To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.
I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be just as productive when we're out of the office.
That said, I'm one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.
Having non-essential spaces for people is complete unnecessary — and it: contributes in less health eating habits, traffic, cars, HVAC related energy costs, wasted time commuting, rising real estate costs, economic lost during pandemics due to downtime, etc.
Same principle holds true for non-essential travel.
I just don't think we have the communication tools to support productive collaboration between people who hardly ever meet.
(I think what I may be saying is that while yes, there are Open Source projects that overcome these same sorts of problems, I don't think it's tools or process that are the reason they work. I suspect the psychology of volunteer work - performed and received - lets people overlook some pain points that they don't in a more mercenary setting)
This move also allows employees to choose locations that better suit their politics. I've always found it highly dangerous to have large tech platforms, which are defacto digital public squares (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Medium, etc.), aggregate in just one or two cities that all share the same culture and politics. This is a risk especially because these platforms have increasingly taken steps to ramp up their censorship. If diversity actually matters to these companies, the diversity of thought introduced by decentralized geographic distribution will be a benefit to society.
I'm at a big (Google/Microsoft/Amazon) workplace and WFH has always been a last-resort thing. I can't even imagine my team moving toward this. Every day I do too many things in the office that are face-to-face. Drop by the architect to get an opinion about XYZ, drop by a PM to ask about their functional spec, drop by a coworker to ask about some comments they left on my PR. Get three people in a room to go over an ongoing incident that's impacting a major customer's operations.
All these things could be pings/video calls, but having done that for a few months now, it's just not as effective as being there.
I wonder if the "WFH" discussion on HN is simply silicon-valley wishful thinking, if it's only possible for highly independent contractors and startup-hopping tech bros, and if it will never actually work in a large workplace environment.
[0] http://www.crenews.com/general_news/general/barclays-lent-%2...
permanent: lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.
indefinitely: for an unlimited or unspecified period of time.
forever: for all future time; for always.
Permanent just means we don't know when some condition will change; contrast with temporary where we do know when it will change.
Forever means it won't ever change under any circumstances.
For example: a magnetized iron nail is a temporary magnet and will lose its magnetism over a predictable amount of time; a permanent magnet can be demagnetized, but otherwise should continue to be magnetic indefinitely; a forever magnet is not a real thing.
Do y'all feel that a trend towards remote work benefits mid/senior level employees at the cost of the development of junior employees ?
IMO, it is the same difference as in-person schooling vs online schools. As convenient as WFH is, it really isn't conducive to hands on mentorship.
Tech companies might not mind it, since the attrition rate in tech at the junior level is incredibly high anyway.
Firstly, home is not an effective place of work. I come home mostly to be with my family and not take my problems from work to home.. Aren't there many studies done on the same, why work shouldn't be brought to home and stuff..
Secondly, if the employer provides all the required setup (monitors, webcams, speakers) and support for electricity backups and stuff then I might be willing. The point about electricity backup is very true especially for developing countries.
Thirdly, I'm actually working more (double time) compared to only working 8 hours. This also has to do with my time management but people are actually lazy at home and very hard to be dependent on them..
That said, it's fantastic to see Twitter do this. Especially given the commutes some are making in the bay area, this is a huge quality of life increase.
The only viable option would be to move out from the city, but then I loose all the other benefits from living here.
(Of course the total cost is the same or higher today, but it's taken by the employer. It's not compleeetley unthinkable that the employer would compensate me for it, but it get's really tricky really fast. I would probably have to pay taxes for the extra salary, and how much "rent" would they pay? Are new grads supposed to work from their kitchen table, or far away just to afford an extra room?)
My organization operates culturally at the pace of an insurance company. Despite the benefits of a semi-remote organization to my employer and the opportunity this pandemic provided for proof that productivity can remain high when working remotely, it will choose to have people on-site.
Now I'm searching for remote-only work.
[EDIT: Added "sick" in the last sentence of the first paragraph.]
The best way to do partially remote is to have even the in-office people dial into the meetings individually as well. This also means trading in your whiteboard for remote collaboration tools like Lucidchart to allow remote folks to contribute as well.
