Twitter and other global companies have been managing the time zone factor and using online chat, video calls, etc. for some time now.

If the time zone difference is San Francisco to London, sure. But I&#x27;ve lived in Pacific while working for a company in Central, and live in Eastern while working for a company in Pacific, and it&#x27;s not a big deal. You just adjust your daily cycle by a couple of hours.Domestically, it only gets complicated when you have an entire office of people in a different zone. Then large meetings get hard to schedule around lunch and COB.

Time zone is gonna be tougher. Going from sync to async requires a big shift and most big companies have enough trouble with communication.One other benefit to companies - maybe they won’t pay a premium anymore for people who live in expensive areas.

Personally, I find it pretty funny how this &quot;work that can only be done well in person, in an office&quot; can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.You&#x27;re spinning things toward your bias with your sentence. Who, exactly, is saying it can be done &quot;no problem&quot;? My experience is that any communication-intensive work is significantly harder and more time consuming. We just don&#x27;t have a choice now, so we&#x27;re doing it.

Personally, I find it pretty funny how this &quot;work that can only be done well in person, in an office&quot; can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.This was exactly what happened with my company. When I was hired, three people in the interview process stated explicitly that remote work was not an option, and don&#x27;t even ask.Then when the state shut down, suddenly it was perfectly fine for hundreds of people to take their work computers home.

These advantages have always existed, and yet most of the FANG have resisted WFH policies until now.Personally, I find it pretty funny how this &quot;work that can only be done well in person, in an office&quot; can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.

I have the same speculations re: why, so far, they have been so reluctant to do so.As for why now? I believe it&#x27;s simply because now that peons have had a taste of WFH and all its benefits (and realized everything you enumerated), it will become one of the most desired &quot;benefit&quot; in a job. It was a massive leap forward from WFH being a &quot;nice to have&quot; to a &quot;must have&quot; to even be considered by a lot of candidates.

I don&#x27;t think all of them will -- it&#x27;s probably significant that Twitter was already thinking about this. However, I know my CEO never would have run this experiment without the pandemic. Now, he has data he didn&#x27;t have before, and he&#x27;s publicly said that this changed his mind.The trigger event was the forced experiment. Studies convinced me, but I don&#x27;t have to take responsibility for the health of a whole company so it&#x27;s easier for me to advocate for risks. Seeing how your company actually behaves in a 100% WFH world is better evidence than a study.

Crises tend to accelerate existing trends. Makes sense to me that a forced quarantine would be the giant straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Under normal circumstances, no one wants to be the first mover on something major like this because it&#x27;s extremely disruptive to the way most people work without a clear example of the benefits. You&#x27;re mentioning all of the upsides but there&#x27;s a lot of execution risk in shifting a large organization to a remote setup. There&#x27;s also a lot of management layers that are largely redundant with remote working and they&#x27;ve likely fought tooth and nail to prevent it.Companies have touted open desk workspaces as some grand collaborative masterpiece for years now. It&#x27;s a very big difference to advocate working from home because you also have to acknowledge that was a total farce.

Well, it&#x27;s not happening now. It&#x27;s been happening gradually for a long time. All my friends in tech including FAANG have been working remotely to a certain degree. Some only once a week, others twice or even fully remote. And even those in the office work mostly in &quot;remote&quot; mode since they need to collaborate with people in offices all over.For big companies it&#x27;s harder to work fully remote. There are too many people and teams and dependencies. Twitter is not small but also not big.

There was some kind of artificial barrier to remote-only that COVID forced the industry to break through. Maybe there was some stigma associated with it. Maybe there was natural resistance to a workplace model which was somewhat untested at scale. I think the current mentality held by most executives who make these kinds of decisions is that face-to-face meetings are better than video-chat.But now that the industry is on the other side of that barrier, it seems to have no reason to go back.

I ve had the same question. I think it&#x27;s because over the years, companies and employees have gone virtual-- Companies have gone virtual, they exist in slack, basecamp-type tools etc. In the 2000s it would sound unthinkable to put your corporate secrets in someone else&#x27;s server. Today it&#x27;s commonplace-- Employees have gone virtual. Their CVs are in github, and the flaky silicon valley market has made them conscious of their personal image &#x2F; website. They prefer a supermarket of opportunities rather than a long-term relationshipThese things oiled up the gears for the transition, and covid gave it a big push.

The interesting question is, why now? I mean on the surface sure - because we have a pandemic and state ordered quarantine. But the more interesting question is - why is this finally provoking companies and why do we think they will continue the trend in the future post-quarantine? I&#x27;ve been a remote worker since 2006. It&#x27;s been obvious to me for a long time that companies could go all remote or some version of remote, and it would have all the positive effects we all know about:-- Reduction of commute, which is good for the environment and good for people&#x27;s stress levels.-- Reduction&#x2F;elimination of the cost of office space-- Ability to recruit across a wider geographic area-- Greater employee satisfaction as people can live where they chooseAnd so on and so on. And yet in the face of this information, plus studies that show higher rates of productivity when employees &#x2F; workers control their work environment (and schedule), companies have been resistant. I can speculate on the reasons for this (read: control, stuck in industrial era management practices, etc), but the question remains: why do we think companies will suddenly become enlightened and embrace this long-term?

Real-estate and cost of living drives compensation which is a main issue for most companies.Biannual &quot;retreats&quot; for companies that are fully remote sounds like a good idea, and I wonder if there is somewhere between &quot;biannual retreats&quot; and &quot;butts in seats 5 days a week&quot; that companies will meander towards.

&gt; They might need to intervene with remote work as well.Do you mean all boundary gateways should censor all information and knowledge, that are past without prior authorisation or a heavy tax, by default? Because that is how customs IRL work.

Real-estate cost is not an issue for most companies. Also, all fully remote companies that I know have company &quot;retreats&quot; twice a year for all employees, which is expensive. It&#x27;s not mandatory of course but very important.The bigger issue for me is what will happen to the US tech market. Why would Twitter hire people in the US if they can hire much cheaper people from Europa and other locations. The US government restricts immigration for the same reasons. They might need to intervene with remote work as well.

I have a feeling a lot of companies will follow suit. It saves up huge costs in real-estate by not having to provide seats to people.
It also might just open up more companies to hire from any time zone.

That could be, although the difference between vacation time and remote work is that any loss in productivity&#x2F;value with remote work is either nil or hard to calculate. Vacation time is different in that it&#x27;s clearly time that the employer has to pay for work to not be done. So the optimist in me thinks that tech employers will have difficulty credibly taking employees that have performed well as remote workers and coercing them to come into the office, which doesn&#x27;t really provide a clear benefit.

This has about as much truth to it as people who say &quot;perks are just to make you stay at the office longer!&quot;.i.e. it&#x27;s typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.

I&#x27;ve always wondered how the &quot;unlimited pto&quot; works in practice.Can you just say &quot;i&#x27;m taking the next week off&quot; to your manager and that&#x27;s it ?

