The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and learning physics. Plus, honestly, I doubt I was doing more than four hours of "real" work a day while full time.
If I could be fully remote and work part time, I would consider eventually rejoining Microsoft. There is a lot of hand-wringing over how fully remote workers get left behind but I've never been interested in moving beyond an IC level.
In the Netherlands it's the law that you're always allowed to reduce your hours, while keeping the same (hourly) salary and benefits. If your employer disagrees the burden of proof is on THEM to proof that your job would not be doable part-time.
This (and to be honest also fiscal policy) has resulted in the largest part-time workforce in the world. In Dutch e-mail it's very common to find the days people work in the signature at the bottom.
Even though it's not mandatory most people will start by taking Wednesday and/or Friday off. So over time the work culture here became to plan meetings on Mo-Tue-Thu, along with drinks on Thursdays in stead of Fridays. As someone who works 40h still this is such a net-positive for me as well, I love that people don't really plan meetings on Wednesday and Fridays and you can just work.
73% of all women work part-time, as do 23% of the men. Only half of all working Dutch people work fulltime.
Part-time is anything between 12h and 32h a week.
I hope this would become the norm everywhere as it truly frees up everyone to suit their needs.
Traditional family values still resonate in these numbers and many people blame women working part-time for a gender imbalance at the top of companies.
So that gender imbalance is definitely on the agenda. Whether you think these numbers are concerning depends on your political stance.
If women on average prefer to work less hours isn’t the concerning thing the people who seem to want to force them to work more? Especially when it’s oftentimes men that call this a “problem”?
It seems unless you have some data showing their preference is to work more but they are limited by something externally forced on them, and you’d need data not opinion, you shouldn’t be concern-trolling.
Women buy more dresses than men, is this a concern we should address?
But do they prefer it more than men? Maybe we should be more careful about this assumption.
I am a man, and I would prefer to work less hours. Unfortunately, my options are mostly limited to full-time or nothing.
Here is how it works: suppose that both me and my wife are at a job interview, and we both say that we want a part-time job. The obvious question is "why?"
If either of us answers honestly: "because I have life and hobbies and friends, and half of the market salary for my skill range is enough to pay my bills, so I see no reason to spend most of my awake time in an office", with such attitude we are obviously not going to get the job. You are supposed to pretend that working to make someone else even richer is the highest calling in your life, more important than your family or friends or dreams or whatever, not just something you have to do to pay your bills.
Luckily, my wife has a socially acceptable excuse. I don't. Therefore, she will get the part-time job, and I will get the choice to either work full-time or try my luck elsewhere. This is not about our preferences. This is about what is socially acceptable for each of us.
In the past I tried repeatedly to get a part-time job, but it was nearly impossible. (The best deal I got was working 4 days a week for 50% of my market salary. Even that was a rare exception.) When I respond to job offers mentioning "both full-time and part-time positions available" and I mention I am interested in the part-time one, I am usually told that those are only meant for women.
So I keep working full-time, because that's the only option I got. And now people will use my "revealed preference" as a proof that this is what I really wanted. Eh.
What if men feel it's a problem because they also want to work part time but feel social pressure to be successful breadwinner? They are frustrated that they will be judged for making the same choices women make without as much social stigma.
I'm sure there are many reasons men are this as a problem, because there are many men. Just pointing out that it doesn't have to be some misguided savior complex.
In general, I think the concern is whether it's a gender role that women are being forced into as opposed to something that they really are choosing voluntarily. Those two things can be hard to separate though. During the current pandemic, the data I've seen suggests that women are disproportionately dropping out of the workforce for childcare and other reasons. Of course if someone has to drop out of the workforce in a family, that may or may not be a "fair" response.
If you look at the data, in the most liberal countries that rank highest on women's rights, education, equality of upbringing and lack of gender stereotypes, etc (nordic and some euro countries), women actually tend to choose more to work in less technical jobs and jobs that have less of a competitive career ladder.
So if you're going on the data at least as far as I know it, this should be a good sign.
Do you think taking care of children is a low status work that people have to do and not want to do? Do you think there is something wrong with a woman preferring raising children instead of pursuing a boring career?
As long as she excepts that other women might have different feelings about the matter, she is completely entitled to her own. I just find it weird that when women prefer a career over raising children it is considered normal and when they prefer raising children it is viewed with suspicion (they must have been forced). Can't both preferences be equally valid and normal?
I think the choice of working or staying at home is mostly a function of economics. Before the pandemic usually both partners had to work for a family to have a sufficient living standard. And now if one is forced to stay at home it makes sense for the partner with smaller income to stay at home.
When you talk in terms of fairness you implicitly imply child care is somewhat less desirable than a career and are signaling to women or men who choose such path that they made a wrong choice.
It's definitely most common to either work 14, 24 or 32 hours: so taking full days off in stead of less hours per day.
It's also very common to stack hours. A lot of people will work 36 hours. But since 'half days' means you have to commute anyway people usually just take every other Friday off. The only exception to this is Wednesday, when some people work half days because Dutch primary schools are often half-day as well on Wednesday.
But I don't think that's the law, just what people prefer.
I know very few people who reduce theirs hours per day but still choose to commute 5 days a week.
But I guess that might very well change now that a lot of people don't have a commute anymore.
I agree with this so much. I have been working part time for almost a year now to rebuild a house and it has been very nice. It always seemed weird to me that people make such high salaries in tech but just don't value time as the main commodity of our lives. The reality is that if you move to a low CoL area and work part-time you will almost certainly be happier.
But this doesn't mean you are idle the rest of the time. It means you can pursue what you love. We place way to much value in jobs as an end rather than as a mean to an end IMO. I tend to believe that the work week should have been reduced decades ago.
People in tech do seem to value time which may explain why they are disproportionately drawn to the "Financial Independence, Retire Early" (FIRE) movement. The tech industry continues to be much more supportive of 80 hour weeks until you strike it rich and "retire" early, than it is of steady part-time work over many decades of steady-state work-life balance. But the motivation may be the same for many.
I think the motivation is actually age discrimination. It's often much harder to find a job when you're older, so you have to strike it rich when you're younger.
I do not see this around me at all. There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs (probably because those who want to work 80+ hours a week and get rich quick-er tend to be young folks without major commitments).
However, there are plenty of people around me who are in the 40-60 age bracket, who work in tech, are financially comfortable (even though they do not get FAANG-type salaries), do not work crazy hours and (at least pre-COVID) had no problem changing jobs if the current one became toxic or boring. My 2c.
> There is probably some truth in this for the FAANG "work 80 hrs a week, get rich in 5 years" jobs
If you are at a FAANG company and working 80 hours a week, you're earning the same compensation as you would if you were working 40 hours a week. It's not like you're going to get richer working 80 hours. Come review time, nobody looks and says, "oh hey, you worked lots and lots of hours. You get a promotion!" It makes no sense.
Now if you owned 10% of your startup and those 40 extra hours meant the difference between a big exit and running out of runway, that makes more sense.
Are you denying the existence of rampant age discrimination in tech, which has been highlighted countless times by many people? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the comment was intending.
> there are plenty of people around me
There's a bit of survivorship bias there. The older people driven out of tech may be invisible to you.
I don't deny there's age discrimination, but that survey also says JavaScript is 2x as popular as Java, and 3.4x as popular as C++
Whereas [1] says among job board postings, C++ is about as popular as JS, and Java is 1.7x more popular than JS.
Perhaps the holders of StackOverflow accounts aren't representative of the profession as a whole? I could certainly believe people who were programming professionally before SO existed, and who have decades of experience, would have gotten good at solving problems without asking for help.
> Whereas [1] says among job board postings, C++ is about as popular as JS, and Java is 1.7x more popular than JS.
I think it's questionable whether job posting are more representative of working programmers. Arguably they're less representative. Job postings are unfilled jobs, so technically they represent exactly zero programmers. And many job postings are never filled.
> Perhaps the holders of StackOverflow accounts aren't representative of the profession as a whole?
Agreed, but unfortunately I can't think of a better source of data offhand.
> I could certainly believe people who were programming professionally before SO existed, and who have decades of experience, would have gotten good at solving problems without asking for help.
