If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests.
But again, maybe I'm the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I'll likely cross it out from my list of places to work.
Also I saw this from the blog post:
>There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are.
Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don't see how that's possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition.
From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway/micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that's already made.
The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k/yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.
This is a pretty straightforward advantage of the internet. Some jobs have always been "remote". For example, writers still type their manuscripts from anywhere and mail them to editors. However, only some jobs work like this. When I did service or blue collar work I always had to be on the site to physically work the capital.
As for "career ambition", you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.
You don't have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.
Instead, you have the freedom to actually live your life. Be with you family, friends, pursue your passions, even something as simple as being able access nature or travel freely. Whatever living means to you beyond working.
From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult. I understand the power balance as a worker. In any job, I want to put in my time and hard work, earn an honest living, and then be free to live as a real human being.
Notice taken. Good for you (not sarcastic). This is why you "have been working remote by choice for years". But as the OP said:
> If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago
...and he didn't. Neither did I. In the past I have worked remotely for about a year, it wasn't great (admitted that company wasn't set up for it). I am doing it now, and I'm miserable about it.
So, OP's point seems not that something is inherently wrong or bad with either mode of working, rather that people who used to be going to the office may not necessarily be happy, or interested, to become remote workers. (Not even because it works well for you.)
I did a nothing little survey during our past team retrospective, and from a dozen of folks 1) most of them want more days working from home than pre-pandemic, 2) most of them would then want more work time in the office than from home, and 3) all of them are desperately looking forward to going into the office again for any sort of time.
>You don't have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.
I'm sorry but that came across as both condescending and judgmental. I know plenty of people chose the life they have here because they want to, not because they have to sell their soul or what not. There is a lot more perks from having a fulfilling job other than making a big paycheck, it ranges from working closely with amazing people to tackling challenging and fun problems.
I know for sure the reason I go to work these days isn't because of money, since I'm past the point where I care too much about it.
Finally there is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing financial success. Having desire to "enjoy nature" and having desire to "have money" are both greed, just in different forms. I definitely do not consider myself morally superior just because I enjoy hiking...
>From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult.
I've been both inside and outside of SV (worked in Texas, Bay Area, and now in Seattle), and I have to say your understanding of SV culture is extremely superficial, likely augmented by the cherry-picking examples and sensationalized media portrayal.
I've been working from home for several years, but to be truely productive I need a separate working space with a good desk, good chair and multiple large monitors.
On occasion I've worked from an airport or a cafe, but the noise, seating position, table height, having to work on a small laptop screen etc just don't work for me. I would imagine this was the case for most people, and the image on sitting on a beach sipping pina coladas while making bank is an oversold pipe dream.
I think this is what people are missing. If you have to go to work then the location of your work is one of the strongest factors in choosing where to live. For me, that means being no more than 30 minutes away from work by bicycle or public transport (I own a car but it's a luxury, not a necessity). If I could live anywhere then for a start I'd be somewhere where housing costs much less. I'd be somewhere near the kind of countryside that I enjoy like the Lake District, rather than the Fens which has some nice qualities but is mostly boring.
This sounds great, unless you have a mortgage on a house which needs paying regardless of whether you're living there, and children in school who can't be moved all the time. Although I'll admit that since my employer is looking at 100% remote, it opens the door to moving to a nicer/cheaper house outside of the office-commutable bubble.
Perhaps a compromise is using shared office space closer to home (short commute, separation of home/work life, social interaction while you're making a cup of tea).
This is a bit of a false premise, I've been working from home for over a decade and I don't mind human interaction at all, I get plenty of it when hanging out with friends and family, but I do prefer my office space at home to some open space office with lots of noise and people constantly coming by and asking for stuff.
> The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL.
While this could be true, it's entirely up to you if you want to work for such a company. Great developers will not work for cheap regardless of where they're from, and just because you live in a cheaper place doesn't mean the work you're doing is somehow lower value than the work employees in the SF office are doing.
Here in Australia, plenty of grads are just as good as someone who might get hired at FANNG. How much are they paid? With the exchange rates taken into account, half as much.
What I think we’ll see is a reduction in SF salaries and CoL, and an increase in ex-SF salaries and CoL.
Haha so you do dislike human interaction to some degree, or at least human interaction beyond family and friends. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, but a lot of people thrive, if not prefer those "noisy environment" you described.