Yes its a hoax. A real attempt at this would include a minimum, so folks know they&#x27;re really intended to take time off.

I wonder if it’ll come to have the same meaning as “unlimited vacation”, a vague policy that in practice, is used unofficially in job evaluations to implicitly punish employees who take advantage of the policy.

Pretty much every statement from an executive or marketing person should be suffixed with the phrase &quot;for now.&quot;

cool news, but &quot;forever&quot; is a big word, nonetheless

Yeah I wonder if this will affect midMarket street development.  To the chagrin of pols they might have promise further breaks to attract marquee tenants&#x2F;HQs to these sorts of areas.

Interesting - do you predict that bay area residential housing prices will go up?I would have guessed folks would just start leaving...

I would guess the opposite. If more Bay Area companies allow WFH, there&#x27;s less demand here.

I think a bit of both #1 and #2, I think you will see a large exodus of people from SF as it is very densely populated and you have people with many roommates who make very good money compared to the rest of the US. I see that crowd leaving for cheaper pastures in droves(#2). There are alot of companies that have positions that are tied to location, hardware engineers, execs, etc, these people will stay and that will point to #1. So I think the prices in SF will drop, and prices in the south bay will at worst stay flat and possibly go up as it is mostly single family homes and the companies in the area are doing very well, (google, apple, netflix, zoom)

There are a whole lot of folks who would love to get away from the Bay Area if possible. The infrastructure is crap, the geography impedes growth and transit, the natives don&#x27;t seem to like us, tax burden is high, real estate is expensive, and it&#x27;s a major fault zone. I don&#x27;t see how paying $1M+ for a 60 year old house makes sense, especially when there are still gang shootouts and high property crime.If investors want to move into that market, they are nuts. I don&#x27;t think you can extract any more money from residents than the current market is already doing. It&#x27;s one more reason not to buy a house here - how much more do you think prices will rise? Will that $1.5M, 1400 sq ft house full of lead paint, asbestos and aluminum wiring go for $2M next year? Probably not.

Don&#x27;t forget about the commercial real estate bubble pop, and potentially a massive pump in prices of family homes as a result.I think that investors are going to be moving their money out of commercial real estate, and into residential.Edit: to be clear: I don&#x27;t live in the Bay Area, and I think the housing prices there could go either way:1) People spend more time in their homes and spend an even larger portion of their income on their home. Having a &quot;good&quot; home becomes even more important since you spend even more time there, and prices go up even more.2) People just leave the bay area. Residential prices go down in the bay area.But there is a whole world out there that doesn&#x27;t include SF, and I think that just generally speaking you&#x27;re going to see an increase in residential home values as investors look for safe places to place their money outside of commercial real estate.

I did that.  I dumped my SF job and started traveling the world last November.  I just picked a helluva year to start :)

I did this and after taxes and cost of living, I&#x27;m actually making slightly more on net.

I&#x27;d gladly take a 15-20% paycut to leave the area but keep my job. Love the company, love the people I work with, hate this place.

If I was asked to work remotely I would ask for a 15% salary increase

If I could work remotely, I would gladly take a 30% cut to go live somewhere like the Netherlands. 50% cost of living cut from SF. I could actually have a woodworking shop too!

As more companies are WFH friendly, the potential employee pool expands massively

I&#x27;m pretty sure the salaries are heavily dependent on location related cost of living requirements.Aren&#x27;t salaries different in different locations? (ie. same company with offices in Vancouver Canada vs Seattle vs SF?) I&#x27;ve heard they are...If pay was purely about talent, everyone would be paid the same.

A lot of us would disagree with that. Housing is so expensive that lots of talented people simply cannot afford to move to the BA.Looked at another way, &quot;talented people&quot; are often smart enough to realize that if they do get the same salary, they net a lot more if they live elsewhere.

Oh, no. The FAANGs are competing for the group of people who are willing to work in a small chunk of California and, to a lesser extent, small chunks of Virginia, Washington, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. Remove those restrictions and the relevant group expands.This is as silly as competing for men, or competing for US citizens, or competing for 22-32 year-olds. Demographics like that have very little power compared to testing for relevant skills, or having a visible track record.

I don&#x27;t understand why? Salaries are high because you&#x27;re competing for the same small group of talented people. They aren&#x27;t high due to the location.

well you are going to miss out on the gargantuan salaries, which will likely still have a premium but maybe closer to 10% premium instead of 250% premium, but if you like networking with people working on cutting edge protocols you still canthe cities and towns themselves aren&#x27;t spectacular though. I mean there are more spectacular ones to immerse yourself into if you are really just trying to relocate somewhere intersting

Don&#x27;t worry, the salaries will still be platinum plated, they just might not be diamond encrusted.

Please no, I&#x27;ve worked for a long time to finally put myself in a marketable position for FAANG and other west coast companies. It&#x27;d be hella disappointing to miss out now.

And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop

They aren&#x27;t the only ones. We&#x27;ve always been supportive of people working from home anyway, but from here on out I&#x27;ll be actively encouraging my team to work from home as much as possible. Apart from anything else coronavirus hasn&#x27;t magically gone away just because we&#x27;ve passed the peak of infection.

I think there is still a lack of things like white boarding tools. I haven’t seen anything that could replace a big whiteboard.Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that.Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help.I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.

Video conferencing is pretty bad IME. I think that all too many companies view Slack as an acceptable option for communication most of the time, and I think that&#x27;s an extremely inhibiting factor for most remote work. I think some innovation around the tools we use for remote work would be great, fwiw.

Why do I need either of those things? If I&#x27;m going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.

There&#x27;s lots of communication which is hard to do remote. The water cooler is o e thing. But even in a meeting when presenting something the feedback is limited. When sitting in a room it&#x27;s simpler to see whether people are following and one should go faster or iterate on a point. Also one can simpler intercept with a question or comment. The text based back channel is limited for that.(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn&#x27;t deep down coding, but requires communication)

Training people, both workers and management, how to work in such environments. Plus for many companies expanding the bandwidth and security for their entry points for the corporate network. This can include locking down connected equipment to block high data volume sites and activities; you cannot believe the number of people who try to stream across their vpn connection.Not everyone wants to be remote, where I work they asked for volunteers for the first wave and had to turn people down for some groups. For these the separation of work and home is line they don&#x27;t like to cross.

&gt;&gt;I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.I dont think that is hard to replicate. Group chat &#x2F; slack &#x2F; teams is a common feature and can easily be used to fill this void.

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing?I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

I&#x27;m not sure how your conclusion follows - it&#x27;s undoubtedly true that more and more folks are involved in teams that at least partly remote.  However, the skills needed to manage these effectively are mostly the same as co-located teams.  To whatever degree &quot;people person&quot; was needed, it seems mostly the same to me.

you have to fly a lot though, live in hotels for weeks here and there. and compensation is aligned to performance in a much deeper way than at IC level

As you move up the chain in global companies such as Twitter, it becomes more likely that you&#x27;ll have a superior or direct report based in a different location than you, and this has been true for years. The &quot;people person&quot; executive theory only holds for companies that do not already have a substantial number of teams that are not all located in the same place.