I don't agree with the assumptions here. As an experienced developer, I ask for help all the time. I'm not an expert on every possible subject, and anyway, tech changes. Also, not everyone on Stack Overflow is asking for help. Some have to be offering help, otherwise nobody would go there.
You're assuming that the ratio is disproportionate because people are being pushed out of the industry against their will. Some people get burned out, some people retire early, and some transition into management or start their own company. The industry has grown exponentially in the 20-40 years those people have been working. If the industry now is 10x the size it was in 2000 (arbitrary number), then 40 year old developers should be 10% of the workforce, even discounting any other factors.
I don't see anything alarming here. I am a 40+ year old developer, and I've never seen anyone my age leave the industry because they were victims of age discrimination. The opposite in fact. I have never had so much clout during job hunting than I do now, with 20 years of on the job experience. Anecdata sure, but that survey is not sound, and it does not attempt to discover whether older developers are actually unable to find work, or what other factors (other than the obvious massive industry growth) might contribute to the imbalance.
I'd say if management routinely burns out programmers and prevents them from having long careers, that in itself is a form of age discrimination.
> If the industry now is 10x the size it was in 2000 (arbitrary number), then 40 year old developers should be 10% of the workforce, even discounting any other factors.
IMO this seems to be an ageist assumption. If an industry is growing, why should the newcomers to the industry be overwhelmingly young? Why shouldn't "older" people join in large numbers too, especially if there's a lot of money to be made? I personally switched careers and didn't get my first tech job until I was over 35.
> I have never had so much clout during job hunting than I do now, with 20 years of on the job experience.
What do you make of the pervasive "quiz show" style job interviews that favor recent CS grads and discount job experience?
In any case, I'd say there's more empirical support for my position than the claim I was arguing against, that people work 80 hours per week and then retire early because they "value their time". Just not their current time, only their time later in life (if they live that long), I guess.
> I'd say if management routinely burns out programmers and prevents them from having long careers, that in itself is a form of age discrimination.
It's not management though that may be a part. Building complex systems with cutting (i.e., bleeding) edge technology is hard. A lot of projects fail, often with career consequences for the people in them. If you experience 2-3 of these you start to look around to see if there's an easier way to make a living.
But that "professional developers" histogram is almost indistinguishable from "all respondents," so really your statement should be "the age distribution of StackOverflow developer survey respondents is different from that of the overall human population."
What's the sampling bias of this survey? How many pro developers over 40 were contacted for the survey but did not respond? Is StackOverflow usage higher among people aged 20-39 compared to 40-59, all else being equal?
I'm not even 30 and I was told in a reply to a comment where I suggested a research paper from the 70s, "This is what's wrong with you old people, you just want us to read all of this irrelevant stuff".
The irony is the replier was 10 years older than me. So the age discrimination bias is so prevalent even older people buy into it.
Só true.
Usually, paraphrasing taleb here, the "old papers" are more important.
They resisted the test of time, and the ones that are still talked about (survivors) are the most relevant, and better insights.
While the thousands of papers that appear every year, most of them will be irrelevant.
> It always seemed weird to me that people make such high salaries in tech but just don't value time as the main commodity of our lives.
It's not about valuing it, the problem is that finding jobs which allow part-time work is just about impossible. I'd give anything for a job where I can work 40% time for 40% salary, but those don't exist.
My wife has managed to arrange 80% time for 80% pay at the G of FAANG for a couple years, but the company absolutely hates the arrangement and tries every opportunity to sabotage it so it's not that great. Also, management demands 40 hours of work for that 80% pay with the explanation that full-time employees are expected to work for a lot more than 40 hours.
Stories like this remind me that maybe my low-six-figure salary in the bay area isn't that bad after all. I may be dramatically underpaid by FANNG standards, but I'm never asked to work overtime and I'm free to take PTO whenever I want.
I'm not from the US so I wouldn't know first hand, but I've read plenty of comments on HN from people who claim to be working for FAANG and just work normal 40 hour work weeks.
I would like to also echo this sentiment. I took a job that lets me work with a much more flexible schedule. I changed from doing straight dev work to software dev support for an API SaaS company to facilitate that.
I like software development, but I don't think I'm cut out for it in a SV work hard/play hard sense because I like to tinker too much. That's just not a good fit for deadlines, production environments, etc.
It's given me a lot less stress professionally which has allowed me to work on personal projects (software and otherwise).
In the past few months
- Started learning about worm composting and I've been raising e. fetida worms to compost trash.
- Started reorganizing my homelab and messing with all my server equipment
- Learning about different machining techniques
- Working on my cars more, and I hope to take on an EV conversion of an old car soon.
Not OP but I did something similar. Used to do the code/eat/sleep/code/eat/sleep lifestyle but realized I liked to refactor, polish and perfect too much and that was incompatible with the industry's demand to "ship barely working garbage on time". So I became a product manager, then project manager, and instead do coding on my free time. It's great because it lets me stay in software, but in a supporting role and I don't feel the pressure to get on the code/eat/sleep treadmill. The down side is it's a little harder to find jobs. Companies hire software developers by the truck load, but usually only require 1 PM or PJM for every 50 engineers they hire.
I keep my skills up and could still pass your company's C++ interview, but honestly I don't really want to.
That's partly because high-paying salaries can be a stepwise function with respect to one's time. If you make $500K a year, it does not mean you can make $300K a year by working three days a week. I'm sure many people are capable of pulling that off, but I guess more can't. Software engineering work in corporate requires certain level of continuity. You may be called upon for a meeting. You may need to jump into a conference call for a system outage. You may need to do an in-depth research to debunk your co-worker's design. You may be able to pace yourself, but your teams won't be able to wait, which disproportionally diminish your value. Again, we can argue how to practice essentialism, but the reality is that many people can't or are not capable of doing so. Otherwise, we wouldn't have books about essentialism.
health insurance is my big wish. 20 hrs/wk with health insurance I'd work for 1/3rd my salary.
EDIT: I have a family like most people.
EDIT2: I'm thinking about how insurance isn't as expensive as giving up more than that in salary, but maybe I need the security of steady work on the resume, sick leave and a job to lean on if things get tough.
If you're single and willing to pay over $500/month you can get some pretty okay health insurance. Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though. Currently I'm just using COBRA.
Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster than ten seconds looking at the public health insurance marketplace.
"pretty okay" is unfortunately about the best you'll find, and even that can be iffy depending on where you are.
If someone's work is truly all-remote I'd seriously recommend looking into residency visas to places with functioning governments and healthcare. I'm currently working remotely at a US client from several locations in the Pacific.
I just had a complete auditory workup to diagnose some recent hearing changes that included consultation with a US-educated doctor, and some medication, and the total cost without any sort of insurance was ~250 USD. My monthly insurance premium at home is 400 USD and likely wouldn't even have covered half of that, because fuck you, that's why.
Well it's more limited right now but under normal circumstances most of southern Europe, Pacific Asia, New Zealand, European-associated Caribbean islands, Costa Rica, Belize, etc, are all decent options.
I spent several months working from the Canary Islands and other than my difficulties in mastering the local Spanish it was great.
> Families throw a huge wrench in that plan though.
> Nothing crystalizes support for medicare-for-all faster...
It's pretty messed up that the lack of universal healthcare throws a huge wrench in the thing that generates the future of society, at least among financially self-aware young people.
It used to be even worse just a few years ago. Before the ACA insurance companies often considered pregnancy a pre-existing condition:
Since you posted the myth that health insurance is better when you pay more, I highly recommend reading this article explaining why the lowest cost plan is likely the best during the most expensive medical situations https://efficiencyiseverything.com/engineering-conclusions-o...
Don't get me wrong, healthcare is the most corrupt industry in the United States (by lobbying dollars). But I give some blame to my peers for not even attempting to understand how insurance works.
> Make sure your hospital, clinics, doctors, accept your insurance
I understand what they're saying but no one plans to get sick (pregnancies aside). Cheaper plans within the same insurance group is probably ok. Which hospital you can go to can be the difference between life and death, especially these days: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/nyregion/Coronavirus-hosp...
Yeah maybe its where the chronic conditions comes in. A normal healthy person can pay their way for regular stuff that comes along. You need the insurance for car accidents, cancer etc. Its the people with Chronic diseases that really need those gold plans.
