My experience may be illustrative of why you should let some employees WFH. Out of the Navy, I got hired as a programming intern assigned to work on the database for "Mouse Works" for the Macintosh, which became "Microsoft Works" after Microsoft decided to publish it. I wrote the database and more. I also managed all three releases from 1984 to 1993 as the build engineer.
I did this all while working from home in Santa Cruz. Our small team all worked from home because the owner didn't want to spend money on an office. We got together every few weeks to compare notes and integrate our work.
After Works, I went to work for companies that required me to be in the office, which was the rule for the time. I found I couldn't perform in an office because there were too many distractions. I need peace and quiet to think, and never found that in the many office settings I worked at. I produced some passable work, but nothing like I had been able to do at home.
If your employees tell you they need to work at home to produce their best work, believe them.
I appreciate this comment for what may not be an obvious reason
A gripe I've had with this discourse, WFH or not, was obviously inspired by the pandemic. The concept has been going on forever.
It's something I've noticed because I've had at least three conversations at work where I've had to defend my status... "I was WFH before the pandemic, I'm not coming in just because it's 'over'"
There's an angle to this whole thing where it seems the powers that be are trying to renege, and I'm not here for it
Good point. To me this isn't a pandemic related issue at all, but an issue of a programmer's right to control his or her work environment. I think managers should ask themselves this question: Why do think traditional public libraries ask people to be quiet and not speak or make noise?
The trap I fell into after I stared working in an office is working from home on the weekends to do the important parts that required concentration. I was giving them free hours but I didn't see it that way because I was salaried. I was giving up my free time so I could perform the job.
I think there needs to be programmer's Bill of Rights (I can't speak to other professions) At the time I couldn't articulate the problems I had with an office but now realize they include:
- I'm sensitive to 60 HZ fluorescent lights that have a low flicker and hum. I get headaches
- I have chemical sensitivities. Many of the chemicals in offices make me feel sick.
- I'm hypervigilant due to trauma suffered in the military. When people are walking around in my field of vision I automatically stop what I'm doing to evaluate their threat level. With the rise of mass shootings in society, I imagine this would be even worse for me.
- I drag in the afternoon, which I can fix with a 30 minute nap at home. It was not possible to do this in an office.
- Sometimes I get really stuck on a problem and get very frustrated. I found the best way for me to fix this was to go surfing, no matter what time of day. I'd usually come back from the surf session with a fix for the problem. Again, not possible working 9 to 5 in an office.
There's more, but you get the idea
Edit: A post supporting some of my claims and more has appeared on HN
"Toxic workplaces can harm your physical and mental health, Surgeon General says"
Managers need to stop thinking they are paying for a programmer's time and start paying for results. Paying for time is like paying for lines of code. Do you want to maximize results or do you want to maximize time/LOC?
From my experience so far with pandemic WFH that turned into permanent WFH for our company, if the employee was generally good or performed pretty well they are performing even better working remotely. However, if the employee was just average or needed some oversight, productivity is not very good remotely. Fortunately, I have a solid team (at least for now) so I'm seeing the benefits and things are going very well overall. However, a colleague's team's overall productivity is abysmal. Btw, we also don't have long hours. Rarely work over 40.
This might be is an indictment of your colleague’s manager. Not that the team individual contributors don’t have agency, but it’s the managers job to corral them and make sure they’re performing. This can certainly be done even if the manager is remote; it’s been done for decades at multiple companies.
Managers have a strong role in shaping the team’s ability to perform and they need to use it. You’ve got to talk to your IC’s. If they’re really incapable of performing, get them help. You can manage remote workers! It’s a thing that can be done.
True. We tried to eliminate management with scrum and agile which helps with accountability, but in my experience, it doesn't help when the dev is overwhelmed, outside his area of competency (the second causing the first, which was my situation 8 months ago), not engaged (too good/not interested) or simply not good enough for the mission. Those are for me the main reasons why a dev would not be productive.
Yes those situations are easier to detect at the office, but a good manager would detect those at home too.
You don’t want travel but that has nothing to do with remote work tho.
I actually look forward to work travel from time to time now since we went fully remote. I’m never going back to office setting as well but occasional meet up is awesome in my experience thus far.
> I wonder if parent meant, "remote work from a hotel forever"
I ended up doing this unintentionally for the last ~1.5 years and...I have to be honest, I didn't hate it.
