Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in • Hacker News Board

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#41

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #6

lotsofpulp wrote: post #2

>She often woke up at 4:30 a.m. to drive from her home in New Jersey, catch a bus into Manhattan, hop on the subway, squeeze in a workout and get to Jefferies’ trading floor by 7:30 a.m. Work dinners ran late into the night, and redeye flights to London were common. >For Ms. Batchelor, Jefferies’s new policy means coming in to the office three days a week. Although she plans to travel to meetings when necessary, Ms.…

As if anyone would believe this person was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. In my experience working with highly motivated, highly paid people they often aren't particularly self-aware or introspective. In their mind it's not a tradeoff; they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hour…

> I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers.

Also, "say yes to and do everything your boss/the police says to you" was ingrained into children for centuries.

The cost of that obedience propaganda, however, never showed up until modern day cutthroat capitalism.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#42

Post by enra » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

Dyac wrote: post #33

bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around. That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator.…

Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.

You and the company still needs to know/decide which locale you get taxed in and which regulation to follow.

Even in California, SF has different payroll taxes and regulation than other cities in the area. Massachusetts requires employers to open a unemployment account in state. If the employee moves to a state the employer doesn’t have a employees previously, you need to register in the state and it might mean you have to now pay sales taxes on revenue in the state.

So unless you become an independent contractor and deal with this things yourself, the employer needs to know where you live most of the tax year.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#43

Post by pgwhalen » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #24

murph-almighty wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better…

The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.

I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps.

I’m sure this varies by company.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#44

Post by lekanwang » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

I'm finding with the teams I'm working with that the junior employees are the ones most impacted by not working from an office, but they often don't realize what they're missing -- the less formal forms of mentorship, stronger community, interacting with more people that's not on their team and in their role, overhearing context, the ability to have a 3-min quick chat with a senior person without a scheduled meeting, and developing that stronger sense of "what good looks like." I'm really concerned that we're going to have a two-tiered system where a bunch of people early in their careers are going to feel stuck in a few years and not even realize why.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#45

Post by dsizzle » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

lekanwang wrote: post #44

I'm finding with the teams I'm working with that the junior employees are the ones most impacted by not working from an office, but they often don't realize what they're missing -- the less formal forms of mentorship, stronger community, interacting with more people that's not on their team and in their role, overhearing context, the ability to have a 3-min quick chat with a senior person without a scheduled meeting,…

In my hybrid office, the juniors are also mostly the ones going into the office, so maybe they've appreciated your point.

I also observe that they are also the ones hanging out outside the office, so I would guess this is part of it too. Seniors tend to compartmentalize "work friends" vs friend-friends.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#46

Post by downrightmike » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

time_to_smile wrote: post #30

chadash wrote: post #20

While I do think that attitudes towards remote work have fundamentally changed, it'll be interesting to see how things shake out over the next 5-10 years. I suspect that as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance, in many fields. If your boss's boss works in the office, who is more likely to get a promotion, the person that works from home or the person who…

> as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance China's "lying flat" movement is already starting to take a hold in the West, and I think as the reality of climate catastrophe and other systemic breakdowns continue to remain visible in the post-pandemic world, there will be an increasingly large number of people that have absolutely zero interest in "career adv…

Modern day advancement is usually done when you hop to a new job anyways.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#47

Post by mabbo » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #25

mabbo wrote: post #5

Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. And that's not to detract from either side of that choice. It's just a choice that has to be made. What's going to be more interesting is what this does to the market rate for labor compensation between these two pools. Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your…

> while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around. That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator.…

I think some companies might do that. I think they'll wind up losing money as a result.

If you're willing to pay more for identical work because your employee chose to live somewhere more expensive, you're encouraging your employees to live in the most expensive places.

On the other hand, if you offer a fair wage for the work done regardless of location, your employees get better value by living somewhere inexpensive, which lowers the required compensation for the same employee.

I think Facebook is simply creating more problems for themselves by bothering with this.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#48

Post by hallway_monitor » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #34

krageon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You responded to something the author did not write using a quote taken entirely out of context. While the text of your message is fair and probably true (although outsourcing comes with chunky quality issues that frankly have not been solved yet), it is not at all topical.

I disagree that it was out of context either of the comment, or in the issue at large. It doesn't matter that in this comment, the particular context was ostensibly 'move to the city to work in the office then get paid more'. It's irrelevant - excessive demands in whatever form will be acquiesced by hiring better talent, elsewhere. American workers making any kinds of special demands are going to get outsourced. The…

It is possible to find companies that indeed do have loyalty. Personally, I have long ago resolved not to work for companies that outsource (offshore, same thing) engineering. It seems there may be a resurgence here in America of people willing to put their money where their mouth is: Buy local, hire local, keep the money here.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#49

Post by kgxkgxkhxoh » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

enra wrote: post #42

Dyac wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.

You and the company still needs to know/decide which locale you get taxed in and which regulation to follow. Even in California, SF has different payroll taxes and regulation than other cities in the area. Massachusetts requires employers to open a unemployment account in state. If the employee moves to a state the employer doesn’t have a employees previously, you need to register in the state and it might mean you h…

More and more remote companies use PEOs. No need to incorporate in 50 states, you just pay someone else to.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#50

Post by amf12 » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #28

jollybean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves. There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will. In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-fa…

Having worked for years with overseas contractors, I’m really not too concerned about my job security

The problem with overseas contractors is - you get what you pay for. There are still excellent contractors out there who charge more, but still less than what employees get paid here. The second problem is discoverability. It is difficult to find those excellent contractors from all the not-so-good ones out there.