Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

Which is it?

As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.

It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.

In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.

Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.

I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.

Every job I've been at I've formed close friends. My closest friends include people from every job and I don't think it's a coincidence. These friendships are just as real (and I'd argue stronger) than your "real" friends.

Maybe the problem is with you and you are just somebody people don't like? Or you think you shouldn't be making friends at work which is kind of sad.

Should you create life-long bonds with people because of accidents of geography, or because you have chosen to spend your working life doing the same thing? Even the incidental friendships you make at the water cooler with people who just happen to be working in the same company are as valid as the ones you make when you're walking your dog.

Despite this, the weekends are always busy with friends from outside of work. I find it builds a strong community.

For my part, I work for a Silicon Valley company and therefore do have some close friends at my job, I get the best of both worlds.

Over my career I've both worked with people that I've voluntarily kept in touch with after our time together ended (we even occasionally float the idea of jumping ship and going into business together) and people that drove me up the wall who I couldn't wait to get out of my life (as people, not even necessarily that they were unproductive employees, although some of them were). If I could just have less of those forced interactions due to physical proximity, then I'd have more social energy to spend on people I actually want to spend it on.

Actual friendships aren’t monetarily driven.

Some of the people I've worked with on it, I've made friends with—ranging from "friendly working relationship" to "would totally hang out with IRL if that were an option."

I'm also a member of a small online community that's about the same age, that includes a bunch of people who have never met physically, and probably never will, but who are very close friends, help each other through some pretty rough times, and are generally very supportive of each other.

"Remote" doesn't have to mean "never interact outside of pure work". You can 100% make friends remotely. Granted, it's not exactly the same type of social interaction as hanging out with someone in a physical space, but it's certainly social interaction—and for many people (me included), it's often better, because it doesn't have the same kinds of demands and pressures as physical interaction. As an introvert, it's much less draining for me to interact virtually.

If that's not true of you—if you're both someone who craves genuine physical interaction, and someone for whom the workplace is the primary place you want to get that—no one (or, well, nearly no one) is saying you shouldn't have access to that. We're just saying your experience is not universal, and we want to make sure there are a healthy variety of options for people with different needs and desires.

I would. No sarcasm. With the caveat that I don't have to spend 9 hours a day with them, as I'm not forced into an office space with them.

I've also found that working at companies which push for closer employee social bonds with countless office activities, quarterly teambuilding events, parties, etc. actually diminished my QoL. I realized that what I actually want are deep connections with people I like, not someone someone else hired to work on the same project. All those (imo, meaningless) socializing activities cut into my free time I could have been spending with friends and family. Working remotely also frees up time I would be wasting on commutes.

That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.

    - I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
    - I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge, or to get something done through unofficial channels
    - I know who is more or less competent in specific domains
    - I know what kind of work people do and do not enjoy

You mean work relationships?

I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully remote and also have work relationships.

I also see “acquaintances” keeping in touch with ex-colleagues on some social media sites, so I know Im not an exception.

I appreciate “most” isnt all, but your comment is very different to my decade of experience. Work is a great place to form friendships.

I may be biased due to getting older and having a family, so I'd expect to hang out after work less anyway, but I observe that generally amongst younger colleagues too.

At my third job between 2008-2012, I keep in touch with one guy that followed me across two more jobs until 2015. We try to meet along with one of my coworkers from my third job at least once per quarter.

I also met my second and current wife at my third job. But I can’t honestly say whether I would have tried dating her if I hadn’t known that the company we worked at was about to go under anyway.

I had a Slack group where I kept in touch with 5 of my coworkers from my 5th job between 2014-2016. But that died off.

When I go back to my home state, I am going to try to connect with my former CTO and a couple of other people from my 7th job (2018-2020). My former CTO reaches out to me every now and then and we talk. I owe him, he gave me a chance to lead their “cloud native initiatives” and hired me even though I had never opened the AWS console at the time. But he thought “I had some good ideas” even though he knew I had just watched a video and went through a certification training.

