Who still needs the office? U.S. companies start cutting space

You want an extra-special superpower? Get a couple teammates and in east Asia or the islands of the Western Pacific, and a couple more in Europe or Africa. Once you solve the remote work problem and get over a bit of your trust issues and get used to the time zones, your team can do 3 days of work every 24 hours. Probably a little easier to add in India or some other 4th node because the 7-9 hour separations are tricky to find any overlap at all, but adding a 4th slice of the world is also a bit tricky.

wow did I ever get that wrong!

I was imagining the "pull up bar" to be a mobile alcohol serving tray.

Can you bike to somewhere that you can work? I don't bike, but I often drive somewhere and work off my LTE connection. Got a little desk that mounts to my steering wheel and everything.

I also biked to work daily before lockdown. I've been doing a "fake commute," where I get out every morning before my work day begins. Either cycling or walking.

Go buy breakfast bread 15 mins away from home?

I don't understand this. Why? Why couldn't you go for a 30 minutes bike ride every morning as if you were going to work? and go back home? What's the difference?

so your home is where you sleep and the rest of your life is in the office?

One of the key benefits of WFH is that people can leave the city where rent is expensive and find a bigger flat for cheaper outside the city limits. In my opinion the ability to have more time to spend with my family and friends outweighs any benefits of having a chef or gym at the office. On another note cooking is one of the most valuable life skills I learned to late, I recommend taking it up, not only does it help with living healthy but it's also a good way to relax and take your mind off things or spend time with your significant other :)

sounds more like a free hotel than any typical office . it's hard to empathize with the pain of extremely privileged office workers

What I want is that if you work from home, you get a stipend to your wage equivalent to the cost they would normally spend on your office space.

I did a quick google which said that in SF, office space is $80 / sq. foot, I presume per month? Assuming you need idk, 15 - 30 sq. foot per employee (not even counting shared spaces), that's $1200 - $2400 / month to be added to your wage, plus a bit for expenses like desks, coffee or lunch that are normally offered by the employer.

I read another post or article that made the statement that if you work from home, you should be earning enough to have a bigger house with dedicated office space. Of course, working remotely would also mean you can move around the state or country where housing prices are lower.

For me, I bought a two bedroom house a few years ago; it works for me, I have my desk set up in my bedroom, quite comfortable but I would still like a dedicated work / hobby space, so if this work from home keeps up, long-term I'm looking at moving back to where I grew up in the north part of the country (NL), where houses are bigger and cheaper than they are over here.

Having worked in the FAANG / startup offices you describe, they always felt like they were designed to appeal to someone in their early 20s who was irritated that they didn’t have the benefits of living at home with parents who take care of “adult” responsibilities. Instead of calling it immaturity, we tech folks give it a more digestible name and call it “time optimization”. Some of us like the autonomy of maintaining our lives without some parent-like figure - you know, actually growing up? It was funny - when I worked there and described the benefits, one of my non-tech friends just stared at me and said - “so... they give you that so you never leave work? That sounds miserable.” Changed my outlook forever on the benefits.

Huge and well-equipped? Why? I work at my dining table. It’s still better than going to the office. Also your office had a 3D printer and gym... you must realise your office is absurdly better than most people’s offices. Most people just have an open plan space full of irritating other people and maybe a pingpong table.

> Additionally, FAANG and startup tech offices often serve as more than an office - they tend to have a lot of shared amenities that are just not practical to have at home. I don't use a 3D printer often enough to own one, but there is one in the office. Gym? Office, and it has more than a pull-up bar. Post office? Office. Inbound packages? Post office. In the office. Grocery shopping? Happens much less often if you eat out. In the office. Why would I want to eat out of my own fridge and pantry (and have to prepare the food myself) when I can grab tasty food prepared by people who actually know what they're doing?

I definitely get why people want these sort of perks, and I don't want to invalidate their appreciation of them.

In reality, it's unusual to find a company with all of those things at once. For starters, I bought gym equipment for my home because I hate the experience of most gyms. If I can get my workout from home, an office gym is just adding a middle-man. In my experience, not all companies are happy when you use their address for your various Amazon orders. Eating out all the time costs way more than eating at home. Besides, there's nothing stopping WFH'ers from eating out if they wanted.

Again, I'm not trying to diss the lifestyle of the kind of work environment you're describing. It's just not what I prefer.