I won&#x27;t go near an open office after COVID19 and I doubt I&#x27;m alone, I think things will change greatly.

I&#x27;m an ardent supporter of remote work, and I wouldn&#x27;t go back to non-remote work without a hefty pay raise, but I think I probably would have considered office jobs during my last search if the offices I&#x27;d worked in previously had actually been pleasant.Open office plans, low cubicle walls, cubicle sharing, frequent noise and disrespect of focus, flimsy banged up office chairs and equipment, no budget for standing desks, the lack of real employee lounges and couches to both work and chill out at, strict clocking in and out, and insufficient meeting space are chasing away good employees, especially now that we&#x27;re all forced to work remotely. More people won&#x27;t be willing to go back if they can help it.Notice I mentioned nothing about free snacks, foosball tables, beer on tap, etc. I&#x27;d trade all of that for some semblance of serenity in the office.

My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.

&gt; My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn&#x27;t have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.Don&#x27;t forget it removes the work&#x2F;home barrier. Now you are at work 24&#x2F;7 and on call at all hours. Work and productivity has consumed most of modern life. The last bastion of freedom from work&#x2F;productivity was the home. Now people are celebrating the loss of that precious personal space. Strange.

Maybe, but it would also be good if more (tech) companies offered a decent working environment.That&#x27;s coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs &#x2F; assignments I&#x27;ve had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements.I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It&#x27;s a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don&#x27;t have their employees&#x27; best interest in mind.My cynical take on this move is that the company doesn&#x27;t have to pay as much for office space + worker transport anymore.

Yeah, I get what you mean. Native applications store your data locally, which is privacy-friendly, but sharing is hard. SaaS brought easy sharing of data, but it also brought data mining. So the goal is to have data in the cloud, but isolated, rather than in a big shared database in some SaaS provider.If you trust the privacy of cloud providers, you can spin up a server and use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;</a>, which is designed around that: private infra, with granular sharing of data.If you don&#x27;t, you need local compute and encryption. Keybase would be a decent example - while you can&#x27;t use your own cloud account, they only see encrypted data.That said, there&#x27;s a reason a lot of people deleted their Keybase accounts when they got acquired by Zoom. Data mining is very enticing, so outside of projects ran by idealist volunteers - which will always have a hard time competing with funded companies -, how do you keep developers from adding mining abilities even to the native&#x2F;self-hosted applications?

What about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockstack.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockstack.org&#x2F;</a>? With this approach you own the data

It would be good if AWS and GCE were leveraged by workers at home as generic data centers to store their private dataWorking on a UI and server for just that. Plug an API key for a cloud provider into the UI which will help users move data from their laptop to a private bucket for example, or spinup basic infra, enable sharing with other users accounts for opt-in data collectionSell or donate access to specific data in your account on your terms.The web is dead. With the right tools anyone can leverage the cloud to regain a ton of privacy and control of their data. Maybe we can dismantle through free market effort, the technocracy middleman now that building such software is trivial

That’s mainly because they have better things to do. Where do you think more money is to be made?  Worry about your typing or be very good at meeting people?

I&#x27;ve always wondered if that was a side effect of them being slow&#x2F;bad at typing.  Higher ups usually don&#x27;t end up having to type a lot themselves, and many are bad at it.

Completely agree - I&#x27;ve tried and failed many times to move from Orlando to Bay area. FAANG (finance work) wasnt willing to pay to relocate so they always went with local candidates over me. There are little to no interesting companies in my area. I want to work and help build the future. I was willing to take a paycut from MCOL to HCOL area for jobs and willing to go down in seniority for a chance to work at a big company in the Bay area. It would be nice if they finally start opening the applicant pool to those in other cities.

Just so you&#x27;re aware, it is possible in Microsoft to some extent, just not very publicly visible (the careers site doesn&#x27;t help you find these jobs).I started working in one team and switched to another team internally because they are pro-remote and I plan on moving back to Australia. Broadly across Microsoft there are also about ~30 other engineers already working from Australia for Redmond-based teams.

If you can relocate temporarily, most of Microsoft will let you go remote if you&#x27;re a top performer (Top 10% roughly) after about 2 years.

I would love for more companies to embrace this just to open up the candidate pool for positions.There are so many positions at Microsoft, for example, that I would have loved to apply for, but they require you to be in Redmond, and I&#x27;m just not in a position to relocate.

The body language thing is important. I think it helps to position the camera and your hands in a way that lets people see your gestures.

&gt; I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.This might also be a trust thing. Studies have found that in-person social interaction leads to increased levels of trust among the group, but remote social interaction doesn&#x27;t have this affect. The higher you go up the management chain, the more trust is required to perform your job effectively. ICs usually work under well-defined, measurable conditions: you can determine from their work product whether an engineer, salesperson, or designer is being productive. Executives do not work under these conditions, and arguably the job of an executive is to define those metrics. To get everyone rowing in the same direction requires an immense amount of trust and collaboration amongst the high-level leadership of the company, and it seems like it&#x27;d be challenging to achieve that virtually.

That would be great and healthy for the whole country if things were more spread out.

A potential compromise I am hoping for would be an increased willingness of companies to open satellite or smaller offices in secondary or tertiary real estate markets.

Yes, Engineering especially coding could work whether you it is Remote, WFH or anything else.Product and Design so far doesn&#x27;t seems work well without close face to face collaboration.

It sounds like the product people are sitting in long meetings. Have you considered the idea that people were already disengaged in those meetings, they were just putting up a better front because they could tell everyone was watching them closely in person?And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?And now they don&#x27;t have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.

As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR&#x27;s, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools.It&#x27;s on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There&#x27;s something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we&#x27;re just sort of feeling our way though it...

The higher you go up the older they get. It is a culture shift and lets be honest no one wants to leave their comfort zone.

It&#x27;s more about being effective managers. There&#x27;s tons of writing and proper follow up and prep work necessary to make remote work happen and most people aren&#x27;t just that diligent to do it regularly.Most managers especially at the top are also not the most diligent people, they have employees to do the stuff that they dislike doing so when they are faced with having to do more prep work and move at what they consider a slower speed (they are wrong, all that prep work and due diligence pays off, Bezos and Amazon are a great example of that) they recoil.

Lots of companies are followers. I appreciate Twitter taking the lead here.

It is generally an oversight to assume that people have ideal work conditions at home and could be more productive. Going to a reliable and steady office is absolutely salutary for many people. There are trade-offs, yes, but no one-size-fits-all. Physical work location and conditions is one potential issue, and emotional&#x2F;relational conditions are another. Would we want to overlook these issues while still searching for the best talent for our companies?

