Shopify Goes Digital by Default(twitter.com) |
Shopify Goes Digital by Default(twitter.com) |
They can work 'remotely'. Of course they can - they are hardly doing anything :)
Twitter, Basecamp, Shopify - what do all these companies have in common? They don't need to do anything and even if they could, they haven't for so long, that working in an office or remotely changes nothing. They're in maintenance mode - you can do maintenance mode from home while cutting staff/costs. Good.
"A survey of senior finance leaders by research firm Gartner found that 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting company Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the entire workforce will work from home at least a couple times a week. Before the pandemic, that number was in the low single digits."
This is kind of terrifying. I started working from home a few months before this mess, and i've found that work-life balance hasn't really improved. Yes, my day is more flexible — i can spend a few hours in the morning with my kid and make up lost time in the evening when she's down — but the days stick to one another, and i'm having trouble disconnecting completely. I used to get home from the office at 4:30, hang with the kid, get her to bed, and then have a few hours to either write or go to the gym or hang with my wife. These days, work is always on my mind to some degree, accompanied by low-level anxiety — and not just because of this surreal and disorienting pandemic.
The past couple of months have been a very different situation than the "normal".
My current internship has been WFH for the past ~2 months and it has drastically reduced how much I actually enjoy my job. Talking with my coworkers and the office atmosphere in general was a large part of why I enjoyed my job, and that has been reduced to a daily standup over Zoom and a handful of strictly work-related Slack messages when necessary. I understand there are some people who simply like to clock in and clock out but for people like me for whom the office is a large source of regular socialization, working from home is incredibly lonely.
It seems as though a large amount of people pushing for WFH situations are more senior engineers, especially those with children or other concerns at home. For a moment, just put yourself in the shoes of a junior engineer or fresh grad who is new to the job or the industry in general and remember your first day on your first job. Probably the only thing that relieved some of the stress or anxiety was a friendly coworker, or the ability to grab a mentor to answer questions sitting just a few feet away. WFH, no matter the technology, cannot create a substitute for this.
Second, if you can avoid entering the market now, do so. There is a lot of data showing how entering the job market in an economic downturn can be worse than a few years of unemployment. You will thank me 25 years from today.
Third, understand that Remote Work (not WFH!) will also allow you to separate the choice of place of where you live from the place/activity that makes you money. You don't have to live in a big faceless city. It will be okay to try spending 3-6 months in different places of the world, meet different people, find different ways to belong to your local community, whatever. If in the end you still want to do Remote Work in an environment that resembles a company office, it will be possible (again: Remote Work is not WFH)
Fourth, if the office is your largest source of regular socialization, I'd seriously recommend you finding ways to change or mitigate that regardless of your working conditions. As friendly and cordial your relationship with your colleagues is, they are still just colleagues. You are not in school anymore.
Lastly, things are changing for everyone, not just the juniors. Even the seniors will have to figure out some of the new protocols and processes when dealing with the upcoming challenges. But finding a way to communicate and exchange some thoughts with your colleagues will always be necessary and recommended. There is no reason to feel more anxious about it.
Don't let these extraordinary circumstances color you vision of things though.
Once people feel like it's safe enough we'll likely go back to hybrid office / WFH as people manage building capacity to allow for distancing.
That will be a lot better
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
> And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
It does seem like they plan on forcing their employees to work from home in this case.
I think that's the problem that most people have - not having the option to work from work.
It's that it was ever not remote-first in the first place.
The now-passing era of startups and big tech companies centering their workforce around physical offices will be looked back on as one of the most strange and illogical aspects of early 21st-century business!
Daily stand-up meetings? Easy.
Weekly team and one-on-one meetings? Easy.
Knowing when your coworkers are working? Easy.
My team is mostly remote, diverse location, diverse ages/demographics. Getting everyone on Slack was hard enough. Having people report when they are actually contactable is impossible. And now that Slack removed presence from their API I have to rely on every more metrics to measure my team.
I should be using many metrics all along? No that's stupid, the reason I have employees is so I can build relationships with good people. If everything was metrics and work whenever you want that's called programming, not managing.
This is not a commentary on WFH in general but I think most people who endorse 100% remote work do the type of work where they get their assignment and then go sit in the corner and bang it out with headphones on and not the type of work that requires active communication and collaboration.
Expecting instant answers from others is the WFH equivalent to "I love being able to walk to my coworker's desk and ask them questions!" Sure, because being able to do that lets you off the hook for needing to break down large tasks into parallel chunks, plan phases of work in advance, juggle multiple plates for when you are blocked, etc. It's making your job easier at the expense of everyone else around you, by basically outsourcing part of your job.
WFH is a mindset shift.
Same with travel. Default should be a Zoom (or similar) but if an in person meeting or workshop is warranted then do it and just be prepared to justify the travel cost. Offices are very expensive so rightfully so companies are re-evaluating how much commercial real estate they truly need to execute their mission successfully.
I've seen a lot of people saying that working from home is objectively better, and I think that that is a bit of a radical claim. I rent a room in a beaten up house, so I have about 130ft2 of personal space, a shared kitchen, and a shared bathroom. There are other people like me who also feel like they're stuck in a bubble, especially now that they can't see their friends and family, or even strangers at a coffee shop.
Have you considered Stripe? They have been hiring remote and have people based out of Europe.
Wow, so they'll be hiring non-Canadians by the majority now? Interesting. I wonder how this will affect the economies of places like Ottawa, with Canada not having the type of Tech Sector the US does.
The question is whether Americans can compete in a global marketplace against the rest of the world who don't expect SV-level compensation and also don't need US-level private health insurance. I'm trying but failing to see the value proposition to hiring American outside of the USA.
I expect lots of announcements from 5k to 10k-person companies over the next few weeks.
I would absolutely live 2 hours from an office if I only had to go in once every week or two. I'd live further if it was once a month.
But then if everyone is working anywhere why on earth would you live in SF.
And why would companies hire in SF if they can pick up comparable talent at a fractional price from Romania.
Lots of questions!
> Home office setup and coworking allowances. Working from a coffee shop? You can use your coworking allowance for the requisite latte!
and from https://javi.blog/2016/01/10/automattic-perks/:
> If you don’t enjoy working from home 100% of the time, the company will give you up to $250 per month to rent a coworking space. Also, if you don’t want to have a permanent place to attend, you can use that $250 to pay for whatever you drink while you’re working from a coffee or similar places.
> You can get a completely equipped home office on the company. For example, I got an Aeron chair, an Ikea Bekant standing desk & a desktop lamp even before my first official day in the Automattic.
They did already gave out $1000 for WFH setups: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-shopify-gives-em...
Presumably that implies that, at the very least, new employees will be offered the same measly one-time $1k payment. Hopefully their restructuring of offices will include a more appropriate reallocation of that spending to cover the true costs of remote working.
Heating/air conditioning as well
I do recall some Seattlites mentioning one specific area that is particularly bad by name but don't recall that name.
People are going to be surprised by the state of the FiDi in SF when things open back up. Many tents have gone up there with everyone gone and WFH. Going to be interesting when people go back to the office there.
But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going to be better (IMHO).
I of course miss the meals and snacks.
Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive. I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else. I mean that's fine but it often leads to thinly-veiled, self-serving, biased arguments and proclamations of the benefits to everyone.
If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything by WFH unless you oversubscribe your work areas (eg hot-desking) and that has its own problems.
All-remote might work best. I've seen this claimed but have no direct experience with it. I do know that mixed WFH and in the office is nearly always detrimental to the remote people and the team as a whole (IME).
I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.
Welp, why bother commenting then? Also half remote half in office doesn't work. I've been working for all remote companies for the past 4 years and (asynchronous) communication has always been great. It's "just" a mindset shift.
You say we're naive for thinking this is a revolution. I'd say naive is the one evaluating the viability of remote work by looking at an incredibly noisy dataset (or a single data point in your case) during a pandemic in which companies have been forced into a paradigm that requires methodical and progressive change.
Similarly to asking someone who has never run to join a marathon and be in the top N.