Maybe it was just pent-up energy from being stuck on a small island (Singapore) for the first two years of covid - and it probably helped that I was mostly in major European capitals - but once I got back into the swing of traveling again it was frankly delightful.
I'm actually a little surprised there hasn't been a class action discrimination lawsuit by tall people against airlines. I'm only 6' with shoes on, and it's getting tight for me.
'Working remotely works, I’m going by my own outcomes not some scientific study. I’m not going back, ever'
I came to the same conclusion. I have no desire to fill the gap in social lives of my coworkers. I prefer to spend the time with my kid. It's just a job and I'm fine without the whole office thing.
Since then, it just seems even more noticeable. I guess there are just different people with different preferences and life circumstances to deal with, but personally I just wish that most would be able to whatever feels suitable for themselves.
Claiming that we should do X because everyone else is doing it feels harmful (outside of external factors that force your hand), as does pigeonholing people who don't prosper in a certain mode of work into it due to others feeling comfortable with it.
In those situations, it just feels like people might be better off just finding a mode of work that suits themselves, rather than sticking around in an environment where they'll be miserable.
The problem with “let everyone work wherever they want” is that there are a lot of real challenges with having some people working remote and some not.
I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office.
Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there.
> I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office.
This is a good observation and probably sometimes the decision to have everyone work remotely vs in office will be made at an org level. Some will be okay with that, some will resign because it's not their preferred mode of work and others will remain working there but will be miserable for some time, which is unfortunate.
Also, I've seen some try to do remote work while still trying to work primarily with sync communication, which actually urged me to create this site: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/
> Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there.
I'm not sure about this, I've heard some explain that orgs want to maintain their property value, which isn't as nice if the buildings are completely empty and thus are urging workers to come back into the offices. That didn't make an awful lot of sense to me, or maybe I misunderstood the argument, but I can also see some benefits of having an office location.
Of course, some try to have offices that have the capacity smaller than the total workforce, accounting for not everyone being in office 100% of the time, which has the benefit of being such a location without being overly expensive, but some have described a setup with no assigned seating kind of sub-optimal.
There's lots of details to be explored in regards to the whole topic, it seems!
Instead of my commute I have used the time to exercise every day. I’ve never been in better shape, and that has translated to me being a better programmer.
Me too. And I only had a 30 minute commute. But I moved. How I walk 40 minutes in the morning and 120 minutes in the evening. Because I can. I’m not in a city where there is constant construction on sidewalks.
I like the choice. If I need to collaborate in person is fastest.
If I need to focus the ability to go to the bathroom or grab coffee without being interrupted and mindlessly do a task while still focusing on the coding problem is unparalleled.
I have a reasonable commute so I don't mind going in every day. My productivity has noticably dropped since I've gone back unfortunately.
I feel like the remote work folks might be unintentionally throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, I believe people should do what they want but I also believe decisions can have unintended consequences.
Tons of people make friends at work. I'm pretty confident, if we stop going to work we, collectively, won't make many friends via work. I go to work 3 days a week as requested by my company but others don't so about 1-2 of 6 days I show up and no one else on my team is there.
There is arguably an issue with people having less friends than ever
People will reply they don't want friends from work but that doesn't change the fact that lots of people make friends at work, people have less friends than ever, and working from home will only lower that number even more.
It was basically saying society doesn't function without a majority of people having trusting relationships. Well, less gathering because WFH arguably means less friends made in aggregate means less trusting relationships, means downward spiral for society.
WFH isn't the reason we got to this low friendship point but it will pretty obviously add to the problem.
I'll go even further, do the WFH arguments apply just was well to Learn From Home (LFH). Why should students have to commute to a school or collage, they can just do it all remote. It feels like all the same arguments apply.
Similarly, people can claim why should they be forced to be with fellow students the same way WFH advocates say they don't want friends from work, why would that be different for friends from school?
And yet, people form lasting relationships from school friends, both high school and college. In fact most people arguably find most of their close life long friends in those years. But applying the same logic as WFH advocates we should allow LFH and I think if we did we'd end up with the same unintended consequences.
>Well, less gathering because WFH arguably means less friends made in aggregate means less trusting relationships, means downward spiral for society.
This is a false equivalency. You don't need to be friends to have a basic sense of trust that people won't stab you in the back or be out to get you.
>And yet, people form lasting relationships from school friends, both high school and college.
There are two very big differences you don't give any credence to. Kids are still growing and put with their peers. Comparatively, adults are far more rigid, have already traversed most of their social lives and many are not among their peers in anything except a commonly practiced discipline. Sharing a discipline isn't a net gain by default, either.