If you actually do this, then I find that over time, the in-office people will begin to question why they are in the office and slowly drift off to be remote, leading to a 100% distributed team.
If you don't do this, then the remote people slowly get isolated and cease to become valuable contributors, eventually either leaving to fully distributed teams, or coming back into the office. Either way though, the partially distributed team eventually gravitates one way or the other.
Twitter will no longer need the large office building that it has.
It will no longer need to run the shuttles, both routes and frequency, that it does today.
Some employees may not want to live in SF anymore. Some may decide to move out of BA and even CA.
Now multiply with other companies that may do that...
The latter would seem insane if they are going to allow teams to be 100% remote. Why pay SF rates if you're getting a WFH employee?
Personally cutting out ~90 minutes of daily commuting has been fantastic. The lack of childcare .. not so much, but when that inevitably resolves I don't see myself going back 5 days a week in the office.
I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.
You can join a club, pick a new hobby, learn a new language, volunteer or even start a revolution. Be as social or not social as you want, but the beauty of it is that thats time you have complete freedom over. I choose that over contrived interactions with a random set of people who happened to do enough Leetcode problems to get in the same room as you.
Virtual machines that live in the cloud. Apple DEP. Microsoft InTune. All of these tools allow companies to drop ship computers to employees from a warehouse or reseller to the employees doorstep. Turn it on and the IT tools take over and set the machine up.
One thing I predict happening if this becomes widespread is a reversion to the mean on salaries. I think the pay for people outside the Bay Area will go up and inside the Bay Area it will go down, as being in the Bay Area will no longer be nearly as essential.
This will have a nice second order effect on Bay Area real estate prices, bringing them closer in line to reality (but we will still have all the problems of massive undersupply, because it's just a nice place to live, tech employee or not).
Prior to the Covid situation, we already had examples of successful remote-only companies (eg. GitLab). Now companies are using the circumstances to experiment with existing hypotheses of going remote-only or remote-mostly. I know my company was already wanting to experiment, and I think we would have done so even in the absence of the virus. Now we know it works.
Why pay rent when you can offload the cost to your engineers? Many already have a home office, and the cost of furnishing their home environment is negligible. Employees may even get a tax write off.
This may be the new norm for everyone.
I shudder to think about what's about to happen with the corporate real estate market, REIT stocks, etc. It's certainly yet another death knell for WeWork.
I also wonder if this will begin making cities with low cost of living and affordable real estate attractive. Who wants to work out of their tiny New York apartment every day when they can have a dedicated room for their office in another city?
Same thing.
Same productive outcome.
Hence, working from the office or working from home is ... the ...same ... gawd ... damn ... thing.
Well done to Twitter for growing a set.
But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it kind of raises the "sleezy car salesman" flags when I hear it now. Like my emotional triggers (family) are being used to get me to comply (dont quit the company, sign the offer, work 80 hours with no overtime). It irks me even more when I see people new to the industry eat it up.
I saw a bunch of it recently in social media from college graduates. Lots of companies who signed new talent promising the offers are just on pause and telling candidates they have a start date in 3 months. And then watching people actually believe it because they've been brainwashed in the interview by the "family" mentality. It just made me really sad about how manipulative workplaces can be.
Sometimes, I just wanna wake up early, slam out my work, and have the rest of the afternoon to myself. I've done it many times over the 7 years of WFH. Enforcing everyone to be in an office for 8 hours is just silly. It should always be about how much work you get done.
Love it how the next 10 years will turn out.
Obviously, this can't apply for all workers, but for a big chunk of the working population, it can.
While companies can save money with smaller offices by allowing working from home the biggest factor imho is you open the potential employee pool to the whole country, if not the content or the world.
You are no longer restricted to the best person you can get within an hour or two commute of an office.
Find someone perfect for the role who lives 5 hours away? It doesn't matter anymore!
You no longer have to convince them to relocate (and put forward cash to cover the relocation as a condition of the contract).
You don't have to throw away the perfect candidate because a decade ago your company decided this is where you office should be but now you can't find local talent.
