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Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

nytimes.com

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

#91

Post by inherently_juxt »

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.

Don't you have to give them your legal address when you start working for them?

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

#93

Post by vincnetas »

tshaddox wrote: post #68
mabbo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the cost of living adjustment were “perfect” then it wouldn’t encourage employees to live in any particular place, right? Presumably the whole point is to give each employee the same “effective compensation” for their particular place of residence. Of course, it’s not so easy to agree on what the ideal method of cost of living adjustment would be.

Compensation should be adjusted to value created not expenses incurred.

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

#94

Post by inherently_juxt »

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.…

If I were looking for work and I were a top tier candidate, I would not let companies play games by determining pay based on my location. I'd work with a company that pays me well no matter where I choose to live. After all, where I live should only concern them if there's some kind of tax implication.

Top tier candidates aren't stupid, and ones that would willingly subject themselves to that are probably just looking for a year or two stint to bolster their resumes. Either that or they aren't as smart as they make themselves out to be.

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

#95

Post by bamboozled »

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,…

This is true, so much so we just don’t hire juniors because we haven’t figured out how we’d manage, we’re fully remote. If We did hire juniors I’d probably want them co-located near me somehow.

Ultimately I think people will work more in offices again for this reason and for the reason that even the company I work for, which has always been remote first has a large group of people who live in the same city, they meet in person more often and seem to call much more of the shots and receive promotions more than others.

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

#96

Post by Animats »

Wall Street banks posted record profit and revenue during the pandemic, as government stimulus supported consumers stuck at home and companies sought to do deals, proving to bankers and traders that they have little need to work out of the office the way they used to. The attendance numbers are low. The financial industry employs 332,100 people in New York City. In October, only 27 percent of those people came in daily.

That says it doesn't make economic sense to bring people back to the office.

The executives pushing for that may be the ones on the way out.

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

#97

Post by enra »

kgxkgxkhxoh wrote: post #49
enra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use it too, but doesn't change the fact the the employer needs to tell the PEO where the employee is located. PEO also have limits, like MA example, the company still needs to open the unemployment accounts directly with the state. Sales tax is another thing that you have to do directly.

My point was that main reason companies need to know where the employee is compliance, employment law, taxes and potentially IP protection. While the employer wouldn't care about the location because of pay scale, they still need to know for other reasons.

Until we can all live in some United Kingdom of the Internet, the unfortunate fact is that local laws apply to companies and employees when the employee resides in the jurisdiction.

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

#98

Post by paxys »

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…

Ultimately it's the employees that will make the choice, not the company. My wife works for a large NYC-based bank which has been trying to mandate 100% return to office since October 2020. They keep pushing it back by a month or two at a time due to employee backlash, and a year later still maintain that things will be back to "normal" soon. It's become a running joke among employees.

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

#99

Post by randallsquared »

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #86
actually_a_dog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. It seems a lot of people disagree with you: > In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baselin…

But what if you turn that around? If you are currently remote but considering an offer from a place that's in-office, wouldn't you want a higher wage to compensate you for the extra hassle of commuting? That's extra free time you're never getting back.

There are people who prefer to work in an office, and some who have that preference even if it puts them on a train for an hour or two a day. As long as we don't get legislation to force employers one way or another, I'd expect employees to self-select into those who like being around others all day, and those who prefer to work in a private office. It's a serendipitous solution we've been presented to all those open plan offices that a certain set hate: you can have your own private office with a view, but you'll pay for it yourself.

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

#100

Post by heavyset_go »

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 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.

Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over how work is done and how it is compensated, but I believe market forces will kill efforts like ZIP code based compensation.

In reality, if you're top tier talent, you can command top tier compensation no matter what your ZIP code is. Facebook's strategy relies on every other company colluding with them to suppress compensation based on locality.

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