The benefits rapidly lose their value once you have kids. Free breakfast / dinner? Who is picking the kids up and cooking for them?

Onsite laundry? Have fun dragging the whole family’s dirty clothes around. Also, if you have room for kids, you probably also have room for a laundry machine.

On the other hand, kids take a ton of time, so losing time to a commute is brutal. You lose many hours of being able to think at home without someone constantly interrupting you. If the commute time is spent driving to an open plan office, it is doubly useless. Can I just work from my car or a coffee shop or something? There’s a reason most big tech companies saw their productivity skyrocket during the lockdown.

Also, there’s much more cleaning, cooking, etc to be done. With work from home, I can turn off my laptop, and read a paper and change the laundry without dozens of interruptions.

If I need to come into the office, screw the perks. Give me an office with opaque walls and a functional door.

Part time WFH and/or a real office are going to be at the top of my list of amenities the next time I look for a job.

You sound like someone who needs to "grow up". Most of you at FAANG's are like overgrown children, who think that they are living their best lives in this infantilized environment.

>This works great if you have a huge and well-equipped home

With no experience of SV tech lifestyles, I would have imagined that with sky-high property values, amenities should be relatively cheap and therefore plentiful. Why wouldn't all homes be "well equipped" when the cost pales in comparison to the property itself? If a shack costs a million dollars, isn't the cost of appliances, furniture, carpet, paint, etc. negligible?

Also, I don't see why you have to have a "huge" home to have a washing machine. I've had one in places ranging from about 800-1300 sq. ft.

Many companies in NL have already said that the new 'normal' will be a maximum of 2 days per week in office, the rest remote.

So I agree with you there's no substitute for physically meeting. But I personally welcome this new normal with more remote work.

Only having to commute to the office 2 days a week already saves me 6 hours of time.

Normally the recommended solution to the loneliness of the long-distance worker is to make friends and go out locally - but right now we can't do that either.

I've definitely concluded that being in the office some of the time would be best. And I miss air conditioning.

I had a linkedin birthday pop up with a buddy I used to go to lunch with every day about 2 jobs ago. We'd hop into either of our cars and just go bitch about work together for an hour and eat cheese burgers. I loathe being in most open offices but I really miss those interactions and friendships.

I agree. I find slack/zoom to be a terrible replacement for the old casual/impromptu/hallway conversations. Sometimes the best information is learned in those formats.

A lot of it seems to depend on if you have a family at home or not. With my wife, dog, and cat at home, I don't feel isolated at all. If I was here by myself, I could see how there could be a desire to go back to the office just to be around other people during working hours.

This is almost exactly me, as well. Still need a car, but I don't have to commute at all, entirely WFH. It saves so much time, and like you, the familiarity of _my_ work area, setup exactly as I want and need it, makes me so much more productive.

I've had one of the most productive days yesterday, because my internet went off.

Went on a berserk coding spree from 1PM to 1AM with some small breaks in between. Completely cut off from any distraction, I was able to concentrate.

Willpower and discipline are nice, but real restrictions that are impossible to circumvent are better, at least for me.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, being without children (or having a dedicated space outside of the home) is important.

Kids don't understand time or space boundaries very well, and will interrupt your focus, your meetings, your work in general.

I have a colleague with kids and he was the first to volunteer back to the office.. I am without kids and I never want to go back.

This works out decently well, because he's alone: thus, safer than if we all came back.

But the issue is if there was more people in the office, then they would make decisions which the rest of us are not privy to.

Looks like nobody else wants to admit that.

Isn’t this more of an issue of school being out? Would your kids going back to school solve this issue?

I can't get any work done with my kid around either. But the difference is not that I'm home instead of at the office. The difference is that she's at home instead of at school.

Same here - I don't have a separate room for work (never needed it) and have 2 pre-school kids at home. Average period without interruption: 10 minutes. I do so little "real" work during the day, that I need 4-5 hours at night to catch up...My wife doesn't work for a longer time now, so there's not a lot of understanding from her side - if I complain, I'm considered a drama queen and I only care about work...If this keeps up, I'll have to rent another small apartment or find another solution.

I'd rather spend that time on other things tbh

I agree that the socialization part is not actually "wasted" time and I would love to do it as much (or as little) as I want per week (ideally one or two days, instead of five days per week on a forced basis).

I would be very interested to hear more about these claims if you can share a link.