Anecdotally I&#x27;m not really sure how much of people persons higher ups are, at least in engineering. Pretty much all of the SVPs &#x2F; CTOs at the medium to large (but not huge) companies I&#x27;ve worked were not really people people. They&#x27;ve been somewhat socially awkward and naturally introverted. They can stand in front of a crowd and speak of course, and present in relatively high pressure situations, but I don&#x27;t think they actually enjoy dealing with people all that much.

People are underestimating the issues which need to be overcome with WFHInfrastructure: 
Do homes have chargers, desks, screens? If not people will soon get carpal tunnel or lose productivity.Internet&#x2F;VPN security costs are real.Productivity creep :
Some of the main issues with WFH have been work hour creep. Managers and other employees feel its easier to make requests for more time given that you are now a few feet from your laptop. Lack of discipline also means that people now work longer.Rewards and promotions
I can&#x27;t find it right now, but I recall WFH resulting in lower pay relative to people with the same qualifications who went to office.Mental costs:
One of the main issues with WFH has been loneliness. Fixing this requires immense effort to recreate physical proximity.Creativity is also lost when you cant engage in banter and catching up with people.

Frankly, I dread the situation where working from home is the norm and suddenly a core part of my job is building remote working relationships that I find easy to build in person.

We are a small SAAS startup that is funded by a slightly larger architectural services firm. My partner was staunchly against WFH until he saw productivity rise and employee satisfaction go through the roof when the business was forced into WFH. While he will continue to come to the office (because he is an old dog), everyone else is WFH forever. He owns the building so i&#x27;m sure he&#x27;ll attempt to rent out the vacated office space. When he realizes nobody is going to want his office space due to severe oversupply, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if he sells the building or converts the land into something more profitable. You might ask, what changed? He assumed that people who work from home won&#x27;t be effective. He lacked trust. The employees proved to be trustworthy.

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools.To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes away an important skill set of theirs.

That sounds like my interview experience too! It was crazy!

One company did that to me twice, the whole while telling me that they never allow remote work and I had to relocate to Mountain View, especially despite neither team I was interviewing with was based in Mountain View.The team I had the most face-to-face interaction with was because I managed to talk the recruiter into to allowing me to interview in the SF office, where some of the team actually worked, despite continuing to insist I&#x27;d have to move to Mountain View if I got the job, that &quot;no one&quot; works in the SF office (despite the closest thing to a majority of the team I interviewed with did), and that remote work was also not an option. That trip the worst interview I had in the day was remotely with someone with &quot;regularly works from home&quot; seniority despite &quot;it&#x27;s not generally allowed&quot;. So much about that interview I suffocated in dumb mistakes because I was angry about a lot of details about that interaction given conversations I had had with the recruiters immediately before and after.The second time the team was mostly based on the East Coast (closer to my home than Mountain View, lol), the recruiter insisted I had to interview in Mountain View, and the only person I interacted face to face with that entire cycle was a different recruiter (terrible flights and bad traffic included).I had a very hard time not feeling very personally insulted at how much they wasted my time with remote interviews I could have done from home without needing to fly most of the way across the country, continuing to insist that remote work wasn&#x27;t possible for the positions I was interviewing when very clearly remote work was already the default if they expected people to be in Mountain View working for teams in other cities. It was not a great way to sell Mountain View to me as an option, and I was already quite clear with them that Mountain View wasn&#x27;t a city I find interesting to live in, if I could avoid it. (Not that I could probably afford SF or even East Bay, but very specifically if I want to live in the Exurbs of an American city, I don&#x27;t have to leave home to find equally carbon copied wastelands of strip malls, parking lots, and bad traffic just like Mountain View.)

Your anecdote reminds me of the time a company I was interviewing at flew me half way across the country for their &quot;onsite interview&quot;, and 75% of the sessions were me, seating in one of their offices, zooming&#x2F;skyping with the interviewer.

The pandemic forced it on companies. Before that mass work from home is a Decision that needs Metrics to determine if it was right and if it doesn&#x27;t work or has issues it could be someone&#x27;s fault with Career Consequences. Without something forcing their hands conservative managers would have continued to take the easier path of having people come in just because the default decision isn&#x27;t questioned as much.Working in the office had huge inertia behind it and it does make things simpler for middle management because they can easily just walk around and look over people&#x27;s shoulders to tell if they&#x27;re working on browsing HN all day or interrupt for some face to face.

I’m not sure why it took a pandemic to make this a real option for major tech companies. At my previous company, the bulk of my team was in NY and I would commute an hour plus each way to sit on endless video chats and conference calls with people in other time zones. But working from home was frowned upon...unless you were a contractor, in which case you had to work from home bc there weren’t enough desks.

Yeah I just took a WFH job and if I HAD to be near one city that would really limit my flexibility and is a huge negative. My company does bi-yearly get-togethers, or did.

I agree. I would quit. This basically forces employees to get another room as an office. If my employers pays for it, fine. But if they don’t, it’s bs that I’ll have to continue to work from my living room because we don’t have a dedicated office space. It’s driving both me and my SO crazy because we want separate spaces to do our work but we are in a studio&#x2F;open 1-bedroom.

I live in Portland, though; people live here because they love Portland, not because of the tech scene.

still requires all the costs of living within commuting distanceIf you don&#x27;t have to go in everyday, the possible commuting distance increases massively. Before the virus, I worked from home and my commute was 160km twice per week by high speed train.

This is already a pretty common situation for many companies (in NYC). A 1 hour+ commute to be more tolerable if you only have to do it twice a week. Fully remote companies, you might see your coworkers in person once a year. That&#x27;s a big leap for a lot of places to accept.

Yet, many workers prefer it. For example, my team is 18 persons fully in-office and 4 fully remote (I&#x27;m one of the latter). We&#x27;ve been all fully remote for two months now, and today the manager asked: what do you think about making this permanent? And all the 18 colleagues agreed that their preferred solution would be partial remote.People like their socialization at work. Many also like living in the city anyway (granted, most of my colleagues are young and childless). And outside of extreme cases like SF, a tech salary is enough to rent a decent apartment.

The average American spends 4.3 hours per week commuting. If you go into the office every day, that gives you a 26.1 minute commute radius. If you go into the office twice a week, now your commute radius extends out to an hour.Take a map around the office where you work. Look at the kinds of home prices you can find an hour out. See how much closer you can be to nature or other particular amenities that matter to you. Would you like to have those with zero total change to your commute time?Sounds pretty nice to me.

I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size&#x2F;perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn&#x27;t seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.

Are you kidding? Traveling economically by air is one of the worst travel experiences you can have. If you&#x27;re going to do it weekly, then it needs to be relatively cheap to make it worthwhile. Don&#x27;t forget, too, that if this does become the norm, companies will start decreasing comp to make up for not having to pay people to live in high CoL areas. In terms of comfort, I&#x27;d rather stand on a BART train than fly for an hour.I don&#x27;t think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.