I heard meditation is good, I wish I had some time though. Yesterday I got blocked in an elevator for 6 hours, so I got plenty of time. I tried to used this opportunity and tried meditate though. Didn't work
You're right that collaboration is much easier in person, even with the latest remote work technology. But could we offset that with companies that have monthly/quarterly offsites instead? What if they invest their office budget into helping people build better home offices? Ship snacks directly to employees or let them expense meals/snacks?
The worst thing a lot of companies will do is jump into fully remote without rethinking how their culture works. This is not just a way to save money by getting rid of your office. That money has to be allocated differently to make up for the differences.
I 100% agree that mixed in-perform/WFH is the worst of both worlds.
Finally, I would note the last 2 months have been very abnormal for everyone, and it's been nothing like WFH under normal situations. I would wait to when things "return to normal" before making a decision on how you feel about WFH.
I work in a shed, 20m from my main house; with a red/green sign on it that my small kids learned to obey, good noise cancelling headphones etc.
But as schools over here are closed now for about 3 months now, no amount of red/green signs or noise cancellation are going to save me from the fact my help is needed in several occasions during the day, or that (especially at the beginning of the lockdown) I have to block out 4 hours just to buy weekly groceries, or 1h to buy something in the local pharmacy.
This thing disrupted everybody. I can only imagine how is it for people who live with kids in apartments with no gardens and no dedicated rooms.
Follow the same processes: be as asynchronous as possible,reduce meetings to a few times a year, rely on tools and build new ones if you need them.
If you are permanently WFH, why are you in a small pad in the city? Look at what you can afford out in the country, or even another country entirely.
Yes, it should be a choice and not forced onto everybody, but after a couple of years of being remote, I get worried about needing to ever go into an open plan office ever again. There are positives to all this, but you may need to adapt to make it work for you.
When I am stuck WFH for this quarantine, it doesn't even feel like I live in the city anymore. Moving out of the city would just make that permanent.
Or to the people who actually need to be in said meetings and conclude them when they need to be concluded.
And catered meals/snacks are not the norm there either - instead, you smelling microwaved fish Bob brought for lunch, plus Karen is babbling away about how her kid didn't get into the honors program. You don't have an office, you're sitting next to bunch of other people who keep talking, walking, watching funny Youtube videos. The best option is to come in late and work late so you have a somewhat distraction-free workplace to yourself - which again is pretty idiotic.
And the communication is not really that much harder, it's actually gets much easier and streamlined the more you WFH. You learn to focus on what matters, you learn to present your thoughts coherently and in an engaging manner as people need to understand you and listen to you even though they don't see you and no one even knows whether they are listening to you or not.
Whereas my wife and I (also FANG) just like doing our work and clocking out ASAP and we both absolutely love WFH. Video chat is more than good enough to make stuff happen with other people, and without a commute I can save hours of my life every single day.
Everyone can't work this way, but it works great for a portion of people. I don't see why we can't let people individually decide. My only concern is that the WFH people will be such a minority that they'll be ignored in large meetings, but as long as ~20% of people are remote then I think it can work for everyone.
I think this would also significantly reduce stress on employees. You could live in more affordable areas, and take commuter transit for the days you have in office. It wouldn't bother me too much to take a 90 min transit if I knew it was only a couple of times week. It's the day after day that really kills ones soul.
2 days/week working synchronously with people? Of meetings? I can't remember a time when a project I've worked on needed that to succeed.
I've been working remotely for a couple years, and at some point started auto-deleting recruiter emails for jobs in the city. Commuting 2-3 hours per day is just a non-starter for me at this point. The extra sleep and exercise I get remotely is probably going to extend my life expectancy.
2. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could: could you WFH permanently or 99% of the days in a year?
3. the meals and snacks -> if you can't cook, now is a good time to learn. save money
4. Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space -> in a normal period of time, you could just relocate to somewhere better. We are not doing normal WFH
5. Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive -> I agree but I also think that you are naive if you think remote working is not superior for information workers
6. If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything -> Wrong. Water, electricity, internet, coffee, amenities, cleaning equipment, toiletries, cleaning services. And of course, the office itself. For workers: they get absolute freedom to shape their home space as they see fit. Oh and the MOST important time, you save everyone their commute (which will get you well rested employees).
7. I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees: do you HAVE to join a 50k company?
“Move somewhere better” is naive, because where they live isn’t necessarily bad; just may not be conducive to full-time remote work.
1. Ok.
2. I leave that to OP to answer.
3. What if I don't like cooking and can afford to eat out?
4. What's better? Maybe I like living in a big city. Not everyone wants a house with a backyard.
5. We shall see. "Information workers" like to think they're superior to everyone else but people are ultimately social. Work is social. Companies build stuff by having people collaborate and so far there's no collaboration better than face-to-face. That's how you break down silos, for example, in many cases.
6. That's assuming that the company redirects the money they pay on offices to help employees pay for their home offices. I really doubt that.
7. Big companies pay better. Big companies have big projects small companies can't even dream of. There are many reasons to join a big company.
> So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I hate it.
> I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.
ok. Why do you consider your arguments against WFH not biased and useful.
"other side is biased" ...quite funny :D
The software industry is doing quite well for itself, busily collecting all the world’s money. It doesn’t mean it’s doing everything right but it does put a larger burden of proof on advocates for change.
Because what I'm saying is objectively true: physical colocation with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely and no one in their right mind disputes that. The best you can argue for WFH-first is that it can be made to work.
Your other clue is the choice of language. I said, for example, "I hate WFH" and (paraphrased) "I like having a catered office". These are my personal preferences. You can't really argue that it isn't my personal preference. You can argue that those preferences don't work for you, which is 100% fine and indisputable.
In comparison, so many things I see written about WFH are stated with broad generalizations of "WFH is better because ..." when you can clearly tell that really means "I want to WFH and I'm going to argue my preference as being a general good".
You've had other people in this thread and elsewhere agree that a mixed WFH/in-person team is (to quote another commenter here) "the worst of both worlds". If you take that as true it then means that for people to most effectively WFH they need everyone else they're working with to do it as well. It's intellectually dishonest.
To be clear, if you can make WFH work for you and you like doing it, great. I hope you find an employer who works like that or will allow at least some of the team to work remotely. Prognostications that Covid-19 will lead to some seachange in WFH-first employment strikes me as unsubstantiated wishful thinking however.
Just go and look at all the blog posts and articles written about how to make WFH work. Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO (Working From Office) work if the benefits are so self-apparent?
There are certain kinds of work that could be remote and would be just fine to do so but they still generally aren't (eg call center work; apart from obvious offshoring cases, a lot of US domestic call center work is still from an office for some reason). But I don't put software engineering at scale in that category.
Could this be the tipping point to a sustained exodus from an urban kind of lifestyle? (spoken as someone who likes/values density)
That's highly arguable. Young people like cities, that's where the girls and the parties are. That's been true for a really long time.
But communication and collaboration isn't that difficult with Zoom and Slack, you can't change my mind. You can make it work.
I love being able to walk into my kitchen at lunch and make whatever I want.
Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and and that's fine because your home is your space and you can make it work for you - even with someone else working in the same room as you.
...
There's a crowd on HN saying there will be a mass exodus from urban centers. I'm not sure if it will play out quite like that, but I think there will be a premium on locations and housing with extra room for a home office, easy access to open space, and nearby amenities.
Also after this lockdown period I suspect there will be a longer period of low% office usage. So we will still be face to face meetings and the like, but less frequently. And that I think will help smooth things out.
I've been wanting a lifestyle change for a while, this might be the gateway for that. I already live rural, but the commute has been unpleasant for me to where I work. I am enjoying not driving.
If this scenario continues, I could see our family moving closer to what we like -- skiing, outdoor recreation, etc. -- and having lower cost of living in the process.
I've heard endless people state that WFH productivity is through the roof with absolutely no evidence. And lets not pretend that we can accurately measure productivity of software devs - we've all been down this road with agile.