>Great developers will not work for cheap regardless of where they're from, just because you live in a cheaper place doesn't mean the work you're doing is somehow lower value than the work employees in the SF office are doing.
That's not how market economy works. Doesn't matter how great a developer is, in 99% of the case there is someone who's just as good but is willing to take half the pay because they live at a place that's 1/4 as expensive when it comes to CoL. A senior engineer at Google would get paid $350k+ in Mountain View, but I guarantee you plenty of people with that level of talent who live in much cheaper areas would gladly take 60% that much, if not less. In the end what count as "work for cheap" all comes down to supply/demand. And due to the supply increase and we'll see the price point drop.
There's a difference between working from home as an employee and a remote consulting job. There is a place for both.
> The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL.
Why is it cynical? It really benefits everyone:
1. "Remote" workers: Workers can stay at their (lower CoL) homes, with their friends, family and culture, and still work on products they couldn't otherwise.
2. Consumers: More competition, as barrier to entry is lower
3. Companies: No need to raise huge funding rounds for the most basic of products or the initial prototype
4. "Local" workers: Not everyone is relocating to your home town, so it becomes a little cheaper CoL for them too
All the things that are touted as pros and cons of both WFH and office working are highly dependent on the individual, the company, the type of work, people's housing situation, disability, and many small life choices.
Whenever this topic comes up I'm always rather disappointed to see how many people struggle with the idea that their situation is not everyone's situation, and make blanket statements about how WFH or offices are the better option, end of argument. Ultimately it's a personal preference, and highly dependent on situation.
What I'm hoping for with all this is that a lot of companies see that remote working can be ok, and it gets easier for those who want to WFH to do so, either full time or just when necessary. It's going to be much harder for many companies to have blanket "no WFH" rules, although I'm sure there will be many that will revert to the norm.
If more people initially chose to work at the office, then the minority WFH people will inevitably be at a disadvantage and they would feel potentially left out of a lot of developments that take place in the office. Then they may end up forcing themselves to go to the office from time to time or move to a different company where more people WFH.
Or if more people initially choose to WFH, then the value of going to office gets diminished and then one may start WFH more and more since not a lot of people go to the office in the first place, then the places becomes pretty much full remote and the company may just close it down to save real estate cost. Then you either are forced to embrace WFH or you have to find a different job with a different culture.
My first "real" job had WFH options for T/H which I regularly took advantage of, and from April 2014 on I've been 100% remote.
I rode out a few consulting gigs and then went full-time for a NYC company, my requirement was that I was able to WFH - and then I stayed living in Cincinnati at the time.
I very thoroughly enjoyed my all-expenses paid quarterly trips to NYC, and I very much enjoyed not having to have any commute. I worked from home or various coffee shops near me - and got to make a few friends that way.
Now I run my own e-commerce business. The business is registered in the US, all customers and business relations are all US based. I live in Bali, Indonesia and my two employees live near Manilla in the Philippines - so we're 100% remote.
I love having the option to work from home, explore the copious cafes and restaurants often, as well as occasionally will go to co-working centers. It all depends on my mood - but I have the option for it all!
I have the added benefit of living in a heavily dense for remote workers - so whenever I want to be social and co-work, I can call any number of people to hang out.
It's given me the option to travel the world, work at any time of the day I want, save countless hours on "meetings", saved a fortune in commuting hours and gas - I could go on.
So I fully empathize with enjoying the work environment, but I also love having all my benefits of working remotely. If you're 100% remote and struggling with the social aspect - you just need to find something that works for you.
This isn't cynical, but the sword cuts both ways. Eventually, those lower CoL areas will equalize towards a higher CoL as folks begin moving there to WFH. The other way around will occur there too, as the discount to entry or mid level IC engineers will erode over time, and the good ones will cost more because of trajectory, while the more middling ones likely will experience some erosion due to increased labor market competition.
With that said, I can't really speak as to what the second order effects or black swans will be regarding the shift to remote first. Some speculation:
- Will suburbs become more or less attractive as commute becomes less important of a perk?
- Will more remote tracts of land previously relegated to just outside the reach of exurbs become more or less attractive now that inhabitants are no longer precluded from virtual labor market participation?
- Will a caste system solidify around those who continue to commute to the office versus those who do not, or will it dissolve as the majority moves towards working and collaborating virtually?
- What will the effect of timezones be? Will we begin to see nations organize around timezone based vertical blocs as economies increasingly shift towards virtual labor and knowledge work?
