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

221–230 of 278 posts

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#221

Post by tayo42 »

ahelwer wrote: post #14
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.

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.

Thats like making payments on a luxury car and not using it

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#222

Post by lastofthemojito »

freetime2 wrote: post #202
netcan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right. I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions. Anyway... WFH and out…

Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging. There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire…

Timezones are funny because you still get a wide variance of working hours within them. I worked on a project a while back with an early bird (~6am-2pm) and a night owl (~noon-8pm) who had to coordinate a lot of changes. I (half-)joked that they probably would have coordinated better if one of them was in Reykjavik and the other in LA rather than try to do everything in that narrow window when both were in the office.

I know some remote companies have timezone-based policies (e.g., you must be within 4 timezones of NYC). I wonder if we'll see less focus on where the employee is and more on when they are willing to work ("I don't care that you're in Kyev or Mumbai or Jakarta, as long as you'll work our hours").

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#223

Post by gregkerzhner »

ghaff wrote: post #209
gregkerzhner wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for part time to be successful it has to be the right environment. Contract work seems perfect - you are focused and have a singular mission. I can also totally see working on a personal project 20 hours a week and being super productive. However, working part time for a large organization seems tricky. There are so many meetings, distractions, and responsibilities other than just coding that it seems like yo…

There would definitely have to be coordination at the organizational level. Say, no meetings on Mondays and Friday and individuals can choose to work individually or not on those days. But that starts to get inefficient for the people who do want to work and it reduces the flexibility of those who want to work part-time. And TBH, if I were to work fewer hours in a year, I'd probably prefer to have bigger chunks of ti…

For me, personally, part time work would be the dream. I used to contract and would do year long projects and then take large multi month breaks between. Neither "mode" was optimal. Work periods are obviously stressful and its hard to find free time. But the rest periods also got a bit old after a month or so, and even when we were traveling to cool places, I would find myself grabbing the laptop and coding just for fun and to keep my skills sharp. A part time scenario seems like the perfect in between.

However, I never saw a place where it could work. For one, if the rest of your team was full time and you were part time, you would automatically be less productive and useful than the rest of your peers.

With your Monday / Friday scenario with no meetings, it seems like the people that only worked Tue - Thur would have their schedule disproportionally filled with meetings, and have much less time to get stuff done. This could work for a manager type role, but it wouldn't work for an IC.

I feel like part time work, much like remote work, might require an all-in buy in from the whole team. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future companies go "all part time" and have their whole organization be tuned for part time productivity.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#224

Post by ghaff »

freetime2 wrote: post #202
netcan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right. I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions. Anyway... WFH and out…

Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging. There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire…

Yes. I (US East Coast) work with Europe a lot and that difference (6 hours) feels to me about the limit of frequent ongoing realtime communications. It means you've got a nice window of time that isn't too early for the US or too late for Europe. More than that and someone's taking 5am calls or 10pm calls.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#225

Post by toast0 »

thebean11 wrote: post #146
marketingPro wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I came to this conclusion myself a few months ago, that getting the cheapest plan and hitting the max out of pocket every single year is the cheapest course of action if you buy your own insurance plan. Kind of figured there was a catch though, maybe not!

Yeah, as far as I could tell when shopping for exchange plans, they all mostly cover the same stuff, and once you pick the company and HMO/EPO/PPO the metal choice definitely doesn't change what's covered or the provider network.

At that point, different metals might hit the out of pocket max sooner, but I just went for the one with the least total of premiums and out of pocket max, which was also the one with the least total of premiums, so I save money if I don't use it or if we hit the cap.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#226

Post by ghaff »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #222
freetime2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging. There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire…

Timezones are funny because you still get a wide variance of working hours within them. I worked on a project a while back with an early bird (~6am-2pm) and a night owl (~noon-8pm) who had to coordinate a lot of changes. I (half-)joked that they probably would have coordinated better if one of them was in Reykjavik and the other in LA rather than try to do everything in that narrow window when both were in the office…

I know someone who has their own PR agency who lives in Hawaii. Most (all?) of her clients are US West Coast. She just keeps an early bird schedule.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#227

Post by uberduper »

kethinov wrote: post #67

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think th…

Everyone thinks they should be getting SF salaries in this new era of remote work. Nobody thinks they should be getting a Flint salary. Equal pay for equal work doesn't have to mean the bar is raised.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#228

Post by JauntTrooper »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #205
JauntTrooper wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

This is kind of off topic... but if something were to happen and you were unable to work for a medical reason (disability), you would be able to claim Medicare at any age, correct? [I am a US citizen and also have the ability to google this, but just wanted to ask another human being...]

Yes, I think so, but after a 2 year waiting period. You don't have that wait for Social Security disability benefits though.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#229

Post by ghaff »

ryandrake wrote: post #207
lastofthemojito wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we'll see a lot of people try to game it: * Not updating their address with their company after moving to a new, lower-cost location * Using the address of family or friends in a higher-cost area * Renting a PO Box or cheap room or studio in a high-cost area, but spending most time elsewhere I'd imagine we'll see companies pop up offering address verification services - physically and/or digitally tailing emp…

I'd expect to see this too, but I think anyone planning to do these tactics is walking an extremely thin line between "gaming the system" and fraud. Not to be Debbie Downer, but if someone is thinking about getting a PO box in SF and funneling all their work connections through a silicon valley VPN, they should think about how it will look in front of a judge when their company goes after them.

I see people threatening to do this sort of thing. But, seriously, do you really think you can keep the fact that you leave a couple time zones away from SV a secret from all your coworkers (one of whom will drop a dime on you eventually).

"Can you drop in on a meeting tomorrow?" "Um, there's a blizzard in the Midwest." "Well sure, but you live in Santa Cruz, right? No snow on 17."

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#230

Post by apexalpha »

nwienert wrote: post #215
apexalpha wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted, but you're right. Traditional family values still resonate in these numbers and many people blame women working part-time for a gender imbalance at the top of companies. So that gender imbalance is definitely on the agenda. Whether you think these numbers are concerning depends on your political stance.

If women on average prefer to work less hours isn’t the concerning thing the people who seem to want to force them to work more? Especially when it’s oftentimes men that call this a “problem”? It seems unless you have some data showing their preference is to work more but they are limited by something externally forced on them, and you’d need data not opinion, you shouldn’t be concern-trolling. Women buy more dresses…

This is a pretty good summary to be honest.
Post reply on HN