I hope when my son starts working (if he works in an office) he says to me "Dad, did you seriously have to go to the same place an hour away every day to sit at a desk and do the same work you can do on any computer with an internet connection? That's crazy!"
So much needless commuting could end if more companies embraced remote working. Not being forced to live within commuting distance of an office would mean more people can live further from "the office" easing pressure on housing, roads, public transport systems, save energy (fuel), reduce commuter accidents (vehicular and public transport), reduce pollution and give everyone more time in their day not mindlessly traveling from A to B back to A again every day.
I wonder how they're thinking about setting comp ($400k will go a long way in Kansas, but also in Thailand).
And how are they going to manage the tax implications?
Will twitter be opening to hiring from other states and countries?
I've also seen the takes re: social distancing requiring larger office space, but why wouldn't companies just send their employees in in smaller, rotating groups?
Remote working as a norm is the breakthrough that society needs.
Time spent with family, commuting cancelled, train, roads, busses, tubes reduced - if it doesn’t happen now, the next pandemic will.
I’ll predict this announcement is step 1 in realignment of staff sizing. Perhaps Disney can buy the FB building and turn it into something productive.
This isn’t about declining ad revenue and SF real estate costs, right?
Before the pandemic started, I was counting down the days to my retirement. But now, I'm actually enjoying my work a lot more. And during my 20s, I would have been absolutely ecstatic to be able to travel the world, while still working a full-time job.
To any non-FANG company: take note. You don't have the same level of prestige, and you certainly don't offer the same level of compensation. So how do you stand out in the job market, and attract the best candidates? Giving people the option to work remotely, is your best bet of ever competing with the FANGs.
It’s odd therefore to see this announcement come via Buzzfeed.
I expect other tech giants will follow suit.
Those who previously can't afford or don't want to live in big cities like NYC/Seattle/SF because they are older, have families, or various other reasons now are included in the candidate pool.
This can go two ways: either the local software business will have to compete with FAANG salaries, or there will be jumps from senior developers, experienced developers, and many smarter/more capable developers from smaller software business to FAANG due to salary/perks attraction. Whatever the case is, suddenly fresh graduates, mid level developers, senior developers, are now competing on the same pool. It is getting even more real to compete in the high FAANG salary job openings now.
This serves as a reminder for us, whether fresh graduates, mid level, or even seniors, to always to keep your edge. DS&A grinding, system design, etc, do whatever you can to not lose your edge.
As a matter of fact, I think almost all knowledge workers will find themselves in this situation. If you are a knowledge/office worker, huge competition looms over the horizon. Never lose your edge.
Companies showed that it's possible to have great office culture even remotely. My company started food/drinks tasting events, small pockets of communities developed around hobbies like video-games and slack got a complete revamp. It has been a real joy!
Right now I'm not sure I don't see any benefits of working in an office other than:
* Sense of inherit accomplishment: I sat here for 8 hours == I did things. Which is of course kinda silly but remote suffers from accomplishment perception issues since you don't have that office sacrifice that you can always fall back to.
* People are fun, and people are more fun in person! Especially in modern offices with ping-pong tables, bean bags and taco tuesdays.
Hopefully other companies will follow.
First Twitter was already moving towards permanent WFH before the pandemic, it only accelerated their plans. I highly doubt (m)any other companies were also seriously considering that move before the pandemic.
Second, working in a remote only team is very different from working in an office, or even from occasionally working from home. I have seen the best managers get completely clueless when managing full remote people.
Third you lose a lot of things by going full remote. You can no longer have hallway conversations, sharing new ideas over lunch, trying to pitch new ideas organically. You lose a lot of spontaneity by going full remote, which I fully expect to impact innovation potential. Some of the best ideas in my group are things that came up from organic conversations that we have been productizing.
Fourth has to do with company culture. I can't speak for every company, but I know that at my company there is a very clear favoring people local to where the HQ is located, probably at least in part for the reasons above. I don't see that changing easily. East coast to West coast in the same team means you have 3 hours a day where you can't have your whole team available at the same time.