Regardless, it doesn't really matter. You don't need to forcefeed people one way of working like we've done for the past decades, for one. For two, most of your arguments towards adults are moot considering work friends aren't solving the problems most people have regarding lack of friends, quality time, love and romance, and more. Trying to pine this on WFH is pointing at the red herring.
> >Well, less gathering because WFH arguably means less friends made in aggregate means less trusting relationships, means downward spiral for society.
> This is a false equivalency. You don't need to be friends to have a basic sense of trust that people won't stab you in the back or be out to get you.
That is not what the point of that article was. The point of that article was that unless people are close they'll assume when they get wronged that there was ill intent even if there wasn't. To put it another way, you forgive your friends but not your non-friends.
> Regardless, it doesn't really matter. You don't need to forcefeed people one way of working like we've done for the past decades, for one. For two, most of your arguments towards adults are moot considering work friends aren't solving the problems most people have regarding lack of friends, quality time, love and romance, and more. Trying to pine this on WFH is pointing at the red herring.
There's a practically unlimited amount of evidence that people make strong and lasting friends at work. Removing that is removing a large source of making friends throughout life.
Further, you mentioned love and romance, well, work is in the top 2 of places that people meet their spouse through work. Switch from spouse to lover and the number skyrockets. Remove that and that source of love and romance disappears.
Dating app are popular now but they only work for people who present well. For the rest, many fall for people they spend lots of time getting to know. Work is the #1 source of a place where people spend time together and so a chance to get to know someone beyond a picture and a paragraph of text.
I realize you're being catty, but the stigma towards in-office work isn't towards people who enjoy it, it's towards the idea that everyone _must_ enjoy it.
COVID proved that many businesses can survive a hybrid or even remote-only environment easily. Being told that employees must come back to office or altering the salaries/benefits of employees who chose remote work is what people are against.
If people want to be in office, let them. And for those who remote is more convenient, let them.
The thing is that in-office work only meets the needs of the in-office people if everyone else is there. So instead of every company feeling like they need to support remote work, there should be some companies that are all in-office and some that are all-remote rather than each company feeling that they need to support both. I am not the kind of high performer that companies fall over themselves to hire, but I prefer an employer with no remote work (other than full remote teams like a Europe office) and I’m sure some high performers feel the way I do.
I’m a 40% in-office worker and don’t see this all-or nothing view at all.
I enjoy white boarding with in-person colleagues, but am fine with remote. I’ve always worked with people in different cities and countries, so I can’t imagine a company where everyone has to be in the same building. It didn’t work that way pre-pandemic, so why now?
You’re totally right. And now they’re downvoting you for saying even this, which is silly. Well, it seems some people agree with me and are able to go against groupthink, so that’s nice.
I don't want to get back to the office. Ever. However, I'm not against offices. I'm against living next to the office, because the majority of them are in the center of the universe (eg, Broadway in New York, Market Street in SF, etc). Real estate prices there are in the stratosphere. So you either live in a shoebox sacrificing your kids childhood or commute to the office 2-3h daily.
Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time?
> Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time?
Wasn't this the idea behind the suburban office-building hellscape that people absolutely hated? We thought we were escaping that with our nice city-centre offices!
The problem is that making it anything else in the (US) suburbs is damn near impossible. So you have your nice little suburban office park ... and what else? If you want to replicate the feel of a city, even at small scale, you're reliant on restaurants and other kinds of stores and entertainment venues being nearby. Unfortunately, they won't see your office park as a draw. They'll still cluster near the big roads. Your choice in the suburbs is to be in Car Hell or to be isolated.
The closest compromise I've seen is the area around a local mall. There are tons of restaurants - everything from brewpubs to fast food to a Brazilian steakhouse to coffee shops and my favorite bubble-tea shop. Groceries of all kinds and levels, all sorts of clothing, hardware, housewares, a movie complex, you name it. And there are a couple of semi-decent-looking apartment buildings in the area. It's still very car-centric, crossing the eight-lane road between the apartments and the mall wouldn't be fun, but if I were single and worked in one of the nearby office parks I could see living there and hardly needing to drive anywhere.
I think even without taking fully remote work into account. Using small offices in small cities is an untapped market of employees.There are plenty of 500k - 1M person cities that could support an office of 100-1000 engineers well. I don't see much benefit in these huge 10k, 20k+ office complexes when people still end up doing meetings on zoom because it takes too long.