Would love to read any research that backs that number. (I'm not saying you're not right, I just like reading research papers).

> all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.

When people say these things I seriously question if they've ever worked remote before. Yes if being remote makes you atypical for your workplace, then you'll probably be left out. But if you're working for a remote-first team the it's completely different. Nearly all of my closest coworkers I've met have been at remote companies.

I have had tons of interesting conversations, brainstorming session and just generally fun discussion while remote.

Honestly, I have personally found the amount of more toxic conversations also drops when remote. The problem with in-office socialization is that you have to socialize with people you might not particularly like (working with people you don't like is fine, but having to have conversations with them, go out for team drinks with them etc is another thing). This leads to generally more toxic behavior, since you have to put more energy into those social interactions.

Political power play doesn't work out as easily remotely. Social manipulations is harder. That is my observation.

Also some teams practice "watercooler-based development". Requirements and coding standards are passed by word-of-mouth. Being remote in an environment like that effectively means you're cut off from key knowledge required to do your job.

Also going by parents idea that completing a task is the end of your workday, any socialization is eating into your free time. The entire thing has added stress as you race towards completion each day

Sure, if you can do more go for it. I just can't: my brain is tired, my eyes hurt, I cannot produce any productive output/outcome.

I think it’s generally more related to a lot of time that’s wasted having ad-hoc conversations with people.

> I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”

If I don't have equity in the company, my interest in that is exactly 0.

A mentoring conversation is actually (or should be seen as) work stuff.

When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)

I did this very often for a long time.

I started on a remote-only team about 6 years ago. For half of that time our only chat system was a 1-to-1 and you could do group chats but had to explicitly invite people and they had to accept. When we switch to Slack (although Teams or Riot or open source would have worked too) and had always-on chat rooms, things changed dramatically.

Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.

I strongly recommend ‘random’ rooms in your shared chat messenger, or a way to make random rooms in whatever communication infrastructure you have. They’re vital for maintaining social interactions

You recognize the problem, now fix it.

Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.

As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.

After 5 years or so working remote I noticed a few of the same things:

* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.

* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.

* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.

* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.

All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.

To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.

To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.

> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.

There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.

Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.

Figured I'd chime in and say that I'm basically in the same situation.

I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle.

My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day"

Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit.

The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.

> Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home;

This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation.

Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode.

Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.

You're right that the spontaneity is missing. Everything has to become formalized in some capacity to ensure everyone knows what's up as well.

Just recently I noticed that my coworkers were all jumping into a slack thread. It was a thread that was active hours earlier but that I missed out on, so I couldn't put in my input. If this was in the office, the fact that everyone was having a big conversation would be a signal to turn around and engage in it, but in the virtual world, someone has to specifically @ you to have you join, or else create a formal meeting to discuss it.

The small connections that grease the wheels of communication are gone or are more challenging when you have to do them over Slack or video call.

I really don't understand this. In a cubicle farm environment, you'd walk over their desk, interrupt whatever they are doing, and ask them to follow you to a separate meeting room to use the whiteboard? And how are other people supposed to contribute if you close the door in order not to disturb anyone in the radius of this meeting room?

I found that it's much less awkward to hit them up on collaborative tools. Meetings are also much easier to spin since you don't have to herd people into a single room and convince them as hard to use their limited time on this meeting since they can just do something else in the background if they're not in another one.

Text chat is amazing. Maybe growing up in the heyday of chat services has made it feel natural to me, but I don't understand these complaints about how people don't feel like they can connect emotionally etc etc.

Do you need to do these interactions over Zoom? Or is it habit?

It's like, if you can connect with a book, you can connect over chat. It's just words.

Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.

The person does the same amount of work at home that they do in the office, because when being in an office there is a normal background level of distraction, socializing, breaks etc that interfere with the person’s work, causing them to only be productive for 5 of the 8 hours. But those “unproductive” hours were paid as part of the expected 40. They are still in essence paid as part of the 40. This person’s output for the company is the same (if not better). Lost time from friction caused by office life is restored. BUT spending that restored time on work can be suboptimal. Eg if I push too fast, I sometimes make subtle mistakes that are time consuming to undo. Or I get out of step with coworkers and have to find a way to cool my heels anyway. People are positive about this because the worker is happier and more effective at the job, whilst reclaiming some hours, and contributing at the same level as always, which deep down is what the company is buying with their forty hours - a certain contribution of work per week.