I&#x27;ve done this in the past - I live in Portland, and worked with a firm in Mount Vernon, WA, which is about three and a half hours north, one way. I didn&#x27;t go in every week, more like a few days a month staying in a hotel, but I found it very agreeable. I quite enjoyed having a few days to collaborate intensively and then private time to finish the detail work.That said, I&#x27;m notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I&#x27;m probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we&#x27;ll see about 20% of people who won&#x27;t want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I&#x27;m really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn&#x27;t work well for some people.

That&#x27;s what I did in my previous job, go there once a week at most and only socialize and goof around, no work

Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week &quot;meeting day&quot; but really try to focus on socializing than &quot;this is the day we do all our meetings&quot; since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn&#x27;t be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)

Typically the company will then reassess the office capacity needed to provide enough flexible space and accommodate all teams and their needs. But there&#x27;s plenty of time to do that, since you cannot break (or not renew) a corporate lease overnight.

If it gets even mildly popular, different companies with different meeting days could time-share an office.

Why keep the expensive office in your case?

Yes, it is not representative at all. It&#x27;s a stressful period, kids are always at home as schools are closed, the lockdown requires more organisation than usual in everyday life and there are less options to relieve stress.We still manage to work with the same productivity in my company but we already had some experience with WFH.

I’m really starting to resent my childless co-workers and their ability to just work happily all day long.My day is basically split up into maybe 20m at a time where I can do something before being distracted.I end up working during the night to catch up (just got done), but this is unsustainable long term.

&gt; work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things outThe ability to hash things out verbally is a great escape hatch, but it has turned into a crutch. I hope universal WFH will push people to work to a standard where it can be the exception instead of the norm.&gt; Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distractedIn my experience, working at home isn&#x27;t much different from working at work. If you don&#x27;t have a private office with a door, it&#x27;s going to be very challenging to focus regardless of whether you&#x27;re sharing space with your coworkers or your family. Long ago I worked in a cube farm that had the depressing gray regularity of a low-effort DOOM wod, and I&#x27;m not sure that wasn&#x27;t better for productivity than the attractive, high-end open plan offices I&#x27;ve worked in since then.In a couple of years, my wife and I will be living in a different house, and we will both have private offices, cost be damned. I&#x27;ve decided mine can be as small as 10&#x27;x6&#x27;, as long as it has a door and a window.

I am having a very hard time staying motivated in the current context. Kids at home yelling at each other, other coworkers distracted, work tasks badly defined without the ability to verbally hash things out, emotional &#x2F; mental health stress due to the current scenario.I don&#x27;t feel like the current scenario is indicative of a well structured WFH setup, even though we&#x27;ve been doing it for 2 months now.In short I hope companies don&#x27;t use this interlude to evaluate WFH productivity, because I think it isn&#x27;t the best representative.

I quit a great job to work remotely 4 months ago after about 15 years of trying to do it. I feel like the universe is having an absolute riot at my expense right now. This is not a fun time to be new at a company. It&#x27;s so hard to focus and sip the koolaid when the world feels like it&#x27;s falling apart outside of my skype meetings and facing customers and selling products is the last thing I&#x27;m energized to do.

I work for another pretty well-known company and management just asked us how we were feeling about a future were we could chose to have a designated desk in the office or not. This is crazy, our wildest dreams are being answered.

&gt;we&#x27;ve proven we can be just as productive when we&#x27;re out of the office.I think it&#x27;s very important to realize that if we are or are not productive WFH, there will be others who feel the opposite.Working from home doesn&#x27;t work for everyone, or it doesn&#x27;t work in every case. Maybe it can be further optimized to work better for most cases, but currently it&#x27;s not.* Speaking as someone who recently started a new job two weeks before the government SIP for the Bay Area and has had to mostly virtual on-board and ramp-up. It has not been an easy experience. Maybe it&#x27;s the on-boarding&#x2F;ramp-up for my team that&#x27;s not optimized, or maybe it&#x27;s not easy simply because I&#x27;m not already a full-time remote worker already. Some people who enjoy WFH and get remote jobs probably don&#x27;t have the issues I&#x27;ve had, and that&#x27;s okay too. But I think it&#x27;s unrealistic to expect everyone joining a new company during this situation to be properly productive through it and potentially WFH indefinitely. For my company in particular they&#x27;ve already mentioned we&#x27;ll get to WFH for this through the end of the year.

&gt; people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a &quot;meeting day&quot; where everyone is in the office.I sort of had this setup before covid: the company I work for does consulting and my coworkers and I will often be at client&#x27;s offices. When we write our contracts we make sure to always designate Friday as the day where all employees come back to the &#x27;home base&#x27; for meetings, catch-ups, socializing, etc. It works quite well, and we&#x27;d always look forward to Friday&#x27;s because of it.If I could continue to WFH 3-4 days a week and then go into the office on Thursday&#x2F;Friday, that would be great.

Before COVID I lived this, and it&#x27;s really the best of both worlds. You have one day a week where you meet with your coworkers and demo stuff, talk about stuff, grab some good food in the city, grab a smoke outside, ride the train. It&#x27;s a nice &quot;day off&quot; as-in out of the ordinary.I think this is the right balance.

I would consider a much longer commute to be acceptable once or twice a week compared to having to do it every day. You could still have the benefit of having a lower cost of living without increasing the number of hours you spend commuting per week.

The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.

I think some of the replies here are misguided, I&#x27;ve interviewed (and turned down offers from) some well-known companies who were doing remote work and renting office space for face to face meetings 1 day a week while they were constructing a new office in my city.This is the best of both worlds for a company.

I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we&#x27;ll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a &quot;meeting day&quot; where everyone is in the office.I don&#x27;t think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we&#x27;ve proven we can be just as productive when we&#x27;re out of the office.That said, I&#x27;m one of the few people who like going into an office. There are fewer distractions and better food options. :)

&gt; There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.
I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.It&#x27;s the same for me – at home, and the opposite at the office. I live alone.

My son is 5 and he knows what my door is for. He still comes in occasionally but it&#x27;s pretty manageable. The 2 year old is a different matter, but soon we&#x27;ll get daycares back so no biggie.

this is exactly the reason I prefer the office .. I have 2 kids, 5 &amp; 2, and if I&#x27;m home they are very much used to me being around them or doing something together, working from home is not ideal

I recommend you set boundaries and expectations.

That’s really difficult in the beginning. Like others have said, boundaries are awesome. One thing I did that helped a lot is simply asking if I’d pop into their work to sit and ask a few questions. The answer has always been no. So I ask that they not do that when I’m at work either.That’s helped in most if not all cases.

This is the biggest issue for me.  Work puts me into a very different mindset(i.e. an asshole) and without obvious signs of when I am or am not working my wife doesn&#x27;t know how to interact with me.