Kids can't have their own rooms (unless you make $300-400k and can afford a 3BR), they do not have opportunity to enjoy outdoor space (there are homeless, traffic, no grass, etc), kids can't go outside without their parents presence, parents struggle to keep up with constantly increasing real estate prices, which down the road affects their children's future. These are just a few from the top of my head.
I have a different opinion. They need their own space to play and do the homework. Parents need their own space to do their adult stuff.
> Cities have parks
Good luck trying to afford a property next to a park. 2BR in New York is $7k per month. If you are buying, prepare for $2M+.
> Kids ride the subway and bus alone
16 year olds - maybe. What about Those 7,8,9,10? Would you let your 8 yo kid to take a subway to the park? Give me a break.
> they can walk alone
No, they can't, unless they are 16+, but even then it's dangerous. My friend lived in Battery Park. Her 16 yo kid was bullied and robbed (several times he was surrounded by a few older "kids" and they took his phone away) at least once a month - all in the subway of NY.
- You can easily get perfectly comfortable 2 BRs in nice neighborhoods for far under $2M. I live in one. Didn't pay close to $2M. Only the high end (unnecessary) crosses that threshold.
I know a wide range of NYC kids and their parents of all age ranges. They haven't sacrificed anything growing up here. They're perfectly well developed kids with just as much going for them as anywhere else. I'm sorry your friend's kid has problems. That sounds horrible, and I hope they find a solution to their personal problem.
Holy smokes. Is that a counter argument? Is that a normal price?
> - You can easily get perfectly comfortable 2 BRs in nice neighborhoods for far under $2M.
Yes, you can. 1000 sq ft for $1M. You'll live in a building built in 1930-1960. Is that normal? How many people can afford a million bucks mortgage?
Let's do a back of the envelope calculations. Quick google search:
> Experts suggest you might need an annual income between $100,000 to $225,000, depending on your financial profile, in order to afford a $1 million home.
Since we are talking about families with kids in New York, I would not hold my breath to rely on $100k annually. $200k is much more realistic.
$200k is ~$5500 bi-weekly paycheck if you are not investing anywhere (401k, stocks, etc).
$1M mortgage is apprx. $6,275 per month. So you need 2 paychecks at a minimum to cover your mortgage expenses alone.
You are left with $4,725. Utilities will take another $200/month = $4,525 - $1k (food) = $3,525. Internet + phone + entertainment for kids + home maintenance - $500/month at a minimum. You are left with $3k. That might be enough if you are ready to live like a robot.
Now, all these calculations are based on the fact that you magically had $200k downpayment, which is a massive amount of money by itself. Average account balance of Americans is $4k (40-45 yo population, data from 2019), which means saving $200k is extremely hard.
An average of 6.68% of US households make over 200k. So, roughly 6.7% of the US population can _potentially_ afford to live in an old 1000 sq ft 2BR in Manhattan.
> I know a wide range of NYC kids and their parents of all age ranges. They haven't sacrificed anything growing up here.
Well, I do know as well. But the counter-argument here is that they don't actually realize that they are sacrificing anything. They have a belief that everything is normal, things are going fine, but that's simply not truth. I lived in New York for 10 years and I thought that the place was OK. Once a travelled a bit across the US, I realized how miserable New Yorkers (including myself) are.
I grew up in a big city (Moscow). I walked the streets alone and took the subway alone starting at the age of 12. I went to the playground outside of my apartment building alone starting at the age of... IDK, 5, maybe?
Did bad stuff happen occasionally? Yeah, I got robbed a couple of times, got into some fights, did some very dumb things myself, to be perfectly honest. But I feel like all of the bad stuff was a small price to pay for independence and street smarts.
Edit: one benefit of that is that as an adult, I've never felt unsafe walking the streets in the US in any neighborhood, now matter how bad its reputation is.
I grew up in Odessa and had exactly the same experience as you. But I don't remember a single occasion when a kid would disappear. Later in life I moved to New York. I lived there for 10 years. AMBER alerts were a "normal" thing.
I'm not one of those paranoid parents, but there is a line when my gut feeling tells me: "no man, this is not safe".
Sincerely: fix your culture. All of this is possible in many developed countries. It's uniquely an American thing to believe children are in danger of everything.