People are paid to be available to do 40 hours a week of work, not to actually do 40 hours of work a week. Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start etc still counts as work because you’re on the companies time not your own.

That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.

Paid salary, work hourly? There's no sense in that for the employee.

Get your work done. That's what Salary used to, and should mean. Takes you 20? Good. Takes you 60? Too bad; get it done.

Companies typically don't pay for hours worked but fo the value that is delivered. It's common to see people work a lot more than 40 hrs a week as well without overtime, and this is legal as per most employment contracts.

If you are a freelancer billing hours, then yes, I agree it would not be ethical. But still it's somewhat of a gray area. In theory, you should be able to raise your hourly rate to compensate for the fact that you can get more done in less time. But in practice, you might not get any clients if you advertise a higher than usual hourly rate, at least until you build a reputation.

> I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home.

In all seriousness: The people putting in the most focused hours are less likely to be discussing their work deep in the HN comment section during daytime hours. The people who think procrastinating for half of the day is the norm are going to be over-represented in the HN comment section. And yes, I realize the irony of posting this comment.

> I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.

It's a common trope on internet comment sections, but I haven't seen it nearly as much in the real world.

Sustained work and focus aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world, but people can and do learn how to put in 6-8 solid hours of work per day all of the time. It's one thing to subtract meetings and e-mail from your count of productive hours, but it's strange to hear so many people claiming that they can't physically work more than 20-25 hours in a week.

In my experience, I've noticed this thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some of our junior hires. If people arrive at the workplace with preconceived notions that no one works more than 3-4 hours per day or that focusing for 8 hours is physically impossible, they don't even try to improve their ability to focus and be productive. Pairing them up with more productive coworkers usually fixes this misconception very quickly.

If my company could lower the cost of its product by half and still make the same yearly revenue, it would. And all the executives would get huge bonuses.

> contracted to work 40 hours/wk

That's not how salaried positions work in the US. If you work 60 hour weeks you don't get paid overtime (but if that helps you perform beyond your peers, you might get promoted faster).

What matters is performance, not hours.

Are you a programmer?

Most HN readers probably regard the concept for being contracted to work for a certain number of hours (rather than achieving certain outputs) with inherent contempt anyway so they're not going to be upset about turning one into the other.

I think I've expressed myself wrongly. I'm not a contractor, just a normal fulltime employee. This normally means (at least in Europe) 8h/day 5 times per week, hence 40h/week. I'm not being payed by the hour.

I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.

Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.

This. People with many young kids, especially, seem to be absolutely miserable.

More interesting than remote/in-office is that we don't seem to be acknowledging the inevitable permanence of social distancing measures. No more four-dudes-in-an-office. No more coming to work with mild cold symptoms.

I'm in a one bedroom Brooklyn apt. Any time I open up my laptop, my 2yr old daughter climbs onto my lap and repetitively hits the caps lock key (it lights up on my laptop). Luckily, I've found alternative places to work from, albeit with less than ideal setups.

My company was at the end of their lease for several office buildings. They’ve since closed all but our largest offices. We have some jobs that can’t be done remotely (security and certification requirements precludes outsourcing.) The remaining offices are running skeleton crews with the heaviest precautions we can do while remaining operational.

In my office the parents and people that have their own offices as opposed to cubicles are the only ones looking to return.

>and the company didn't even let them take their dual monitors home with them when WFH started

That is such a low life mentality. Not to give two screens worth $200 to someone who's probably making 10-20 times that a month.

What I envisage is super localised hubs,or small office spaces in residential areas. Small building nicely fitting into the area and offering local people some level of office like environment

Exactly - I'm lucky in that I made a deliberate decision to have a slightly longer commute because it meant a bigger house and closer to an amazing school my children attend. I'm fortunate to have a proper office that I can enter at the start of the work day, and leave at the end - separating my work and home life.

Having to work from your lounge, or kitchen, or worse bedroom makes it much harder to switch off.

>I don't understand this, why?

My sentiments are similar to OP's, and for me a large part of my job satisfaction was getting to hang out with really incredible people all day, getting lunch with those people, getting afterwork drinks with them, etc. Hanging out on video chat just isn't the same.

Of course, an argument can (and maybe should) be made that it's smarter to to keep your work focused on the work, and find your social outlets elsewhere. However, the unfortunate reality is that for those of us far removed from school and our home towns, work is where we tend to make our friends.