I think part of the shift is because companies are realizing it isn't as bad as they expected. A friend works for a company that announced they will allow 100% WFH in the future too. The CEO said she thought WFH would cause a 50% loss of productivity. But after 2 months of it, no significant loss in velocity has been noticed. Not just for development work, but for other office work as well.
If you have a remote first company, it means your employees can actually move somewhere that they can settle down and own a house.
And yes if it’s mixed WFH and on-site then of course the remote workers will lose out. But both Shopify and twitter are doing perm remote for all employees, creating an even playing field.
People don’t live in cities just for jobs. I live in the city to go to museums, art galleries, the symphony, plays, comedy shows, concerts, restaurants, happy hours etc. I have no interest in living outside the city and I especially have no interest in maintaining a house.
I really want to go back to my nice office for work.
The wild card is that things may seem easier when people have no choice but to WFH, but once things open up completely, there could be a shift back but inevitably everyone would have already had a taste and some may want it permanently
I mean it's trivial to say you're projecting that on to others. Particularly with the closed minded comments like "you can't change my mind".
The 'revolution' is already happening, but I don't think it will be across every company and every industry. I don't know who does say that.
You can't just hammer WFH out of existence.
> I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees can operate this way indefinitely.
The other thing is that those-sized companies have made significant real estate investments in their office space. If suddenly their own workforce didn't use them, what would the value of those be? I imagine e.g. Apple Park would not be worth even close to what Apple paid for it if Apple wasn't going to use it.
However if not and especially if you have a commute WFH is great. I agree with other comments in that fully remote isn't always ideal though.
I've done both (ex-LinkedIn) and I currently run a tech consulting firm.
I think the right mix is a choice.
I prefer 2 or 3 days in the office and the rest of the week from home.
Don't want to change your mind, so instead consider that your statement might be more accurate if you said:
"But communication and collaboration for me is just much harder work remote."
I'm not trying to be facetious - you seriously can't provide your own meals and snacks working from home?
>> Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space and it's not conducive to being productivity, particularly if you live with other people, if you can't get some form of separation.
Do you live in that space because it's close to your office? Ok, so now you're remote you can live anywhere. If there was no pandemic you could work from a library, or café or dozens of other places. You could move around each day. Or you could move to a cheaper location and have a nice home office.
Yes, I can prepare my own lunch. But it takes about 24 hours to make a vat of delicious homemade ramen that will feed 500 people. Do you know how long it takes to make a single serving of that same ramen? ...About 24 hours.
Likewise, an office with 100 people can easily have a whole variety of fresh fruit and produce to spontaneously choose and snack from and most will get eaten before any goes to waste. When I buy produce, I have to get exactly what I'm going to eat which means my weekly trip locks me into exactly one set of produce that I'm stuck with.
The set of foods that scale down efficiently is a very small subset of the set of foods that I like to eat.
Also, pragmatically, the free food was a perk of the job that I factored into the compensation package when I took the job. Losing access to the free food is effectively the same as taking a pay cut or giving up a couple of vacation days. Given the state of the economy, I think this is actually a reasonable way for the business to save money right now, and I'm much rather give up lunches than see layoffs happen, but the compensation package has shrunk.
Also, there is real value in not having to come up with new food to eat.
Of course I can but I just don't want to. This isn't about being cheap or lazy (although I'm guilty of both to varying degrees). The biggest benefit of having a catered office is the lack of having to make a decision about what to eat. I'll just eat what they're serving that day.
I'm a big believer in decision fatigue [1]. Don't make me make decisions about things I don't care about and what I have for lunch is one of those. For years I worked in offices where I either had to bring in my own lunch (never gonna happen) or I had to go out and buy it. I'm fine with the cost of it. I'm not fine with choosing where to go and what to order when I get there. I'll end up finding something I like and just getting it every day until I get sick of it because that's let cognitive load than having something different every day.
That's why I like a catered office.
> Or you could move to a cheaper location and have a nice home office.
I live in NYC because I want to live in NYC. I chose the job because it's in NYC where I wanted to live. On a side note, I think this is the fundamental difference with the Bay Area. hardly anyone wants to live in the Bay Area. They want to work for [Google|FB|Apple|...] and to do that they need to live in the Bay Area. Most other places people have decided they want to live there and then look for work options.
So yeah, I could buy a big house Georgia but... why would I want to?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fr...
for me, at least, it's about the contact with other people and the talk during the lunch break. face to face human contact. i honestly can not comprehend how can people wish to be isolated... but maybe it's something different with me.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
moving to a cheaper location also usually means giving up a lot of things that urban life comes with as well. you cant expect that everyone is going to be happy with that decision
What we are witnessing might be a historical shift as big as Nixon re-opening with China, and the top comment is really complaining about some missing perks? How about start thinking of how many people who live in these big tech centers only because of their jobs and how many will just leave these cities once it is become accepted practice to work at a Canadian company while you live in the Caribbean? Or maybe start thinking that people who used to complain about H1B workers bringing the salary down now having to face competition from some random guy in Romania who can code circles around you and can accept a job at one quarter of your salary? Or how about we discuss the opportunities for startups that will come from this?
Also, start thinking if you are a VC and soon you will actually have to leave Sand Hill because no one will be crazy enough to move there to sleep on someone else's dishwasher hoping to make it big.
Personally, every announcement from an established company that is moving to a Remote-First (or Digital by Default, call it whatever you like) mentality is thrilling. Is anyone from Shopify here reading HN? I was already planning to apply for them but this announcement made me even more interested.
- Make meetings accessible to everyone
- Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the adventurous types)
The main "downsides" of working from home (which is not necessarily remote-first) - not seeing your colleagues in person, life <-> work separation, etc. will be a new industry that will end up resolving itself. I've seen office space costs. It would be cheaper to fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party than to maintain an office space sized for the same amount of people by an order of magnitude in a large, popular city (NYC office space is approximately ~$100/sqft/month - a desk sized for two monitors, a keyboard and writing space is about 2 x 4 minimum, so 8sqft, or $800/month just for a single person in a nice space)
In other words, being forced to do anything - whether that was working from home or from an office - is an oppressive activity. Remote-first simply gives back that freedom of choice. Companies can maintain more minimalist offices for those who insist, and coworking spaces will grow for those who don't like the office and want separation, and finally those who have the space in their homes can work from home.
I'd be curious to hear a good argument against all organizations that can be remote-first being remote-first.
Outside of just being harder to communicate virtually, I really need the change of scenery and social interaction that comes with an office. Sure you can get that by joining different social groups outside of work, but that requires lots of intentional effort, and I actually enjoy hanging out at work and going to lunch with my coworkers. And the office has lots of perks like snacks and meals which can't be easily replicated at home (I mean I don't mind cooking, but I get much better lunches at work than the sandwich I would make for myself). I can't think of a working situation much better than going to an office where I have all of the food I need, a properly set up workstation, and coworkers I am able to talk to in person and go to lunch/dinner/social activities with. To me that is far better than sitting in my home alone all day (and I don't even have kids, which would be a whole other set of distractions).
The real truth though is most people are far less productive remote because it requires proactive communication and self discipline that just don’t appear because now you are working remotely.
This is to virtue signal and get out of expensive real estate in Civic Center SF in Twitter’s case. That area is a zombie apocalypse.
If you are fully remote then anyone in the world can do your job. Supply goes up prices go down. I bet execs will get paid the same though.
I get to develop features independently, so if I am given the spec, I have no need to speak to anyone for the rest of the day except for a couple messages with QA. For me, it is great.
But I am essentially a microservice with defined inputs and outputs. For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.
Anecdotally, while productivity seems to remain at a high level, a lot of that seems to be enabled by employees working more hours and being always available.
I spent 7 years working purely remotely with a globally-distributed all-remote team for a mostly remote company. I'm not impressed by armchair arguments of "it won't work" because I've done it and it works great. Nor am I impressed by the argument of "I don't like it so no one should do it" because I don't like commuting or working in a rigid office regime so my counter is "I don't like it so no one should do it" right back.