Now that I work remotely at AWS in the consulting department, there isn’t anyone I consider a “friend”, but one person who I worked with from the time they were an intern when I was their mentor.

The “team” I work with changes dynamically based on the project.

Not sure what happened

I have plenty of friends in real life and plenty of things to do, but I do value, at least somewhat a good work environment considering how much of my life I'm going to spend in it.

Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.

Ya'll really are socially inept.

What’s sad and socially inept is that you’re demonstrating no ability to empathise with that.

Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!

Example. My parent has neighbors. They have lived closely to one another. So closely and long, in fact, they had to sue to resolve some outstanding issues. In other words, neither prolonged proximity or meaningful relationship is a useful metric. I will trade those for a new neighbor every year.

Humans work like they always worked. Their predilections move them. If those are not satisfied, they are channeled.

>If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth

I guess all my 20's demograpic in town don't crave socialiation. Or I guess literally all of them are in bars. Not my scene.

My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.

Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.

Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.

I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.

I’m a pretty social person, and have great relationships both at work and outside of work: this list you’ve provided made me recoil in disagreement. The first two items are aesthetics and politics!? Even philosophy and world view I cannot strongly agree with.

Not saying that this isn’t true for you, and that’s genuinely fine. But I wouldn’t agree that you can generalize your preferences in relationships to others if the quoted sentence is genuinely true.

Mutual respect, friendliness, interest, shared experiences come to mind for me, though I admittedly typed that up in a few seconds without thinking very much about it.

I'm not goint to like nor even remember every neightbor, but it gives me OPPORTUNITY. You need some luck to make friends post college, and luck is simply opportunity + preoaration.

Especially post COVID, opportunities are sparse. All I want is a chance. If we don't click, cool. The kind of people that I probably click with aren't going to random meetups I guess.

Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.

But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.

Spend less time socializing at work, and more time creating that prolonged proximity outside of work, so that relationships of your choosing can be formed that are less subject to the whims of your bosses and the economy.

and then you realize no one wants to choose you back and maybe your niche geeky tech company is the best place to find fellow introverts.

I do like my co-workers. A lot. But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die. I can't speak for everyone, but personally the time/effort invested into forming meaningful relations by regularly showing up to places where I can engage with others who have similar interests (oly lifting, music, acroyoga) has probably been the best thing I've done for myself.

And being able to work remotely greatly facilitates that.

great. Now imagine if you didn't have that nor any clubs where you felt welcome. That's the situation for many people who do make friends at work.

I'm currently reading Marx Das Kapital and it's amazing how all the narratives are more or less exactly the same. The worker is lazy, society will collapse if every moment of time is not taken from the socialised labour etc.

This never seems to end.

yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.

This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.

Oh well at least the pay is good.

People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.

Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.

As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.

But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting remote work as just your average way of doing business means what I can fire my boss too, without breaking a sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find another, similar, remote work just easily. Oh, I don't need to take the day off for the interview.

I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.

Those sound like benefits to many.

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This is only a negative for people who were already making absurdly high incomes in HCOL areas. For many people away from the coasts, salaries are now higher because they have access to the kinds of jobs and companies they didn’t before.

> Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

Has this every not been the case? Besides, there are only two kinds of layoffs. Massive ones that do not take performance into account, and rarely take input from your direct manager about who is going and who is staying. On the other hand, for layoffs in which performance is taken into account, I’m sure many prefer the criteria to be more about their work than how chummy they are with the boss and how well they politick.

I can see how these might be disadvantages for a certain kind of worker, but for other kinds they are huge wins.

I don't live there anymore but in my home county in Eastern Europe, the WFH boom from 2020 brought in thousands of well paying tech jobs from US companies which might have never arrived if not for Covid. Tech workers there are making bank now, relative to local CoL.

