Coinbase will be a remote-first company

Off topic but why would a corporate company use a website for their blog which puts articles behind a paywall? It seems completely at odds with the purpose of a corporate blog.

>As for "career ambition", you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.

>You don't have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.

I'm sorry but that came across as both condescending and judgmental. I know plenty of people chose the life they have here because they want to, not because they have to sell their soul or what not. There is a lot more perks from having a fulfilling job other than making a big paycheck, it ranges from working closely with amazing people to tackling challenging and fun problems.

I know for sure the reason I go to work these days isn't because of money, since I'm past the point where I care too much about it.

Finally there is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing financial success. Having desire to "enjoy nature" and having desire to "have money" are both greed, just in different forms. I definitely do not consider myself morally superior just because I enjoy hiking...

>From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult.

I've been both inside and outside of SV (worked in Texas, Bay Area, and now in Seattle), and I have to say your understanding of SV culture is extremely superficial, likely augmented by the cherry-picking examples and sensationalized media portrayal.

> maybe I'm the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction

This is a bit of a false premise, I've been working from home for over a decade and I don't mind human interaction at all, I get plenty of it when hanging out with friends and family, but I do prefer my office space at home to some open space office with lots of noise and people constantly coming by and asking for stuff.

> The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL.

While this could be true, it's entirely up to you if you want to work for such a company. Great developers will not work for cheap regardless of where they're from, and just because you live in a cheaper place doesn't mean the work you're doing is somehow lower value than the work employees in the SF office are doing.

your comment is dismissive.

I have been in Silicon Valley for 5+ years and I agree with his assessment. Culture here is fake and hollow. A lot of hypocrisy.

I have been swallowed by the corporate machine and endured the bullshit commute, bullshit office and bullshit tasks that made me busy the whole day without making me really rpoductive. Now that I'm working from home, I'm finally realizing what I missed out on.

My quality of life is levels higher than it used to be and I'm way more productive. This pandemic is an awakening for me. I will now refuse to go back to the office more than maybe one day a week and I'm ready to change job to do so.

I would bet that 90%+ of people got swallowed into the corporate machine without thinking too much simply about it because it is the easy and convenient thing to do. I was also saying that I was "fulfilled" with my job and that my goal was not to make money.

Going remote is not the norm and therefore it takes a bit of courage to jump into it.

100% prefer remote work (not to be confused with WFH. Remote work != WFH). It's not necessarily the WFH aspect actually, it's more the "live anywhere you want" part, not having to commute, and the "avoiding all the office bullshit" aspects.

Regarding location: I don't have roots in SF/NYC/Seattle where all the well-paying tech jobs are, and have no desire to make any of those cities my home. Lived in NYC 5 years, that was enough for me. Visited SF for a weekend for an interview, was appalled by the blatant homelessness on the streets. I'm not really interested in living anywhere long-term where a "starter home" goes for $1m, especially a boring suburb like Mountain View or Menlo Park (to be fair I've never visited, but I grew up in the suburbs of DC and U.S. suburbs just aren't my thing). While working remotely, I've been able to travel the world, and more recently settle down in a (first-world) country where my cost of living is no more than 1/3 of what it was in NYC, with increased quality of life.

Regarding the office bullshit part - every office job I've ever had has office bullshit. You're expected to be there between 10:30am-5:30pm, or whatever the mandated hours are, passive aggressively enforced by some dreaded morning standup where for some reason the time is non-negotiable. You can bust your ass off for the first 4 hours of the day (probably the limit of productive work before reaching diminishing returns). Then it's 2:30pm and you've done a day's work but your brain is fried so you know you're not going to be productive, but you can't just leave early because then your PM and co-workers on other teams will think you're a slacker, and the executives will be concerned that their secretaries, oops I mean "executive assistants", who get paid a fraction of your salary despite working longer hours, will start to get jealous. So you have to figure out a way to burn the next 3 hours, maybe have your IDE up in one monitor while reading HN in another.

Meanwhile when I WFH, when I know I'm not going to be productive, I just do something else and don't have to put on this facade of looking like I'm being productive 8 hours/day. As a night owl I'll get into a flow state and pull an all-nighter one day, and then take the next day off. I don't set an alarm clock before I go to sleep because I'm more productive when I'm well-rested.

Also open offices suck. Maybe I wouldn't be so appalled by office jobs as much if we at least got our own cubicles. As fun as it is to make fun of cubicles, they're a hell of a lot more comfortable then being on an assembly line of desks in a giant coliseum. Though no matter where your office is, it eventually gets boring. Variety is always good, and remote work gives you that freedom.