Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#231

Post by nwienert » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #219

nwienert wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In general, I think the concern is whether it's a gender role that women are being forced into as opposed to something that they really are choosing voluntarily. Those two things can be hard to separate though. During the current pandemic, the data I've seen suggests that women are disproportionately dropping out of the workforce for childcare and other reasons. Of course if someone has to drop out of the workforce i…

If you look at the data, in the most liberal countries that rank highest on women's rights, education, equality of upbringing and lack of gender stereotypes, etc (nordic and some euro countries), women actually tend to choose more to work in less technical jobs and jobs that have less of a competitive career ladder.

So if you're going on the data at least as far as I know it, this should be a good sign.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#232

Post by marketingPro » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

x87678r wrote: post #158

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…

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.

No. Stop propagating that myth.

Read the link provided that explains the terms and proves that low cost plans are the best for chronic conditions.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#233

Post by marketingPro » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

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!

Only difference is who is in network.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#234

Post by sethammons » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

wrkronmiller wrote: post #133

koheripbal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate outcome, no matter what companies do, is that tech workers just won't live in big cities any longer. If remote work is an option, then paying high rents just doesn't make sense. Moreover, as this trend continues, the ultimate outcome is not US workers moving to low-cost locations, it is foreign workers supplanting US workers in extremely low cost locations.

I don't buy this. > If remote work is an option, then paying high rents just doesn't make sense. I live in NYC because I like NYC, not because the pay is higher. I took a net pay cut after rent, taxes, etc after moving here from Maryland, in spite of getting a substantial pay rise. I suspect that's not uncommon. > the ultimate outcome is not US workers moving to low-cost locations, it is foreign workers supplanting U…

yeah, to each their own. You would have to pay me an order of magnitude more than I make now to get me to work in NYC.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#235

Post by ghaff » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

gregkerzhner wrote: post #223

ghaff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In tech, I think it would be hard to take large multi-month breaks on a regular basis. There's such rapid change that you either keep your hand in a bit when you're off or you're going to spend a month of time getting back up to speed after every break.

I would spend more time off if I had it but I really can't complain too much as I have pretty good vacation by US standards and I normally also travel a lot on business to interesting places which is almost like having extra vacation.

The one person I know who did work part time in this manner was a contract lawyer with a company and I think they could pretty much just take multi-month breaks with a bit of planning.

>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.

The challenge there is that the pay almost has to be less than it would be for full-time work. And a lot of (most) people aren't really in a position to take a low salary in exchange for part-time work. Overall, I assume you'd cut your hiring pool appreciably.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#236

Post by 908B64B197 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

davidf560 wrote: post #131

ghaff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if (even just keeping the discussion to the US) a company pays, say, Chicago wages everywhere, that means they effectively probably can't hire anyone in the Bay Area for example. Of course, a lot of companies already basically don't try to salary match the hire who has an offer from Facebook or Google in SV and wants to work there.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will s…

> Perhaps the real message here is that SV companies are realizing this is a perfect way to get out of paying $300-500K salaries for jobs that are more like $150K anywhere else in the US. It's kind of like the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago, except instead of getting 3-5 developers for the price of 1 by going to Europe or Asia, SV companies can get 3-5 developers for the price of 1 that are still US-based and only a couple of timezones away.

Is it really possible to get the same talent and skills?

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#237

Post by mercutio2 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

JauntTrooper wrote: post #164

jsjohnst wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's something that's often referred to as the "Mega Backdoor Roth" that lets you shelter an extra $37,500 per year beyond the traditional 401(k) limits.

True, but that tax sheltering is of future income, it's not pre-tax in the normal-employee case.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#238

Post by chefkoch » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

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.

Where is that? In Germany i pay 480€ for a top notch private plan.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#239

Post by jjav » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

Charles808 wrote: post #85

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…

Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs. Companies save a fortune by having employees work from home. "Geopay" scales are exploitation. Employee X should be compensated in relation to the value they bring through their efforts, not at the minimum possible level that the employer can get away with.

> Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs.

That estimate is high by about an order of magnitude. To get a sense of the cost ceiling per person, look at the least cost-effective way to rent a monthly desk which is to do it as an individual in a co-working space.

Here's one price list for coworking space in Campbell (Silicon Valley) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iljwYScQ4d5F4rUcQN-9XH0D8E2...

An open office desk is $325/month, up to a dedicated cubicle for $725/month.

So for a junior engineer at $150K salary, that's between 2.6% to 5.8% of their base comp in office space cost.

Now, of course, a company renting tens of thousands of square feet at a time gets better rates due to scale, so the percentage is less than those examples.

Re: Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

#240

Post by rich_sasha » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

I wonder how many of these “permanent” WFH positions will be made to return to the office after Covid.

It’s nice to say that now when you don’t have the choice anyway. But when the tide turns, it will be easy to force people to return / fire them / make it unattractive for them to avoid the office.