Very happy WFH, and have.. on and off, for years. Sometimes self-employed.
Also like part time digital nomad-ing.
Companies that are WFH friendly tend to have less meeting waste and office culture time wasting. The last company I spent time at had a nice building but horrible amenities. The kitchens were swampy and busy, meeting rooms difficult to schedule, inaccessible VPs who were always in meetings, etc. because decisions took forever the workforce also spent a lot of time waiting, and the socializing was endless. I just find less of that when working for a company that has tuned away from that.
One important difference is that "the flexibility to WFH when wanted" means you need to live near the office. Having the freedom to live where I want, or even work remotely while travelling digital-nomad style would be a huge plus in my opinion.
As for lowering the cost of staff, as someone who lives in a part of the world where developer wages are a lot lower than typical US salaries, if a company is willing to meet me in the middle and I can get a decent pay rise while the US company makes a saving, surely that's a good thing for everyone involved? Companies operate globally now. Why shouldn't that include hiring?
My ideal set up is a small private office about 5-10 minutes walk from home, preferably with a cafe and gym on the way.
Also working in an office was the best with a small team in a separate room with a nice view, the noise from open office plans is so bad for people like me, who can't work with music in the background on the headphones.
When people have this issue I always recommend NYC. I know it's not the easiest city to live in, even with a tech salary, but at least the gender imbalance is not a problem at all.
Music I find too distracting and white noise too harsh (makes me feel like I have a hangover) but pink noise is soothing, almost like being in the womb and really helps me focus
This gives me time to see my colleagues, interact with them in person, quickly accomplish certain tasks that can't be easily done over a call or screenshare, and have that social interaction (probably only matters to those that enjoy their colleagues, but still, it's a thing).
This would save me some money each year in gas and in time driving and would strike a good balance for me. Sadly, I think my job is going to go back to 100% in office. But I also know that my general feelings on this are very in the middle and finding a local (to me) company that'd be willing to do this is pretty low.
I've found I can almost all of the benefits of going into an office by having a nearby coworking space / community which I like, often more-so.
> If I wanted to stay home forever
> most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction
Your company being a remote business, doesn't mean that you ONLY MUST work from home. It means you have the flexibility. You can work 3 days from home, 2 days from an office or co-working space, enjoy being around your friends and like minded folks or elsewhere.
Your entire response is based on false assumptions or a purposefully wrongly painted picture of WFH. Maybe your view is badly skewed because your only WFH experience is a pandemic lockdown, which is not what true WFH looks like, just like going to the grocery store with 2 metre distance and a face mask is not how normally people go to grocery stores when there isn't a pandemic.
I know of coworkers who are single and really looking back to get back to the office because they are sick of being alone in their small apartments for days at a time.
I also know of coworkers who are married with family and can't wait to get back to the office because they need to take breaks from their spouses/kids from time to time.
The communication concerns you are talking about do exist when there is a mix of office-based and remote staff. But those problems evaporate when everyone is remote. You learn new communication styles, and everything is different, but it works. That being said, I do agree that if you have a split company, the remote staff ends up being a little out of the loop. For some people, that is acceptable, for others it is not. I'm in that boat at the moment, and I accept it because the benefits of being at home outweigh my desire to be involved in all decisions.
As far as lowering costs go, yes it is a cost saving measure and it does mean that cheaper talent gets hired in. And sometimes the talent is lower quality because of that as well. Again, whether or not that is acceptable depends quite a bit on your own career goals and motivations. I am a 47 year old coder, transitioning out of coding, who has already accomplished all I wanted to in this industry. Someone 20 years younger than me who is ambitious will certainly desire a different working environment than I.
Everyone paying ludicrous rent in SF proper who can now move, saving thousands per month
I've had a similar experience. WfH does a lot to inhibit those conversations by raising the bar to informal conversation. A mixed environment will tend to mean that informal discussion happens in the office first, and over video link when people remember to ask the others. I've seen this blow up into major tension with as few as three or four people involved.
I think a lot of people are low to mid-level ICs whose career ambitions don't include promotions. No few are quite attached to the freedom, the romance, of being a digital nomad.