I&#x27;ve been working from home for about 16 months, and I&#x27;m afraid my partner doesn&#x27;t quite get what a different head space I am in when I&#x27;m working, when she comes for a friendly visit if she isn&#x27;t busy herself. I can seem cold and even abrupt, sometimes, when she comes to see me. But it takes so long to get in that space, it is hard to be brought out of it.Ironic thing is, she also works from home about 80-90% of the time. Guess she inhabits that mind-set more easily than I do!

Yeah, I think many people don&#x27;t realize that working from home during a pandemic is not a normal work from home experience. Normally, that someone popping over your shoulder would be at work, school, day care or otherwise outside playing during most of the working day. A lot of people working from home today are responsible for a lot more than their work, which is distracting in and of itself.Outside of all that, it comes down to self-discipline.

Before this, I was just not able to work at home. I was always distracted and would only get a half day of work in at best. But finally had to actually buckle down and set up my desk. And set boundaries for interruptions. I could really use an actual KVM, but otherwise working from home is finally nice for me.

A normal schedule helps, but there are a number of other things which need to align in order for it to work. I&#x27;m guessing you have those things and take them for granted or you would have listed them.A proper work environment is key, including limiting distractions and proper ergonomics. You also need co-habitants which respect and understand the boundaries and work rules. It really helps to have a house. I live in an apartment and can&#x27;t control the distractions(literally as I hit &#x27;reply&#x27; someone started a power saw in the garage below my office).

I’ve worked from home for a number of years. It’s all about having a normal schedule. My family knows when I’m in the office, I am at work. There isn’t anyone popping over my shoulder, and general interruptions are almost nil in my case.I think a lot of people are going to be super surprised what a quiet room and your playlist of choice can do to increase productivity. Just my 2 cents.

Any big name ones allow it? Twitter is the largest that I know of.

Is this really breaking news? Tons of tech companies allow this. If anything it&#x27;s news that they didn&#x27;t allow it before.

After trying to make tech workers spend as much time as possible at the workplace with expensive perks became frowned upon - a much cheaper alternative is to have work  spend as much time as possible at employee&#x27;s home.

I often laugh when looking at companies solving the problems for working remotely, while you look into their job openings to see none allows working remotely, in this case, 7 out of 13 positions aren&#x27;t remote, not bad but still surprised.

Not affiliated, but Mural somewhat makes it less painful online

friendly suggestion, when sharing the URL it&#x27;s helpful for the reader if you stylize it like the site does (collabUML). Otherwise it&#x27;s hard not to see a misspelling of &quot;collab album&quot;.

Shameless plug, I&#x27;m pretty bad at drawing on the computer, which is one of the reasons I launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collabuml.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collabuml.com&#x2F;</a>

The thing I miss the most while WFH is the whiteboard conversations. It&#x27;s nice to be able to drag your colleagues for quick tech discussion and go back to work. Pen is much faster than drawing diagrams online.

I may not like having a tiny desk crammed in a huge team in a loud noisy space, I do still like seeing my coworkers daily and attending meetings with them and going out to lunch with them. Working from home is isolating and lonely for me.

I have everything you list above, and I&#x27;m not swayed.I still looking forward to going back to normal. I&#x27;ve never been the social butterfly who sees tons of friends on a regular basis out of work, and yet I enjoy talking to others. Work gives me that, lunch at work gives me that too.Some of my colleagues are razor smart. I can have lunch time discussions about rocketry or special video coding algorithms or War time cryptography, just random interesting stuff that I&#x27;d never have otherwise.Working at home has some benefits, but how many times do you really use that swimming pool?

Is your answer: &quot;try being rich&quot;? People with what you have are rarely sitting in cubicles or open offices any way.

I will have to shamelessly try and sway you.Get a large house, a swimming pool, a home office room with all the games and gadgets you ever wanted, a nice surround 5.1 system optically connected to a gaming pc, a nice couch to rest now and then and plan your code ahead.See if you still miss your cubicle (nothing wrong with that, but just what i wrote a thought).Thats my lifestyle since i starting working remotely. As summer is coming, trees are blossoming, fresh and clean air. My client is pretty impressed with my productivity and most of our e-meetings are held while we all sit in our gardens (most of the team is remote).

What makes you say that remote problem solving is more difficult?  I&#x27;ve worked in places that were 100% distributed, and we were able to handle issues over conference calls without much issue.

I can&#x27;t count the number of times, my team has run into a complex issue, be it a production issue or a coming up with a complicated algorithm design that would&#x27;ve been a lot more difficult to do remotely. My current team has 2 members that are remote only and one person who comes in once a week, or every other week depending on circumstances.I think there&#x27;s a lot of day to day work that is more productive at home but in an ideal world, you could have the best of both worlds.

It&#x27;s strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100% remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike open offices, they&#x27;re noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack, and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team. I&#x27;d be happy if we just go back to offices or even cubicles. I miss my cubicles with my mini-whiteboard and my own little corner with a desk with drawers. In the bay area at least we&#x27;ve been crammed into ever-larger open spaces like workers in a meatpacking plant, with smaller desks and more noise and disruption.

At some point, unless working onsite is (really) essential — employees &amp; employers that have onsite unnecessary office space should have to pay tax to do so, otherwise, them having an office space just paid for by those who are willing not to have an office.Having non-essential spaces for people is complete unnecessary — and it: contributes in less health eating habits, traffic, cars, HVAC related energy costs, wasted time commuting, rising real estate costs, economic lost during pandemics due to downtime, etc.Same principle holds true for non-essential travel.

Good news ! You don&#x27;t have to be - just allow your work IT a full control of your home network and they&#x27;ll have it secured to corporate standards !

Some companies make &quot;home office access points&quot; for that use case: a WLAN access point that the employee has at home, which provides a WLAN just for the work devices, tunnels everything back to the company VPN and can be remotely managed.

Or equipment. Am I now liable for preventing my home network from being hacked?

A blurred distinction between the home and the workplace could also have legal implications for side projects, &#x27;everything you make during employment period belongs to us&#x27; clauses can sometimes be punched through or voided but it&#x27;s  harder to do if you can&#x27;t show a clear work time and resources vs. personal time and resources boundary.

I suspect at some point, if there is a larger adoption, this is going to lessen the need for work visas etc.

This is essentially the same as saying &quot;the sky is blue because it just is&quot;

The thing is, if more people are remote, the market includes people -outside- of SV.

&gt; I can&#x27;t see this being good for employees...... that want to live in NYC or SF. For everyone else, who doesn&#x27;t want to live in places like that, this is awesome. (And that&#x27;s a word I never use)

If the scenario you&#x27;re describing happens, some startups will appear and pay SWEs 160k&#x2F;year to live wherever they want, and the good engineers will leave to work at those startups.The fundamental problem (for the cost-cutting employer) is that good engineering orgs really do generate that much value.This happened with the wage-collusion attempts in the valley. Facebook was willing to give more raises than Google or Apple. In the latest roll of the dice, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and friensd were willing to pay more. It&#x27;s the cycle of business.