On top of that, I just enjoyed the change of scenery in leaving my apartment in the burbs to go into a nice office space in the city. Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.

Of course that later point would be somewhat mitigated in a world where I could work out of shared space or the local coffee shop, so I'm not sure if that's an indictment of remote work in general for my purposes.

> I don't understand this, why?

As far as I can tell, this seems to be an introvert/extrovert thing (for the most part). Extroverts miss being around people they can engage in conversations with, while introverts love not having extroverts around trying to engage in conversations with them. I think both camps have valid needs and right now the extrovert's needs aren't being met to their satisfaction.

True, but if you were remote only, you could live in a low cost place and afford a bigger space.

Long ago I made the decision to live in a smaller house close to work. My company's office is 15 minutes by bike from my house. Riding through the cool air every morning was a great start to my day. The office is perched above a canal. As I worked, I'd watch the boats go by and the bascule bridge go up and down. It was a great life.

Now I'm working in windowless cinderblock closet in my basement. I live near family and friends so just uprooting to a mini-mansion in the country isn't really a workable option. Companies clearly valued nice offices as a quality of life benefit to their employees, but now providing that nice office experience is squarely on my shoulders.

If my partner and I are going to be working remotely for the long term we'll probably need to move to a bigger house that can give us both better work spaces, which will probably cost $200K-$300K more than our current home. $250K financed at 3% interest over 30 years is $1200/mo plus things like heat, maintenance, furnishings, etc.

I don't expect my company to pony up a $15K/year remote work stipend, but also I see this a WFH future as a net downgrade from my old way of life.

Many people in big tech hubs don't pay for lunch. Work provides it. Now, they all have to pay for lunch that they weren't paying for before because the office is closed. Sometimes this isn't just lunch - but up to 3 meals a day. Same is true with transit. They took a company bus or work paid for public transit.

Now, people who were living in spaces where they didn't have a dedicated office space are dying for one. (like myself) And, unfortunately, the competition for homes with more bedrooms has skyrocketed. I'm looking at paying $2000 more a month just so I can get a couple more bedrooms for office work! Moving away for a year or more isn't a real option either.

> I run a 10 people team that will be half that size in a few days.

Is this something that is coming about as a result of the pandemic?

I love working from home but I’m about 30-45 minutes out of central London and friends and family often ask me why I don’t want to go into an office in town for the buzz, it must be difficult working at home with a baby running round, etc.

I honestly wouldn’t give up working from home for triple my salary. The flexibility to come and go as I please, not losing time to a commute, watching the kid grow up. All priceless to me.

However, I have enough bedrooms to use one as an office, a garden I can work in during summer. I can understand if I had to work at the kitchen table with the family making noise around me I would be yearning to go in to the office.

I can take public transportation which is $2.50 a day. If I don't then parking downtown is $150 per month in our current building, but no one is allowed to go into the office. We're getting a new building next year when we do return to the office and parking will be $250+ across the street or $300+ for garage attached to the same building. That's what it costs me to run my ancient, inefficient 220 volt window unit and keep an uninsulated wooden garage apartment cool in the summer. I will gladly go back to the office when it's allowed.

At least with my own company, the approach has been pretty reasonable.

They know they're saving money in the long term on space, and they're splitting that with employees pretty fairly. $1500 up front for all existing employees and all new hires to provision a space to work remote, and a $125 a month in reimbursement for internet/phone/electricity, no questions asked.

Frankly, it's made the transition pretty positive for all parties. The company saves a ton in the long term on rental space, and employees get a nice perk.

There are still folks that would prefer not being remote, but most folks are pretty happy without a commute.

Remote meetings work best when they're frequent, short and small groups.

Good remote teams have better communication in my experience because very often "implicit" communication in an office means you think you communicated something but did not.

Making all communication explicit is a useful habit to into, and overall improves everything.

> Companies can't really "rent an office space" for one day a week can they?

Not exactly but they could get 1/5 the space and rotate people onsite one day per week.

> 4. I am eating healthier

Agree with most of these, but man do I ever miss the free and very well provisioned salad bar at the office :( I've eaten more grilled cheese and peanut butter sandwiches during WFH than any self-respecting adult ever should.

It's standard operating procedure for a major relocation to come with a COL adjustment. About as normal as it gets.

Companies are typically very impersonal about money, to a much greater extent than people. I'm sure some highly compensated employees are about to be sad, but this is just business. It's a free market, and it just got a lot bigger.