Also, I spent a year working in the building beside Shopify's head office and the 1-to-3 hour commute (each way) and downtown parking fees would be a big incentive for me to choose remote work if I was an employee there. So good on them.
- Commute time is reduced to seconds/minutes
- Driving or taking public transportation plummets
- Fuel consumption is vastly reduced, taking care of Pollution as well
- Rush hour peaks flattens. might still have traffic, but it won't be because of volume of cars. like from accidents or road work
- Cook/eat at home vs. going out for lunch solo or with colleagues
- Work from home or sometimes go to nearby cafe, the rise of nearby desk options
- Dressing up for work, replaced with pijamas! Who needs a suit or any formal wear?
- Suburban expansion, city planning project have to be completely revised.
- Location becomes irrelevant, housing/rent costs will displace huge amount of families
- Office space occupancy plummets and thus impacting commercial real estate. Might see a plan for retrofitting office buildings into residential properties which will increase the inventory of homes and reduction of housing costs in major cities
- Group meetings and gathering going digital, will also prevent spread of viruses and general sickness, impacting health care industry and pharmaceuticals
- and so many other direct or indirect dominos I haven't mentioned or considered...
= Conclusion: Savings are huge for both employees and employers but other in-direct industries will have to reinvent or disappear.
I don't. I live in a flat and live by myself. The only physical people I talk to are cashiers or delivery drivers.
If your life is further on than others or you have a nightmare capital commute then I can see WFH being the way forward. But personally I like to go to the office for social interactions and the banter that happens within. Just going to the shop for lunch with a colleague makes my day. That burger that you all decide to go for in the pub around the corner and have a cheeky pint alongside, even better!
This permanent WFH is already making me feel separated and even lonelier than normal.
That being said, if I was in a new city with no friends or family, I would 100% want to have an office to go to.
Once things open backup, I think a lot of people find that WFH is a lot less lonely.
I'm keeping track of announcements here: https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7
Tech companies have a huge incentive here - they can now start hiring engineers at non Bay Area prices. Which, if enough companies do it, means your salaries are at risk. Nobody cares that it’s expensive to live here, they only pay because they all insisted on in person offices. By going remote they can stop paying Bay Area rents and compensation levels.
The productivity gains of WFH might be only in comparison to awful open office plans, and may disappear when compared to more private office layouts. There are still major questions about long term impact to new hires and their growth, where retention takes a hit (employees feel more like free agents and consequently switch jobs more frequently), etc.
It seems incredibly short sighted to be making these decisions on the basis of a 3 month experiment with confounding factors (to say the least!).
The problem with companies that have started in Urban centers is that many of their employees don't have the "extra" bedroom in their house to be able to accommodate for this new work from home scenario.
This is especially true in NYC. Where apartments are usually significantly smaller than anywhere else. And if both adults in the house hold are working from home, often times one of them ends up in a closet taking zoom calls.
As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
— Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO
Why not? The wage differential will still apply: why hire someone remotely from SF when you can hire someone remotely from Ottawa at 70% the wage?
E.g. When Joe Employee walks into the office, we know it is him and what he does and where he works. At home, Joe Employee might have a friend who looks over his shoulder at the project launch document he is completing, at the financials that are being submitted to the CFO.
Shopify follows the the zero trust networking/Beyondcorp model, and we never had the physical office spaces as part of our threat model. Not much can be done for shoulder-surfing (aside from privacy screens, and our security training), however we have built out robust systems that build trust modeling out of identity and device security.
The first time it was a little odd, but it's routine for those companies who have sensitive IP.
Bad actors will always be able to get round these controls imo.
Do they handle it? A heck of a lot of companies are using nothing more than remote desktop from personal machines right now.
> Canada’s tech darling Shopify—the online platform used to sell everything online, from wallpaper to roasted almonds—has just moved into their new King Portland Centre digs. The quickly growing company (they currently have 700 employees in Toronto and have committed to doubling that number by 2022) has taken over the top nine floors of this 15-storey, Hariri Pontarini–designed tower. Shopify will be keeping their Spadina and Wellington office and plan to add a third location at the Well once that development is complete. This new office at 620 King Street West will house around 450 “Shopifolk,” which is what the company calls its employees.
As tooling improves, there is some point at which gains from expanded recruiting pool + real estate savings outweigh coordination/culture costs of remote. Beyond this it will be irrational to force physical presences (for many roles, at least) and there'll be no going back.
In reality, it's probably 3x savings on top of just real-estate.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10111935689155051 https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10111936118050541/
“Informal whiteboarding saves me so many meetings!” “It’s great to get to know your coworkers as people!” “Relationships with colleagues actually matter!”
(Though i can’t see going back to pre covid office centricity)
I have a unique situation since I can't hear well, and everyone being on WFH has been a huge benefit for me: since everyone's got their own microphone/camera/etc, they come through clearly enough that my captioning app can actually understand them well - typically I get captioning as live CART through a crap conference room phone. Being able to hook my captioning app on my phone up to my laptop's audio out and jump on a Teams call with just a few minutes' notice has also been a huge benefit in easily being able to collaborate with my team and talk through problems.
I'd worked from home before, but never in this kind of remote-first/remote-only scenario, and now that I've gotten a taste of it I kind of never want to go back. I understand that other people are more extroverted than I am, and can hear normally, and it's not an ideal situation for them - but it's been pretty awesome for me.
I hope this mindset carries over to other companies who are committing to allow employees to stay home. There's more to remote working than staying at home. The whole culture of the company has to embrace it.
My question is how companies will handle cost of living differences and if salaries will be adjusted based on locations? Or can I take my California salary to Seattle and pay no income taxes?
That said, I've had catered lunches at Google when visiting friends, and that's way better than eating gum restaurants every day.
The decision fatigue is real. But also, there are relatively few options that are genuinely good in the area, especially if you're trying to eat somewhat healthy. You get very bored after a while. Lunches provided by an in house chef are very good, tend to be healthier, and more interesting. I think - like I said, I mostly ate a meal here and there.
(and if we're comparing to cooking at home, obviously that incurs greater time cost)
I have a funny feeling the people that don't like working from home are the same dickheads in the office that everyone else hates working with.
Where my wife works there are two types of people who want to return to the office; the old school "we only trust you if we can see your butt in a seat" and those who need the social aspect of the office.
The first group I couldn't care less about. I hate the attitude that I am good enough to be employed but clearly not mature enough to be able to work without being monitored.
The second group are more interesting. Personally I mostly dislike the social aspect of the office. Sure it is fine during lunch but I hate the interruptions at my desk either directly (i.e. someone walking over to ask a question when an IM would be far better) or indirectly such as the conversations of others.
My hope moving forward is that working from home won't be seen as something "special" the few are "rewarded" with for a day or two a month but that it is a choice for each person without prejudice.
For those that want/need an office fine let them go in. But for those of us who function better working from home we can do that.
It doesn't have to be a binary option for companies moving forward of "our company is only work from home" but instead a mixture.
This is true to some extent, but there are companies that pay well. Currently I work remotely in a country where the very top salaries for engineers are around $20K, and I make close to $80K.
My question is about the "Expression of Interest" positions that are listed. Are they used mostly as way to collect CVs from no-exact-match candidates, or could this be the channel for someone that, e.g, is working on an open source project that might align well with Shopify's interests?
If you prefer to answer by email, feel free to write me, lullis at google's mail.
Here are my new thoughts on the future of working from home...."
I wrote a similar answer on the thread (which suffered from the same issue as here) from Coinbase announcing going remote-first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257935.
What will be the new opportunities which aren't already available today?
As an introvert who has had to deal with working with extroverts I'd be lying if I wasn't feeling a little schadenfreude right now.
As a new grad, I'm terrified of a transition where WFH is the default. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and that I can't do it all on my own. Casual interactions with coworkers and the ability to passively absorb new information in the workplace are essential for entry-level employees like me. Plus, personally, I find the social aspect of work to be crucial to my mental well-being. I feel a stronger sense of purpose when I can see that the people around me are all invested in the same project I'm working on.