Bingo! I often talk about how you can rent a 3BR apartment in my home town (Nowhere, Michigan) for like $900. This is true -- I&#x27;ve verified it recently. The drawback is that you have to live in my home town.I can certainly see companies wanting to pay less based on CoL simply to make the bottom line better. Given the way capitalism works, I&#x27;d say this is a near inevitability. The end result will probably be that the big tech companies are going to start &quot;offshoring&quot; work to the Midwest, and other low to very low cost of living areas. (&quot;We&#x27;ll pay you $70k per year, but you can live wherever you want in the US!&quot;)I can&#x27;t see this being good for employees, because there are significant benefits to living in a place like NYC or the Bay Area, and those benefits would be lost if people had to live in the middle of nowhere to make it worthwhile.

Will people start streaming out of the Bay Area, though? The thing that always interested me about the Bay Area was that my friends in Mountain View would be posting long bike rides throughout the winter. Where it&#x27;s snowy and below freezing in New York, it&#x27;s 55 degrees and sunny there. I imagine people like that a lot, and is part of the reason it&#x27;s a popular place to live.There are other places in the US that are warm in the winter, of course, but less of them are also nice in the summer. Then among those, very few of them match the Bay Area in friendliness to things like LGBT causes.I have a feeling that many people will continue gravitating to the Bay Area.

Isn&#x27;t this a win-win-win though? Salaries become more normalized across the country so people can work from where they choose, SF rents will go down as techies start streaming out of the Bay Area, hiring pools for companies become inclusive of people who don&#x27;t want to move to the Bay Area (or the other 2-3 tech cities).  
The rest of the country also certainly doesn&#x27;t pay 1&#x2F;3rd of your salary.

The current gig I&#x27;ve got, if they&#x27;d had a senior engineer - even as an advisor - from the outset, basically the last ~8 mo of work split between myself and a different senior engineer would have been unnecessary.

I wasn’t asserting or claiming one way or the other. I’m asking the question. Your response assumes some stance I might have - I don’t. I found your response pretty unpleasant and combative even though there is truth in what you’re saying.

then how come the same engineer at google transferring to a europe or india office gets 1&#x2F;5th the pay? they are just as skilled. it’s the same person

If this were true, remote positions would pay just as well as the highest paid places in the US, but they generally don’t, because they don’t have to.It’s only difficult to hire developers anywhere because you don’t want to pay what it would cost to get a yes.

&gt; when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1&#x2F;3rd of the salaryWhat makes you think this is true and not just a post-hoc rationalization? Let me put it this way: offer that salary worldwide and you will still have difficulty finding top-tier talent, as many remote-first companies are finding out the hard way. Having been a hiring manager in such a position before, I will tell you that you are still competing against every other remote tech company to find and hire from the same global talent pool.Secondly, you&#x27;re not accounting for communication ease and timezone differences. A huge amount of the world is cut out if you optimize for remote candidates within +-1-3 TZs.Finally, the assertion that the average valley firm doesn&#x27;t need a $200k+ in 2020 USD terms engineer is also not necessarily true. Demand for senior talent is significantly higher than for mid range and junior talent, because mid-large size firms want it (to bolster their senior roster and make it easier for teams to subdivide), and small firms absolutely need it (they simply do not have a senior engineer and need at least one).

Is this a popular thing inside of gitlab? Personally, I&#x27;m conflicted: it&#x27;s an interesting experiment, and I get where it comes from, but it&#x27;s perhaps a bit too nearsighted.In the end, I think zipcode (and COL) is a weak proxy for talent. It&#x27;s very easy to measure zipcode, compared to talent.But, think about it from the other angle: if you have a history of this talent (earning high salaries in high-COL zip codes or otherwise), why on earth would you accept anything less than that, when moving to a lower COL area?To me, it seems like a decision that would hurt the employer more than help them, since the people with proven talent would work for companies that don&#x27;t discriminate on zip codes. And that costs more than the investment in assessing incoming talent levels.

Wait, so you can move to a super expensive place and the company will subsidize your mortgage investment?

I&#x27;m glad you are principled.  Get paid what you&#x27;re worth folks!

I&#x27;m with you. GitLab would be near the top of my employer targets if not for their bizarre location-based salaries. I want a remote-work job in large part so that I can move around. I relocate every 2-3 years, all over the US and internationally. If I get hired in the NYC area I&#x27;m not willing to take a 50% paycut because I want to spend a year living somewhere else.Their calculations and reasoning are completely irrational. Rent is more a lot more in NYC, but utilities are the same; medical costs are the same; groceries are roughly the same (I found them cheaper in Manhattan than in nearby suburbs); you don&#x27;t own a car (or two, as a couple); you don&#x27;t have the expense of maintaining a large home and yard; etc. It costs a lot to live in NYC, but you can&#x27;t compare the rent on a 1BR NYC apartment with a 1BR suburban apartment and say it&#x27;s three times as expensive. It&#x27;s a completely different lifestyle, and the choice for people like me is between a shoebox in the city with the perks of city life, or a comfortable 3BR home with a yard in the suburbs and a car and maybe a swimming pool or a boat or something. It&#x27;s not a cheaper life, it&#x27;s just a different life.

&gt;There are plenty of remote companies that don&#x27;t do thatCare to name some?

I wfh and I won&#x27;t work for a company that bases my pay on my zipcode (Gitlab). I want complete flexibility on where I live. There are plenty of remote companies that don&#x27;t do that, especially now post-covid.I wish more people would reject zip code COL so that companies starting to WFH don&#x27;t just take Gitlabs idea of it.

Regarding raw talent, didn&#x27;t Google, Apple, etc. form a cartel a while back to suppress the wages of engineers? I highly doubt wages are tightly bound to value output.In my own experience throughout my career I&#x27;ve been both severely overpaid and underpaid relative to my economic impact.

Definitely an interesting point. What happens when you are remote in one expensive city then move to a cheaper city? Does the employer need to know where you presently reside? I would think not.

the pay is based (as it should be) on market conditions, regulations and contractual obligations. Should not be based on ethics - those can vary in surprising ways.

The US Government, normally a very conservative org, has cost of living increases for federal workers and (I think) military service members. Based on that, I think it&#x27;s pretty well accepted (perhaps incorrectly!) that it is ethical.Or maybe practical beats ethical.

&gt; If they employer can pay $200k&#x2F;yr for a remote employeeIt&#x27;s interesting that folks envisioning a globally uniform payscale tend to posit SF salaries in Hanoi rather than Hanoi salaries in SF.

Yeah employers should pay employees for the value of their work, which does not depend on their physical location.Also, employers always pay employees less than the value of their work and pocket the rest. This is called profit.