Why not? It's a business relationship; both parties are in it to come out as ahead as possible. Why would a company pay a remote worker $400k/yr in Oklahoma when they can just pick from a country-wide candidate pool who will do the same job for a fraction of that?

Markets in everything:

Your salary is the balance between the leverage you have over the company and the leverage the company has over you. If they can get rid of you and hire someone remotely for half the price they will. If you want to stay in an expensive city while working remotely and the company can't do without you, they won't.

I've thought about playing this game, one of the largest retailers in the country just pays you based on the cost of living in your zip code. I could move in with my in laws in Honolulu for a few months and use that zip code, get hired, and then move back to my low cost of living area.

Your employer probably has to pay state taxes/state unemployment insurance, may have to ensure that they are filing certain state forms as an employer of a resident of a given state, may have to adjust health care policies to address state-specific requirements (or residency requirements of the plan they have, etc).

Unfortunately, given the run-amuckness of registration and compliance requirements, it probably is needed for your employer to know where you live (or at least in which state and local taxation/regulation entity).

I feel like GitLab is one of the few places where this would happen. They have a salary calculator that's basically just band * CoL * performance in band[0].

0: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

GitLab was rumoured to be suspending hiring in Russia and China, but I can't see a reference to it on their page. They ban seemingly random countries [0] like Sweden, while allowing hires in Australia, wonder what their rationale is.

That only works as long as the company is able to hire someone with your skillset at your new LocalRate.

Each individual hiring case is wildly different, with different supply/demand and price dynamics, and it's nothing like the commodity sold at a gas station example. Yes some companies will penny pinch, but some companies just wont. Not worth their time.

Soda is a fungible commodity. People are not.

I guess as it becomes more obvious to people that the logical next step for a fully remote company would basically be to lay off staff in higher cost of living locations (I'm sure we are starting to see this), more people will internalize this reality.

Sure, but this is closer to having soda delivered to your home. The costs on the production side don't matter to you. You only care about price, quality, and delivery time.

I personally suspect the employment market is just not very efficient due to a lack of information. If companies had perfectly accurate information about how good every software person is, available for free, we'd probably all be paid based on that information, with our cost of living ignored.

This is about the time that people start to imply (or even say straight out) that their skills are really special, and that there aren't good developers outside the valley. So they totally deserve the rate they're being paid.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there are actually quite a lot of smart people who just don't care to live in the valley for various reasons, and they are all just as available as you are when the whole team is 100% remote. Companies are going to love it, but a subset of employees are going to be sad as the market rate adjusts to the new reality.

So why don't they just fire every remote worker in high cost of living areas?

You don't understand probably because your paycheck depends on not understanding, e.g. you think you are benefiting from the current status quo. Others call it unfair because their paycheck also depend on it.

What if the market says you can get away paying less for group X? What if X is some historically marginalized group? Does it make it OK? What if X = remote workers?

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

> How about the number we agreed on is the number we agreed on.

This is exactly what the company is doing.

They’re paying you the number you agreed upon until they don’t want to anymore (or until they’ve fulfilled whatever contractual agreements they’ve made). You’re not guaranteed to keep getting the number you agreed upon if your work sucks or the company goes out of business.

By the same token, you’re not obligated to hold up your end of the bargain any longer than you have to based on whatever agreement was made. Want to move to a cheap city and find a new high-paying job? Go nuts.

Yeah, ironic how there is nothing on https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ about cheaper packages based on the customers location. But they want to pay you less as an employee based on your location.

I don't think that it's the right thing to do, but just to share what's being done elsewhere, for 1 it's absolutely the case in Japan.

As an anecdote from first hand experience, if your parents live close enough to your work (less than 2 hours commute) it's considered that you could live with them, regardless of what you actually do. Then, you cannot claim the $7k/year indemnity for accommodation. This is significant for a salary of $36k in this company (not in tech).

If you find that bizarre, why isn't it also the case when the starting pay is different when the same company hires someone in a different location?

I think you're over thinking it.

The company agreed to pay you X amount because that's the market in the area you and the employer are competing in. Once you expand beyond that area the market changes. You're now competing against all of the other engineers from SF to Arkansas (and beyond). Let's put this way. If you're working from Arkansas, why should your employer pay you 400k/yr when they can just hire someone else in a cheap COL area within a reasonable timezone for a fraction of that?