What I expect to happen is most likely much greater flexibility for companies that were not open about it before, but full time remote for everyone seems like a huge stretch even over several years.
Isn't living at work and working at home two sides of the same coin? Is the merging of work and home really something we should aspire to? One of the basis of a healthy work/life balance is the separation of work and home.
In an era of mass surveillance and privacy loss, the home is the last private space we have. Is it wise to let work invade that space? Just things to think about.
We're following suit, just haven't announced officially.
This won't be good for me. Competition with regions is going to be tough.
If every other FAANG, in fact every other IT shop in the US or Europe did the same the wage bill would still crater in comaprison to hiring exclusively from the valley.
While I 100% support it, I'm also on the far side of introverted. I would have thought that half or more would hate not having their social interactions daily.
Companies used to provide lot of benefit allowances for using personal items, space and time for company work like, home office, equipment, personal car, phone, on-call, education and training, etc. Slowly, slowly these benefits have been discontinued for everyone, except top executives, in the name of cost savings for the company, and such costs were shifted to employees. Based on such history of taking away benefits from rank and file and giving to top corporate executives, I doubt any of the corporate cost savings from WFH will go to employees.
(We realized it wasn't worth the rent, and gave it up after about 6 months.)
Some of those years were very travel heavy -- fullish time on the road -- but for the last 10 client travel has vanished in favor of GoToMeeting conferences.
I love it. I love the flexibility of it, I love not having a commute, and I love not having dry cleaning bills anymore. The music in my office is whatever I want. If I feel like it, I can catch a nap. And I love being able to eat at home, where one can make MUCH healthier choices.
People SAY they'd miss the water cooler, but in my whole career I've only had co-workers I really really liked on a social level in one company. It's rare.
My current employer -- where I've been for almost 13 years, which shocks me -- is entirely virtual. We have no office space anywhere, and the closest other employee to me is about 4 hours away by car. I have colleagues that, until recently, I'd never even seen a picture of.
I get that not everyone is constitutionally able to do this. I came to it from heavy travel (even pre-2001), so I was used to working in weird places (hotel rooms or lobbies; airport bars; frequent-flier clubs; taxis) already, and I think that made it easier.
I also get that it's not even appropriate for everyone, and that our success at my current company is tied to the fact that we have never had "entry level" developers. I think it'd be super hard to mentor and acculturate and teach this way.
But as for me, at this point I'd have a very hard time going back to an office.
I had a good bit of December off and did WFH most of January/February because the scrum team I was working with was distributed. Our primary location .. would go into the office once or twice a week to sort/connect on the larger issues (and not plan to get my stuff done, but rather help others). I do miss that.
A lot of us have small kids at home, so now we’re (mediocre) teachers on top of our work.
But most importantly, this is a national — no, a global — trauma. People might not realize it, but that trauma is there, and it will have to be addressed at some point. It’s another factor which makes it impossible to fairly evaluate the efficacy or desirability of working remotely.
Climate change is another reason work will likely have to change over the next decade. This pandemic has forced us to confront the types of changes we might need to make to adapt to a world of less flying, commuting, etc. Those changes seemed impossible, but we’ve been forced into a trial run. If we can get through it in these incredibly difficult circumstances, it gives us time to design a future of work that’s a bit more balanced. Perhaps a mix of remote and in-office. Perhaps an office that is less crowded. Perhaps a more distributed, regional world, where we can revitalize the lost cities in America rather than crowd into overpriced hubs.
Is it convenient? No. Will we lose certain bits of magic? Maybe. But we’ve ignored problems for a long time that we now need to confront.
It’s time to put on our design thinking hats. We’re the innovators — so let’s innovate the future. It doesn’t have to suck.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~ Inigo Montoya
But I can totally understand those who have young children who can distract them and hinder productivity.
There are solutions, once it's safe again. You can fly everyone to a common location once or twice a year, but that's not cheap. And so far at least for me, attempts to do team social video conferences have had at least mixed success. It does help with reconnecting socially, but video conferences are tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not.
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