I mean I think it’s a foolish and selfish decision to have children in the face of coming climate change, but if you’re going to have them you should do it in a city rather than the suburbs. Stick ‘em on a bus make ‘em walk, whatever.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We've had to ask you this more than once before. You can make your substantive points without swipes, snark, or flamebait. Please do that instead.
I'm guessing this is referring to US cities, where it feels too dangerous/stressful to raise kids. Cities in Europe, like Amsterdam, have a completely different experience.
I was at a law office my friend worked at where one of the upper guys was walking around chanting "BUTTS IN SEATS, BUTTS IN SEATS" at the beginning of the pandemic in reference to WFH as a possibility.
It depends on your social class. The people interviewed in the article are all highly-paid software workers who can negotiate good working conditions. Meanwhile, people who don't have the funds to move around have to deal not only with the local inflation and decrease in living standards but also with the gentrification that comes from the nomads. In places like Portugal, it's approaching dire proportions already. They can no longer aspire to own a home or have a living standard equal to that of their parents.
You could then ask why workers don't just learn to code, but the quality of life of digital nomads also depends on others not having the possibility, aptitude, or natural interest for doing those jobs.
I agree that in many ways life is better, but there are also multiple indicators for it getting worse and more feudalistic due to the accretion of wealth.
Its also lifestyle when you are young and alone, not when you ie want to start family. For me I preferred (before starting family) to have 3-4 far away backpacking vacations and come back to green mild climate civilized safety and mountains. Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there)
> Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there)
Growing up, my dad would take me one month before school ended for the year, travel the world with me while mum stayed at home, then came back one month after school year started.
This was met with a lot of 'not much respect', by both family members and broader society, but as an adult, those were the best moments of my life and I am grateful my father was never one for taking society's judgement to heart.
I suspect if you ask any of the "essential" workers, they would disagree.
The divide that has been created between essential workers and the pyjama class is extreme.
In some cases, pyjama classes were being paid to just stay home and not do anything because their work could not be done remotely or the systems were not in place.
Meanwhile, nurses, grocery store workers, and pharmacist techs were all killing themselves working insane hours for virtually no pay increases, all in the back drop of a "deadly pandemic".
It should be no surprise that the labour shortage is affecting the jobs that "essentials" perform, and meanwhile we have a surplus of pyjama class.
> [Atlassian] had to adjust salaries based on location...
I'd really like to know their calculus for adjusting based on location. The whole cost-benefit offset of remote work conditions stem from minimizing office space costs and attracting talent for less than a relocation hire.
I'm skeptical most talent management departments are staying disciplined.
> You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace. Hence the location based pay
You're partially right. Pay is very much about how difficult you are to replace. However Location in many industries is no longer the dominant input.
Location is the dominant input in an office-centric model, but isn't in a Remote model. In an office centric model, the company would have to pick where to locate the office and that location would have a "commute radius" in which they could effectively expect their employees to willingly come in to the office from. This meant that any physical office's "commute radius" was effectively its talent pool.
So if you put your office in a high cost of living area, you now have to pay enough for people to live in that area or be willing to commute in from lower cost of living areas. This reality is the foundation for the "location based pay" detente between Labor and Capital.
It's worth noting that these things are also interdependent and self reinforcing. Eg: An area (like Silicon Valley, or any other business cluster) has a higher density of talent, which is more attractive to employers, which means more employers want to be in that area. More employers means more competition for that talent, which drives wages up. As those wages then filter into the market you see the price for supply constrained necessities (houses typically) go up, and often times that will drive cost of living up.
In a remote work world, this entire cycle is dramatically disbursed and the core foundation of the "location based pay" detente between Labor and Capital is shattered. What this ultimately means is that Capital no longer pays for Talent + Location + Competitive wages within that location. Instead they pay for Talent + Availability (timezones mostly, but internet connectivity is in there as well). This should, in theory, drive a larger talent pool, which, depending on demand for that talent, might lower wages in a given "Availability". If it does, then the cycle starts anew as Employers start to seek out ways to be in that "Availability".
The big question one needs to ask is whether there is enough demand to suck up all the talent within the workable "Availabilities". If there is, then wages stay the same or go up. If there isn't, then wages go down.
My personal opinion is that any company doing "location based pay" in a remote work world is shooting themselves in the foot (unless they have market power in those locations).
Everything you've said is logical, but the radius you are describing is multifaceted. There are regulations, inertia, cultural and ideological factors, and all sorts of other considerations that come into the capital vs. labor struggle and recreate the radius even with remote technology.