Having worked full time remotely before this pandemic, I struggled with the social aspects and being left out of casual conversation and left for a job with a dedicated office space. Now that I find myself again working remotely, but with a forced remote-first attitude, I prefer it. It's a different ballgame when all workers are working remotely.
Best of luck in starting your career.
but, if you do find yourself accepting a remote position, perhaps renting a coworking space would mitigate that downside a little? i've never used one, because i've never worked remote before now, but i do see the appeal.
In any case, remote-first doesn't mean WFH-only in any case, so you could just go into the office, no?
(1) Personal relationships & trust - it's very, very hard to build strong personal relationships without face-to-face contact. Impact often requires trust that's hard(er) to build remotely.
(2) Casual serendipity - New projects (innovation) are hard to identify in a vacuum. It's the lunch-conversation "huh, maybe that could work" that often drives impactful change. MUCH harder to do that remotely. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323798104578455...
(3) Fewer meetings - if every interaction of substance (read: not an easy slack message) has to be a scheduled, there are a lot more meetings. Admittedly, this is just my experience, but I've seen it more than once.
Note that all of these are long-term trends. Maybe they get resolved as people get used to working remotely and new patterns emerge. But at least for me, this is why I wouldn't think most companies should go remote.
Yes, you want to travel to meet your client in person, maybe to do some big planning/milestones, but for every day work, the consultants are in person to give the clients the perception that their money is being put to good use. This is especially important as the top consulting companies hire undergrads fresh out of school (who don't know anything except how to put in the hours and do powerpoints/excel) and bill them out for several hundred dollars an hour.
It’s hard for many of us to say we need other people, especially when you compare it to all the confidence benefits of working from home, but it’s absolutely true. Being alone for long periods of time really really sucks (that’s what I’m going through).
Maybe we’ll see a rise in social clubs that will revitalize everyone’s social lives. But even with that, most people who are working remotely are going to be alone for 8+ hours per day.
For people that use a particle accelerator or make scrambled eggs work from home is nonsensical.
For people who produce computer code as their entire work output and rely on very sophisticated digital collaboration tools already work from home is mostly interchangeable with work from an office.
And then there's a really vast grey area in between. What about lawyers, or architects, or film and television executives, or whatever else you can imagine?
The answer is that it depends. But, even limiting ourselves to the subset of work where it's even plausible that it could all be distributed there are some important things to note:
A pretty relevant data point is that when there has been a genuine choice between fully remote and mostly in offices the mostly in offices approach was way more popular. To the point where Silicon Valley real estate spiraled out of control, or literally everyone with deep knowledge of cutting edge electronics manufacturing ended up in the Shenzhen region.
In any another context we'd call that a "market" and say pretty definitively that the invisible hand of that market decided that this is a more effective way to build companies.
It seems we're going to get another experiment, whereby many companies begin the experiment all over again. Perhaps something has changed, perhaps virtual technology has advanced to where this makes more sense. Perhaps the culture is at a tipping point.
Or, perhaps there's some advantage to people all being in the same place that will make companies that do it outcompete companies that don't.
It's quite plausible that this is what the market will decide, in the future. It's also a really important data point to note that it is not, in fact, what the market had decided up until now.
With each 8 s.f., there is additional overhead for hallways (minimum width prescribed by ADA in the United States), bathrooms, and other necessary fixtures. If you counted everything in an office, it's probably at least 25% higher than that.
Also, Remote domestic or Remote International ? That changes things drastically as well.
How will local governments adjust for loss of tax base as it is likely real estate values for office properties will drop and in turn the cascade effect on businesses which serve them; from restaurants to small services.
Companies that own their own head quarters and other facilities may be less willing to have people work from home. Some companies put a lot of pride in their head quarters and other facilities.
How many companies who do swing to this type of work will expect reduction in salaries as compensation? Would you trade a percentage of your salary for the guarantee of working from home? How many days would you be willing to meet at a central site or would they even be a thing?
Personal experience, it took till COVID19 for where I work to make quarterly meetings available to those who are remote. For the most part they have done pretty well in this regard to even offering streaming of past events and presentations normally done by phone to using survey monkey to gather questions to be addressed.
> And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
It does seem like they plan on forcing their employees to work from home in this case.
I think that's the problem that most people have - not having the option to work from work.
Please don't! I love working remotely; but I don't want to travel for work. I don't need a party. I don't need a fancy offsite. I don't want to spend a week with colleagues in some ridiculous tropical destination.
I want to quietly work from home, deliver quality work, get paid for it, and enjoy my life. Being forced to travel is the opposite of enjoying life.
This was my stance before the era of COVID-19... Now, I'm definitely not boarding any kind of airplanes.
No commuting, which on its own is reason enough for WFH since it's such a massive waste of time. Commuting would add an extra 10 hours to my workweek, and I don't get paid for it. Add in things like control over your own workspace, no "open office" nonsense, access to your own kitchen/bathroom, together all outweighs the benefits of working from the office.
The ideal situation for me would be WFH by default, with the option to work from an office if you want to or for specific situations.
You may like your office conversations, I like not having to commute to work, not being distracted, and making my work space mine.
Try picking up a phone or hop on Slack instead of attempting to sabotage WFH because you're a social butterfly.
IMHO, ALL of the chat services make this problem worse, not better. None of them let you easily and fluidly say "I'm interested in this topic for the next few days" or whatever. They hide, rather than render discoverable, important discussions, either (due to GUI structure pushing people to do it) threads moved to 1:1 chats or just lost in the sheer volume of text scroll.
The future of UI is bounded attention: "alert me for xxx _for the next { hour, next few days, this week, through next week, this month, for quarter, as long as ..., forever }" attention filtering. UI right now assumes that the doesn't change and that users actively correct it. But we aren't even at the point where that basic level of automation even exists.
Even as an introvert that enjoys my alone time, fully remote would be a deal breaker for me.
BUT I want the flexibility to WFH 3/5 days a week. I don't mind living within an hour and a half commute, and coming in 2 days a week. Going every day... painful.
In theory I could WFH before, but as things weren't really set up for that, I only did it once a week if that.
So in that regard, I welcome this kind of thing. If companies can work out the logistics.
Going full remote with trips to the office once per quarter for example allows you to live wherever you want. That's the way I see this working well in other companies. Remote first and once per quarter everyone gets together for a couple days.
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
I would personally trust Shopify to do it right, to allow that kind of social interaction remotely.
Seems they'll keep their current offices but reformated as spaces for people that really want to work amongst each other physically, instead of expecting the majority of workers to come in every day.
Putting aside the fact that these policies can change on a dime (it's really "permantnet work from home _for now_"), what's really crazy is that people are seriously planning to take companies at their word and are considering leaving the Bay Area and are assuming they are taking their Bay Area comp with them.
Ok, cases:
1. company does NOT to geo-based adjustment to any current employee, but DOES use adjusted salaries for new ones (in other words, path-dependent compensation). Two people, same job, different compensation. This is not that unusual in other industries but can be a source of serious resentment. Suppose a bay area employee moves to India..
2. company uses relocated employees to establish new comp packages for those geos - this will only go so far. many cases will be employees moving to less expensive areas.
3. company sets a "standard" compensation package world-wide that everyone gets - this is impossible to really execute on, or it will be very low relative to peer companies.
and so on. Employees who end up in a case 1 situation will find that after AVERAGE_TENURE they go looking for a new job and end up geo-adjusted. From a company perspective, this is a no-lose golden handcuffs situation and anyway the problem resolves itself quickly.
I tend to believe companies will walk this back as soon as covid-19 dies down, if not right away then as part of executive transitions where someone decides to "transform the business." But in the end it makes no difference - the long term trajectory, if it sticks around, is probably case (1) or some blend of (1) and (2). For developed nation engineers, case (3) is dire, the end of the career.
This is obviously not true. If my employer announced permanent work from home, I would immediately start looking for a new job.
My experience has been that people that struggle with these things are just as unproductive in an office, they just hide it better.