What if we took that thinking and turned it around:The minimum wage for a McDonalds cashier in NYC is $15&#x2F;hour.McDonalds also operates in India, and hires cashiers that do essentially the same work. If the employe was able to pay $15&#x2F;hour for the same type of work in NYC, then shouldn&#x27;t they pay the Indian cashier INR 1,125 &#x2F; hour? Or what about the other way around, why shouldn&#x27;t the NYC cashier get paid at the Indian cost-of-living?And forget wages, how about the cost of goods and services? A 4BR house in Columbus, OH can cost about $300,000 — but the same house might cost about $3M in Palo Alto. Is this unfair &#x2F; discriminatory? The house itself might be identical.

&gt; is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live?It&#x27;s not just rent&#x2F;mortgage price differences, there are also different laws regarding taxation, healthcare and retirement.On the other hand you can&#x27;t offer someone in the Bay Area a Eastern Europe level salary. Nobody would come, but you can offer a slightly higher than average salary in E.E. and they would definitely come. It&#x27;s just that a global company needs to hire in both regions to be competitive.

Just playing devils advocate: is it ethical to pay someone SF salary despite them living in a third world country where they are essentially richer than kings and can wreak havoc on the economy&#x2F;culture if they themselves aren&#x27;t ethical (paying off government, etc). 
Salary is not a number, its a &quot;standard of living&quot;. But paying two engineers in two different zip codes the same number, you are technically paying the person in the cheaper location more. They have a much higher &quot;standard of living&quot;.

I&#x27;ve had a related thought: is it ethical to pay a person less based purely on where they live? I understand that there are different cost of living factors for different places, but that&#x27;s on the employee&#x27;s side and should be none of the employer&#x27;s business. If they employer can pay $200k&#x2F;yr for a remote employee, it shouldn&#x27;t matter where they live, and so scaling that value seems discriminatory to me.Anyone have thoughts about this?

There&#x27;s an interesting theory about this based on game theory.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shapiro%E2%80%93Stiglitz_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shapiro%E2%80%93Stiglitz_theor...</a>

&gt; I work for places that pay me for what I&#x27;m worth, I don&#x27;t work for places that pay me based on where I live.That is very short sighted. Your dollar value is highly dependent on where you live, that&#x27;s just reality.

How do I find a job that pays me top dollar independent of where I live? I&#x27;m a software engineer in a lower cost of living area of the US and I&#x27;ve considered moving to the bay area because wages stagnate here pretty early on in your career, and are generally far lower than in other areas of the world.

I work for places that pay me for what I&#x27;m worth, I don&#x27;t work for places that pay me based on where I live.I&#x27;m not cranking out code that is somehow less effective while living in the NW England, and so to pay me less than someone else is downright insulting.I also, to be clear, don&#x27;t have any hard feelings about people who live in even cheaper[0] places than me, it&#x27;s their choice. I used to work with a guy in the Phillipines who was on the same as me. Good for him![0] It&#x27;s not that cheap in the NW England. It&#x27;s clearly not SF, NY or London, but it&#x27;s not cheap.

If i can work remote at facebook for 200k or work remote at google for 210k who would I pick? Salaries I expect would dip slightly as the pool of engineers grows then go back up as it gets more competitive. Salaries would only go down if the supply of jobs goes down. I don&#x27;t think that happens in the short term.

no offense intended, but how does that compare the an equivalent position in the valley? The point is not so helpful without the reference.For example, are you equivalent to a L3 with 0 years of experience at google making 200K, or an L6 with 10 years experience making 600k?

You can make far, far more than $200k in the bay area. An E6 at Facebook (not an extremely senior position) can make $600k+.

I live in Atlanta and make over $200k total comp. As do my coworkers.I think your perception about salaries outside of the valley is skewed.

&gt; Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1&#x2F;3rd of the salaryThat is a pretty ridiculous assertion. Rent and taxes are higher but they are not $130k&#x2F;year higher.You can even save &gt;$70k of the $200k you make in the bay area without being exceptionally frugal, which you obviously can&#x27;t do if you&#x27;re making $70k&#x2F;year.

Looking at the disparity of incomes of tech workers across regions, makes it abundantly clear that wages would be 50% lower if they could hire anywhere in the country, and probably 80% lower if they could hire anywhere in the world.We&#x27;ve all worked with highly qualified offshore resources (as well as many bad ones). Do they really deserve that 20k salary when we&#x27;re making high six figures?I&#x27;ve started hiring abroad. It&#x27;s a different form of management, sure, but you absolutely beat the return on investment.My advice is to try to stick with the same timezone, and the same language (or roughly anyway).

Then why pay $200k for a software engineer in the valley when the same talent can live outside of the bay area and can do with 1&#x2F;3rd of the salary? The question I have is what portion of the $200k salary is 1) due to the raw talent of the individual 2) because they live in the bay area.

I love how Automattic refers to their work not as remote, but decentralized. Remote work indicates there is a central location, but there isn&#x27;t one at Automattic.

There are successful, fully remote, companies, such as Automattic (Wordpress), Gitlab and more. If they can figure it out, seems more companies can as well.

No real deadlines and mostly one or two developers max on any given improvement.

&gt;I just don&#x27;t think we have the communication tools to support productive collaboration between people who hardly ever meet.How do Open Source projects achieve it?

My company is on the smaller side, but we&#x27;re 100% remote work and have employees and a management team spread across the US, Canada, Europe, and China.We communicate extensively through video calls and Slack.

I want to know how to run a 24&#x2F;7 company with senior employees spread around the world a few timezones apart.I just don&#x27;t think we have the communication tools to support productive collaboration between people who hardly ever meet.(I think what I may be saying is that while yes, there are Open Source projects that overcome these same sorts of problems, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s tools or process that are the reason they work. I suspect the psychology of volunteer work - performed and received - lets people overlook some pain points that they don&#x27;t in a more mercenary setting)

I could see companies not going 100% remote but maybe having 1 day a week in the office.  You might not be able to work from anywhere, but it would allow expansion into areas that aren&#x27;t a soul crushing commute 5 days a week.

If the big tech companies embraced this, one of the big side-effects would be easing of the Bay Area housing crunch. If tech workers did not have to commute to work, they could move to other areas where the housing prices are cheaper while still working for the tech companies. As the demand eases on the housing, prices will fall.

I hope this opens up more remote opportunities in Canada. Also, the whole of Americas.

I look forward to the geographic decentralization this enables. People can move to places that best suit their lifestyle, whether that is low or medium or high density. They can forego commutes. They can have lower costs of living. They can potentially even move away from rigid work hours to a lifestyle that allows them more time and involvement with family.This move also allows employees to choose locations that better suit their politics. I&#x27;ve always found it highly dangerous to have large tech platforms, which are defacto digital public squares (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Medium, etc.), aggregate in just one or two cities that all share the same culture and politics. This is a risk especially because these platforms have increasingly taken steps to ramp up their censorship. If diversity actually matters to these companies, the diversity of thought introduced by decentralized geographic distribution will be a benefit to society.

Not asking for any sympathy — not asking anyone to care about my problems any more than I care about theirs.

Yikes. My Silicon Valley home price is likely to suffer.

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever