No one knows what the future holds, but as the dust settles on WFH, I think that FAANG will double down on in-office and use their leverage as desirable large market cap companies with lucrative total comp packages to selectively seek out and retain those who are willing to agree to an in-office or hybrid work environment. They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage going forward, want people who agree with that philosophy and don't see the need to budge despite threats from some of their workers that, without WFH, they will quit and the company will wither and die without them.
WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.
The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.
The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).
I think startups that work in-office have an advantage because of the potential for early velocity of execution and social cohesion -- if they can find and retain local talent in this market. But I think the ship sailed for the BigCorps a long time ago.
And on top of that the round of layoffs they just did are killing morale. And the status that came with their titles is sinking or has sunk.
Their only advantage now is compensation rates, and those are dropping too, by their own efforts and by the drop in their stock values.
Finally, I'd say the problem with startups that are doing in-office, is that so many of them continue to insist on the Bay Area as their locus, which limits their talent pool and also diversity of ideas of their workforce. It can work for some companies but not all.
OH, but if employees competence is a large bottleneck for them to maintain that cartel/monopoly position. If they keep messing up with their people, not even buying all the correct startups will suffice.
We may be just witnessing the beginning of their end.
IMO they're more likely to mess up their cartel/monopoly position by getting too greedy than by being unable to hire competent staff (see Doctorow's [enshittification cycle](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/) for more).
Count the number of management layers and the percent of MBAs in roles managing non-analysts. That tells you everything you need to know.
You can abstract away from FAANG and generally observe that companies with "professional manager culture" have less work from home, while companies with "founder culture" or "SME culture" have more remote/hybrid work.
You see this even in "never were work from home" fields like Medicine -- plenty of MDs I know will be WFH doing zoom apts for more days/week than SWEs at Amazon, which is kind of hilarious.
These companies have generous vacation policies and health insurance benefits not for reasons of productivity, but because that's part of what it takes to attract talented workers. People love to argue about WFH for reasons of productivity, but in the end that flexibility is another benefit that these companies may start to compete on.
401K is unambiguously a benefit to every employee. Remote-first or remote-only is not unambiguously a benefit; some people actually prefer to be in the office and interact with people face-to-face. Yes, even some talented ones.
If remote work was all it took, Gitlab (remote only since 2014) would have sucked up every talented engineer on the planet. Yet somehow they're still a very distant second to Github in their space.
Gitlab is somehow in the conversation with github and a huge reason for that is talented engineers. There hiring process is not the best, the ego level is higher than it should be and management isn't the sharpest or most creative.
Without wfh you wouldn't be talking about gitlabs.
They have access to a greater pool of talent but they still have to have a solid business plan / sales / some luck.. And they have to pick the right talent from that greater pool
The problem is that interaction face-to-face takes at least two people. You may like it and you would do it any day of the week, but the person in front of you may hate it. So, obviously the win-win scenario is to be flexible and let the people decide where they want to work from. Only then you can be sure that the person in front of you really want to see your face that close… it was their choice.
FAANG total comp is a lot higher than what most other companies will pay. I think the parent poster is right -- the smaller companies will pay lower salaries and offer remote work, and the larger companies will pay higher salaries and require at least 3 days per week in the office.
FAANG total comp is higher, but I think I've made way more money/hour off working remotely than I ever would have if I stayed at FAANG [1]. So while I have less total money, I have made the money I made way more efficiently. Which in some ways, makes me richer :)
I sometimes have to remind myself that this level of leisure is basically what "traditional retirement" looks like (but with like a quarter-mil/year income + benefits) and that gives me get a sense of perspective when I'm feeling stressed.
[1] A key thing that makes this true is that commute + forced office time is like 3-4x the active working time I average working from home. So it's not hard to beat the Amazon 400k total comp quote when weighted against hours - I honestly beat that at my first remote gig years ago as a relatively junior dev! And I have the same engineering output more or less.
The commute angle of the remote work argument always seemed weird to me. If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work.
I feel sorry for people in the service industry who have hour-long commutes because they can't afford to live closer. But that is not the case for tech workers.
> If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work
I think this is an exaggeration. Not everyone who works at FAANG companies is making $300K+/yr or whatever the current figure being quoted is, although senior people probably are. For rank-and-file employees, even engineers, your choices "within walking distance" of a FAANG office typically are: 1. A tiny apartment or townhome, 2. A larger townhome with roommates, or 3. Unaffordable. Numbers 1 and 2 are fine I guess if you're young and don't have kids, but I'm not willing to move my family into a sardine can in Mountain View or Cupertino.
So yea, you can afford to live almost anywhere, but only if you adjust your lifestyle drastically.
To be fair, I had a 15-20 minute walking commute. But that adds on 30-40 minutes to an 8+ hour workday.
Also, you can start bean counting and consider the costs of housing with a short commute vs the longer commute and realize that the market knows what it's doing and it becomes a wash comp-wise.
The main thing that is cheaper in cheaper cities is housing. Most of the other stuff people buy costs the same everywhere. If you move to a cheaper place and have a lower income, your non-housing expenses will become a larger portion of your spending.
Once you've worked in tech for several years in the Bay Area or Seattle you will generally be well off enough to buy a home in a nice area and still be able to save or invest a large amount every year. Housing will feel expensive but everything else will feel cheap -- even new luxury cars will cost a fraction of your income. Early retirement will be a definite possibility if you have a basic amount of self control over your spending. And if you have children, they will have access to all the opportunities that some of the country's largest metropolitan areas offer.
> If you do the math that doesn't always work out.
I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?
The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.
Contractor total comp is a lot higher than salary. I don't see anyone talking about the glamour and prestige, just the uncertainty and overhead. Companies that don't offer it 100% will be seen as "gig" equivalent. Cheap, manipulative, gross sweat shops.
Being a contractor means less income security than an employee, higher and more complicated taxes, and no benefits. There is not much "glamour and prestige" either.
Frankly most contractors do not make as much as FAANG employees, and even if they did, they would end up keeping less of it because of the taxes and paying for their own health care etc. Even contractors contracted by FAANG companies make less money than full-time employees at those companies.
I've always thought about this being the settling point at the end of the day.
Putting aside the debate between what people like/is effective.
FAANG companies have a lot of political leverage when they have in office employees.
Amazon specifically in Seattle, wouldn't surprise me if some of the reason they're doing this is so they can continue to work their way into city's politics.
> WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation
...as it was for all of the tech world's history before 2020.
Not a comment on if that's a good or bad thing, just stating that we're seeing a reversions to what was considered normal.
Pre-2020, if you met a random guy living in small town Idaho or some random suburb in Indiana, working out of his house, completely remotely, it was more likely that they worked at some company you've never heard of than one of the highest-paying FAANGs, and that their income was more similar to his neighbors than the FAANG worker making $400k.
This is one of the most strange recurring theories. Companies are valued based on the recurring cashflows they generate from operating activities. A large technology company could have a _huge_ one-time write down of their real estate assets, and (assuming it does not make the company illiquid) not have its valuation materially impacted. Nobody is buying these companies because of their skill at investing in real estate.
> They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage
That's an interesting statement about the relative value proposition of a lot of the technology many in this sector make their money selling firsthand or secondhand.
WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.