By far the most productive teams I've been on as far as getting work done are remote teams. When you're remote all that matters at the end of the week is how much stuff you can concretely show you have accomplished.
In an office you can get credit for doing nothing very easily.
So yea remote work is going to be rough for people that are currently using office culture to hide, and in some offices that is a very large number of people.
Separately, if you're undifferentiated then of course anyone will be able to do your job if you're colocated with headquarters or not. The trick to selling your time for more money is to differentiate yourself in a way that creates more value for the company hiring you. Your career is a business that rewards a continuous growth and sales process.
I work for an all-remote company and wages are based on the NY labour market. Anyone on the planet can apply sure, but I've not seen salaries reduce (if anything they're highly competitive outside of SF!). If you can get $150k and live wherever you want I wouldn't complain!
I feel like these kinds of blunt "no reason" statements are meaningless, just like saying "work from home sucks" or "work from home is always the best."
I live in a city and work from home, and I will continue to live in my city even if the entire industry goes to primarily work from home. There are a lot of reasons to live here, several centered on "driving sucks, according to techsupporter." I would hate to live in a suburb or out in the country, places where I've lived before and have moved away from.
Coming from a non-coastal state, I honestly do not understand the superiority complex a lot of coastal developers have. There are good developers everywhere, and the ones living in the southwest or the midwest are willing to do the same work for less money. But, you can be willing to bet the execs will receive a pay bump for their "cost-saving measures".
Then why do so many Google/Facebook/Apple employees live in SF and commute for over an hour to the suburbs?
Why not pay them 40k a year to live in India instead?
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?
If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.
I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.
I work in a Support Engineering group, where we often need to collaboratively debug. Remote forces us to clarify our thinking (you get better over time at writing your thoughts that way) and video calls work solidly well for most of the world. We have new hires that have come in and have said "people are surprised I work here remotely, because I like to talk to people but actually I talk to people ALL DAY."
The style changes a bit due to the technology, but you can choose the fidelity as needed. It's not for everyone, and sometimes remote slows things down, but even then, you get ruthless at prioritizing, because sync time becomes valuable.
It also removed a lot of distractions that we had in the office yet we miss the "coffee breaks" we had to discuss and unofficial align what tasks we should address next and the best way to approach these. We are quickly adapting to these.
Right now, I find WFH pretty tough, and in my experience so far, I get markedly depressed and collaboration challenging without all thes social cues of meatspace
Work from home could be harmful for employees, warns Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/work-from-home-could...
Really big companies like Microsoft use their massive campuses as a recruiting tool - which obviously means nothing if you're remote-first.
But back to mental health: I've been doing MUCH better since I started WFH years ago. Going to an office every day was just too draining. Everyone would walk to hang out after hours, take extended lunches, etc.
Maybe this will be the killer app that VR/AR was waiting for. Not entertainment, but enterprise.
The cynical part of me thinks this is a way of trying to save costs (of renting offices) and pass this as some kind of politically correct virtue signalling. We so care about your well-being and we're so forward looking!
Most effective - All of the team physically together in the same space.
2nd most effective - All of the team remote.
Least effective - A mix of in-office and remote team members.
Most companies that try out remote work start with the least effective option (the mix). I don't know enough details of Yahoo's attempt to say if that's what they did, but I expect so.
The 100% remote option can save some office space cost, but some of that gets eaten up by increased travel. Even 100% remote teams can greatly benefit from getting together sometimes.
But one less-appreciated possibility opened up by 100% remote is the ability to draw talent from a much larger geographic area. We had engineers from all over North and South America. On balance, I think that makes it easier to retain older employees with valuable knowledge, who might want to have a house in the suburbs in a non-coastal state, instead of limiting your hiring pool to people willing to tolerate the congestion and cost of living in a big city.
100% this. Will be interesting to see what employers do when workers start requesting part-time coworking space.
For now, it saves tremendous costs as it could be over a year before their typical engineer wants to come into an office.
Considering that the number of total active websites is estimated at over 1.3 billion according to a survey published by Netcraft, that means that around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress.
So I’d say they’re doing pretty well for themselves.
So...
This isn't even remotely objective. It's amusing how people think their personal perspective is the objective one.
> Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO
There's an ocean of WFO content on the Internet - everything from leases, to security, to feng shui. I'm willing to wager there's an order of magnitude more WFO than WFH content. And it's all about making office life work (or work better).
Believe it or not, offices are a modern invention. Just because it's been the status quo for several decades, doesn't mean it's the only way to get things done.
Screwing over worker was the status quo at one point, too.
There are countless examples of companies large and small who have found massive amounts of success switching to a remote based methodology. Saying that this is objectively wrong and that these folks are not in "their right mind" makes your argument, that could otherwise be valid, look foolish.
It largely depends on what kind of work you're doing. For software development, I could just as easily claim that it is objectively true that asynchronous communication and a freedom from non-technical people tapping you on the shoulder 10 times a day is objectively easier.
> Why aren't there just as many (or more) articles about making WFO (Working From Office)
Because that blog (or more likely book) has already been written and re-written for the past 100 years. WFH is a somewhat new phenomenon in the age of modern internet and broadband.
> with your coworkers is inherently easier to work with than working remotely
This is so dependent on the coworkers. There's plenty of folks who I can work with remotely OK preciesly because we're remote. Sitting next to these people 6-8 hours per day would be extremely counter productive. I'm sure there's plenty of folks that can take me only in small doses, and 8 hrs/day of working with me face to face would be too much - I don't fault them for that!
This is objectively not true for the kind of work I (and many others) do. Physical colocation with coworkers actually makes it harder for knowledge workers to do their work, which is why lawyers and accountants have their own offices even when they're in the same building.
But to address a finer point: there is still a lot of activity about open vs closed plan etc. So wfo is not a fully solved problem either!
It's not to say that it won't be a problem, but introverted folks have been forced into being in offices even when it stressed them out and caused them mental health issues for years. If the extroverts are getting the other end of it now, there's plenty of room to find clubs, meetups, gyms, and other hobbies. Just because I work with you doesn't mean I'm now obligated to be your social support network.
Between meetings and misc. things that come up I had human contact all day. Lunch was the one time I could have to myself.
WFH != isolation
I think, once the boss gets a taste of working from home, they too want to enjoy their fancy homes and spending times with their kids instead of sitting in traffic all day. And Covid now provides them a generally acceptable way to push that change through.
Recent news and surveys do indicate significant change expected in remote work changes and real estate footprint changes.
"Large companies already expect more of their workers to continue to work remotely and say they plan to reduce their real estate footprint, which will, in turn, reduce the foot traffic that feeds nearby restaurants, shops, nail salons and other businesses." [1.]
This is part of data from a deport by Deloitte [2.][3.]:
> "In a year, 75% of CFOs expect more of their workforce to work remotely and nearly half expect a smaller real estate footprint."
[1.] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/economy/coronavi...
[2.] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-cfo-signal...
[3.] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/finance/articles/reope...
Regarding salaries due to support expensive city lifestyles: True, I would like to see how remote-first companies handle hiring people in such cities.
There would be a transition period, probably on the order of years to even decades, before they would cease considering the cost of living in where their remote workers live. Hopefully by that time, rents in the Bay Area will have dipped as people slow moving in/start moving out because of flexible remote work situations.
That hasn't happened yet either. It's more like "we're going to stop expanding".
I think this set up provides much of the benefit of remote (greater flexibility in personal life commitments) while retaining the necessary components that many often cite for why remote isn't a good option (no face to face meetings). The point however is that it's not supposed to replace either in person or fully remote, but find more choices firms have in their staffing configurations. More choice means there will be greater market fit for both job seekers and employers.
Even for whiteboard discussions, you can buy a literal whiteboard for your work area, hold the meeting over video call, and exchange photos afterward. It's not quite as low friction as walking up to a whiteboard in the office with a coworker, but, at least you know the damn markers will work.
