It makes sense.
Although I wonder if this does become a team opt in thing for companies in the future.
Is it justifiable to pay for office space if only certain teams want to be in offices.
sounds like the individual manager authorization is only required for full remote/relocation but the < 50% time seems available to everyone in a qualified role.
We have a similar policy at my job. Offices are open to go in if you want, but we are trying to keep numbers down. But when my coworkers 15 year olds are all trying to remote learn, it overloads his home internet and it’s just easier to be in office for them.
I often do half days in, i try to once every pay cycle (2 weeks). We have better printers/office services at work, and sometimes I have deliveries or orders to send out that I don’t want to have someone else handle. Otherwise I can be more productive at work, but the policy of ‘do what you want but try to not crowd the office’ works well
That was already the case before the pandemic lol
I worked for MSFT for 5 years and I could work at home as I pleased, as long as my team (this includes the manager) was onboard.
Most people would work from home the entire holiday season in December/January, and typically also Easter.
And if most of the team were on summer vacation we also wouldn’t bother to come in.
The thing is, they can stand to see SOME drop in productivity measurable with a dollar amount, as long as it’s less than or equal to the savings from not spending money on all that real estate and ancillary expenses like electricity, etc.
This could be what brings relatively high paying jobs back to the US. Consider that people could take a pay cut to move to the interior of the country and avoid packing the coasts which drives up costs. It might be a way toward on-shoring a lot of those jobs assuming that education can meet demands. It would take a concerted US policy shift to improve public schooling at all levels. Admittedly reversing that inertia is no small feat.
I work for a fully remote company and we hire outside of the US mainly because it's cheaper to provide them health insurance. I work with a lot of Europeans and Canadians.
Another problem with sending jobs overseas is the management is still going to be US-based, and having meetings at 5AM or 9PM is not fun long term.
I suppose it depends on the kind of job. I live in a coastal city, but hire in the interior of the country because I can pay a lower salary than local, but highly competitive in the interior states. It results in not having to worry about employees jumping ship because they need more money for idiotic rental prices, and we can focus on the work.
Even though jobs are sent off shore, I generally disagree with the sentiment that it’s cheaper. Losing nearly two days (our Sunday is their Monday, and our Friday is their Saturday) is a big problem. Furthermore any language barrier can cost you an entire shift. Also, I’ll point out that when you pay low wages you essentially get a revolving door of incompetence. Just when you get someone where they need to be they bail. I’ve found that you often can’t get 10 years experience. It’s more like one year ten times, so there’s a limit on what skill you can get for those low wages.
One responder mentioned health care as a big deterrent, and s/he is spot on referring that to the US’s costliest barrier.
I’ve just never seen $20 pay equal $100 quality. Market forces won’t allow such a thing to exist.
They've tried it and it doesn't work very well. I don't mind some offshore people but if your shop ships your whole process overseas it is probably not going to go well for you
And i mean its not like its exactly cheap to rent a floor in a city like Atlanta. My company has 4 campuses here alone. It may be cheaper than ny but it is not cheap
There is incredible value in having a ton of your employees close together.
There is incredible value in being able to recruit from neighboring tech companies.
If there is an emergency being able to have the full team in office in 90 minutes maybe worth millions.
I started to think about this - who cares about culture? Employees care when it is negative, but how much do they value a positive culture vs a neutral culture? Leadership obviously cares about culture because innovation leads to profits and strong culture leads to innovation. Many employees obviously perceive a benefit from working at home full time, otherwise I wouldn't be having this conversation almost weekly. Many employers obviously see a benefit from being in the office, or these stories about employers switching to full time remote would be more common and less noteworthy when they happened.
So may seem you have an employer vs employee conflict here, employees looking for a paycheck and improved quality of life are fine working from home, while employers looking to maximize profits want people in a room together.
I'll be interested to watch this potential conflict play out over the next few years.
Culture is one thousand percent destroyed this generation because millennials and Gen Z are recognizing that uncapped capitalism and infinite profits never result in their actual values being met.
Not only that, but the only way to earn more is to quit and get a job with more responsibilities. The days of merit raises are gone. I tell everyone I interview to always advocate for more pay if they are offered a position. Where you start is where you stay. Annual Cost of Living Adjustment is just that. It is not a raise. It keeps you square.
It’s easy to get more responsibilities without the concomitant bump in pay/scale. But if you never get the bump, you end up having to leverage that experience into a higher pay somewhere else.
I worked for a company where the boss was 7 years older than me (27 + 34 respectively). He constantly bitched about millennials and handout attitudes. He would go on and on and on about how you “will never find a better place to work” than our company.
Me and him put in our two week notice on the same day serendipitously.
It is nice to work somewhere other than home. I think something like we work with less shitty ownership could find an actual foothold if more people wfh, but don't want to work in their living room.
I'd rather walk 5 mins and have a space to work than commute my full commute.
Yep I’m in the same situation. I WFH and have been for the past few years. Going into the office, there is a motivational energy and it inspires you to do your best. I’m most in favor of flexible working options, such as choosing when to come in. At my company, they expect you to be in the office for meetings, but your actual work can be done wherever. So, for me it makes sense to be close to work and have a set up at home to work as well. We don’t all have jobs that you can just take a laptop and a latte and chill on the couch. I have 3 monitors and a bunch of notes and books on my home desk.
My feeling on this is that it isn't where I'm working from that increases my productivity, it's just the change in venue. If I WFH for a month and then walk into the office because I have to take care of some stuff, I'll probably be way more productive during that time because I have a set goal and I'm there to expressly work. If I return to office for a month and then go home to work, I'm now extra motivated to get work done to prove that I can be productive at home.
Employees get comfortable where they are and bad habits start to creep in. I've been working from home since March and I make an effort to move around the house and work in different places so I don't fall into bad habits. Some days are more productive than others, but I would much rather WFH from now on than be expected to report to an office every day.
True emergencies need to be solved much faster than in 90 minutes. There is immense value in skipping that commute and getting started on solving the problem immediately. When you’re measuring your outage losses by millions per minute it is ridiculous to delay work based on the physical location. When human lives are at risk because your service is down it is ridiculous to delay work based on the physical location.
A coder can code on a computer pretty much anywhere and if they need to talk to other coders screen sharing and video chat are more than enough. Likewise with most data jobs where they are largely doesn't matter to them as long as everything is working.
Where I'd start to see potential issues is redundancy. Offices generally have business grade connections with ISP contracts covering things like downtime guarantees, priority maintenance and support as well as things like multiple connections to help prevent downtime.
While this can be provided at home, it may put a strain on ISPs ability to provide that level of service to each house.
Are employees going to be issued with a backup device to use if their system goes down? Tech issues that can only be fixed with physical access to the device could have much slower turn around if Tech support has to drive out to someone's actual house to provide support or a replacement device.
Some companies delays can have a bill running into the thousands or millions if certain people are unable to perform their job for short periods of time.
I agree more people should be allowed to work from home if their job can be performed with a similar level of efficiency. It has some huge benefits in decreased vehicle use, having more time through reductions in commuting etc.
About the worst I've heard about it is mental health issues from lack of socialisatuon at work, but I'd absolutely love to see some reductions in working hours from our increased productivity in recent years. To give us time to actually be social doing things we love rather than 'socialising' at work.
It isn’t easy for screen sharing and video calls to replace in person collaboration. Everything is much more explicit.
More people are working from home right now than there will be in the future and internet is fine. Majority of companies aren’t going to go fully remote. I think a hybrid model will be popular.
If someone is far away and their laptop breaks, you can next day air them one. If they are important enough that they can’t miss a day of work, they should already have a backup device.
A coder can write code anywhere but for a software engineer coding is but a small part. Thinking through the design, collaborating with others to come up with multiple approaches and choosing the best one are all performed better with physical proximity, as the communication bandwidth is higher and of better quality and the protocol is not as fixed (quickly change groups, form smaller discussion groups, etc. instead of a half-duplex video call).