I came to this conclusion myself a few months ago, that getting the cheapest plan and hitting the max out of pocket every single year is the cheapest course of action if you buy your own insurance plan.
Kind of figured there was a catch though, maybe not!
Yeah, as far as I could tell when shopping for exchange plans, they all mostly cover the same stuff, and once you pick the company and HMO/EPO/PPO the metal choice definitely doesn't change what's covered or the provider network.
At that point, different metals might hit the out of pocket max sooner, but I just went for the one with the least total of premiums and out of pocket max, which was also the one with the least total of premiums, so I save money if I don't use it or if we hit the cap.
Well for many reasons (good and bad) healthcare is more expensive in the US than any other country.
But why is healthcare bought individually more expensive than healthcare an employer buys for all their employees?
One is real and one is hidden.
The hidden price difference is that most employees think they pay $200 per month in health insurance, but actually their employer is paying $600 and chips in $400 so the employee only pays $200. And of course, $200 taken out of a paycheck before you receive it doesn't feel as bad as a monthly $200 charge to your credit card.
The other reason is adverse selection: When an entire employee base gets health insurance together, the people needing expensive care and the people not needing any care all average out together.
But in the individual market, less healthy people are insured but more sick people are. Healthy people forgo health insurance, so the average cost per person rises.
> When an entire employee base gets health insurance together, the people needing expensive care and the people not needing any care all average out together.
Often/usually, the people needing very expensive care aren't employed in the first place, as they're often not able to work, or at least not able to work in a company with employer-provided health insurance in the first place.
That is sometimes the case, but you also don't have to work a job to be covered under employer-sponsored health insurance -- you could simply be related to someone with a job.
Or, at least, the young healthy people buy the cheapest insurance they can find while people who know they'll have a lot of expenses will tend to buy the gold-plated offerings.
Quick story. Once upon a time I was in a Contract-to-hire position where the contract house (CH) was paying my salary/etc until I was on-boarded.
However, this was a small shop, they had 3 people running the business and less than 2 dozen contractors under them at a time.
Between the Owner's Knee surgery, and some health issues I had had years prior, the CH's premiums were going to jump by 200$ (both on their end and the employee's). Thankfully they were able to find another insurance provider, but it was a pretty clear cut example of how sick people in the pool can sway costs by a large amount.
That's part of why a lot of US companies now will give you discounts for various wellness tasks. My BIL's company offered an insurance credit just for taking a smoking cessation course (not even STOPPING.)
I think there are two parts to the answer. Firstly, health care in the US is extremely expensive. There are long articles written about this but IMO a main reason is market failure. The US, especially republicans, place a lot of value on free markets but people are willing to pay almost anything not to die.
The second part of the story is that the US is richer than Europe. I moved to the US from Western Europe. Before I moved here I didn't expect how much more everything is more expensive here, but at the same time salaries are also higher. The US's GDP per capita is $62k, Germany's is $47k. But that doesn't tell full story. In the US there is a big difference between low paying and high paying jobs, rural and urban areas.
Overly naïve and simplistic rhetoric about "the market" invariably fails to mention that while ideal markets are effectively forced to price commodities as close to the minimal margin of efficient production, it doesn't take much of a barrier to entry for suppliers to silently shift to pricing at the point of pain because they know it makes them all more money.
The recent collapse of movie theatres clearly illustrates that there is no reason they could be getting away with making $10 margins on popcorn, of all things, other than customers were being charged exactly as much as they would tolerate without telling the proprietors where to stick it.
> but people are willing to pay almost anything not to die.
No, not really. This is a narrow picture of reality. People are often willing to sabotage their own bodies and drive their bodies toward obesity, clogged arteries, and liver disease while not spending the money to go to a doctor for annual checkups or flu shots.
The dollar menu is cheaper & tastier option than buying a salad and people consistently choose the cheaper, tastier option
I think the clearest evidence for market failure is the complete lack of price transparency. Medical providers simply don't compete on price.
Prices quoted aren't actually prices. You have zero idea how much it's going to cost you until you get the bills, often split across dozens of providers, and what you see are the results of negotiations between providers and insurers.
You're also now 10 years older. Health insurance pricing never goes down as you get older, only up. That $77 might have been $150-200+ for someone your age now 10 years ago.
Well it got rid of insurers denying coverage or charging more for pre-existing conditions, which is obviously the morally right thing to do, but is roughly like being able to buy fire insurance while your house is already half burned down. IMO the conclusion is just that insurance is a bad model for healthcare coverage.
It sounds like you had the equivalent of “short term health insurance.” They might not have called it that back then, but it’s sold now under that name (with limitations on how long you can remain in the policy that were relaxed recently) to remain ACA compliant. You can still buy these type of plans (at least in my state, North Carolina) for under $100/mo. There are lifetime maximums, exclusions for pre existing conditions, and high deductibles, but that’s probably the same as what you had pre-ACA as well.
These plans are typically referred to as “junk insurance” but if you can’t afford or just don’t want a more comprehensive plan they’re better than nothing.
It's not. I had a low deductible and a low yearly maximum out of pocket. They didnt deny me for a pre existing condition, my knees, and I had 2 knee surgeries while on the insurance and my low deductible and co-insurance meant I spent less the $3000 for both surgeries combined.
While the physician salaries in the U.S. are indeed much higher than in Germany, I believe the time to become a fully accredited doctor is roughly the same.
In the U.S. it's 8 years of school plus a 3- to 7-year residency program, versus 6.5 years of school plus a 5- to 6-year residency program in Germany.
As an American, I do believe that the US has some of the best doctors, research, and medical technology in the world. I also believe it's really, really expensive, and out of reach for too much of our population, largely due to how to tie health insurance plans to employment. That makes sense in industries with a high injury rate, but the US doesn't have that kind of economy anymore.
Plenty of European countries offer the same if not better technology, health service, and professionalism. I had 3 surgeries in the US, 2 were so and so, 1 was "botched" in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the US (Stanford). Treated of course like no more than someone whose insurance is paying, not a follow up beyond what is required by law. I would much prefer to have my next (hopefully in a distant future) surgery in my native European country. And at least they tend to see you as a human and not a cash cow.
I think you've hit on why it's also so hard to change the system in the US. Quite a number of people do have this great care. They work (or are trapped working) for big companies or the gov. who subsidize their health insurance. They simply don't understand when people say the US has all these issues because for them there are no issues.
This is just another example of the US being a place where the gap between the haves and have nots is extremely large.
a) Costs/prices in the US are inflated in the entire industry for a bunch of reasons that basically boil down to half a century of lack of incentive to control costs
b) Your cost isn't actually $100. Your cost at the point of service is $100 but you're paying more taxes which subsidize your healthcare (among other things).
edit: And before some snarky jerk tries to score some cheap virtue points by saying something to the tune of "well I am perfectly ok paying more taxes for healthcare". I was deliberately avoiding making a value judgement one way of the other and simply explaining why his bill at the point of service is lower.
I don't think difference in taxes is as much as people think.
I have lived and worked in many cities in the US as well as a couple of central European countries. Once you get into a high salary range the taxes aren't much different. The exception being if you have a bunch of kids then you will pay lower taxes in the US. However, you will also have increased costs including medical for the kids.
To add another US data point, for my family of 4 I pay $770 per month for health insurance and my employer pays an additional $1,370 per month.
My health insurance is through my employer, a large publicly-traded company. My insurer is one of the large well known providers.
Our insurance is very mediocre. We pay the first $3,000 out of pocket and 20% of the cost beyond that, but that's only if a doctor is "in network" (which is sometimes hard to find). Out of network doctors have a separate deductible.
I also pay 1.45% of my paycheck to Medicare, and my employer pays another 1.45% on my behalf. Plus my wife and I pay an extra 0.9% of our paychecks for all combined wages above $250,000. But I won't be eligible for Medicare until I'm 65 years old.
This is kind of off topic... but if something were to happen and you were unable to work for a medical reason (disability), you would be able to claim Medicare at any age, correct?
[I am a US citizen and also have the ability to google this, but just wanted to ask another human being...]