In our current world, American salaries are inflated for macro reasons, but the shift you are describing may very well flatten the skilled salaries for currently wealthier regions and increase those for poorer regions.
> Everything you've said is logical, but the radius you are describing is multifaceted.
No disagreement there.
> There are regulations, inertia, cultural and ideological factors, and all sorts of other considerations that come into the capital vs. labor struggle and recreate the radius even with remote technology.
No disagreement there either.
> In our current world, American salaries are inflated for macro reasons, but the shift you are describing may very well flatten the skilled salaries for currently wealthier regions and increase those for poorer regions.
> You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace
May be true in general but definitely is unrelated to location based pay (wouldn't it be easier to higher another faceless IC in the bay area than in OKC?)
By this logic pay would be lowest in for example San Francisco because there are tons of engineers with diverse skill sets there they can hire. Obviously not the case.
Companies still want to hire local, non-remote talents for all sorts of reasons, from timezones to regulations to just internal/external culture. This will take a long time to change, if it ever does. Technically, a company could chose to hire only foreigners in cheaper countries, and I'm not talking about unreliable hires from developing nations but other competent Westerners whose biggest QoL mistake was not being born with a US visa.
If you are an American who wants to be a nomad, the company will rarely fire you on the spot in favor of a more manageable new employee of your country of residence, because it already has a relationship with you and hiring is expensive and lengthy. What they can do however, is decrease your salary because they are no longer beholden to American anchor prices. You are no longer part of the contingent of local talent that they hire for various reasons, and will concede the decrease because the company still offers you the perspective of being a highly paid nomad.
Think of it another way: how come it is nearly universally the case that junior American devs are paid salaries that are equal or higher to that of non-American devs working outside of America but within the same company?
> What they can do however, is decrease your salary because they are no longer beholden to American anchor prices.
They pay you as much as they need to to get you or someone of equivalent skill as you (encompassing all things including communication skills) to work for them. 'Anchor prices' isn't a thing.
> how come it is nearly universally the case that junior American devs are paid salaries that are equal or higher to that of non-American devs working outside of America but within the same company
Because that's how much it takes to get them to work for the company.
That's the only answer to any question of 'why is someone paid this much' (in a functioning market.)
Well that's exactly my point. There is great educational infrastructure in America, so all else being equal Americans have astounding opportunities to become highly paid knowledge workers and the American society will produce many of these individuals. However, that does not make the typical competent American dev that much smarter than the mass of competent employees elsewhere. What will cause the discrepancy in salary is that there is much more money swirling into America per capita, and that immigrating to the US is very difficult. This becomes obvious if you consider the salary difference between Canadians and Americans, despite them being nearly identical in many relevant respects other than the amount of capital involved in their respective countries.
If you combine that with the multiple reasons that might lead an American company in hiring American talent or at least talent based in America, you end up in a situation where you want a portion of America-based employees even though you have to pay them more, but if any individual employee leaves the territory the reason to pay them American market rates erodes away, even if they have the American nationality. They no longer meet the need that led the company to paying those prices in the first place. Keep in mind that if that need didn't exist, and salary was the sole consideration, they would have more than enough great devs around the world to never have to hire in America to begin with.
The nomadic employee has fewer cards in hand because they want to live in a different country and also have a near American salary, which leads to a compromise where their salary is decreased. If they start to make too much trouble to the point where starting the hiring process anew is worth it, they can be replaced by an equally intelligent and capable local dev who will quietly accept the salary in question.
> but if any individual employee leaves the territory the reason to pay them American market rates erodes away, even if they have the American nationality. They no longer meet the need that led the company to paying those prices in the first place.
This doesn't make sense to me.
If my company employs me because it wants me to write a Ruby compiler, and there are only so many people in the world who can or want to write Ruby compilers and can communicate effectively about it, then exactly which 'reasons to pay them American market rates' do you think have gone if I move? They weren't paying for that in the first place.
They were paying to get something done. It's still getting done no matter where I am. Me moving doesn't mean that someone else suddenly becomes able to do my job for less money if they weren't before.
Companies pay to get things done. If the find the best people to do that is people who happen to be in the US then they hire there.
If we take the premise that companies will hire solely based on getting the job done vs. the cost of hiring, the current market we have wouldn't make sense. It would not make sense for a junior American dev to ever be paid equally or as much as a senior non-US based dev in the same company, or even more than a junior dev is some other developed region, yet that is an extremely common if not universal occurrence.