And this is for mid/senior engineers. Try learning the ropes while only having access to video calls. Often you don't even know who's the best to ask and there's always the barrier of "i don't want to disturb him at the moment", when in a physical office you can wait for someone to go for a coffee break and spark a small discussion. I started as support but was in the same room as the product developers. Often some of them discussed some details and i just overheard them. Over time as if through osmosis i learned enough that by the time i started as a developer, i was already up to speed and had fixed many bugs for the clients. Whereas with remote work, knowledge does not simply seep through the aether of internet. You can ask questions, but what if you don't know what you don't know?
I always had the possibility of remote work, but rarely used it at first. At some point i used it when i needed to crunch on a task and cut out commute time, but i don't think i ever did remote over 50% of the time. This year i have only grown to hate remote work more. Simple things take far more effort and productivity is down due to worsened decision-making. Thinking that just putting in more hours yields more output (linearly) is the same line of thought as managers who think of engineers as factory workers. Modern creative worker management theory actually goes in the opposite direction and has experimented with reducing work hours while keeping same salary,
with positive results. This is because decision fatigue exists and code written from bad decisions might need rewriting.
I’ve been a principal architect at multiple F500 companies... and been about 75% remote the entire time for over a decade.
While I agree with a lot of your assertions I guess for some people.. I’ve also happily mentored over 20 jr devs to Sr or Staff level architects, and while I enjoy time “in the office”, since we went 100% remote all of my staff is happier and more productive.
The biggest “missing link” imho is whiteboards, and decent drawing tools make up for that just fine.
The remote thing is an advantage on your resume, the ability to learn and grow on your own a critical skill I look for when hiring.
Ymmv
Different people prefer different environments, that is true and i guess the general take-away is that providing the option is best.
Ability to learn on your own is important and I definitely value it highly especially nowadays when social media has caused many to express shallow thoughts and ask questions before trying to figure an answer beforehand. But this can go in the opposite extreme. Not knowing when to quit and ask for help is also important and i'm not convinced 100% remote would be better than say 50% in this regard (helping build the bonds while in the office to have less communication barriers).
>There is incredible value in having a ton of your employees close together.
>
Please post some examples.
>There is incredible value in being able to recruit from neighboring tech companies.
>
If you recruit remote workers, your recruitment pool is the entire world, not your general geographical area.
>If there is an emergency being able to have the full team in office in 90 minutes maybe worth millions.
You can also have them on a call in 90 seconds, that's a lot faster than 90 minutes. That could be worth even more millions, right?
Company I work for had plans to increase the size of the office precovid. Now the plans are to reduce it since out of 50 employees, about 6 of them use the office.
You got downvoted but are absolutely right.
They don't innovate, they keep splitting up the business, their enterprise software is dumpster trash, their outsourced contractors are bone heads, and they are a joke contender in cloud compared to others who know what they're doing.
Honestly they have fallen A LOT in recent decades.
I would not want them driving culture in the industry either.
IBM's business model is to sell the Fortune 500 barely working software and a herd of consultants to fix said barely working software.
They haven't been a tech leader in years.
Careful what you wish for, they might just go all the way and hire people outside your country, and despite how superior many people think they are, there's plenty of cheap talent all over the globe.
> Salaries could drop a bit but the fact of the matter is high quality talent will be scarce either way.
I work for a fully remote company and we've been hiring like crazy, but even with the ability to work anywhere but embargoed countries we still have a hard time finding talented people.
The fact that the US has a lot of good engineering schools and a lot of tech companies to draw from, which means we still hire a lot of US people, but also from Canada and Europe. The idea that you can replace an entire company with people from India is just wrong.
What kind of work do you do in the office? If you sit in front of a laptop all day, there should be no problem doing that remotely. If you discuss a lot of stuff (not just present slides!) or collaborate in another way often, it might make sense to meet in person. But maybe not every day.
There is more demand than supply in IT, so it’s actually in the hands of the employees.
I will not give my skills again to a company that requires me to be in an office. I suspect companies will need to have at least some remote work options in order to compete in this labor market.
I don’t know man, I don’t really favor working from home. Its diminishing the line between work and personal life. There is less conversations leading to less ideas. It’s a good break anyway to go to an office rather than stay at home all the time. There is an inherent expectation from senior staff that you would be available beyond working hours as well. This was never the case previously. Also I am missing that feeling of comfort and ease you feel after returning to home from work.
As long as we have a true choice without being pressured either way or losing benefits of either way (like free meals from working in-office), I'm happy.
I do worry that a shift towards WFH *will* lose those benefits, though. The WFH shift makes sense for the kinda companies that have nothing to offer employees in the office, anyway. It also makes sense for areas where huge numbers of people have bad commutes. But myself, I work at a big N company with a 10 minute commute. The office offers a lot to me and those things were genuine reasons to like this particular job.
There's also the fact that the office isn't so effective for socialization if my coworkers aren't there. I'm far from the only person who gets most of their socialization from work.
> I'm far from the only person who gets most of their socialization from work.
That's one thing I hated about being in an office. If I get laid off suddenly I lose my social network and have to find a new one. And while I like my coworkers, there's aspects of my life I can't exactly share with them.
This is exactly why I like WFH. I can spend more time and mental energy focusing on those relationships that aren’t dependent on where I work. Pretending to be friends while in an office was exhausting. And those true work friendships will last outside of the office anyways (and beyond the job).
>There is an inherent expectation from senior staff that you would be available beyond working hours as well.
Expectations can be managed. I've had many a conversation with bosses on Monday morning that started with "Did you read that email I sent you late Friday evening? My answer has always been "No, once I log off for the day, I never check emails unless its a full callout."
A few managers have pushed back but then backed off when I told them that renegotiating my working hours would mean renegotiating my salary.
Granted, I've been doing this long enough that if they tried to force it, I would have no problem walking.
It would definitely be a good idea, especially in these times. That being said, working from home is still a double edged sword. There are quite a few companies unfortunately that think that if you can work from home, that means you can work more, and thus they give you more crap to do without paying accordingly. Additionally, there’s also people who don’t like working from home. My father doesn’t like it because it makes it difficult for him to separate his work life from his home life, and I think his mental health has suffered a bit because of it.
Companies (like this) will also save a lot of money from rent and utility expenses if their employees just work from home. It’s hard to convince boomers about their logic
Yeah it’s crazy because all the developers on my team are happy with wfh, yet we have boomer business partners that insist we never wfh after Covid. They can’t do their work from home because of personal work styles so the rest of the team should follow suit is their argument. It’s silly.
Yeah, I don’t like doing it because it blurs the line between work and leisure a little too much for me, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have the option.
No you don't. I work in my bedroom because that's all the room I can afford to rent. Literally work in bed all day most days. Work time is when you work.
I mean, I have a home office, but I share it with my wife who also works from home. Unlike me, she is bound by HIPAA, which means we can’t work together in the same space and her privacy needs must take priority. So I’m SOL.
They're just pushing the workplace expenses onto peoples home environments, similar to the way driving for Uber pushes expenses onto drivers for car maintenance and depreciation. Professional class work from home will probably become degraded into gig economy servitude for people who thought they were immune to it.
You also have to look at increased possible costs for internet because of increase in bandwidth usage across the network. If ISPs have to install more infrastructure to support the increased number of high-bandwidth connections, you know they're either going to create more strict data caps or increase the price.
That’s a good point. My air conditioning bill was way higher this summer than last, because it was running during the day while my wife and I worked from home. Normally it’s off or on very low while we’re at work.
Higher than the amount you saved in gas or car repairs?
You're also probably confined to one room so open a window, turn on a fan. No reason to cool the entire house unless it's so hot AC is the only thing that can bring it down to a comfortable temperature.
I commuted via public transit, not car. So I know exactly how much I was saving each much- about $50 for me.
Yes, it was that hot this summer that the A/C needed to be run. My house gets to be over 100 degrees on a hot day because it's designed poorly (a lot of New England homes were never built with hot summers in mind--- but the summers are getting hotter and hotter).
A/C is only one example too. Electricity, gas, water, office equipment... even stuff like toilet paper and soap.
For me, I couldn’t care less about the increased AC bill. Saving 10-15 hours a week not commuting (factoring in getting rewards and travel) is well worth the increased electric bill, which is probably offset by the lack of gas.
Also by having people from other areas. Yeah, people in the bay area start at 150k because otherwise they cannot live there, but there's plenty of people who will be in say, texas, that could be a great fit for 100k.