> Plus my wife and I pay an extra 0.9% of our paychecks for all combined wages above $250,000.
Calculate how much taxes you'd pay in e.g. Germany or Belgium, and put half of that towards health expenditures. I think you'll still come out ahead by a large margin.
Healthcare is provided for everyone in my country from central taxation - same as police, education, defence. You can top it up with private care which can offer you things like more convenient appointments, quicker appointments for non-urgent cases, nicer accommodation if you do have to stay in, etc.
For a healthy, non-smoking 35-year-old you're looking around $80 a month.
For a healthy, non-smoking 70-year-old you're looking at 3 times that.
A family with a couple c. 40 and a couple of 10 year old kids is around $200-$300 a month (with no excess). With a $1300 excess that drops to $120 a month.
I guess so - very few people (1 in 7 I think) have health insurance in the UK, but I assume it's like car insurance - if my car is written off, I have to pay the first £250, and the company pays the next £10k (or whatever it's worth)
Most European private health insurance isn't actually 100% private, as well. Often you will have some state provided healthcare in there (especially for major trauma in ER).
Many many reasons. Health care in the US is very expensive because providers have monopolies in most markets. Pharmaceuticals are also the most expensive in the world. The govt spends a lot of money, but in a way that makes market efficiencies impossible to achieve. Ultimately, that results in very high prices.
Essentially, no participant in the market has an interest in reducing costs.
Furthermore, the business goal of health insurance companies is to not pay for health care, to the greatest extent possible, given regulations and market dynamics. They even call it "medical loss". It's right on the tin.
What is your take home pay as a software dev after insurance, vs the US? My math says the US still wins big for the top half of society (and loses for the bottom)
When I contracted in 2018, I paid $650-700/month for a pretty good "silver" insurance plan covering my wife (34 then) and I (39 then). Definitely varies by state and availability of insurers. But it was by choice... 1099 rate easily covered all taxes and insurance with room to spare and allowed be to set up a solo LLC and dump a buttload of pre-tax money into a 401(k)... About $53k in one year.
Taking time off was hard for me mentally with that high rate, knowing how much gross income I'd give up to take a week off for a trip.
> dump a buttload of pre-tax money into a 401(k)... About $53k in one year.
That’s like double the IRS allowed maximum for pre-tax 401k deferral in a year, no? This is not my area of expertise so I could easily be unaware of something. Can you explain how you did this as I’m genuinely curious and want to do the same.
There is a separate, higher IRS max for employee+employer contribution (this is why many jobs can offer 401k matching), and that number is somewhere around $55k these days. But there is a loophole—when you are your own employer, i.e. self employed, you can contribute that full amount to your own 401k.
There's something that's often referred to as the "Mega Backdoor Roth" that lets you shelter an extra $37,500 per year beyond the traditional 401(k) limits.
Check out college/grad school. You can do a couple classes and get excellent coverage for cheap.
When I did it it worked out to paying $3k for an MS, but I bet you could look harder and get the degree and a discount over just buying a high quality plan.
Depends on the state, but seems like if you're single, the individual plans in most states are around $3-500 per month with a ~$6k out of pocket max. This means annually:
That 'maximum health costs' also doesn't really factor in the time having to deal with insurance companies chasing up decisions they make (or don't), and for money/income lost due to no work. Insurance for that - short term disability insurance - may add another $100/month on the the equation.
Healthcare seems like it is a pretty big problem in the USA. The USA spends ~20% of GDP on healthcare, while the other advanced economies spend around 10%.
For whatever reason, American love to malign things as socialist, and confuse communist totalitarian with socialism.
I've been thinking about part-time work lately too, which makes me wonder: Which US companies/organizations offer part-time jobs with benefits?
I work as a patent examiner right now and I noticed that the USPTO might let you switch to part-time with full benefits (that you pay more out of pocket for) after you reach GS-11. It requires approval, they have a limited number of slots for it, and the vast majority of the slots for it require a justification like parenting or eldercare.
The minimum number of hours you can work per week is 16 in the program, and you can choose which days you work. To maximize federal holidays off, pick Monday and Thursday as work days. (I think examiners need to work Thursdays from 1-2 pm due to USPTO rules, and you also get Thanksgiving this way.)
I think for part time to be successful it has to be the right environment. Contract work seems perfect - you are focused and have a singular mission. I can also totally see working on a personal project 20 hours a week and being super productive.
However, working part time for a large organization seems tricky. There are so many meetings, distractions, and responsibilities other than just coding that it seems like your actual focus time to do work would be pretty nonexistent in a part time scenario.
There would definitely have to be coordination at the organizational level. Say, no meetings on Mondays and Friday and individuals can choose to work individually or not on those days. But that starts to get inefficient for the people who do want to work and it reduces the flexibility of those who want to work part-time.
And TBH, if I were to work fewer hours in a year, I'd probably prefer to have bigger chunks of time off, i.e. more vacation time, than having every weekend be 3 or 4 days--much less have shorter work days.
For me, personally, part time work would be the dream. I used to contract and would do year long projects and then take large multi month breaks between. Neither "mode" was optimal. Work periods are obviously stressful and its hard to find free time. But the rest periods also got a bit old after a month or so, and even when we were traveling to cool places, I would find myself grabbing the laptop and coding just for fun and to keep my skills sharp. A part time scenario seems like the perfect in between.
However, I never saw a place where it could work. For one, if the rest of your team was full time and you were part time, you would automatically be less productive and useful than the rest of your peers.
With your Monday / Friday scenario with no meetings, it seems like the people that only worked Tue - Thur would have their schedule disproportionally filled with meetings, and have much less time to get stuff done. This could work for a manager type role, but it wouldn't work for an IC.
I feel like part time work, much like remote work, might require an all-in buy in from the whole team. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future companies go "all part time" and have their whole organization be tuned for part time productivity.
In tech, I think it would be hard to take large multi-month breaks on a regular basis. There's such rapid change that you either keep your hand in a bit when you're off or you're going to spend a month of time getting back up to speed after every break.
I would spend more time off if I had it but I really can't complain too much as I have pretty good vacation by US standards and I normally also travel a lot on business to interesting places which is almost like having extra vacation.
The one person I know who did work part time in this manner was a contract lawyer with a company and I think they could pretty much just take multi-month breaks with a bit of planning.
>I wouldn't be surprised if in the future companies go "all part time" and have their whole organization be tuned for part time productivity.
The challenge there is that the pay almost has to be less than it would be for full-time work. And a lot of (most) people aren't really in a position to take a low salary in exchange for part-time work. Overall, I assume you'd cut your hiring pool appreciably.
> The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work.
Part-time work at a big shop, for many returning to work new moms, can be more accurately described as squeeze 5 days of work into 3 days. I'm not saying that Microsoft cannot pull it off, but many other big shops (and even those that rate highly on such magazine prizes for working moms) have been extremely disingenuous with such claims. That being said, the full time benefits for part time work has been a real thing.
I can say unequivocally that at the USPTO as a patent examiner you would not be expected to squeeze 5 days of work into however many days you work per week. You work a certain number of "production" hours and you are expected to get a certain amount of "count" per production hour. So, as the number of production hours you have decreases, your count expectations decrease proportionally as well.
I’d love to get into this but I’ve found the results for contracts or part time roles on job pages is quite minimal. Can you recommend how to get started?
I've done a lot of IC dev work in my career of 20+ years, and I've moved cities often, so I had to frequently "start over" with reputation and networking.
What I found to work best was that any time I entered a new market, I would find a local contractor organization (that already has a lot of contacts), and do short-term high-skill jobs for them for 3-6 months (for example, spending two weeks at a bank helping optimize one of their new internal services). Contractor organizations tend to work more with mid tier developers, but they get frequent requests for high skill jobs that they don't have the people resources for. This allowed me to build up a group of very happy local references which can then be leveraged for longer, better pay contracts.
Once I had some references and a budding reputation, I'd go to networking events 2-3 times a week and talk to as many people as possible about the kind of work they do and I do. It's not uncommon to have two or three potential contract leads out of every event. After doing that for a month or two, my availability and rep would spread by word-of-mouth, and people would start contacting me directly for work, and I could be more selective about the jobs.