It also wouldn't make sense that American salaries would be much higher in general to begin with, since the corresponding premise that America-based devs are that much more naturally talented than the entire rest of the world is not plausible, even if obviously there are massive concentrations of talent in the US. This latter concentration suffers in itself from chicken-and-egg circularity, since people came to the US due to the salaries involved.
The only plausible explanation is that for historical and geopolitical reasons there is a disproportionate amount of capital flowing into the US, and American companies have an incentive to hire US-based talent regardless of the tasks needing to be addressed.
Try to reverse the analysis here: if the market rate factors aren't gone if you move, why would Atlassian ever 'adjust' salaries for remote workers who leave the US? You're still doing the same job, so it can't be that they were paying you solely for it to be done.
> It would not make sense for a junior American dev to ever be paid equally or as much as a senior non-US based dev in the same company, or even more than a junior dev is some other developed region, yet that is an extremely common if not universal occurrence.
This does make sense - they have better technical skills (because of better education - you said this yourself) and better communication skills (because of cultural context) and also in general I think better attitude and aspiration.
> why would Atlassian ever 'adjust' salaries for remote workers who leave the US?
In a foolish attempt to save money that doesn't make any sense, based on the same misconception you have.
If they could hire people for less money to do the same job then why weren't they already doing that?
>This does make sense - they have better technical skills (because of better education - you said this yourself) and better communication skills (because of cultural context) and also in general I think better attitude and aspiration.
This isn't a plausible explanation if you are at all familiar with the tech world outside of the US, or even higher education systems. It's easier for an American to get a good education, but the quantity of quality educated people is high in every developed country. Besides, for the explanation to make sense, the Americans wouldn't have to be slightly better, they would have to be multiple standard deviations better to merit the current salaries.
>If they could hire people for less money to do the same job then why weren't they already doing that?
Because the whole point is that locality is a factor in the hiring practices of tech companies, though this is changing significantly
> This isn't a plausible explanation if you are at all familiar with the tech world outside of the US
I live outside the US and work in tech, so I am familiar with it.
> or even higher education systems
I'm also a Visiting Academic in a higher education institution, so I'm familiar with that too.
> the quantity of quality educated people is high in every developed country
I'm not so sure - I'm in the UK, and we have a chronic lack of skilled technical people. It's a big problem - big enough to be a national security issue. We just don't seem to have the knowledge, skill, or aspiration to produce a lot of talented tech people, outside of a small elite.
And I think the UK is in a good position compared to places like France, Italy, etc, which are even worse.
Let's have another 500+ comments thread full of subjective opinions. I am sure this time everyone will agree on one universal truth and we'll all hold hands. /s
Companies are free to try and enforce whatever they like. The job market will respond accordingly and a new balance will be found.
That being said, such measures are only leading to more and more segregation (tinfoil hat: maybe that's the actual goal here?). I don't enjoy the idea of a society even further segregated but hey, I am not judging either side for preferring to work in an office or at home. Work where you like, as long as you actually have a choice and your livelihood is not threatened.
And that is the key element that always flies out the window even at the start of every WFH / WFO discussion: give people a choice.
If you can't do that then you're more or less declaring war on one of the sides and then don't get surprised at the repercussions (whatever they might be; I am not implying anything in particular).
I despise remote/wfh articles for this reason on HN. At this point - some ML script could do a better job creating new comments than what people on HN could.
Everyone has to share their 10,000th anecdote about why work from office killed their pa and remote work - in the particular version they are experiencing - is the messiah.
From my experience, there are broadly speaking two types of people. They are often grouped into introverts and extroverts, but one aspect of this grouping is their differing response to external stimuli. In this context I'm suggesting that there are people who require external stimuli to maintain concentration/creativity; and people who require serenity.
Personally, I require being around a lot of external stimuli to maintain focus and work/study; and am therefore better suited to working in the office; however, I have developed strategies for becoming productive when working from home.
I have found that when working from home my best work happens when I am in a room with flashing disco lights and driving metal/house music, where the lyrics are in a language I don't understand. I need this stimuli inorder to be creative, and If I don't have this I become very lethargic and unproductive.
Who would want to be a real worker now? Teachers, Nurses, construction workers, factory workers have to be at work every day. Either their wages need rising or WFH office workers need a big pay cut.
Precisely. Tech workers are for the most part spoilt. Being paid more than the average worker, having the option to work from home, lots of job benefits - and yet the thought of going back to the office brings comparisons to indentured servitude? Come on…
The WFH crowd wishes. Corporations are not logical in this way. They are far more concerned with enforcing their own culture than they are with the expense of their real estate which is, after all, both an investment and a tax write-off.
Over time in a perfectly spherical market, companies outsourcing their office costs to employees will be able to charge less and thus win more custom thanks to the invisible hand.
Of course large companies have further inefficiencies, where middle manager incentives are not aligned with those of the board, which are not aligned with those of the owners (all of which boils down to management layers being unable to reliably measure the worth of the layer they manage)
In my opinion, it's not fair for jobs that cannot be WFH. There should be some kind of percent over minimum wage pay or tax breaks for jobs that cannot be done remotely. While the market seems to be heading this direction, I think the government should step in to ensure those that will dedicate their time to being somewhere else are rewarded as much as those that get to sit in their pajamas and work from the comfort of their homes.
I say this as someone who has worked remote for years. Folks that have to be onsite (like tradesmen) see the inequality and it is furthering division within our country.
Or the prophecies of remote jobs being outsourced will come true and the onsite folks with their job security will have the last laugh.
I can see some consequences of people taking up WFH that could be good for the people who have to commute: fewer people on the roads / in public transit is a clear win: it's more comfortable. People working from home full-time could move further away and lessen the pressure on housing and child care. Prices could go down and allow those who commute to move closer and further improve their commute.
In the city where I live, there are ridiculous traffic jams every day during rush hour, and the metros and busses are bursting at the seams with people. Most people are "service industry workers", sitting in an office in front of a computer all day. Why on earth would we, as a society, want to not encourage the people who can to WFH?
Even if nobody were working from home, there would still be significant differences between jobs. I hate my commute and greatly prefer working from home. But even if I had to sit my butt in the company's chair, working in an air-conditioned office is leagues above having to work, say, construction under a scorching sun or in the freezing cold. Should the government mandate that I carry a 50 pound sack of cement up the stairs twice a day and blow a heater in my face during the summer?
It's true that some (most?) "lower-end jobs" that "keep society working" are under-paid, but I doubt that some people working from home makes the difference between positions significantly worse. Trying to somehow "tax" people who work from home just sounds like a bitter "since I can't have it, neither can you".
> Or the prophecies of remote jobs being outsourced will come true and the onsite folks with their job security will have the last laugh.
Hailing from a country that's a popular outsourcing destination (Poland) I noticed that during the pandemic while the number of remote job listings accepting the likes of me increased, so did the salaries.
All around me people suddenly started having daily rates of €350-600 - the lower end of that range was close to the upper end of local listings.
To an extent it stayed that way. It appears that regardless of how wide a net companies cast, they still need to pay up to attract talent.
Isn't this one of those things the market finds a balance for? If the comfort gap between remote and in-office gets too big or too small, people will push the salary/conditions to where it works for a sensible number of people?
There is zero inequality. Salesmen for example get % of actual profits plus pretty good fixed salaries. They chose the extra stress for extra money.
I, a WFH worker, am not in any shape or form stopping them from becoming financial advisers who scratch their balls in the living room while filling up Excel spreadsheets all day (and taking less money).
It's their choice. I am not forcing them into it.
If we're going to pull out the inequality card then two can play at this game: why should I be forced in an office when OBJECTIVELY AND FACTUALLY my job will be just as, if not more, efficient when I work from home?
If a government starts subsidizing on-site work, what’s to stop corporations from demanding that all their employees go back to the office? How would you prove a job can be done at home?
If someone dislikes working from home (say, fresh grads in need of in-person guidance) but are forced to do it, do you believe a government needs to penalize them?
Should people who avoid traveling due to carbon footprint be penalized?
If an enterpreneur opens up a small office at their home, should they also be penalized?
Do you believe tradesmen are generally underpaid at the moment?
More regulation, especially when through taxation, is a very dangerous path. The actual outcome is unpredictable, and it's likely that those who can will take advantage of any benefit
I did this all while working from home in Santa Cruz. Our small team all worked from home because the owner didn't want to spend money on an office. We got together every few weeks to compare notes and integrate our work.
After Works, I went to work for companies that required me to be in the office, which was the rule for the time. I found I couldn't perform in an office because there were too many distractions. I need peace and quiet to think, and never found that in the many office settings I worked at. I produced some passable work, but nothing like I had been able to do at home.
If your employees tell you they need to work at home to produce their best work, believe them.