91–100 of 186 posts
I worry at the long term implications of remote work: - I hear of Bay Area tech companies throwing stupid high salaries at senior devs in smaller local firms -> more consolidation in tech - how non people centric will work become? I feel being 100% remote I have even less of a relationship with anyone at home. I’m a commodity doing work. Maybe there’s more of a temptation to get that commodity cheaper elsewhere
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Equilibrium is what I expect. That may have a more sharp effect than the math would suggest, though. Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off. The cross-effects of a limited pool tend to be multiplicative, not additive. The fact that the people doing the hiring probably enjoy those salaries too is maybe the biggest counterargument I'd have to my own…
> Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off. It will be very interesting to see just how big the pool of people who can pass the interviews[0] but weren't willing to relocate is. The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers. If only 10% of the folks who could pass those interviews and get those…
The open office movement should be all anyone needs to see to believe that the no-office movement will have legs. We perpetuated an employment style for years that widely known to be worse for both employees and employers on many levels than a traditional layout, and merely absorbed that as the cost of doing business.
If it works well it'll hit all the much faster, but in tech, anyway, all you need to hear is "less overhead" and "cheap office rental" to know it'll become popular no matter how well it does or doesn't work. I dunno other knowledge worker industries but I can't imagine they're much more altruistic.
At the individual level, productivity in office VS at home varies depending on your personal circumstances, preferences, and role. I hope larger companies realize that a one-size-fits-all policy isn't the best solution.
Instead, I'd like them to allow individual teams to decide what options they want to allow within the team (full-time in office, work from home N days/week, full-time remote, etc.) Then the team can develop norms and processes for work and communication that make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off. It will be very interesting to see just how big the pool of people who can pass the interviews[0] but weren't willing to relocate is. The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers. If only 10% of the folks who could pass those interviews and get those…
> The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers How? For at least the last decade, your typical developer in the Bay Area has been a renter...long since priced-out of a single-family home. Even FAANG developers are priced out of the better suburbs.
The rental prices and turnover speed are another indicator of this - sure, the ones buying houses are the ones who've hit the stock jackpot, but the competition for places of any sort is intensified by the importation of well-paid talent.
Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to be in the office more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass. I won't give this up.
Too take the exact opposite view : Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to setup zoom calls every time I need to talk to someone more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm less productive than ever. I'm more depressed than ever. I'm eating poorly and drinking more. I almost don't sleep anymore. I just want to spend few hours by myself instead of being constantly around my family members. My f…
If you hate your family so much why don't you move in with roommates? I don't talk to my family either.
I suspect a lot of the "we're all going to be remote from now on" sentiment is overblown. It seems to me more likely that there will be a few more remote friendly companies, and a very few more remote-only companies after the dust settles, but the real shift will be for most "office based" workers will be the expectation of partially working from home. There is a big difference between "never going to an office again…
We sit at our desks and communicate via IM & email anyway. The internet has changed reality, and changed a lot of the underlying logic for the status quo. Social distancing for a whole year is one hell of a catalyst.
Meanwhile, there are real economic factors like large housing cost and wage disparities between (often nearby) locations. Reasons why remote isn't always good notwithstanding, underlying economics exerts has a ratchet like influence. ...Not to mention globalisation.
So yes, I agree that the maximalist prediction is overblown. That said, I think this is a complex chain-of-events type of process that is now going to be moving faster. Companies are now more experienced/capable of remote. Employees are more capable of it. People have an understanding of it, how to fix it, etc.
It's a combination of prevailing wind and gust of wind.
My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…
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There are some people who cannot work from home. These people have been especially vocal. Sometimes they include people who have kids, other times they include people who get their social interaction in at work. I think the office should accommodate them as well as remote workers. The biggest challenge I've faced being on a remote team (read: not necessarily WFH) is that people who are at the primary physical locatio…
In my experience, there are two ways for a company to be successful at having remote employees: 1. everyone is 100% remote 2. everyone comes into the office occasionally Anything else leads to a two-tiered system.
just wait until corporations realize that if your job can be done from kansas city... it can also be done from manila... and a whole new class of gigs just vanish.
There are a lot of assumptions going into that implication. My experience with working remotely, on globally distributed teams, for about 20 years now is: * Synchronous high-bandwidth communication (read: meeting, ideally with a shared whiteboard) is pretty handy sometimes. * Timezones really do matter. If you want a sync meeting that includes people in Europe, the US, and APAC, someone will have a bad time. If you w…
My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…
I've heard of companies hot-desking like this so they can have fewer desks than total employees, splitting each desk between people whose schedules are "out of phase" with each other. It sounds basically intolerable.
I'm somewhat less sensitive to many common office complaints than a lot of sw engineers I've worked with, but if this were something my employer announced I'd be on my way out immediately.