place to live.

There are other places in the US that are warm in the winter, of course, but less of them are also nice in the summer. Then among those, very few of them match the Bay Area in friendliness to things like LGBT causes.

I have a feeling that many people will continue gravitating to the Bay Area.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#198

Post by gen220 »

mjayhn wrote: post #140
fermienrico wrote: post #85

Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1/3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

I wfh and I won't work for a company that bases my pay on my zipcode (Gitlab). I want complete flexibility on where I live. There are plenty of remote companies that don't do that, especially now post-covid. I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don't just take Gitlabs idea of it.

Is this a popular thing inside of gitlab? Personally, I'm conflicted: it's an interesting experiment, and I get where it comes from, but it's perhaps a bit too nearsighted.

In the end, I think zipcode (and COL) is a weak proxy for talent. It's very easy to measure zipcode, compared to talent.

But, think about it from the other angle: if you have a history of this talent (earning high salaries in high-COL zip codes or otherwise), why on earth would you accept anything less than that, when moving to a lower COL area?

To me, it seems like a decision that would hurt the employer more than help them, since the people with proven talent would work for companies that don't discriminate on zip codes. And that costs more than the investment in assessing incoming talent levels.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#199

Post by nostrademons »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

> I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.

This might also be a trust thing. Studies have found that in-person social interaction leads to increased levels of trust among the group, but remote social interaction doesn't have this affect. The higher you go up the management chain, the more trust is required to perform your job effectively. ICs usually work under well-defined, measurable conditions: you can determine from their work product whether an engineer, salesperson, or designer is being productive. Executives do not work under these conditions, and arguably the job of an executive is to define those metrics. To get everyone rowing in the same direction requires an immense amount of trust and collaboration amongst the high-level leadership of the company, and it seems like it'd be challenging to achieve that virtually.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#200

Post by cmrdporcupine »

louhike wrote: post #121
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional / mental health stress due to the current scenario. I don't feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we've been doing it for 2 months now. In short I hop…

Yes, it is not representative at all. It's a stressful period, kids are always at home as schools are closed, the lockdown requires more organisation than usual in everyday life and there are less options to relieve stress. We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.

My employer gave us the clear message early on that personal / family care comes first, take the time you need to deal with crisis, etc. And we have indeed had plenty of family issues to deal with and it's been very difficult to concentrate on work.

The problem is going to be when performance is evaluated -- no matter how much leeway has been given now, I will be compared in some respect to my coworkers who have been able to manage this transition better, who haven't had a turbulent home life, etc. etc.

This is giving me the stressies.

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