Maintaining WLB is something one needs to be attentive to. Having a dedicated work area as well as maintaining specific work hours (and sticking to them) are key. Other than that, I don't think maintaining WLB at home has to be any tougher than at the office. Kids present special issues, but, if you're a non-WFHer, you already have provisions for the kids during work hours, anyway.
But for a lot of white collar professionals at an associate to mid senior level, there's plenty of work that you should be able to do independently.
In the case of SF almost every 20-something I’ve interacted with is here primarily for career and plans on relocating at some point.
SF used to be a place people moved to because they wanted to live in San Francisco, they wanted the culture, the access to nature and its beauty, the arts scene that was traditionally more cutting edge (citylights, burning man), the cutting edge food and wine scene, the walkability.
Nobody moves to San Francisco for that anymore. They move to San Francisco for work not life. They move to San Francisco to extract value from a job and then leave.
San Francisco is too amazing a city to be relegated to becoming a company town. If there is a positive outcome from this, it will hopefully result in a recalibration and people who want to be in SF because they WANT TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO will stay and the people who came here to just smash and grab some cash will leave.
So I took the plunge and moved to Washington last October before COVID was a thing. And i couldn't be happier. It was all because my company had a SF and Bellevue location.
I forsee many other people doing the same now that job opportunities aren't tied to location.
I was forced to work in SF because thats where the Jobs were for me, but I never wanted to be so near or work in SF.
Instead of having to pay exorbitant prices in an extremely in-demand real estate market, people like me could move a little further out and still have reasonable access to those social, leisure, or other opportunities with slightly more time invested without requiring spending 5 hours a day commuting.
Spending 2-3 hours in transit one way to get to work is not reasonable. Spending 2-3 hours in transit to spend the day in the city on the weekend is a little more palatable.
I think most companies already have workers who do work from home, even if they're not remote friendly. So most corporations already have secure email / vpn / firewalls etc etc if data security is crucial. As for tech companies, don't we all push commits from home every now and then? it's already been happening for years.
The majority responded that they didn't want to WFH. There was a question that had several options for which composition of WFH vs WFO people wanted in the new normal. Only 25% of people picked an answer where they would WFH more often than they'd WFO.
I'm biased as a remote worker; I want more orgs going remote so there are more jobs to choose from, and commutes are soul sucking. If you want an office, rent a coworking space near home (with an employer picking up the tab, with a reasonable ~$300-500/month coworking stipend). A local library near me offers one for free, coffee, desk, wifi, printers, and free parking included.
And this was after I modified my work hours to take the bus during less-peak time.
So now I drive. It's about the same time, but in mostly stop and go traffic. I can listen to podcasts and don't have people literally sitting on top of me, but I also have to deal with being constantly hyper-vigilant because (1) people drive like fuckwads and (2) traffic patterns in a lot of places are really screwed up and being in the wrong lane at the wrong time can wind up easily adding 30% to your commute time and (3) the cyclists have this bad habit of trying to weave through moving traffic instead of using the bike lanes and following the traffic signals and then physically assaulting you if you don't notice them and give way.
I have been telling my coworkers and friends for years that these salaries are not sustainable for 30 years and everyone called me a pessimist.
It's not hard to see that the "good times" and "gold rush" can't last forever. The fact people lied to themselves thinking it's permanent should teach them something about themselves.
I may be wrong about the reasons, but I still believe the example of consulting - and entire industry built around paying a high cost to colocate - suggests a value to colocation.
The answer to this really depends upon the person. I've worked from home since I graduated from college, and initially I would eat, sleep, work, and play games all in the same room, because I had roommates. And I was fine with it.
Some people can't do that. Some people need a dedicated workspace. Some people need to get dressed. My brother works from home, and he still wears a tie everyday. Because that's what he needs to do to get into "work mode".
I'm not saying any of this will work for you. But just wanted to let you know that while this is a thing for some people, you still might be able to get that feeling when you work from home.
And all of the medium.com thinkpieces and "COVID made me realize I don't like remote work" comments are based on a an experience heavily colored by these other factors.
My person preference is having flexible work-from-home a couple of days per week. Often on those days I compensate by taking more walks, or going to a coffee shop for a snack and some time outside the house.
The last couple of months of working from home AND having additional societal restrictions, spouses and kids in the house, stores and restaurants closed, and limited social interaction outside of work aren't representative of what working remotely might be like during normal times and by choice.
Heck if you were a full time remote worker by planning, you might choose to life in a different place less constrained by the highway commute time to your office. Somewhere closer to walkable shops and restaurants, or on the other end of the spectrum somewhere with yard space where you can have a garden outside.
On the professional side, a company that mostly worked in the office that had to pivot and adapt to remote work in an emergency situation is not going to be the same procedurally or culturally as one that has been based around remote work from the beginning, or adapted to it long ago.
TL;DR: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/QuarantineWorkIsNotRemoteWork...
Edit: If it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with your original point that the naysayer comments on every WFH related discussion are off track, repetitive, and lacking context.
One interesting thing to observe is how different cultures are reacting to the pandemic.
In Europe, it feels that the memories of two world wars are still recent enough to make people understand these are extraordinary times, and that the best way to return to normalcy is by collective effort and making the fight against the virus a top priority. It is hard in the beginning, but people promptly change their behavior until the problem is solved or controlled. Only when the war is over is when people start trying to go out on the streets to reclaim their lives.
In Brazil and in the US (where I lived and have friends and family) it seems they can not accept the reality changing so rapidly in front of their eyes. Even today, when I have my older relatives learning about a friend or acquaintance of theirs getting sick or dying, their reaction is "They were in the risk group/not taking care of themselves/did not take magical-pill-X". They are struggling so much to accept the risks and want so much to return immediately to having some sense of normalcy that in the end they are probably gonna end up worse than the Europeans - a lot of lives lost and still no true recovery.
My team and I have been doing this, I have been in calls with a more senior team member that was helping me (I even got some Vim tips alongside with the explanations I was getting for completing the task).
I also recommend doing pair programming with people on somewhat the same level as yours as you can help each. You can divide a task in two and work in half the task yourself while the other person just watches and comments and then the other way where you watch and comment and the other person has all the keyboard and mouse control. This helps with reducing distractions and it offers the same advantages of Code Reviews but in real time.
Do not do this every hour or even everyday as this is more mentally intense then focusing alone and I think focusing alone also offers great improvements in learning. A balance of the two is key!
(That said, anyone smart enough to be concerned about it is also probably smart enough to seek out what they don't know so I'm sure the author of the parent comment will be fine.)
The impact of these kinds of things seems to get lost in the convenience of working from home / remotely. Don't get me wrong, I like working remotely, but only for 2 days a week at most. Now that I've been forced to transition to full work from home for the last 3 months, it's been a much poorer experience overall and has severely hindered or completely stalled my relationships with pretty much all of my coworkers, despite frequent zoom meetings and the like.
These are also former coworkers that I've joined at other companies because we like working together. I really believe that this kind of relationship is impossible to build if you're remote-first.
Plus, again remote first does not mandate working from home. One could still go into the office so the qualms are moot.
Perhaps a solution is to somehow formalize some of these implicit knowledge transfer mechanisms in the workplace. Explicitly assign mentors to new employees, etc.. But I just don't see how it could possibly compare to a normal working environment if I have to do it all from home.
Some other complications:
> A lot of the benefit of in-person work is asymmetric (I benefit more from casual conversations with my manager than he does).
> I learn a lot by observing my coworkers interact. Remote work makes this very difficult, because it's not really possible to "overhear" workplace conversations, or to casually drop in on water-cooler chat. It's also not really possible to have brief side conversations in a team-wide zoom call, which is one valuable aspect of in-person communication.
> New grads tend to live in small apartments rather than a house in the suburbs with a spacious home office. I started my first full-time job remotely this week and I'm working from my dining table. Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.
Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.
On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.
I guess my take is the hot one, but if a remote team is routinely travelling to meet, I do not think that is 100% remote! It's just mostly remote. I recently had a 'remote job' that required 6-8 cross-country airline flights per year. The stress from those trips dramatically decreased my productivity in the weeks leading up to the trip (via increased personal costs not covered by the company, via harassment at airport security, etc). When hired, I was told it was 2 trips per year. This was okay with me, but the increase was not.