Regarding location: I don't have roots in SF/NYC/Seattle where all the well-paying tech jobs are, and have no desire to make any of those cities my home. Lived in NYC 5 years, that was enough for me. Visited SF for a weekend for an interview, was appalled by the blatant homelessness on the streets. I'm not really interested in living anywhere long-term where a "starter home" goes for $1m, especially a boring suburb like Mountain View or Menlo Park (to be fair I've never visited, but I grew up in the suburbs of DC and U.S. suburbs just aren't my thing). While working remotely, I've been able to travel the world, and more recently settle down in a (first-world) country where my cost of living is no more than 1/3 of what it was in NYC, with increased quality of life.
Regarding the office bullshit part - every office job I've ever had has office bullshit. You're expected to be there between 10:30am-5:30pm, or whatever the mandated hours are, passive aggressively enforced by some dreaded morning standup where for some reason the time is non-negotiable. You can bust your ass off for the first 4 hours of the day (probably the limit of productive work before reaching diminishing returns). Then it's 2:30pm and you've done a day's work but your brain is fried so you know you're not going to be productive, but you can't just leave early because then your PM and co-workers on other teams will think you're a slacker, and the executives will be concerned that their secretaries, oops I mean "executive assistants", who get paid a fraction of your salary despite working longer hours, will start to get jealous. So you have to figure out a way to burn the next 3 hours, maybe have your IDE up in one monitor while reading HN in another.
Meanwhile when I WFH, when I know I'm not going to be productive, I just do something else and don't have to put on this facade of looking like I'm being productive 8 hours/day. As a night owl I'll get into a flow state and pull an all-nighter one day, and then take the next day off. I don't set an alarm clock before I go to sleep because I'm more productive when I'm well-rested.
Also open offices suck. Maybe I wouldn't be so appalled by office jobs as much if we at least got our own cubicles. As fun as it is to make fun of cubicles, they're a hell of a lot more comfortable then being on an assembly line of desks in a giant coliseum. Though no matter where your office is, it eventually gets boring. Variety is always good, and remote work gives you that freedom.
You also need to realize that offices are not made to be productive but are made so that people can escape their daily life: Kids at home, or wife that you don't want to see anymore. Just check all the people with kids that cannot wait to go back to the office.
Even physically, I find personally, it'll require quite bit of investment to make WFH viable/productive for it to be permanent, to have a permanent "work" room set up. Limited space shared with my personal computer and equipment are not very ideal for the productivity.
Still then, I would certainly prefer getting out of my place and working outside of my home.
It's one thing someone joins the company knowing that it's a remote job, I'm curious how people are adjusting to this change.
Agency is worth a lot to me.
Because the option will also be extended to all your colleagues.
And the moment a team gains a single remote worker it gains a load of process and ceremony. Every conversation becomes a scheduled meeting, every scheduled meeting books a meeting room with AV equipment, every meeting gains five minutes of AV setup time, everything that would have been a group of people at a whiteboard turns into a presentation prepared in advance by a single person, and every lightweight task tracking system gets replaced with Jira.
All of which is done with the best of intentions - you don't want Remote Person to be excluded, or unable to see the whiteboard. And the changes aren't terrible - plenty of companies use Jira quite happily. Some people would even prefer a 20 minute scheduled meeting to a 10 minute interruption! But each change makes your life slightly more like the cliches and jokes about corporate life.
It's not all downsides of course; if you get to avoid commuting or working in an open-plan office you might find on balance it's less alienating.
I'm pretty sure 90% of the people commenting on this thread have never actually lived through working without an office for years, and these people have no idea what they are talking about.
Here's what happens to so called WFH people:
Phase 1. It's exciting to work independently and productivity rises for a couple of weeks.
Phase 2. Working from home gets old very very fast, and you end up pushing yourself to go work at more public places like coffee shop (otherwise your productivity goes down no matter how productive a person you are).
Phase 3. If you work out of coffee shops for a long period of time, this gets old too. Not everyone reaches this state but many people do. You would rather work from a fixed place with less uncertainties than floating around different coffee shops every day. And this is why coworking spaces exist and people pay a lot of money to work out of coworking spaces.
Remote First != stay at home forever. You're being deliberately inflammatory towards people who prefer to have control of their surroundings, including the people they surround themselves with.
I'm curious though how this attitude will change if a lot more companies (and eventually a majority) move to remote work. Currently (pre-pandemic) when I WFH my friends are all at their offices. So is my partner. I'm alone. Therefore I like going into the office a few days a week for the social aspect, even if it's just a chat at lunch. If more people are WFH though I might be able to meet my local friends at lunch. Or meet specific people at cafés or other locations to work together for a couple of hours. I would be able to invest in a better home office setup too.