What would be an example of a "contractor organization"? I am interested working on contract but I live in NYC and here it seems like it's always contract-to-hire situation where they want someone long-term but are using the contract as a way to limit the damage if the hire doesn't work out. I'd love to find a series of 3-6 month contracts like you mention but have had little success.
I've worked with all kinds and sizes, often a couple at the same time. Any temp or contract-to-hire agency that is willing to work with developers should work in my experience. If they're not used to working with developers, sometimes it can take a week or two of checking in regularly for them to find something. My experience was that they want to make money from your skills (and tech tends to bring in more money than something like extra hands for doing inventory) which creates motivation for them to find work for you. Friendly persistence can go a long way. Good luck!
Except the most common instance of "part-time" work is actually full-time, just without benefits, and the majority of those jobs are not cushy expensive contracts with large American companies. They just call it part time because they aren't monitoring hours strictly.
I probably should not bother trying to describe this here because almost no comes on HN and admits they aren't highly compensated.
I did it on a contract for a while. I'm not sure my productivity was significantly impacted. It's really hard to actually sit down and focus for more than 6 hours productively.
This is my dream! I recently moved and working from home is great but I keep thinking to myself "gosh I really don't have 8 hours a day to spend working."
do you have a write-up on how to make such a transition / do you have one or more that you read to learn about it? Mostly wondering about the nitty gritty like how to register as a business, tax considerations, simple contract stuff, etc. Seems to me that info is rarely in one place.
IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all.
This current "we're kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes" is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you're not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you.
Example: I once ran into my boss talking to a colleague at a coffee break about a potential project with a new customer and volunteered to work on it as I liked the tech. Months later, I got it. If I would have been remote that day I would have never heard about it as stuff like new projects and new customers is pretty hush-hush until the ink dries on the contract so they're never written about in public slack channels until then, but then it's usually too late to call dibs as the pieces are already in motion.
Not to mention, you can't really move far away from the office either since you could at any time be expected to show up in the office for $IMPORTANT_MEETING.
>the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you'll be left out because you'll miss the coffee/water cooler/cigarette chit-chat where future projects/directions are discussed casually and off the record without you
The reality is that merit is only one of many reasons that promotions happen. And often not the primary reason.
Not sure about other peoples experiences but all the best and smoothest projects of my career were done with groups who had good social cohesion, got on with each other, supported each other and most importantly socialized with each other.
There is close to zero opportunity for free creative brainstorming in the workplace and all the true innovation we made came out of discussions outside of work at the pub.
Definitely know there's benefits for working at home, especially for the first few years of your kids lives. But career wise if you reduce your presence to a name in a slack sidebar and an occasional face on a videocall, don't be shocked if you're treated like a name in a sidebar because just like any relationships in life presence makes a difference.
This has been my experience as well. One thing I'm missing right now are the crazy random ideas that people say jokingly but then someone takes seriously and turns into a product feature.
>The group ideas are only as good as the smartest member
Even the smartest members tend often to not realize the brilliance of a random idea they have (out of their list of many). A cohesive group of people that you trust and can bounce ideas off of is valuable, both in case of bad and good ideas.
Yes - for someone living in a big city half office, half WFH is the worst of everything. It means that I have to maintain an expensive home office, don't get all the benefits of working in an office with other people (which I prefer) and I can't move out of the big city.
I completely disagree, and I am in that situation. I feel like working from home 3-4 days a week, and then in the office 1-2 days a week is the best of everything:
1. I have much more freedom to choose where I live because my commute is much less of an issue if I'm only doing it once or twice a week.
2. I feel like I get the best of all worlds: I get great "focus time" when I'm working from home, but I am still able to have more personal relationships from meeting people in person at the office.
3. Our company I think has done a great job segregating heads-down work time from specific days where we have more meetings or more collaboration.
There are winners and losers every time there's large change.
Those people slogging out 1.5hr commutes from the outer suburbs are the winners because remote work even with a "you must be in the office 1 day a week" policy makes their land more attractive. The people who mortgaged themselves up to their eyeballs to get in on those good inner suburb commutes and schools are the losers because suddenly outer suburb housing is a more viable alternative to what they own. The people living in illegal 300sf studio departments in people's basements are neither since they weren't all in on any particular side. They can rent somewhere further out and cheaper with space for an office without too much friction.
Back in the early 90s a lot of cities were dumps compared to today. The people who bought there and held on for 20-30yr won because a lot of cities gentrified.
You’re describing my situation. I have no dedicated room for my home office, just table with my own decent monitor and company’s decent workstation plus some hardware from the office. My place looks ugly with all that equipment, but it’s still better than punching a card daily in the office. Moving to a cheaper area is too good to be true.
But you can get a coworking space in a cheaper location if that's where you want to live. (Or get a bigger place with room for an office.) Some people prefer working in a different location than they're living.
I don't think that rents are the motivation behind this and instead I believe they want to get new heads and make work at Microsoft more attractive.
I get what you mean with either/or, currently you just don't know who is available on a day to day basis, which can ruin any planning.
One the other hand I would like to see mixed models like having 2 WFH days per week where I can work without the usual office distractions. For productivity purposes it would probably be best if those day are synchronized for development work of course.
If you still have to come in multiple days per week you now still need to live within a reasonable commuting distance of the office and preferably have a decent home office. Less of an issue if the office is in a suburban office park. More so if it's downtown in a city.
If it's one day per week, it's probably more tractable because you can probably put up with a pretty long commute if need be if it's just once a week.
At the extremes, maybe. If 9 people on a team are in an office and 1 is remote, perhaps a few time zones away, that tends to be a problem. "Oops, we forgot to set up a dial-in AGAIN."
But, in general, not really. I work for a company that normally has offices but also has quite a few remote people. And we're a global company anyway so people are going to be in different offices in any case. Even our management is pretty distributed.
>Not to mention, you can't really move far away from the office either since you could at any time be expected to show up in the office for $IMPORTANT_MEETING.
Again, in normal times, there are planes etc. I work in a broader group that's scattered across the world and we would normally get together for team meetings a couple times a year.
Yes and no. My current employer and the previous one had more than one branch, geographically located in different areas (and nations).
To me all the colleagues from other branches were "remote". As far as I can tell, it made no difference to me if they were in their office or at home, I still interacted with them via tickets, instant messaging, video calls etc.
I have experienced "remote not done right". I routinely felt and was in reality disadvantaged in that situation.
I am currently [back into the] same industry during COVID and am splitting time between WFH and the [pretty much] deserted office. I do not feel disadvantaged in this current situation.
I can tell you that the manager and the team makes an incredible difference.
I have a feeling a lot of people come at this from the perspective of small companies. In the case of large/global businesses, you may have teams that are largely co-located but you're probably on calls in the course of a given day with people on different continents. One of the main teams I work with, even if everyone were in the offices where they are technically located (or were) that would be two different although relatively nearby offices and another 6 time zones away.
Exactly this. Multinational companies are relaizing that they've already incurred the cost of distributed teams and that since there's really no difference between your manager being in Munich, Germany and Munich, North Dakota they may as well cut costs by allowing the latter case.
Agreed, I worked on a small company where we offered the choice to work from home or come in. Half the company hated coming in and half hated working from home. The end result was low energy in the office and poor bonding across the team. I personally prefer working from home, but I don't think anyone has figured out how to do the remote thing without alienating a portion of the workforce, which is why many companies are hanging on to in-office policies (e.g. Netflix).
The practices/processes need to embrace a "fully remote" model. That doesn't mean you can't have a physical office. I've been part of companies where this works very well.
That being said, yes, you usually don't want to be the special remote snowflake in the middle of a strong on-site culture.
Usually Mondays and Fridays are no-meeting focus days, so they are easiest to wfh on. The "team-building and fun" events are all crammed on the same days when you have meetings for which you'd usually come into the office anyway.
There’s 2 real world things that I think would need to happen in order for companies to go all-in:
1. Companies need success stories of that kind of ad-hoc innovation happening from within the company remotely. Otherwise someone will 100% kill it. Somewhat a function of how long until return to normalcy if that’s possible.
2. Another uncontrolled viral outbreak in the next decade changes the math on financial sustainability of the large campus and externally forces companies to go all-in.