I really hope you mean /s

Except that this idea is always a farce. People talk about cost of living as though it doesn't vary wildly within a city from neighborhood to neighborhood.

You in effect pay people more to live in nicer areas. If I move to a place tons of other people move to it likely has some positives (better schools, more to do, closer to nice vacation opportunities), and higher costs.

Also if the high COL employee owns a property, much of that difference goes into equity in their home. Which they can they cash out and move to a low COL area.

So if I have 7 kids and a physical disability should I get paid more because my COL is higher? Shouldn't someone get paid for the work they provide? COL is frankly none of the f*cking company's business.

> Doesn't work well when time zone difference is too large, though.

That is true. Although I've noticed that some outsourcing companies are comfortable working to the office hours of the headquarters.

Will there? Plenty of workers fly in from non EU countries to work in the UK and rest of EU.

We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa.

Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip.

Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa.

Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply.

If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already.

I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work.

Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing.

People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed.

When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.

Even within the EU every country has its own income tax rules and employment regulation. I'm not a fan of Brexit but I don't see any significant changes around this.

> London is notorious for low SWEng salaries

I was actually going to challenge this before I did a bit of research and discovered you're right - the average wage for a software engineer is £47,500 (https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-it-salary). That's ugly.

I'm from Liverpool originally (live abroad now) and I have friends in Manchester earning £50-60k... in the North of England. That's a big wage in that area.

> London is notorious for low SWEng salaries

With the banks and big tech, I'm pretty sure it has the highest paying SWE salaries in Europe.

Wage decrease in one place means wage increase elsewhere. If someone who could do my job for half of my income, maybe they should get the job.

I place my future in the fact that it will be hard for employers to hire someone that can do my job (all facet of it) for half of my income. Sure there will be people slipping through the crack at that level, but hiring is a numbers game where you don't count on luck.

Having worked with overseas teams in the past, I'm not particularly concerned.

There are plenty of companies specially in tech sector that build and support products that are focused and used in multiple countries, and are quite successful. They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience. Why would it not be possible to do it the other way around?

Agreed. It's actually amazing how often I've seen a company truly believe that the lower wages they pay to offshore workers has no impact on the quality of the product, only for the truly diminished nature to become apparent after some time.

That's not to say all offshore workers are bad, of course. Just that, just because you can hire an Eastern European for half the price doesn't mean they will produce the same quality work as the other people who were more expensive.

Would that really be any cheaper for the business than just renting an office?? Flying people to nice destinations and putting them in expensive hotels along with their families is $$$.

How would this work when both parents work different jobs and children in school?

Going "someplace exotic" may be great for some people, but if you have responsibilities such as being the caregiver for an aging parent, being forced to be away from home for a couple of days or weeks can be a big problem.

I worked at a company that did this: big in person retreats, once or twice a quarter. I've now been working remotely due to covid about as long as I worked at that company before I was laid off. I still feel much closer and more in sync with my current coworkers than I did to my coworkers at the remote company.

I'd say that totally depends on the area you're working in. If IT is at the core of your business, you'd probably be fine working from home. For companies in manufacturing/retail/etc. where the IT is not the core, I doubt permanent work from home would be equally good. Looking at my company, the IT departments seem to be doing just fine. However, basically all people I know from engineering and other departments are really looking forward to come back to the office. Having everybody onsite is just so much easier if you have that many dependencies with other departments.

Also, I think the size of the company plays an important role as well. We're about 2000 employees in the IT departments alone, I somehow cannot imagine all of those people permanently working from home while also being able to properly cooperate with the other 100k employees.

> I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.

Would it be? Seems like, at a minimum, various employer liabilities that exist when an employee is working independently of whether or not it is at the employer’s location become less controlled in remote work, which potentially works strongly against that.

Also, the argument you make, even in the best case, fails to grasp the difference between “is” and “has always been” and the magnitude of impact of cultural inertia in favor of what has worked well in the past.

Cities will still exist even if remote work rises significantly. There is a huge amount of buildings and infrastructure which won't just disappear. Rather, demand for them will fall, and since supply is flat, prices will drop. This will give opportunity to less lucrative ventures to work at the city center. Artists, for example, would have a harder time working remotely.

It's not the 'everybody works there' that does it, it's the 'cheap enough that artists can live there' that does it. My mom split her time between art, her true love, and working as a secretary, or a maid, or an office manager. She had a way of living near where the art was happening, as artists tend to have very little money, as did she. She could afford to live just off the Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach in the mid-80's, as did hundreds of other artists. The South Beach that is now luxurious and pricey was once cheap, and shabby and a bit dangerous. That's really the seed of a vibrant inner city atmosphere. She repeated that (to smaller degrees) several times in her life.

That's true, but if now there is central space freeing up in major cultural hubs like NYC and SF, maybe it could be cool. These places might, although to a lesser extent, have the customer base of affluent people to support new cultural spaces.

There are important differences between cities in regions where an industry collapsed and where competition for down-town office space has collapsed.

One of them lost their economic engine. The other is undergoing a real estate adjustment.

I have seen this happen in a medium sized coastal city on Australia's east coast. The major employer shut down in the early 1990's and the once vibrant inner city did indeed become a cesspool for a decade. But begining in the early 2000's it started to come back to life, and the people who moved in were the artsy types and the city became a wonderful and curious place while still having a bit of a air of danger and decay. These days it is somewhat gentrified, but it has become very beautiful and pleasant. In the end my city doesn't really have a central core which is a little problematic for public transit (terrible quality), but the old CBD is a lovely place.

The North of England has some good examples of the opposite. The Leeds/Bradford/Halifax/Huddersfield area is - was - gentrifying rapidly with an obvious shift away from the ruins of heavy industry to art/craft projects and enterprises of all sizes. The Calder Valley is almost notorious for it. There's also Salts Mill near Shipley, which is a carefully authenticised artisanal mall in an old converted mill.

And you'll find plenty of web/creative agencies plying their trade in the area, although that sector isn't quite as distinctive as in - say - Manchester.

It's all part of the standard gentrification cycle: - collapse -> bohemian -> artisanal -> gentrified -> investment grade -> collapse... but hurried along some.

It's a bit more subtle than that, no? GP specifically mentioned early stage startups. The argument is that too high cost of living makes cities less vibrant, not that developers ruin them.

I always keep our leases short because you never know what the future brings. I'd hate to be locked to a five or 10 year contract. Sure, I don't get the best rates. But that flexibility has paid off more than once.

You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.

It will, because people will buy farther out. One of the major drivers of the urban core, density and transit was how bad traffic can be. You want to live closer to work, which is usually downtown. Now you want pretty much live on the outskirts or the sticks. Without the commute, nothing stopping cities from becoming extremely diffuse.

If AZ = Astra Zeneca then drug research is not something you can easily do at home!

Arizona?

> Could anyone have honestly foreseen the pandemic and its ensuing upheavals?

Absolutely. Previous WHO classification has a "Phase 4: Sustained community-level outbreaks -> Medium to high probability of pandemic" designation, which has a roughly once-a-decade frequency historically. Compared to multi-quarter, multi-year scale of real estate planning, 10 years is not infinite long term. Of course it is so in comparison to quarterly earnings, share prices, average tenure of a fund manager, a CEO and so forth, so it doesn't get priced in or gets bundled with other catastrophes.

It's a ten minute drive in Sunnyvale, walkable in Tel Aviv.

WeWork should make studio space for YouTubers that has ambient noise dampening and good facilities for lighting and rigging.

As I keep explaining to people, timezones are a harsh mistress.

The furthest you can really go in terms of proper outsourcing (as opposed to building part of the team remotely) is around +- 3hrs either side. For SF, that basically only allows for the American continent.

This is potentially something that could happen a lot more in the EU, as there's (somewhat) common laws and less of a timezone shift between the expensive (London, Paris) and the cheap (Sofia, Warsaw) places.

x can be negative.

If nobody is in the office, it won't be true. But is that even possible? A lot of people really like working in offices, even though the voice of those who don't are presently louder in media

I think one way in which we saw this movie before, was with the move to offshoring programming. It was really big 5-10 years ago, and then quietly got unwound when it turned out that close communication between teams requires more than phone, email, and video. There are places where it works (I am an example of that), but it normally doesn't work all that well, because the advantages of being in one physical space are normally hard to quantify and thus hard to reproduce.

I've worked from home and while I do enjoy aspects of it, I feel like a lot of executives only see the money saving aspects of it.

Ideally, we could have an office, but we could also have flexbility, I think this would be the ultimate outcome for both the worker and the employee, it's a shame it seems to be one or the other right now.