Who knows, maybe this trend will accelerate now that the tap of zero interest money which enabled companie to out-bid each other for SV labor has dried out and many start-up and scale-ups need to actually be profitable for a change, they might look towards skilled remote workers abroad to fill their ranks till the next bull run.

Interesting times ahead indeed.

The problem is more about the company/organization that is doing the outsourcing than the outsourced work itself. You have to have a clear definition of what you are trying to outsource. Is it "just coding"? Is it "some design, but not analysis"? Is it "do everything below a certain level of management" (the worst)?

If you don't know what you want other than "cheap" then you won't get either of the other two qualities of "good" or "quick".

Developers aren't fungible, neither are designers, or analysts or architects. About the only people that are fungible and easily replaceable are project managers (sorry, buzzword compliant "product owners" and "SAFe scaled Agile practitioners").

But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.

Drawing from a worldwide pool of capable technologists is pretty obviously the end state and, unless global demand picks up by a factor of over 10x, that will inevitably depress tech salaries in the currently most highly compensated markets (while raising salaries on the other end of the distribution).

This goes both ways for employer and employee

Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

You might find someone with 80% of the ability for 60% of the price, or 50% for 25%, and in some cases companies could save a lot that way. But obviously two 50% developers != one 100% developer in output. And just to reiterate, I'm not saying excellent developers don't exist in other countries; they of course do, but you can't generally expect to get them for a fraction of the price. Maybe a slight discount, which would obviously be worth companies pursuing, but not enough to suddenly put US developers out of work en masse. That's already mostly true, and will become entirely true as remote work becomes more the norm. So it will be somewhat good for developers outside the US, and for US companies; I just don't think the change there will be as massive as it might appear.

I also expect on net it will be great for most domestic US developers as well; there may be added competition, but there will also be more flexibility. The one group that I guess will likely lose out are those who really want to live somewhere like San Francisco, as you'll still have the disadvantage of cost of living, but lose the advantage of privileged access to high-paying companies. (Though as a result, those property values will probably come down over time.)

I know. This is going to sound crazy.

The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.

A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.

Indiana and India still very different.

Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?

It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise really smart data guy, who was giving me something that clearly did not make sense in the business context - not everything can reasonably be placed in a requirement ( assume earth is not flat ).

This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. Other employers are now competing for those workers too!

Most companies just looked at the direct cost and went with it. Of course they picked the absolute worst workers and so the whole scheme collapsed.

The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers.

Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?

Until the war, Ukraine was also climbing that same ladder. And when the war is over, they will soar. Their skills are at least the equivalent of any developer I've worked with, their language skills are impressive, and their analysis and design skills are as well.

:)

Cities need to downsize but at the same time regionalize. Smaller cities with HSR and equivalent will work to reduce the need for individual vehicles, which saves on costs, environment, energy consumption, and people's overall health.

Working in a local community is much better for everyone involved than people spending 1+ hours each way every day to get from their home to their work and back again.

The same applies to retail, hospitality and most other service industries.

Manufacturing (particularly heavy industry) is better to be localized to transport hubs (rail, river, sea ports) because of the tonnage that has to be moved in and out, as well as localizing the polluting and environmental degradation (no one really wants to live next to a steel mill).

The latest CT is that the WEF is trying to somehow lock people into their suburb and restrict freedom of travel. That's complete and utter nonsense.

Is it not odd that we have traditional liberal activists and corporate/government on the same side also?

I agree wholly with you regarding how it is better for everything to be community based, with people working in a local community, that cities need to downsize, that manufacturing is better to be localized, all of these things move us closer to a much better world and I would even be happy if the government used its power to force the change on the population ... but if you study the groups behind this they are international socialists, the presentations they have given quite clearly outline malicious intentions when you look at other movements and ideas the same groups are lobbying for.

Regarding the WEF point you made. I point you towards the case of Oxford City in the UK , which as of last month has already implemented a 15 minute city without any dialogue with its citizens.