Perhaps some teams who work remotely can and do benefit from frequently meeting in person, but I honestly do not count that as 100% remote. It just...isn't 100%.
I also have a great deal of respect for my teammates, some of whom I've worked with on multiple projects and companies over the past decade. But I'm especially glad not to complicate our relationships beyond our work together.
And there is no way I am going back to going to an office to work.
YMMV
1. It was obvious from the data that tons of people were taking advantage of WFH at Yahoo (e.g. never logging into the corporate network)
2. Easy to make the argument that the problem was Yahoo management didn't manage WFH well, but even if one takes that as a truism (I'd say especially if one takes that as a truism) seems like the fastest way to fix that would have been to at least get everyone in the office.
WFH can work great, or it can be a total failure, but the worst in any case would be to come into a specific situation and not make decisions based on the data for that company at hand and instead base them off some broad "industry trends" standards.
At least when you had a central office there was a place where you would meet some people and be in the middle of some sort of hustle and bustle.
Big cities might become even more attractive in a WFH future .
- Companies that previously laughed at the idea of WFH were forced to implement it without much time to prepare. Their technology, culture, and processes are bad.
- We're in a pandemic, so I can't go hang with my friends after 5pm at a bar or do any outside hobbies. This slight cabin fever is making people dislike WFH which is ironic because usually WFH means you have more time to go outside and do fun things.
In 10 years you will have a whole new generation of engineers that always worked from home and by then I would be surprised if the ratio is only 1:10.
As another comment mentioned, this current pandemic makes you hate a lot of aspect of life, regardless if you worked from home or from the office.
The world is moving in that direction. Adapt or become extinct.
I would be very surprised if in 50 years the concept of an office even exists anymore.
That rule is to prevent spread from strangers in grocery stores etc during brief contacts
I don't want this to come across as overly harsh. But a helpful rule of thumb to understand what life is like after having kids, is: there is no free time. None! It's like being in the military, where you wake up at 6am, shower until 6:30am, do calisthenics until 9:30am... and so on, with every single hour occupied, until bedtime, promptly at 9:00pm.
If you tell a person like that 'just watch a movie during your free time,' they'll look at you blankly and say, 'I don't have free time, not on my schedule.'
Why are things so different? Because not only do you have another person(s) making messes who do like 0% of the cleanup, they require much more care than adults. So free time trends to 0%. There's no 'weekend' in the sense of no work (there's always housework), in a sense there's no 'after work.' There's only work, as far as the eye can see.
So for example, with commuting, I don't have enough time to do housecleaning, so the house stays in a permanent state of ugly messiness. Without it, I can apply that time to cleaning, so it becomes only moderately, to slightly, messy. There's no big block of free time - nowhere - where I can do stuff to bring back the time that's lost by commuting.
I love my kids of course, but taking care of small kids can be very exhausting.
From my read, he's saying "no commute is good because you can do a few chores during the week and not have as many to do on the weekends".
You're saying "no commute is good because you can apply that time to cleaning and the house is cleaner; but also kids are exhausting".
?
He is saying:
> Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH
I am saying:
> If my commute time is removed, some amount of necessary chores cannot get done. I can't do chores in any time other than the commute time. There is no real 'weekend' or 'after work' time, when I can do them 'later'.
All time is accounted for, and removing time necessarily knocks some items (like 'morning/midday rooms cleaning') off the list permanently.
When I'm in the office, I often take breaks - 20-30 mins. Sometimes a longer walk during lunch time. I'm simply doing the same here but instead of being on my phone I'm maybe doing a quick vacuum sweep, trip to the bodega for some hand soap, or dropping off my laundry somewhere.
I do have friends that work for companies that expect them to be "online" all the time so this may not work for them.
I think that working from home will stay and that some kind of work discipline will be a skill people are just required to have. You know, like being able to communicate professionally and to keep promises.
Except now you have the choice of living anywhere you think the cost of living makes sense for you, which more than makes up for this.
> a reasonable way for the business to save money right now
And so is not having to worry about office space, leases, parking, security, and the cost of logistics of running an office. WFH has the ability both save companies money and put more money in workers pockets.
> Except now you have the choice of living anywhere you think the cost of living makes sense for you, which more than makes up for this.
We were able to basically just put one car in storage. Car insurance, gas and parking alone are saving me like $650/mo. That alone would be enough for me to go buy a fresh fruit platter every workday to pick through and throw the leftovers out and still come out ahead.
You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.
How is an open office any better?
I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.
At any rate, I brought it up because the fix for both noisy neighbors at home or in an open office is the same pat answer: get noise-cancellation headphones.
Two things:
1. Working-from-home-during-global-pandemic-with-kids-and-spouses-and-roommates-and-not-ideal-setup isn't the same as working-from-home. Undoubtedly some people are less productive today.
2. Commits isn't necessarily a great proxy for productivity to begin with. For example, with greater focus comes less "oops I missed a unit test and broke the build" type commits, or even just more time to interactive rebase and clean up commits before pushing. "Go slower, you'll be done sooner."
It is also hard on people that are used to working in the office to be told that they now have to work from home suddenly. I'm sure a non-trivial amount of people did not have a space for themselves to be able to work and they are trying to figure things out as they go. Not to mention figuring out how to communicate properly while everyone is remote.
There is also not a one size fits all solution. People will be more productive being where they are more comfortable. That may be at home, in a coffee shop, at a library, in the office or any other number of places. People are expected to work from home right now, so a lot of those other options are out of the question.
TL;DR, don't judge work from home when everyone has to do it during a pandemic.
What I mean is:
There is an hour of my morning and night, 2 hours a day, which I am calling 'commute time.'
I can commute during 'commute time'.
Or I can WFH and stay at home during 'commute time'.
If I don't commute, I can do chores during that time.
If I do commute, those chores are never done, and are permanently knocked off the to-do list. The house is just that much messier as a result.
I can clean during the weekend, but I would have cleaned during the weekend anyway.
During the week, the house looks trashed, because there isn't enough time for chores as it is; the time that is available will instead go to even higher-priority chores, like washing dishes and clothes.
Basically if 'commute time' goes towards trekking to the office and back, it comes out of the chore time budget, meaning a really, really messy house during the week.
I will just point out, in closing: 2 hours a day is a really big amount of time to subtract out of the time budget. It can't be recovered.
Even if I don't play games and don't do anything 'fun' - I don't, incidentally - there's no compensating for that loss.
People are getting confused because your reply is structured like you disagree with him, because your comment is written like a rebuttal and your tone is derisive.
However, in your original reply, you're not disagreeing with the above commenter. You're agreeing with them, and ALSO, you take issue with another small thing they mentioned, the comment about how this person would do the cleaning on the weekend.
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To your original point I say this- lots of parents have free time. My mother had hobbies in her free time. My aunt has hobbies has hobbies in her free time. I'm sorry you don't, but the fact that you don't does not mean much about young people that do.
This doesn't check out. All of those companies have large offices elsewhere. I agree with your take that you work in NYC because you want to live in NYC so that's where you work but your bias is showing that you can't consider that people feel similarly about the Bay Area.
As one data point, I chose San Francisco when I had the guaranteed option to work for the same exact company with proportional pay (stupid high relatively speaking) in my hometown. People with options move where their quality of life is maximized -- that's the beauty of having options.
It doesn't make NYC sound very appealing if working from your home in NYC is hellish.
Working from my home in the Bay is actually quite nice. The best part is getting an hour of my day back because I don't have to commute to work. That 1 hour commute probably added more stress to my day than any other hour.
Speaking personally, I made some optimizations, but there's only so much that can be done with the fixed amount of space that I share with others.
Because living in a big city with lot of options for food (and maybe other enjoyable and interesting things) give you decision fatigue?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN generally? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261569 is another example. We're not here to cross-examine each other or make each other look bad. We're here for curious conversation and to learn.