From what I’ve seen I think companies hedge #2 happening by allowing remote in perpetuity, and it solves gnarly issues with “forcing” people back in. But at this point I don’t think #1 happens with this pandemic.
Some good points but I think now things are going better for partially remote companies since most companies shifted their culture to fully remote even if not everyone is remote. Then there's also all the work visas implications. Companies like MS rely heavily on foreign talent and I don't think they can bring them over without an office.
The onsite employees would still have an advantage of forming relationships with more people and knowing more what's going on in the company from informal lunch conversations etc.
Not everyone can work effectively from home. Having an office you can go to whenever you want is a big plus.
Companies don't exist to be fair, and fairness isn't built into promotion/advancement necessarily. This might just be another one of those insider edges that you may or may not have. Companies are already full of these.
Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their "geopay" scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp's "pay everyone SF wages" thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think that the equal pay for equal work principle should apply here. One should neither receive a big city subsidy nor have their pay cut for choosing to live somewhere else.
The problem is that if (even just keeping the discussion to the US) a company pays, say, Chicago wages everywhere, that means they effectively probably can't hire anyone in the Bay Area for example. Of course, a lot of companies already basically don't try to salary match the hire who has an offer from Facebook or Google in SV and wants to work there.
Maybe this is overly simplistic, but won't this all work itself out over time? More companies refuse to pay inflated SV salaries (note: most companies in the world already do not employ people there anyway), so some of the concentrated SV talent leaves for other places like Chicago where they can still get a sufficient wage relative to the cost of living. This continues for a while and eventually the COL in SV will start to equalize with other places in the country like Chicago, won't it?
Perhaps the real message here is that SV companies are realizing this is a perfect way to get out of paying $300-500K salaries for jobs that are more like $150K anywhere else in the US. It's kind of like the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago, except instead of getting 3-5 developers for the price of 1 by going to Europe or Asia, SV companies can get 3-5 developers for the price of 1 that are still US-based and only a couple of timezones away.
As someone who doesn't live in California but still near a big city in an area that is still "expensive" (but nowhere near SV prices) relative to smaller towns and rural areas, I can't figure out if this remote shift is a good thing or bad thing for me yet. I fear that my suburban house will be worth less going forward because proximity to a major city may be way less valuable now if so many fewer people ever physically go into work anymore.
It's a big assumption that SV wages are inflated given the value that sector has generated for the economy. Facebook made around $600k in profits per employee.
Software developers simply do not get offered pay anything close to SV wages pretty much anywhere else in the US (maybe NYC? not sure on that one) - as far as I can tell. It's not really in dispute that SV software wages are significantly higher than elsewhere in the country, is it?
Now, we all know there's many reasons for that, including competition and housing costs. My point is that salaries are so much lower almost anywhere else that FAANG could offer half of what they do in SV and get the best of the best in an area because it would still be a huge premium over local rates. The question becomes: if Facebook could hypothetically switch all its employees to other parts of the US and pay them top dollar relative to the area, would they still be earning $600K profit per employee while spending considerably less on salaries? Prior to C19, FB needed to pay those rates to be able to attract the best to the high COL area in SV because they felt a strong need to have their employees co-located. If FB has proven to themselves that they can have their employees WFH permanently without any significant productivity loss, then naturally they will no longer care about having to attract people to the Bay (and by extension they wouldn't need to offer those kinds of salaries anymore).
Proximity to a major city still has advantages like access to cultural events, good healthcare, etc. even if you don't need to go into the city for work. And, indeed, historically tech companies were in the suburbs rather than the city itself. Boston basically didn't have any major tech employers within the city limits for a period even though there were many in the suburbs. So even people who may not want to actually live in a major city might still want to be within an hour or two of one.
I'd argue it sort of has played out. A handful of companies are willing to pay almost anything for the people they want, especially if they're located in SV. Pretty much everyone else has shrugged their shoulders and moved on. And it works because 1.) Hiring is a very inexact process and 2.) Not everyone want to work for one of the big tech companies for various reasons.
> Perhaps the real message here is that SV companies are realizing this is a perfect way to get out of paying $300-500K salaries for jobs that are more like $150K anywhere else in the US. It's kind of like the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago, except instead of getting 3-5 developers for the price of 1 by going to Europe or Asia, SV companies can get 3-5 developers for the price of 1 that are still US-based and only a couple of timezones away.
Is it really possible to get the same talent and skills?
Believe it or not, I have no interest in living in the bay area - even if the costs were the same. I personally would like somewhere that didn't get quite so cold in the winter but still has 4 seasons.
I can honestly tell you that out of all the people I know, I can't think of a single one who would move to the bay area even if the costs were the same. Weather isn't everything.
The Bay area is nice and I certainly understand the attraction when I visit. And I probably wouldn't want to live in Chicago; winters are especially brutal in the upper Midwest, there aren't "real" mountains, and I have no connection to the area. But I have no problems with winter generally and I doubt I would move to the Bay Area even if you took money off the table. Silicon Valley is meh and SF is nice to visit but has a lot of problems. Santa Cruz mountains maybe--if one ignores the wildfire problem.
The ultimate outcome, no matter what companies do, is that tech workers just won't live in big cities any longer.
If remote work is an option, then paying high rents just doesn't make sense.
Moreover, as this trend continues, the ultimate outcome is not US workers moving to low-cost locations, it is foreign workers supplanting US workers in extremely low cost locations.
> If remote work is an option, then paying high rents just doesn't make sense.
I live in NYC because I like NYC, not because the pay is higher. I took a net pay cut after rent, taxes, etc after moving here from Maryland, in spite of getting a substantial pay rise. I suspect that's not uncommon.
> the ultimate outcome is not US workers moving to low-cost locations, it is foreign workers supplanting US workers in extremely low cost locations.
This was already on the table. Generally speaking, you get what you pay for.
> This was already on the table. Generally speaking, you get what you pay for.
Right, but now companies are a LOT more comfortable with it than before, and have the tools, the management training, and the executive buy in to accelerate this.
Sounds like a good incentive to just pay SF wages to everyone which any company currently in SF clearly can do.
Those that aren't in SF already can't afford SF talent so it makes little difference.
It's not like there's some glut of companies out there paying Chicago wages to most employees except for their 1 or 2 in SF who get a HCOL bonus. And to the extent that there are companies doing that, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for society if they stopped.
A policy like this is basically saying 'we only pay you as much as necessary to compete with your other employment options', which are currently still mostly those near where you are living.
If more companies allow remote work and they don't all do the same thing, this kind of 'geopay' policy will have to be abandoned.
But I agree it's completely backwards, you should be paid according to the value you create for the company, and nothing else.
> you should be paid according to the value you create for the company, and nothing else
But, you need to subtract your pay from the value you create. If you create $1MM value but cost $500K, and someone in the Midwest can create that same $1MM value for only $150K, it's pretty obvious what most companies will choose.
FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less. This massive WFH experiment that we've all been in seems to have demonstrated to some of them that physical location doesn't really matter as much as they thought. The next logical step is that paying inflated rates to hire someone in a particular physical location doesn't make sense, if you're just going to have them work remote anyway.
WFH may just be the pin that burst the SV tech wage bubble.
> FAANG companies somehow convinced themselves that paying $500K for talent in SV made sense even if they could get similar talent basically anywhere else in the US for less
Could they? The market for 500K engineers is very different than 60K or 100K.
With remote work, you'll see a handful of organizations getting the top talent across all locales, and the local companies who won't be able to compete be stuck with the rest. It's a winner-takes-all situation that will now happen on a global scale.
My point is there is no such thing as a "$500K engineer" anywhere but SV (and maybe Seattle), and thus no such market exists elsewhere. Honestly even writing "$500K engineer" sounds so absurd to me because it's so far away from "normal"... I doubt anyone who lives within 500 miles of me doing software development as an individual contributor makes even half that. Maybe I'm badly misinformed though.
Believe it or not, there's plenty of smart, even brilliant people who do not live (and choose not to live) in California. I myself may not be FAANG-caliber, but I've known known a number of people who used to work where I do and now work for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They moved to the west coast, but obviously prior to taking those jobs they were just as good and living in the Midwest working for a Midwest salary.
It's honestly rather shocking to me that people seemingly genuinely believe that there can't possibly exist smart engineers who live somewhere other than SV.
I don't think people are doubting their existence, but rather if they could staff a whole floor with engineers of that caliber anywhere but in these cities.
Partly because, as you said it yourself, a lot of great engineers simply move there.
Unfortunately the ability to quantitatively capture how much value you created is next to impossible for most knowledge workers. Sure you can approximate but that’s about it
Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs. Companies save a fortune by having employees work from home.
"Geopay" scales are exploitation. Employee X should be compensated in relation to the value they bring through their efforts, not at the minimum possible level that the employer can get away with.
> Overhead cost of providing a physical workspace is easily 50%+ of base compensation costs.
That estimate is high by about an order of magnitude. To get a sense of the cost ceiling per person, look at the least cost-effective way to rent a monthly desk which is to do it as an individual in a co-working space.
An open office desk is $325/month, up to a dedicated cubicle for $725/month.
So for a junior engineer at $150K salary, that's between 2.6% to 5.8% of their base comp in office space cost.
Now, of course, a company renting tens of thousands of square feet at a time gets better rates due to scale, so the percentage is less than those examples.
The only way to counter that is through collective bargaining, which many people on this site seem to view as beneath them. “Geopay” really isn’t any different from how Google/Apple/etc colluded in the past to suppress developer wages.
I think there are reasons to make either choice (one global salary vs a localized market salary).
The former optimizes for fairness/equality of continuing employees and takes the "what is the value of the work?" as the foremost question.
The latter puts the focus on "what is the market price [the next-best-alternative] for this employee?" and tries to ensure that you don't have unhappy employees staying longer than either side would prefer because they are "stuck" with a salary that they can't match in any other opportunity available to them and so do just enough to not get fired.
The latter seems unlikely to me. If we stigmatized or outlawed geopay, the net effect would be rising wages across the board because companies would not want to be locked out of hiring good people in HCOL areas. That or the cities would empty out and the relative income needed to live well would flatten. Either way, a win for society.
Everyone thinks they should be getting SF salaries in this new era of remote work. Nobody thinks they should be getting a Flint salary.
Equal pay for equal work doesn't have to mean the bar is raised.
The nuance you might not get from just the title: "Microsoft will now allow employees to work from home freely for less than 50 percent of their working week, or for managers to approve permanent remote work. "
In order for true relocation to be an option, that 'manager approval' must be unequivocal, unrevocable and transferable, when, as happens very frequently at Microsoft, the worker gets a new manager.
Remote work is possible, but it’s not for everyone. Some people are good at it; they adapt well and remain productive. But... as Marissa Meier found out, some people are utterly bad at it, or some take advantage of the privilege of self management and milk the system. So they will have to measure and gauge to see the balance of benefits and detriments of permanent change.
The quality of management will be the same regardless of if the employee is working from the office or at home. The person who was allowed to "milk the system" in the office, surely, will be allowed to do the same when they are working from home. It seems unreasonable to me an employee's manager would change their behavior based on where the employee happened to be working.
I don't believe Marissa Meier demonstrated that managers significantly improved when their employees were required to work full time in the office. I think that would be the interesting measure here: do managers really perform better when their direct reports are in the office?
Simply put. Some people need “structure” (that can be in the form of peer pressure, accountability, visibility, etc). Without it they flounder. At work if someone is not mainly on their job, people will eventually come to know them as slackers. Working from home allows quite a few slackers to fly under the radar.
It has parallels in learning. Some people are self paced self learners and can learn remotely. Some need the pace and management by going to a physical classroom with an instructor.
My question is why would they perform better at the office? In your example their performance is the same and they become labeled as "slackers" by their co-worker and management. If we allow these people to perform poorly in the office, shouldn't we also allow them to perform poorly when they work remotely?
If a manager is not providing adequate structure at the office, it seems unlikely that this would change regardless of where the employee is sitting. Those that need structure and do not get enough of it will flounder no matter their work location.
I disagree that it is more difficult to detect those employees who are less productive when the employee is working from home. On the contrary, I suspect their lack of productivity would be even more glaring and obvious then in the office.
Peer pressure. There are more eyes at work. Wannabe slackers see other slackers getting cut and want to avoid that fate by doing the minimum that allows them to avoid that result which is greater than the minimum to avoid that while working from home.
> My question is why would they perform better at the office?
If you spend the whole day watching Youtube in office, your boss/colleagues will notice that and ask questions, no one is going to do that when you are at home.
?? That’s a total non-sequitur and has no connection to the other. Slackers will slack against themselves (hire a responsible home contractor vs one who slacks off and one who shows up whenever and does things half arsed). So it’s not about revenge or getting something back (that might be a motivation for some malcontents, but most slackers aren’t malcontents.
I don’t think so. Demotivated people are troubled by the situation. They do not seek the situation that put them there. They want to be productive, but the system undermines them. Slackers just don’t give a care either way. They just wanna slack. They make a million excuses. It’s really not the same in any way.
Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results?
Also, do you think someone dishonest enough to take advantage of a remote position to spend their time working on their own startup would be a great asset on-site?
I'm not saying remote work is for everyone, far from it, but there is a difference between comparing someone that is not as productive when WFH, and someone who milks the practice illegally.
>” Is there any evidence showing that Meier's drastic move actually improved Yahoo's results?”
I don’t think we have public insight into any internal results. We do know that there was evidence that a significant number of people logged in seldom or sporadically for years according to accounts of VPN and other logs. So the skating and slacking was inordinately sufficient for her to pull the plug on that option.
Of course. That’s understood. We know at max, your best workers are productive doing things 40 to 50%. Slackers at the office much less. Slackers at home even worse.
> even seek to move internationally if remote working is viable for their particular role
This is not true, it is not related to the role but related to if you are in the USA or not. In written internal memo it is specified exceptions are possible, but reality is the manager telling you directly this is not happening for employee outside USA.
Not sure about the US, but in the UK, if a manager agreed that you could remote work, and then at some point later, withn no justification (e.g. poor performance), and the company tried to back out of that, it would be construed as constructive dismissal, which can force a pay out.
What I'd like to see happen when the pandemic ends is this: if I return to a company's office, I should be able to return to an equivalent of my home office. My home office is a small room in my home, but it has a large window providing natural light and top of the line office furniture including a couch and a really big desk. Most importantly I am the only one that works in this office.
Having a setup like this in a company's office would remove any incentive I have to work from home. I wonder how many developers want to work from home just to escape the shitshow of open offices.
After working remote for about 5 years now, I don’t think I could ever work in an open office again. Whenever I do need to visit an office, I don’t even attempt to get any focused work done. I just attend my meetings and try to spend time socializing with coworkers who I haven’t seen in a while.
Commutes are a pretty miserable aspect of working in an office, too.
The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that's the way we're going.
It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies.
The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don't need to be all that ruthless. This takes off a lot of pressure. But as things go on, "geopay" is going to become an optimizable cost structure. There will be uncomfortable conversations as people move to higher geopay places. False addresses. Optimisations on all sides.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a mess, as the games play out.
I have a evil theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.
There's an old pg essay about what the dotcom got right.
I don't quite remember the details, but I remember that I did take away a "correct but early" interpretation of the whole thing. "First movers takes the whole pie" was taken too literally, eventually dominant online businesses did build unbreachable moats. E Commerce is eating retail. The dotcom was just 5-10 years ealy in its predictions.
Anyway... WFH and outsourcing did have a small boom and bust. On WFH, Marissa Meyer pulled the plug and the WFH reversed. "IT Outsourcing" was imminent circa 2000, but a lot of companies had to reverse out of this strategy.
It may be that these were right-but-early. WFH & outsourcing are now ready.
I also think they are hard to seperate. Once WFH becomes a norm, the labour market is internationalised by default. Not just tech jobs. If you can work from Montana, you can work from Sophia.
Timezones are still going to matter when it comes to remote work. I work on a team that was historically distributed in the US West and JAPAC regions. Communication was fine, because there was enough overlap that we could easily schedule meetings with everyone. But once we started adding team members in Europe, communication became significantly more challenging.
There may also be legal reasons for companies to hire within a certain country. For example, government contracts might stipulate that only US citizens are allowed to have access to production servers.
So while I definitely think that adoption of remote work will result in more opportunities for people living outside of traditional tech hotspots, I think we will still continue to see individual companies preferring to hire within certain countries and regions.
Timezones are funny because you still get a wide variance of working hours within them. I worked on a project a while back with an early bird (~6am-2pm) and a night owl (~noon-8pm) who had to coordinate a lot of changes. I (half-)joked that they probably would have coordinated better if one of them was in Reykjavik and the other in LA rather than try to do everything in that narrow window when both were in the office.
I know some remote companies have timezone-based policies (e.g., you must be within 4 timezones of NYC). I wonder if we'll see less focus on where the employee is and more on when they are willing to work ("I don't care that you're in Kyev or Mumbai or Jakarta, as long as you'll work our hours").
Yes. I (US East Coast) work with Europe a lot and that difference (6 hours) feels to me about the limit of frequent ongoing realtime communications. It means you've got a nice window of time that isn't too early for the US or too late for Europe. More than that and someone's taking 5am calls or 10pm calls.
This is already how organizations work and have always worked.
The more ambitious, sociopathic and lucky ones rise up the ladder.
The people who don’t care that much about work remain ICs and enjoy the rest of their life outside work.
There’s a great blog post about this on Ribbon farm.
* Not updating their address with their company after moving to a new, lower-cost location
* Using the address of family or friends in a higher-cost area
* Renting a PO Box or cheap room or studio in a high-cost area, but spending most time elsewhere
I'd imagine we'll see companies pop up offering address verification services - physically and/or digitally tailing employees to find address mismatches. They'll probably sell themselves to large tech employers by saying that the geopay savings incurred more than pay for their services. Maybe this already exists?
I'd expect to see this too, but I think anyone planning to do these tactics is walking an extremely thin line between "gaming the system" and fraud. Not to be Debbie Downer, but if someone is thinking about getting a PO box in SF and funneling all their work connections through a silicon valley VPN, they should think about how it will look in front of a judge when their company goes after them.
I see people threatening to do this sort of thing. But, seriously, do you really think you can keep the fact that you leave a couple time zones away from SV a secret from all your coworkers (one of whom will drop a dime on you eventually).
"Can you drop in on a meeting tomorrow?" "Um, there's a blizzard in the Midwest." "Well sure, but you live in Santa Cruz, right? No snow on 17."
Yeah, I wouldn't do any of the things I listed either. The potential punishment way outweighs the potential gains. But some people just can't resist trying to "beat the system" or "stick it to The Man" or whatever.
I also wonder how things will go for people who take up the digital nomad lifestyle. I think most digital nomads thus far have been freelancers, entrepreneurs, etc. But big Microsoft-esque employers, much like the US tax system, are going to expect you to have a fixed address. If I'm currently based in India but sell my home to hop from location to location every couple of months, am I permanently on India-level pay? What if I did the same thing but had started in Silicon Valley? Can I keep getting that Silicon Valley pay as long as I don't stay in one place too long? Or maybe nomads default to a baseline pay level?
I like globalism, I think it's good for most humans. However I can't help to think that quickly US workers will be replaced with our lower cost English speaking alternatives.
The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing/teaching/leading their counterparts. This is the skill employers are paying the big $$ for.
However, this stops now, no new generation of US leadership. Why hire a junior US engineer? They have never been a leader.
Is it common for companies not to have this already?
Both places I've worked so far have had this. There's an office and everyone has a desk and is presumed to be in the majority of the time but if you want to WFH you just did and let your team know. There was an understanding that for certain events you should try be in the office (big planning/roadmapping meetings, retros and manager 121s) but otherwise it was at will.
If for some reason you needed to WFH for an extended period of time that was a conversation they were open to. For example a colleague's partner was ill so he WFH for a month to help with the kids, or another colleague was changing meds and that was easier to cope with if they WFH that week.
Maybe I've just been lucky with employers but flexibility around WFH has always been a given for me.
I've also mostly been at organizations where it was never a problem. I believe traditionally FANG have been resistant even to the part-time remote model.
The thing is that many companies are likely open to WFH now and then for appropriate roles and others are open to WFH-mostly. So it may be a difference between WFH one day a week and WFH nine days every fortnight.
Often you need more than manager approval. At Google, you need VP approval for permanent remote work (hopefully for now - we will see if things change).
There is general policy that is passed to each organization and then organizations decide by themselves, overriding policy. Most of them block any country change, which means maybe you change state in US, but anything else is refused
In policy written it is vague with mention of exceptions but verbally communicated by management you understand how forbidden it is
Microsoft is still holding on to idea of employee in sight is better managed
My wife and I were about to buy a 1.4M house in Redmond but for the past two weeks we've been considering a completely different rural area with beautiful new houses and lots of land
This could be such a boon for Redmond. The area is way too expensive and the traffic is horrific, and this is mostly due to Microsoft workers needing to be in the office. We finally quit our jobs and left, but this could certainly help for the future!
If this works, it would be Indians, Chinese and Eastern European coders who would make up the majority of Microsoft rank and file in a few years. Killing the H1B visa was not going to save American jobs, the corporations are always a step ahead. We are looking at a Microsoft with a truly global workforce. Why pay $150k to a dev when it would buy 5 Romanians instead who are just as good.
I wonder how many of these “permanent” WFH positions will be made to return to the office after Covid.
It’s nice to say that now when you don’t have the choice anyway. But when the tide turns, it will be easy to force people to return / fire them / make it unattractive for them to avoid the office.
It's great to see Microsoft jumping on board. I think the reason that Microsoft was hesitant to do this initially was because they have enjoyed high productivity increases over the past few years (especially on the software development side thanks to awesome tools like TypeScript) and so they didn't want to risk losing that momentum. Thankfully it appears that Microsoft employees have been able to adapt to remote work and were able to maintain similar productivity levels.
I think it speaks to the high quality of project managers who work at Microsoft. Project managers are the foundation of any solid tech business.
As with Twitter's announcement back in May for allowing their employees to WFH permanently, this puts pressure on other big software companies to adopt similar policies. Microsoft being as big as they are really pushes other similar-sized companies like Google.
We've seen Facebook follow suit to shift their workforce in a similar manner. It makes you wonder when we'll hear something similar from Google, Apple, and even a reverse course for Netflix. If they don't, then recruiting might suffer as a candidate would likely pick the more WFH-flexible company.
I read few months ago after pandemic started, Microsoft studied productivity of its employees. Wonder this policy is a logical conclusion from the results of that study or they simply want to attract talent like few other ones or both
If my wife didn't work for a traditional company who's heavily pushing their tech workers back into the office, I'd be living in a mansion in the woods by now instead of this tiny apartment.
Taking aside all the deaths (I'm still afraid that my parents and parents-in-law will catch COVID).
The pandemic is doing a really great work on shifting minds of a lot of WFH-awerse companies/managers, and is doing an interesting shifts in economies (e.g. at my country a lot, and I mean a lot of people started doing online purchases for things that were normally bought offline - e.g. I was surprised how much I can save of diapers alone).
Some services thrive (all online) but others are declining (restaurants, pubs), interesting times.
A lot of info is missed here as well. Sales orgs (quite a large part of Microsoft) must still work from the office (with exceptions) and cannot relocate as they need to meet customers - including the technical sales. Even though they've worked fine from home and were in fact MORE productive. So a lot of nuance is missed, and the application of this isn't as broad as it is suggested.
I can't speak to Microsoft specifically but a lot of outside sales (i.e. people who sell directly to enterprise accounts) are already typically at least mostly remote in practice. They may have a desk somewhere but the typical sales manager is going to start asking questions if they spend too much time in the office instead of meeting with customers.
Friendly with a bunch of people in sales at msft. Most people in those roles were on the road 60% percent of the time before covid. If anything they were the most remote friendly org considering a team for a product will have regional posts, so team meetings were always over the phone.
I have a nefarious theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.
If I could be fully remote and work part time, I would consider eventually rejoining Microsoft. There is a lot of hand-wringing over how fully remote workers get left behind but I've never been interested in moving beyond an IC level.