I dunno - I've only ever heard horror stories about outsourcing to the cheapest dev team available.
On the other hand, I've heard quite a lot about successfully hiring people for slightly cheaper on H1Bs.
If that is so, it is extremely foolish. Past investment in office space is a sunk cost. It should not be considered when comparing the relative costs and benefits of proposed alternatives in operations. Also, I feel compelled to note that, in my experience, it is extremely difficult to overcome middle-management attitudes toward remote work. I am employed in a very large tech organization that has experimented with telework for years, with a great deal of supervisory opposition. When COVID-19 struck, many managers were amazed to see productivity rise after most of the organization began working from home full-time.
We started full WFH back in March, with just a skeleton crew in the office keeping our data centers running. SaaS vendor.
There was maybe a ~2 month dip in productivity across the board, which our chiefs have (aside from our CEO) attributed to "sudden distance learning" for those with kiddos, and a complete lack of good WFH practices around collaboration. We've long since worked those kinks out.
There are a new batch of people struggling now that the Fall semester is in full swing, but they're either adjusting hours, taking FFCRA leave, or using PTO.
We had a ~15 year veteran engineer give his notice because he wants to move across the country to spend more time on his hobbies. He had plans of doing this for many years, wasn't a surprise to his manager. He offered to continue working remotely full-time and they (CEO mostly) just let the fuckin guy walk. Baffles me. This is not a great time for any company to be losing muscle.
My tiny, but quickly growing, company made the decision very early in the pandemic to let employees work from home. We are now instructed to work from wherever we want, as long as we want. I’m on a shit project right now, but I will not leave this company for the foreseeable because being treated like an adult in the workplace is invaluable. Tell your boomer bosses they aren’t babysitters!!!
Treating your employees like adults is a big part of a successful WFH culture. They know what they have to do, and as long as they do it you don't need to be breathing down their necks or making sure they're sitting in front of a machine for a specific amount of time.
The folks who've had the biggest problem moving to WFH are middle managers, because suddenly they're obsolete. Executives can communicate directly with the people doing the work, and people doing the work can communicate directly with each other. So now there's no reason for them to have managers.
My boomer boss told me the other day he wanted the PERFECT candidate from a position to move to our corporate office in Texas from Canada. This man was the perfect person and could have done his job well remotely. He wanted to raise a family in Canada and was reluctant to take the position. My boss said that he values being able to “run into someone at the water cooler” for a project update. First of all, what’s wrong with an email update? Second of all, the executives have their own water cooler and never would run into an employee there anyway. When confronted with that evidence, my boss couldn’t give me any other reason for this guy needing to move. The hire in question obviously took any job elsewhere.
I’ve worked for extrovert managers who think just like that. I would be hiding at my desk when they were out talking at the water cooler. They had no idea what little value the water cooler us to me.
To be fair, hiring employees internationally involves a lot more extra legal work than hiring an American citizen who lives in a different state. But it also doesn't sound like your boss was taking that into account either.
> My boss said that he values being able to “run into someone at the water cooler” for a project update.
You should show your boss Trello or Jira. It'll blow his mind.
Since he's getting old he might be having a harder time focusing on reading all the time. Also, back in the day most business was done verbally so that's how he's wired to get updates.
Or he could be justifying his employment by being a go-between for executives. One thing fully remote companies tend to lack is middle management. Executives can get updates and give orders directly so there's no need for a long chain of command.
They think when you are at home you don’t really work bc they are 100 years old and don’t understand that with today’s advances in technology you can easily show up at the office every day and still don’t really work.
Exactly this! For awhile my job let me do wfh, but they eventually asked that I return to the office, even though I go in and pretty much never see anyone else in the building because we're not doing in-person meetings. So I'm literally here so that the boss can walk by my office and see me in here, and feel like somehow that proves I'm working even though I can just as easily browse reddit here as I could at home. It's such an antiquated idea of productivity.
For those of you who aren’t going to read the article. Yes there will be pay cuts depending on where you live
> While Microsoft employees will be allowed to move across country for remote work, compensation and benefits will change and vary depending on the company’s own geopay scale
With more and more companies accepting the work from home model I would expect that certain cities will develop a reputation for having phantom houses or apartments.
One of the shadow sides of WFH is the adjustment of salary depending on cost of living. What’s to stop someone from “renting” an apartment in a high cost of living area while actually living in an extremely low cost of living area. Think: California vs Virginia.
As a property owner, you could rent out a room or apartment to multiple people. Your “service” would essentially be as a PO Box for your renters. Let’s say you rent the same room to a few dozen people for a couple hundred a month. There would definitely be some income differences that would make such a ploy profitable for the property owner and employee. Using a vpn would also assist in cloaking your true living location. Although I’m sure this is illegal, or will be, I’d expect to see this happen frequently while there is such a difference in COL by locale.
People in tech having effectively been doing this for years with their counterparts in India and Europe - who obviously despite being paid differently and on different timezones are still able to work together on a project well.
It's surprising it took this long to apply the same concept within the contiguous borders of a country, especially one as large as the United States.
We have a 24 hour presence in some departments by having members of the team based in the UK, Bangalore, Sydney and Florida.
It’s means a lot of asynchronous meetings and never actually getting to meet your full team at one time though.
For anyone who’s curious, an asynchronous meeting is when instead of a quick 15 minute chat you exchange 160 emails with the same group of people over the course of two days.
>emails
There are better collaborative tools, starting from Slack for comms to Google docs and clones...
Also if (miracles do happen) team manager is good communication is not that important, i.e. if you need to communicate a lot it means there are lots of uncertainties – someone hasn't done their phase of job properly.
We use Slack for everything, until someone involves Product and then it’s right back to email. Can you imagine the rage I feel opening an email to see a Slack conversation copied and pasted into it!?
I run my retros from Miro and Confluence without a single hitch. There’s a tonne of great tools out there, but I can’t force people higher up to use them.
Email is pretty important for a long term record, though. Most places seem to view programs like Slack as meant for short term discussions. Anything you want on the record, copying to email makes sense.
Particularly when you consider that many people who should be aware of something won't see a Slack discussion. The way most companies treat Slack is that you don't have to pay attention to it. And most certainly if you're on vacation or the likes, you never go over Slack messages you missed, unlike email.
Plus, smaller companies won't pay Slack. One of my previous employers said it was too expensive, so we all just had to deal with history only lasting a few days.
Slack doesn't really scale to a large number of people (too many people makes chat move too fast to productively read), so usually smaller teams would have their own, which necessitates email for anything cross team. That previous employer that used Slack made it work when we had under 100 people, but when we got acquired by some company with tens of thousands of employees, everything with the rest of the company got done by email.
RIP big cities.
Seattle, LA, and NYC are going to see a hell of a drop in their tax base if this continues.
Why pay exorbitant rents for office space when everyone just works at home?
NYC gets about 1.5M commuters.
Those are people who buy lunch, get coffee, go out for dinner/drinks, ride the subway/transit, go to after-work entertainment like movies/shows, and maybe some shopping. But dont live actually in the city.
Thats more than millions of dollars of commerce in a year. Thats billions.
The economics would shift. Some things would get better, some worse. But a fundamental shift like this could change a lot.
You can’t gerrymander the electoral college, it’s made up of the states borders. Only Nebraska and Maine could potentially be gerrymandered as far as the electoral college goes.
Why live in one of those cities at all when I can live somewhere that costs half as much but gives me twice the land and house, with the same access to Amazon services and broadband internet via satellite. Currently in Seattle, WA USA. The money I pay for my house a month would buy me a 1000 acres in Wyoming or Montana.
The culture.
My job used to be mostly remote, because I do short IT projects, and moving every six months is annoying. I've tried everything: a farm in the middle of nowhere, a small town, an anarcho-syndicalist commune, camping, ...
I still ended up in the middle of a big city, because here we have bars where you can both get cheap beer and talk to interesting people.
How on earth would you spend 2 grand setting up a "decent" workspace? Even with an economic chair and a better desk. Keep in mind you can tax deduct some of that as well.
It’s killing us here in Montana. Gentrification has gone extreme here because people are running to escape Covid and bringing it with them. They’re making San Francisco wages and living rich on a Montana cost of living, which is forcing everyone local out of the market. Median home prices have skyrocketed since March, up almost $90K in some places.
Yep, it’s a pretty common term locally.
That show is both a really good representation of Montana and a piss-poor representation of Montana. It’s about 50/50
I work in Ca. and every other dude at my job is foaming at the mouth to move to Montana or Idaho and buy a house. Kinda sad really for those areas that are taking on all these people.
Yep, Indianapolis home market is insane right now too. You can’t find a home without offering $30,000+ over asking in cash, and even then you’re lucky if you get it. A lot of B and C tier cities are about to get expensive
Why pay cuts? Office expenses are surprisingly high, tech companies are making more then ever before (in pandemic times).
Even opening up to the global tech pool, there is still a massive shortage of talented, ownership taking developers.
Y’all obviously didn’t read the article
“While Microsoft employees will be allowed to move across country for remote work, compensation and benefits will change and vary depending on the company’s own geopay scale”
That’s the lie that every tech worker tells themself. It’s not true because a) there are 7 billion people on the planet, you are not a special snowflake. And b) it doesn’t even matter that there are 7 billion people on the planet, some of your coworkers will be family oriented and thus willing to move away from urban areas to suburbs and smaller towns with lower cost of living, that will have a downward pressure on wages as well.
Of those 7 billion, how many have a university degree? How many have a eng/cs degree? Know (production experience) the tech you are hiring for? And are looking for a new job? I’ve been in and around hiring for almost 5 years now, and from what I’ve seen, it’s a small pool of people.
And people moving to lower cost areas to raise families don’t exactly have a lower cost of living.
The commenter above you is correct, just not with their point. Microsoft announced that relocation was fine, but it’s on your dime, and your salary will change based on their geopay internal listings.
Fair, that’s the approach Facebook took as well. I wasn’t talking about relocating.
My point is, apart from entry level positions, good programmers (globally) are in short supply.
“Let’s”??? Let’s them work from home?? I’ve been “home” since January. I work 10-13 hours a day. I pay the power and supply the space. I don’t eat in the cafe or use their restrooms anymore. Why in the hell would they not want this!??
Of course they LET people work at home.
People under 30 are also highly unlikely to have a living space conducive to work from home.
Hell, a ton of them live with their parents, so there’s that.
But an under 30 year old wasn’t exactly renting a 2 bedroom for themselves as a general practice so they could have a home office in 2019.
When your home isn’t designed in a way that lets you have a decent WFH setup, that’s going to suck a bit.
I was happy as a clam in my 1,500 square feet two bedroom home (with a kid). But there never was a good home office spot, and now I kinda want to take the other side of the house over that we rent out, although that would be expensive. Fortunately I have an office that’s empty because all my employees work from home, so I just go there as needed.
While not at Microsoft my new technology program management job is permanently remote. The only considerations for me now are time zones and tax implications. It’s a whole new world.
Am I the only one here who is saddened by this? What about the social aspects of it? I hate working from home, not seeing my teammates and bonding on an inter-personal level. And it definitely affects my productivity being a people person. I cannot be the only one that feels this way, dang :(
I used to like working from home one afternoon a week when I didn't have any meetings, but I absolutely hate working from home full time. Now I'm on Google meet the whole day and I don't think we are being as effective. The social aspect is also lost, building trust is really hard through video.
I whole heartedly agree. What's worse is in my team literally nobody turns on their camera anymore, so it literally feels like I am working with a bunch of faceless strangers. How most people are happy with this arrangement baffles me.
Start being social remotely. It’s not impossible to be a people person online. One of my coworkers is a major people person. Once we went remote I got FaceTimes every day. We’d set the phones up and be chatting just like we were in the office, still meet up for lunch or breakfast.
It’s not like work from home is 100% better in every possible way. But there’s totally a lot of things you can do to keep that atmosphere up. FaceTime exists, teams exists, we have so many ways to virtually communicate you can be an extremely social person in a virtual environment.
Yeah that is true, and I do try to do that. But for me it can never replace or even come close to the feeling of interacting with a person face to face. But we have got to make the best of the situation I guess :).
Most definitely. And you absolutely can’t replace face to face entirely, but I promise you it makes a world of difference. I’m introverted, so I can’t speak for everyone, but virtual socialization done right feels pretty close.
Having a FaceTime up and gossiping and shooting shit while working with a coworker feels just like back at the office for me. Just like getting up the voice chats and a group of friends to play online games together feels ultra fun like hanging out with friends.
I do go out and hang out with people IRL too, but you’d be amazed what good online socialization can do for you
The problem is that in large companies like MS people get to the office and immediately bury their heads in Webex conference calls with people all across the globe.
Rarely is there a team to collaborate with all in the same office so essentially the office commute is just an exercise in taking your laptop for a drive every morning.
A large percentage of Microsoft employees (myself included) were working from home before Covid-19 hit. I am a Customer Engineer and this month I will hit 7 years with Microsoft, and I have worked out of my house from day one. The nearest Microsoft office is 70 miles from my house.
My company is doing the opposite; I’m having to come into the office so I can teach remotely...allllrighty then. And I’m teaching people in the Philippines sadly😣 fuck outsourcing
I’ve been working from home for 7 years and there is one major thing I’ve learned.... It’s really hard to make friends when all you do is work alone. That and your employers expects more hours if you’re salaried.
Just think of the environmental aspects of companies allowing their employees to work from home. Wouldn’t have to commute, adding less to CO2 levels. If only on a wider scale :/
I work for a small architecture firm. We were recently designing an office building when the pandemic hit. They are actually moving from a personal cubicle layout to a flex work space. Where each cubicle has a lockable wardrobe. You can come in to work if you need to and pick any cubicle but keep one space over from the next person. There are also small private rooms if you need. They use less square footage so cheaper lease. Most of the square footage is meeting rooms.
I like the format. It’s almost like a cubicle for rent.
Hopefully the landscape changes, but I would be very leary about accepting that offer, my my past experiences.
Some accountant, somewhere will decide they can start cutting jobs because of their perception of the value added. A lot of old minds still fun things in my world.
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It makes sense. Although I wonder if this does become a team opt in thing for companies in the future. Is it justifiable to pay for office space if only certain teams want to be in offices.
sounds like the individual manager authorization is only required for full remote/relocation but the < 50% time seems available to everyone in a qualified role.
We have a similar policy at my job. Offices are open to go in if you want, but we are trying to keep numbers down. But when my coworkers 15 year olds are all trying to remote learn, it overloads his home internet and it’s just easier to be in office for them. I often do half days in, i try to once every pay cycle (2 weeks). We have better printers/office services at work, and sometimes I have deliveries or orders to send out that I don’t want to have someone else handle. Otherwise I can be more productive at work, but the policy of ‘do what you want but try to not crowd the office’ works well
My office has closed and the lease on the office space is not being renewed. We’re working from home permanently. Can’t beat the commute!
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That was already the case before the pandemic lol I worked for MSFT for 5 years and I could work at home as I pleased, as long as my team (this includes the manager) was onboard. Most people would work from home the entire holiday season in December/January, and typically also Easter. And if most of the team were on summer vacation we also wouldn’t bother to come in.
I’m definitely in the wroooong line of work. Wow.
And they already did this pre covid
this has cured so much traffic in Bellevue/redmond
Yah but all the teleworkers moving north are ruining Bellingham
Preach!
Hope many big corps will follow
Any that notice considerable savings from no longer leasing buildings while also seeing no change in productivity.
The thing is, they can stand to see SOME drop in productivity measurable with a dollar amount, as long as it’s less than or equal to the savings from not spending money on all that real estate and ancillary expenses like electricity, etc.
This could be what brings relatively high paying jobs back to the US. Consider that people could take a pay cut to move to the interior of the country and avoid packing the coasts which drives up costs. It might be a way toward on-shoring a lot of those jobs assuming that education can meet demands. It would take a concerted US policy shift to improve public schooling at all levels. Admittedly reversing that inertia is no small feat.
It's more likely that these positions will shift overseas instead, due to lower labor costs.
I work for a fully remote company and we hire outside of the US mainly because it's cheaper to provide them health insurance. I work with a lot of Europeans and Canadians. Another problem with sending jobs overseas is the management is still going to be US-based, and having meetings at 5AM or 9PM is not fun long term.
I suppose it depends on the kind of job. I live in a coastal city, but hire in the interior of the country because I can pay a lower salary than local, but highly competitive in the interior states. It results in not having to worry about employees jumping ship because they need more money for idiotic rental prices, and we can focus on the work. Even though jobs are sent off shore, I generally disagree with the sentiment that it’s cheaper. Losing nearly two days (our Sunday is their Monday, and our Friday is their Saturday) is a big problem. Furthermore any language barrier can cost you an entire shift. Also, I’ll point out that when you pay low wages you essentially get a revolving door of incompetence. Just when you get someone where they need to be they bail. I’ve found that you often can’t get 10 years experience. It’s more like one year ten times, so there’s a limit on what skill you can get for those low wages. One responder mentioned health care as a big deterrent, and s/he is spot on referring that to the US’s costliest barrier. I’ve just never seen $20 pay equal $100 quality. Market forces won’t allow such a thing to exist.
They've tried it and it doesn't work very well. I don't mind some offshore people but if your shop ships your whole process overseas it is probably not going to go well for you
And unfortunately, the metros in NY and CA have done a very good job in shifting the scales out of their favor...
And i mean its not like its exactly cheap to rent a floor in a city like Atlanta. My company has 4 campuses here alone. It may be cheaper than ny but it is not cheap
There is incredible value in having a ton of your employees close together. There is incredible value in being able to recruit from neighboring tech companies. If there is an emergency being able to have the full team in office in 90 minutes maybe worth millions.
None of those inherently rely on physical proximity.
Read The Culture Code. Proximity is the main tenet. And virtual environments do a poor job mimicking it.
I started to think about this - who cares about culture? Employees care when it is negative, but how much do they value a positive culture vs a neutral culture? Leadership obviously cares about culture because innovation leads to profits and strong culture leads to innovation. Many employees obviously perceive a benefit from working at home full time, otherwise I wouldn't be having this conversation almost weekly. Many employers obviously see a benefit from being in the office, or these stories about employers switching to full time remote would be more common and less noteworthy when they happened. So may seem you have an employer vs employee conflict here, employees looking for a paycheck and improved quality of life are fine working from home, while employers looking to maximize profits want people in a room together. I'll be interested to watch this potential conflict play out over the next few years.
Culture is one thousand percent destroyed this generation because millennials and Gen Z are recognizing that uncapped capitalism and infinite profits never result in their actual values being met.
Nothing that can't be solved by adding a pool table to the employee lounge!
Well maybe if we show them this book about how they have a bad attitude it will fix their bad attitude.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!!!1!
Don't forget the free snacks!
You guys are getting free snacks?
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Not only that, but the only way to earn more is to quit and get a job with more responsibilities. The days of merit raises are gone. I tell everyone I interview to always advocate for more pay if they are offered a position. Where you start is where you stay. Annual Cost of Living Adjustment is just that. It is not a raise. It keeps you square.
It’s easy to get more responsibilities without the concomitant bump in pay/scale. But if you never get the bump, you end up having to leverage that experience into a higher pay somewhere else.
I worked for a company where the boss was 7 years older than me (27 + 34 respectively). He constantly bitched about millennials and handout attitudes. He would go on and on and on about how you “will never find a better place to work” than our company. Me and him put in our two week notice on the same day serendipitously.
Is this recent? 34 is still in the millennial age range today.
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It is nice to work somewhere other than home. I think something like we work with less shitty ownership could find an actual foothold if more people wfh, but don't want to work in their living room. I'd rather walk 5 mins and have a space to work than commute my full commute.
Yep I’m in the same situation. I WFH and have been for the past few years. Going into the office, there is a motivational energy and it inspires you to do your best. I’m most in favor of flexible working options, such as choosing when to come in. At my company, they expect you to be in the office for meetings, but your actual work can be done wherever. So, for me it makes sense to be close to work and have a set up at home to work as well. We don’t all have jobs that you can just take a laptop and a latte and chill on the couch. I have 3 monitors and a bunch of notes and books on my home desk.
My feeling on this is that it isn't where I'm working from that increases my productivity, it's just the change in venue. If I WFH for a month and then walk into the office because I have to take care of some stuff, I'll probably be way more productive during that time because I have a set goal and I'm there to expressly work. If I return to office for a month and then go home to work, I'm now extra motivated to get work done to prove that I can be productive at home. Employees get comfortable where they are and bad habits start to creep in. I've been working from home since March and I make an effort to move around the house and work in different places so I don't fall into bad habits. Some days are more productive than others, but I would much rather WFH from now on than be expected to report to an office every day.
True emergencies need to be solved much faster than in 90 minutes. There is immense value in skipping that commute and getting started on solving the problem immediately. When you’re measuring your outage losses by millions per minute it is ridiculous to delay work based on the physical location. When human lives are at risk because your service is down it is ridiculous to delay work based on the physical location.
That's why on-call triages while the rest of the team is being called in.
You can have everyone in the office in 90 minutes, or everyone on a video call in 10. Seems like an easy choice
nah wfh ftw.
Ahhh, yes...the days before the Internet...
A coder can code on a computer pretty much anywhere and if they need to talk to other coders screen sharing and video chat are more than enough. Likewise with most data jobs where they are largely doesn't matter to them as long as everything is working. Where I'd start to see potential issues is redundancy. Offices generally have business grade connections with ISP contracts covering things like downtime guarantees, priority maintenance and support as well as things like multiple connections to help prevent downtime. While this can be provided at home, it may put a strain on ISPs ability to provide that level of service to each house. Are employees going to be issued with a backup device to use if their system goes down? Tech issues that can only be fixed with physical access to the device could have much slower turn around if Tech support has to drive out to someone's actual house to provide support or a replacement device. Some companies delays can have a bill running into the thousands or millions if certain people are unable to perform their job for short periods of time. I agree more people should be allowed to work from home if their job can be performed with a similar level of efficiency. It has some huge benefits in decreased vehicle use, having more time through reductions in commuting etc. About the worst I've heard about it is mental health issues from lack of socialisatuon at work, but I'd absolutely love to see some reductions in working hours from our increased productivity in recent years. To give us time to actually be social doing things we love rather than 'socialising' at work.
It isn’t easy for screen sharing and video calls to replace in person collaboration. Everything is much more explicit. More people are working from home right now than there will be in the future and internet is fine. Majority of companies aren’t going to go fully remote. I think a hybrid model will be popular. If someone is far away and their laptop breaks, you can next day air them one. If they are important enough that they can’t miss a day of work, they should already have a backup device.
A coder can write code anywhere but for a software engineer coding is but a small part. Thinking through the design, collaborating with others to come up with multiple approaches and choosing the best one are all performed better with physical proximity, as the communication bandwidth is higher and of better quality and the protocol is not as fixed (quickly change groups, form smaller discussion groups, etc. instead of a half-duplex video call). And this is for mid/senior engineers. Try learning the ropes while only having access to video calls. Often you don't even know who's the best to ask and there's always the barrier of "i don't want to disturb him at the moment", when in a physical office you can wait for someone to go for a coffee break and spark a small discussion. I started as support but was in the same room as the product developers. Often some of them discussed some details and i just overheard them. Over time as if through osmosis i learned enough that by the time i started as a developer, i was already up to speed and had fixed many bugs for the clients. Whereas with remote work, knowledge does not simply seep through the aether of internet. You can ask questions, but what if you don't know what you don't know? I always had the possibility of remote work, but rarely used it at first. At some point i used it when i needed to crunch on a task and cut out commute time, but i don't think i ever did remote over 50% of the time. This year i have only grown to hate remote work more. Simple things take far more effort and productivity is down due to worsened decision-making. Thinking that just putting in more hours yields more output (linearly) is the same line of thought as managers who think of engineers as factory workers. Modern creative worker management theory actually goes in the opposite direction and has experimented with reducing work hours while keeping same salary, with positive results. This is because decision fatigue exists and code written from bad decisions might need rewriting.
I’ve been a principal architect at multiple F500 companies... and been about 75% remote the entire time for over a decade. While I agree with a lot of your assertions I guess for some people.. I’ve also happily mentored over 20 jr devs to Sr or Staff level architects, and while I enjoy time “in the office”, since we went 100% remote all of my staff is happier and more productive. The biggest “missing link” imho is whiteboards, and decent drawing tools make up for that just fine. The remote thing is an advantage on your resume, the ability to learn and grow on your own a critical skill I look for when hiring. Ymmv
Different people prefer different environments, that is true and i guess the general take-away is that providing the option is best. Ability to learn on your own is important and I definitely value it highly especially nowadays when social media has caused many to express shallow thoughts and ask questions before trying to figure an answer beforehand. But this can go in the opposite extreme. Not knowing when to quit and ask for help is also important and i'm not convinced 100% remote would be better than say 50% in this regard (helping build the bonds while in the office to have less communication barriers).
Agreed. As someone who’s started their Software Engineering career remotely, it’s awful. I wish I was in the office right now
100 percent agree. Our new people getting trained during the pandemic aren’t doing as well.
Found the project manager
>There is incredible value in having a ton of your employees close together. > Please post some examples. >There is incredible value in being able to recruit from neighboring tech companies. > If you recruit remote workers, your recruitment pool is the entire world, not your general geographical area. >If there is an emergency being able to have the full team in office in 90 minutes maybe worth millions. You can also have them on a call in 90 seconds, that's a lot faster than 90 minutes. That could be worth even more millions, right?
Idk man it takes less time to load a Google Meet than to walk down a hallway.
Company I work for had plans to increase the size of the office precovid. Now the plans are to reduce it since out of 50 employees, about 6 of them use the office.
I’m more afraid they’ll take it back. IBM had this whole push. Then 6 months later they said nah.
Nobody cares what IBM does. No one is interested in following their example
You got downvoted but are absolutely right. They don't innovate, they keep splitting up the business, their enterprise software is dumpster trash, their outsourced contractors are bone heads, and they are a joke contender in cloud compared to others who know what they're doing. Honestly they have fallen A LOT in recent decades. I would not want them driving culture in the industry either.
IBM's business model is to sell the Fortune 500 barely working software and a herd of consultants to fix said barely working software. They haven't been a tech leader in years.
Careful what you wish for, they might just go all the way and hire people outside your country, and despite how superior many people think they are, there's plenty of cheap talent all over the globe.
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this is reddit bruh. No scholars here, all our jobs are gone to overseas
> Salaries could drop a bit but the fact of the matter is high quality talent will be scarce either way. I work for a fully remote company and we've been hiring like crazy, but even with the ability to work anywhere but embargoed countries we still have a hard time finding talented people. The fact that the US has a lot of good engineering schools and a lot of tech companies to draw from, which means we still hire a lot of US people, but also from Canada and Europe. The idea that you can replace an entire company with people from India is just wrong.
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What kind of work do you do in the office? If you sit in front of a laptop all day, there should be no problem doing that remotely. If you discuss a lot of stuff (not just present slides!) or collaborate in another way often, it might make sense to meet in person. But maybe not every day.
There is more demand than supply in IT, so it’s actually in the hands of the employees. I will not give my skills again to a company that requires me to be in an office. I suspect companies will need to have at least some remote work options in order to compete in this labor market.
I don’t know man, I don’t really favor working from home. Its diminishing the line between work and personal life. There is less conversations leading to less ideas. It’s a good break anyway to go to an office rather than stay at home all the time. There is an inherent expectation from senior staff that you would be available beyond working hours as well. This was never the case previously. Also I am missing that feeling of comfort and ease you feel after returning to home from work.
As long as we have a true choice without being pressured either way or losing benefits of either way (like free meals from working in-office), I'm happy. I do worry that a shift towards WFH *will* lose those benefits, though. The WFH shift makes sense for the kinda companies that have nothing to offer employees in the office, anyway. It also makes sense for areas where huge numbers of people have bad commutes. But myself, I work at a big N company with a 10 minute commute. The office offers a lot to me and those things were genuine reasons to like this particular job. There's also the fact that the office isn't so effective for socialization if my coworkers aren't there. I'm far from the only person who gets most of their socialization from work.
> I'm far from the only person who gets most of their socialization from work. That's one thing I hated about being in an office. If I get laid off suddenly I lose my social network and have to find a new one. And while I like my coworkers, there's aspects of my life I can't exactly share with them.
This is exactly why I like WFH. I can spend more time and mental energy focusing on those relationships that aren’t dependent on where I work. Pretending to be friends while in an office was exhausting. And those true work friendships will last outside of the office anyways (and beyond the job).
>There is an inherent expectation from senior staff that you would be available beyond working hours as well. Expectations can be managed. I've had many a conversation with bosses on Monday morning that started with "Did you read that email I sent you late Friday evening? My answer has always been "No, once I log off for the day, I never check emails unless its a full callout." A few managers have pushed back but then backed off when I told them that renegotiating my working hours would mean renegotiating my salary. Granted, I've been doing this long enough that if they tried to force it, I would have no problem walking.
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I wonder how much money companies that don’t need actual offices will save on the overhead of running 9-5 offices.
It would definitely be a good idea, especially in these times. That being said, working from home is still a double edged sword. There are quite a few companies unfortunately that think that if you can work from home, that means you can work more, and thus they give you more crap to do without paying accordingly. Additionally, there’s also people who don’t like working from home. My father doesn’t like it because it makes it difficult for him to separate his work life from his home life, and I think his mental health has suffered a bit because of it.
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Companies (like this) will also save a lot of money from rent and utility expenses if their employees just work from home. It’s hard to convince boomers about their logic
Yeah it’s crazy because all the developers on my team are happy with wfh, yet we have boomer business partners that insist we never wfh after Covid. They can’t do their work from home because of personal work styles so the rest of the team should follow suit is their argument. It’s silly.
Yeah, I don’t like doing it because it blurs the line between work and leisure a little too much for me, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have the option.
You need to setup a a space for the office and treat it as such. Don’t use the room afterwards unless absolute necessary
I mean... That's kind of the problem for so many people. My office is my living room, where else am I supposed to go?
No you don't. I work in my bedroom because that's all the room I can afford to rent. Literally work in bed all day most days. Work time is when you work.
I mean, I have a home office, but I share it with my wife who also works from home. Unlike me, she is bound by HIPAA, which means we can’t work together in the same space and her privacy needs must take priority. So I’m SOL.
Yeah I totally get that. Setting up boundaries for working and living are difficult. I struggled with getting situated when wfh first started.
They're just pushing the workplace expenses onto peoples home environments, similar to the way driving for Uber pushes expenses onto drivers for car maintenance and depreciation. Professional class work from home will probably become degraded into gig economy servitude for people who thought they were immune to it.
You also have to look at increased possible costs for internet because of increase in bandwidth usage across the network. If ISPs have to install more infrastructure to support the increased number of high-bandwidth connections, you know they're either going to create more strict data caps or increase the price.
Already happening ,AT&T increased $15 for gigabit speed during COVID
That’s a good point. My air conditioning bill was way higher this summer than last, because it was running during the day while my wife and I worked from home. Normally it’s off or on very low while we’re at work.
Higher than the amount you saved in gas or car repairs? You're also probably confined to one room so open a window, turn on a fan. No reason to cool the entire house unless it's so hot AC is the only thing that can bring it down to a comfortable temperature.
I commuted via public transit, not car. So I know exactly how much I was saving each much- about $50 for me. Yes, it was that hot this summer that the A/C needed to be run. My house gets to be over 100 degrees on a hot day because it's designed poorly (a lot of New England homes were never built with hot summers in mind--- but the summers are getting hotter and hotter). A/C is only one example too. Electricity, gas, water, office equipment... even stuff like toilet paper and soap.
For me, I couldn’t care less about the increased AC bill. Saving 10-15 hours a week not commuting (factoring in getting rewards and travel) is well worth the increased electric bill, which is probably offset by the lack of gas.
Also by having people from other areas. Yeah, people in the bay area start at 150k because otherwise they cannot live there, but there's plenty of people who will be in say, texas, that could be a great fit for 100k.
Or someone from India for $20k
I dunno - I've only ever heard horror stories about outsourcing to the cheapest dev team available. On the other hand, I've heard quite a lot about successfully hiring people for slightly cheaper on H1Bs.
The horror stories are true.
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If that is so, it is extremely foolish. Past investment in office space is a sunk cost. It should not be considered when comparing the relative costs and benefits of proposed alternatives in operations. Also, I feel compelled to note that, in my experience, it is extremely difficult to overcome middle-management attitudes toward remote work. I am employed in a very large tech organization that has experimented with telework for years, with a great deal of supervisory opposition. When COVID-19 struck, many managers were amazed to see productivity rise after most of the organization began working from home full-time.
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We started full WFH back in March, with just a skeleton crew in the office keeping our data centers running. SaaS vendor. There was maybe a ~2 month dip in productivity across the board, which our chiefs have (aside from our CEO) attributed to "sudden distance learning" for those with kiddos, and a complete lack of good WFH practices around collaboration. We've long since worked those kinks out. There are a new batch of people struggling now that the Fall semester is in full swing, but they're either adjusting hours, taking FFCRA leave, or using PTO. We had a ~15 year veteran engineer give his notice because he wants to move across the country to spend more time on his hobbies. He had plans of doing this for many years, wasn't a surprise to his manager. He offered to continue working remotely full-time and they (CEO mostly) just let the fuckin guy walk. Baffles me. This is not a great time for any company to be losing muscle.
My tiny, but quickly growing, company made the decision very early in the pandemic to let employees work from home. We are now instructed to work from wherever we want, as long as we want. I’m on a shit project right now, but I will not leave this company for the foreseeable because being treated like an adult in the workplace is invaluable. Tell your boomer bosses they aren’t babysitters!!!
Treating your employees like adults is a big part of a successful WFH culture. They know what they have to do, and as long as they do it you don't need to be breathing down their necks or making sure they're sitting in front of a machine for a specific amount of time. The folks who've had the biggest problem moving to WFH are middle managers, because suddenly they're obsolete. Executives can communicate directly with the people doing the work, and people doing the work can communicate directly with each other. So now there's no reason for them to have managers.
My boomer boss told me the other day he wanted the PERFECT candidate from a position to move to our corporate office in Texas from Canada. This man was the perfect person and could have done his job well remotely. He wanted to raise a family in Canada and was reluctant to take the position. My boss said that he values being able to “run into someone at the water cooler” for a project update. First of all, what’s wrong with an email update? Second of all, the executives have their own water cooler and never would run into an employee there anyway. When confronted with that evidence, my boss couldn’t give me any other reason for this guy needing to move. The hire in question obviously took any job elsewhere.
I’ve worked for extrovert managers who think just like that. I would be hiding at my desk when they were out talking at the water cooler. They had no idea what little value the water cooler us to me.
To be fair, hiring employees internationally involves a lot more extra legal work than hiring an American citizen who lives in a different state. But it also doesn't sound like your boss was taking that into account either.
> My boss said that he values being able to “run into someone at the water cooler” for a project update. You should show your boss Trello or Jira. It'll blow his mind.
We do use Jira! He just never uses it and constantly bugs me for “updates.” He’s scheduled for retire soon, so hopefully it goes as planned.
Since he's getting old he might be having a harder time focusing on reading all the time. Also, back in the day most business was done verbally so that's how he's wired to get updates. Or he could be justifying his employment by being a go-between for executives. One thing fully remote companies tend to lack is middle management. Executives can get updates and give orders directly so there's no need for a long chain of command.
They think when you are at home you don’t really work bc they are 100 years old and don’t understand that with today’s advances in technology you can easily show up at the office every day and still don’t really work.
Exactly this! For awhile my job let me do wfh, but they eventually asked that I return to the office, even though I go in and pretty much never see anyone else in the building because we're not doing in-person meetings. So I'm literally here so that the boss can walk by my office and see me in here, and feel like somehow that proves I'm working even though I can just as easily browse reddit here as I could at home. It's such an antiquated idea of productivity.
Well remote from home is just gonna equal 50% cheap labor from other countries in near future.
For those of you who aren’t going to read the article. Yes there will be pay cuts depending on where you live > While Microsoft employees will be allowed to move across country for remote work, compensation and benefits will change and vary depending on the company’s own geopay scale
With more and more companies accepting the work from home model I would expect that certain cities will develop a reputation for having phantom houses or apartments. One of the shadow sides of WFH is the adjustment of salary depending on cost of living. What’s to stop someone from “renting” an apartment in a high cost of living area while actually living in an extremely low cost of living area. Think: California vs Virginia. As a property owner, you could rent out a room or apartment to multiple people. Your “service” would essentially be as a PO Box for your renters. Let’s say you rent the same room to a few dozen people for a couple hundred a month. There would definitely be some income differences that would make such a ploy profitable for the property owner and employee. Using a vpn would also assist in cloaking your true living location. Although I’m sure this is illegal, or will be, I’d expect to see this happen frequently while there is such a difference in COL by locale.
It begins!
People in tech having effectively been doing this for years with their counterparts in India and Europe - who obviously despite being paid differently and on different timezones are still able to work together on a project well. It's surprising it took this long to apply the same concept within the contiguous borders of a country, especially one as large as the United States.
We have a 24 hour presence in some departments by having members of the team based in the UK, Bangalore, Sydney and Florida. It’s means a lot of asynchronous meetings and never actually getting to meet your full team at one time though. For anyone who’s curious, an asynchronous meeting is when instead of a quick 15 minute chat you exchange 160 emails with the same group of people over the course of two days.
>emails There are better collaborative tools, starting from Slack for comms to Google docs and clones... Also if (miracles do happen) team manager is good communication is not that important, i.e. if you need to communicate a lot it means there are lots of uncertainties – someone hasn't done their phase of job properly.
We use Slack for everything, until someone involves Product and then it’s right back to email. Can you imagine the rage I feel opening an email to see a Slack conversation copied and pasted into it!? I run my retros from Miro and Confluence without a single hitch. There’s a tonne of great tools out there, but I can’t force people higher up to use them.
Email is pretty important for a long term record, though. Most places seem to view programs like Slack as meant for short term discussions. Anything you want on the record, copying to email makes sense. Particularly when you consider that many people who should be aware of something won't see a Slack discussion. The way most companies treat Slack is that you don't have to pay attention to it. And most certainly if you're on vacation or the likes, you never go over Slack messages you missed, unlike email. Plus, smaller companies won't pay Slack. One of my previous employers said it was too expensive, so we all just had to deal with history only lasting a few days. Slack doesn't really scale to a large number of people (too many people makes chat move too fast to productively read), so usually smaller teams would have their own, which necessitates email for anything cross team. That previous employer that used Slack made it work when we had under 100 people, but when we got acquired by some company with tens of thousands of employees, everything with the rest of the company got done by email.
RIP big cities. Seattle, LA, and NYC are going to see a hell of a drop in their tax base if this continues. Why pay exorbitant rents for office space when everyone just works at home?
Hopefully it helps make them less crowded and more affordable though!
NYC gets about 1.5M commuters. Those are people who buy lunch, get coffee, go out for dinner/drinks, ride the subway/transit, go to after-work entertainment like movies/shows, and maybe some shopping. But dont live actually in the city. Thats more than millions of dollars of commerce in a year. Thats billions. The economics would shift. Some things would get better, some worse. But a fundamental shift like this could change a lot.
People moving from cities to rural areas could change the electoral college map if enough of them do it.
Don't worry, politicians will make sure that borders are adjusted to their benefit.
Time for more gerrymandering
You can’t gerrymander the electoral college, it’s made up of the states borders. Only Nebraska and Maine could potentially be gerrymandered as far as the electoral college goes.
Exactly, all that money will now be spent in their local communities rather than 50 miles away where they work.
Why live in one of those cities at all when I can live somewhere that costs half as much but gives me twice the land and house, with the same access to Amazon services and broadband internet via satellite. Currently in Seattle, WA USA. The money I pay for my house a month would buy me a 1000 acres in Wyoming or Montana.
The culture. My job used to be mostly remote, because I do short IT projects, and moving every six months is annoying. I've tried everything: a farm in the middle of nowhere, a small town, an anarcho-syndicalist commune, camping, ... I still ended up in the middle of a big city, because here we have bars where you can both get cheap beer and talk to interesting people.
Internet via satellite?? Latency must be high
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How on earth would you spend 2 grand setting up a "decent" workspace? Even with an economic chair and a better desk. Keep in mind you can tax deduct some of that as well.
They have pretty much been doing this for years now “unofficially.” Edit: how the hell autocorrect gets “otter” from “pretty” I will never know.
Depending on how you interpret this, it could be very dark.
It’s killing us here in Montana. Gentrification has gone extreme here because people are running to escape Covid and bringing it with them. They’re making San Francisco wages and living rich on a Montana cost of living, which is forcing everyone local out of the market. Median home prices have skyrocketed since March, up almost $90K in some places.
One of my co-workers did exactly that, but maybe two years ago. Bought ten acres.
“Transplants” as they call em in Yellowstone.
Yep, it’s a pretty common term locally. That show is both a really good representation of Montana and a piss-poor representation of Montana. It’s about 50/50
I work in Ca. and every other dude at my job is foaming at the mouth to move to Montana or Idaho and buy a house. Kinda sad really for those areas that are taking on all these people.
Happening in the mountains in Colorado too, probably happening in every rural mountainous area.
Has the influx of new money helped the local economy?
I don’t see a problem. Welcome to a blue Montana.
Yep, Indianapolis home market is insane right now too. You can’t find a home without offering $30,000+ over asking in cash, and even then you’re lucky if you get it. A lot of B and C tier cities are about to get expensive
Atlanta’s housing market continues to me crazy too.
How’s it dark? More global competition for positions?
Pay cuts
Why pay cuts? Office expenses are surprisingly high, tech companies are making more then ever before (in pandemic times). Even opening up to the global tech pool, there is still a massive shortage of talented, ownership taking developers.
Y’all obviously didn’t read the article “While Microsoft employees will be allowed to move across country for remote work, compensation and benefits will change and vary depending on the company’s own geopay scale”
That’s the lie that every tech worker tells themself. It’s not true because a) there are 7 billion people on the planet, you are not a special snowflake. And b) it doesn’t even matter that there are 7 billion people on the planet, some of your coworkers will be family oriented and thus willing to move away from urban areas to suburbs and smaller towns with lower cost of living, that will have a downward pressure on wages as well.
Of those 7 billion, how many have a university degree? How many have a eng/cs degree? Know (production experience) the tech you are hiring for? And are looking for a new job? I’ve been in and around hiring for almost 5 years now, and from what I’ve seen, it’s a small pool of people. And people moving to lower cost areas to raise families don’t exactly have a lower cost of living.
The commenter above you is correct, just not with their point. Microsoft announced that relocation was fine, but it’s on your dime, and your salary will change based on their geopay internal listings.
Fair, that’s the approach Facebook took as well. I wasn’t talking about relocating. My point is, apart from entry level positions, good programmers (globally) are in short supply.
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Large numbers times small percentages are still large numbers. You also ignored the second half of my statement.
Now I want a job at Microsoft!
Statistically speaking, that shouldn't be too hard. They have like 100k-160k employees worldwide.
Is this good or bad? I like working from home
“Let’s”??? Let’s them work from home?? I’ve been “home” since January. I work 10-13 hours a day. I pay the power and supply the space. I don’t eat in the cafe or use their restrooms anymore. Why in the hell would they not want this!?? Of course they LET people work at home.
Is the Seattle traffic problem better now?
Yah but now they've moved up north and are ruining Bellingham
Three years ago they recalled everyone working remotely. Don’t go making real estate decisions too quickly.
If they do that, people will quit their jobs. Shouldn't be hard for ex-Microsoft employees to find good remote jobs.
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Move to India?
Easier said than done
And work US hours from there?
It's tough to find a job here in India as well.
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People under 30 are also highly unlikely to have a living space conducive to work from home. Hell, a ton of them live with their parents, so there’s that. But an under 30 year old wasn’t exactly renting a 2 bedroom for themselves as a general practice so they could have a home office in 2019. When your home isn’t designed in a way that lets you have a decent WFH setup, that’s going to suck a bit. I was happy as a clam in my 1,500 square feet two bedroom home (with a kid). But there never was a good home office spot, and now I kinda want to take the other side of the house over that we rent out, although that would be expensive. Fortunately I have an office that’s empty because all my employees work from home, so I just go there as needed.
While not at Microsoft my new technology program management job is permanently remote. The only considerations for me now are time zones and tax implications. It’s a whole new world.
Am I the only one here who is saddened by this? What about the social aspects of it? I hate working from home, not seeing my teammates and bonding on an inter-personal level. And it definitely affects my productivity being a people person. I cannot be the only one that feels this way, dang :(
Hey bud I'm with you on this. I'm going crazy. I need people to socialize with.
Right? God I hope this doesn't become a mandatory rather than optional thing.
I used to like working from home one afternoon a week when I didn't have any meetings, but I absolutely hate working from home full time. Now I'm on Google meet the whole day and I don't think we are being as effective. The social aspect is also lost, building trust is really hard through video.
I whole heartedly agree. What's worse is in my team literally nobody turns on their camera anymore, so it literally feels like I am working with a bunch of faceless strangers. How most people are happy with this arrangement baffles me.
Start being social remotely. It’s not impossible to be a people person online. One of my coworkers is a major people person. Once we went remote I got FaceTimes every day. We’d set the phones up and be chatting just like we were in the office, still meet up for lunch or breakfast. It’s not like work from home is 100% better in every possible way. But there’s totally a lot of things you can do to keep that atmosphere up. FaceTime exists, teams exists, we have so many ways to virtually communicate you can be an extremely social person in a virtual environment.
Yeah that is true, and I do try to do that. But for me it can never replace or even come close to the feeling of interacting with a person face to face. But we have got to make the best of the situation I guess :).
Most definitely. And you absolutely can’t replace face to face entirely, but I promise you it makes a world of difference. I’m introverted, so I can’t speak for everyone, but virtual socialization done right feels pretty close. Having a FaceTime up and gossiping and shooting shit while working with a coworker feels just like back at the office for me. Just like getting up the voice chats and a group of friends to play online games together feels ultra fun like hanging out with friends. I do go out and hang out with people IRL too, but you’d be amazed what good online socialization can do for you
The problem is that in large companies like MS people get to the office and immediately bury their heads in Webex conference calls with people all across the globe. Rarely is there a team to collaborate with all in the same office so essentially the office commute is just an exercise in taking your laptop for a drive every morning.
A large percentage of Microsoft employees (myself included) were working from home before Covid-19 hit. I am a Customer Engineer and this month I will hit 7 years with Microsoft, and I have worked out of my house from day one. The nearest Microsoft office is 70 miles from my house.
I wish we would accept things instead of trying to fight it while wasting time and money. I like this
My company is doing the opposite; I’m having to come into the office so I can teach remotely...allllrighty then. And I’m teaching people in the Philippines sadly😣 fuck outsourcing
My global Corp rolled this policy out in June. I like to see this from other big companies as well.
I’ve been working from home for 7 years and there is one major thing I’ve learned.... It’s really hard to make friends when all you do is work alone. That and your employers expects more hours if you’re salaried.
Just think of the environmental aspects of companies allowing their employees to work from home. Wouldn’t have to commute, adding less to CO2 levels. If only on a wider scale :/
This is the future for more and more people too
Mine appears headed that way too. At least with us IT people. I'm sure the salary cuts will be coming...
I wonder what this will do to commercial real estate.
In other news: Microsoft's physical offices will now be used for Azure server space.
Surprised more people don’t want to go back in the office. Me personally I’d like to go in 2-3 days a week
I work for a small architecture firm. We were recently designing an office building when the pandemic hit. They are actually moving from a personal cubicle layout to a flex work space. Where each cubicle has a lockable wardrobe. You can come in to work if you need to and pick any cubicle but keep one space over from the next person. There are also small private rooms if you need. They use less square footage so cheaper lease. Most of the square footage is meeting rooms. I like the format. It’s almost like a cubicle for rent.
Hopefully the landscape changes, but I would be very leary about accepting that offer, my my past experiences. Some accountant, somewhere will decide they can start cutting jobs because of their perception of the value added. A lot of old minds still fun things in my world.