The communist china style tracking camera and permit system has been created in their city and it is likely by next year its citizens will start to be fined 70 pounds sterling whenever they go to a neighboring zone without a permit.

It was reported this week 100 councils (local governmental planning agencies) have signed up to implement this in the UK in their jurisdictions own cities. This is without any dialogue or permission with their citizens.

Does the speed of this being rolled out not frighten you enough to question what is going on? It is such a drastic change. Taking a trip in a car from one part of the city to another is such a small journey, such a small cost to the environment. It is not like a cross country trip, I understand the distances between points in the USA is larger but they are planning this for the cities in the USA too, not longer journeys, but god knows where this will end.

E.g. the option for remote work is really nice for many and may be required to be viable in the future... but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?

I do not believe I am special in any way but I am remote since 2000 and while working with the clients I often work with teams. At no point I felt like I am loosing some "fundamental part". Maybe because work team is work team and nothing more. I do not consider work as a source of friends even though I have acquired couple this way. Mostly I have friends outside of work.

In some ways yes. It is much harder to brainstorm through conference calls for example.

>And does it really just make us more expendable?

technically yes. It's very easy to be "forgotten" in a remote setting if your job is isolated out. They won't even have a face to place on someone when it comes to re-orgs.

The HN Community isn't.

HN isn't a coherent whole with one voice.

And, as a sibling comment pointed out, neither, typically, is any individual contributor. We can even change our opinions.

It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to clean house).

Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison their valued contributors just to have their competition scoop them up.

The emphasis here is on Good. Bad companies likely will jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction because they aren't paying attention. Remote work is one of those factors that some companies are struggling to set policies for.

Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many people on HN work for them.

If you can't get enough good employees in office, then it is smarter to go 100% remote as you now have an easier time hiring and working globally.

Marketing teams, creatives and other similar groups need more face-to-face interaction because what they're creating is all about interaction, with the company's customers, their consumers (if not B2C), etc.

Those building the product after the marketing and other designers have created their designs don't require as much F2F time. They need whiteboards and C4 diagrams (in IT at least) when architecting systems, as well as some team F2F for thrashing out system level functionality and how it will be implemented (shared services etc).

But an individual developer, writing code, doesn't need F2F time with anyone. They need the capability to be available (video calls, text chat etc), but it's not an inherent requirement.

Having done an in-office RIF and a remote-in-COVID RIF, I can confirm that the decisions are made in Spreadsheetville and the actual notifications are different but not different enough to detectably feedback into the plan.

I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet.

An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-drone.

In that case, I’ll just assume you’re a bot and simply parroting what you’ve been programmed to say.

> assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains

Then took a moment to do a quick mental check, recall faces and dress codes and behaviours, and I could hardly disagree, they are run by cartoon villains!

Both ex bosses of mine and pop CEOs fit the bill to such a degree that it's scary.

My last job had a similar structure but the office was ~15 minutes away so it was harder to push back on some "well let's just all work on this here together for the next 3 weeks since we're local" type asks and didn't work out as well. I don't mind collaborating but after years of not being used to coming in every day coming in is honestly not much better to me than the idea of "my job requires me to fly out for weeks at a time" type travel (which I've also done before).

Is the expectation here that "people on HN" are a monolith and only capable of singular thought? Are you suggesting there can't or shouldn't be any room for diversity of thought and debate?

And the two extremes don't even cover the whole spectrum of opinions you can have.

I personally like working in the office, I believe humans are social animals that need more than just interaction through voice and crappy video with a bad angle, yet I hate the commute. So I'm completely fine with the hybrid approach we have right now at my company. Although I would understand if for cost-savings they'd make us 100% remote.

Working from home where I'm mostly independent is great, I can concentrate much better. Working from home on something that needs collaboration is hard. Meetings in Teams are psychologically exhausting. You can't see the reactions of people when you present something. This feedback is necessary.

Maybe if we had some kind of VR/metaverse kind of thing it would help, but it would need to convey facial micro-expressions in real-time. Audio would need to be placed appropriately in the room.

Like for VR meetings to make sense it shouldn't be necessary to mute your microphone. The app would need to make it sound like you're in a room together and multiple people can be distinguished properly by ear.

Sometimes it's nice to be remote, sometimes it's nice to be in the office. Some people like it 100% remote, other 100% on site.

It's a community of individuals having a debate.

But I get your point! :-)

It does seem that way...

Wait for it… even single person can hold 2 or more conflicting opinions or views at the same time. Fun part is they also can and will use them in discussions as they see fit.

There is no law or logic involved.

“You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation.

> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.

You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.

And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism).

Welcome to the crapnet.

Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways.

Consider rock paper scissors.

If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors.

So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations.

> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home

This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home.

I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer.

Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.

A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.

You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it.

And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.

Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.

Employers quite clearly already think that way.

> They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.

There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.

In 2016-2021, I worked at another company that had an office in the Philippines where most of our junior employees worked. In fact, at one point before covid, they started rapidly hiring Tier 1 NOC staff in the Philippines and announced they would no longer hire Tier 1 positions elsewhere and would phase out the US-based Tier 1 staff via attrition... and then a few months later (still before covid) all the remaining US-based Tier 1 staff got unceremoniously laid off out of nowhere.

Mass outsourcing has been happening since long before covid and remote work took off.

You don't think it might be reasonable for the term "us all" to include people in Europe or Asia?

And yet, it's generally so easy to detect the ones that are, because so many of them have the same attitude you do: that you're the only ones who matter on this site, or even the only ones who matter at all.

It gets to be pretty disgusting at times.

- A programmer who's never come anywhere near San Francisco

Regardless, I'm sorry you find it disgusting, and that you drew the inference that I think nobody else matters. I was simply pointing out that not returning to bay area offices is not consequence free.

I have been hiring very capable people in other countries at my startup. It's not just hypothetical to me that people in other regions will be the beneficiaries of this movement.

I couldn’t have had the 3200 square foot house built in the burbs in 2016 (when I was making $135K) in any place close to a tech hub.

Now I work remotely for $BigTech and I can live anywhere. I live in a resort area in Florida half the year and fly around the US the other half and rent my place out (professionally managed). I actually downsized and paid about the same for where I live now as I did in 2016 and no state income taxes.

I’m starting to get serious about it and it’s really exciting.

Remote offers so many possibilities for a more enriching life. I’d for sure take a 20 or even 30% pay cut (to <$100k)to enable this, easy!

And for context: my budget at 49 years old could easily be supported by what a returning intern got at my current company. We aren’t talking about a lot of money by tech standards.

Housing: we were paying around $3500 a month all in - mortgage, utilities, yard, pest control etc. When we stay in our “Condotel” between October and mid March we are paying less than $3000 all in, the mortgage + HOA (CDD) thst covers everything else including utilities, access to three pools, a lake, a gym, three restaurants onsite, a running trail etc all included.

Our budget for hotels is about $3500/month - midrange Hilton extended stays also with gyms and pools.

-ground transportation - we had one car with a car note, that and maintenance, gas and car insurance for two cars came up to around $1000/month. We sold both of our cars. That’s now our Uber/occasional rental car budget.

- flights - before our “vacation budget” was around $8000 a year. Now that’s our domestic one way plane budget for the year.

I looked at a budget from 2016 when I was making $135K (less than a returning intern offer at my current job and I was 43 at the time), and my yearly spend has only increased by the $8000 flight budget.

Now “my“ budget does include my wife’s “allowance” that she was providing for herself when she was working part time in the school system. We agreed for her to stop working post Covid and when I got my current job.

Also, I give myself an “allowance” too that’s actually less than hers.

This wont happen in the united states because of timezones. UK time is 8 hours off PST Indian is 13 off.

SA is really the only viable alternative.

Good.

Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.

(This message was bought to you by a contractor).

What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor?

And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers.

You as an employee have far more to lose.

What I am advocating for is for people here to see reality more clearly.

C'mon now: "to see reality", "not proposing to make it easier to fire people".

Why can't the working class demand changes and influence the reality?

Coming from a contractor... yeah, really...?

I don't want my company in the red, but I also don't want to feel like I'm dangling on a cliff. There's a reason most companies stopped doing stack rankings.

Exactly, which is why labour of all classes and types should organize and gain power against businesses. Too bad the labour movement was killed decades ago.

The parent was saying (if I understood correctly): "stop complaining, you should accept the business decision, because that's what a company does: optimize the profit without caring about how the employees feel".

I was just saying that as an employee, you have the right to negotiate your working conditions. If you accept all the "business decisions" because they help the company make more profit, then they will stop paying you. That would be completely rational as a business decision.

I would argue that companies already view their employees this way, in office or remote. Companies do not value employees. We are valued the same way you would value coal. If you need energy, keep buying and if not, stop.

That's basically how the movie industry has always worked. Why keep people on your books when you're not actively in production? It's one of those cases where organized labor seems to work out well for all sides. The unions provide talent and craft support when/where it's needed, then they go away when the work is done.

It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. Similar incentives exist, but a company that makes software or hardware isn't an on-again, off-again concern like film production.

If the US offered some sort universal healthcare this would be much easier to see happen. UH would also be a boon for small business.

I don't know. With sufficiently large organizations it's quite easy to lay off people you never crossed eyes with, remote or not.

But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless.

I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.

It’s called contract employment.

But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.

But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.

100% remote has become a requirement for me.

Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.

You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.

I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me.

I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip.

Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.

I personally enjoy working from the office. It was a better work environment and there was a clear boundary between work and personal life. The large amount of remote lovers representation on HN are outliers in the real world.

We are all cattle, not pets.

I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.

Sure we are, and aggregates in fact, not individual figures.

I never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)

Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.

A "happy side effect" is that it made it easier for micro-managers to micro-manage.

Regarding the open office ... Everyone can see your computer screen. At any moment someone can be watching what type of face you're making and if you are working hard or dozing off.

Everyone is scared of raising their voice or talking in case you disturb others or others hear you.

Everyone can see when you arrive and what time you leave, what you wear.

Now if we lived in a land of plenty and profit did not matter, then it would be tragic that people are stuck in that hellish environment instead of having their own private office and peace of mind.

However.. when you consider why people do not have hobbies and are lazy... it becomes quite tragic in the here and now... because you have to think of Schools in our society and are they really for the benefit of children or to train them to work and to demotivate them towards life itself ?

People are forced to regurgitate things in a depressing, boring and oftentimes hostile environment (in the sense of their future being on the line if they do not submit to this torture) and in a place that resembles prison blended with an open office... from the age of five ... starting off fun with plenty of toys and play time in kindergarden club ... for most of their childhood becomes increasingly horrible when they are stuck in the grind. Does your own experience not make you feel rage at the time you lost ?

The tragedy of human effort as a whole is that 90% of corporate jobs in their current form are designed to exist in this way simply as a way to put humans into a hellish environment five days a week which they have been trained to accept and even expect all with plausable deniability for the elites who consider us nothing but their cattle. They made us slaves that compete against each other for them and police each other into doing it.

To put it another way, I can just take my laptop and work in a common area with a wall behind me, and I get more space and privacy. That's what I do. I'm not slacking, I just don't like eyes on my screen at all hours and people constantly interrupting me.

This implies that companies that have offices keep people on in order to make sure every desk is being utilized.

Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical offices.

Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.

This is called “contracting” and it has been around regardless of whether there’s an office.

No! I won't have it. That's the proper realm of the contractor.

if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.

Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.

Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.

In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.