People see quite divided on this issue (I love WFH/I hate WFH) so maybe it's important to keep in mind that the WFH you are currently experiencing is nothing like a normal WFH (due to the pandemic) and if lots more people start WFH then WFH in general has the possibility to change drastically and be much less solitary.
Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed.
Multisig works great across distances. I’ve built coordination apps for multiple distributed parties to propose and approve and sign Bitcoin transactions before. It’s pretty straightforward.
But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Let’s just accept that the world is complex and people are different. I don’t think it’s necessary to convince the other side everyone should work from home from now on.
Thank you for that nuanced view. Many comments here want to drive home the point about how all office offers is "bullshit" and "distraction and toxic culture", and anyone who enjoys working at an office with coworkers don't care about actual productivity and only want to do it because they want have someone to gossip with during the day...
There was literally a top comment here that implies someone isn't even living the life of a "real human being" if he's not WFH. That is such a ridiculous stance to take.
People have different personalties and value different things in life and are in different situations in life, there is no one solution that would make everyone happy.
Remote work is not WFH. It is not a discussion about the home vs office environments. This is largely irrelevant.
The fundamental shift that Remote Work will bring is that it will allow people to separate physically where people live from their work activity. This means that people will no longer have to live close to their jobs - for whatever definition of "close" you have. It's one degree of freedom that everyone can get when choosing where to live.
And it is a very important degree of freedom. When choosing a place to live, one has many things to consider: is this a good environment for my growing family, will I be surrounded by like-minded people, can I find good schools, is the weather good for the kind of activities I enjoy doing the most, etc, etc... but none of that will matter in a location if the jobs are not there. In the current situation, people flock to where the jobs are because they can't afford to choose a nicer place with no jobs.
If you prefer the office environment, you can and will be able to have that even when Remote Work becomes the norm. The key point is in understanding that your office can now be in SV, Texas, Croatia, some city in South America, South East Asia or the Ukraine and you will (should) not be missing out in any professional opportunity.
If you know of companies that have made changes like Coinbase, please help me build the list by sharing anonymously here: https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0
Aside: Companies, please stop using Medium for your corporate blogs. It’s super unprofessional.
Pros: I save an insane amount of time due to not having to waste my time commuting. Even a 10 min bike ride takes much longer in reality since you have to properly dress, come in, out, settle down, prepare etc... So I have much more free time. Also no distrations is 10/10. We have an open office and the distractions cause a severe drop in my productivity. All talks can easily be had through Slack. In fact I much prefer Slack since there is not BS time wasting: you have a talk with a VERY SPECIFIC agenda, nothing else.
Cons: connections, and I'm not talking about "nice to see a human face" or that kind of mundane-waste-of-my-time-BS-water-cooler-conversionation. I'm talking practical things: new business connections by meeting random people for example can be easily done face-to-face without sending any cold emails, there is no denying that "many businesses/connections get done during the smoking break"
To understand what real “remote first” might mean, let’s define the status quo: “in-person first”.
To me, in-person-first companies are those in which being a remote employee means hampered career potential, and mingling with the right people at the headquarters is sooner or later required to advance.
By that logic, remote-first companies either flip that on its head, or at least make personal presence not a factor while encouraging remote participation.
Becoming X-first implies a fundamental shift. Improving X does make you more X, though.
> To address all of these, we will form a cross-functional team to oversee this transition. This group will identify the changes we must make to become a remote-first company (e.g., around people management, recruiting/talent, culture and connection, and documentation and async work…), host open design sessions with all of you to surface ideas, considerations, dependencies, and concerns, and partner with internal experts to redesign how all of this works for a remote-first Coinbase.
In the definition I believe makes sense there is just one defining trait, and the author manages to tiptoe around it.
It’s unclear whether the changes promised are cosmetic (to convince remote workers they aren’t disadvantaged) or fundamental (actually making remote staff equivalent or even prioritized first before on-location staff).
Covid has forced many companies to run the previously-risky experiment of whether they can thrive while remote, and it's unsurprising that those that can remain productive will use it to evolve + reduce costs.
Historically most other services were Rails/Sinatra with Postgres. These days there’s a lot more Golang being used for new services.
There’s also some services that are serverless, using Lambda and DynamoDB but these are a minority.
For the employee though it’s going to be tough in the long run. Building relationships at work is one great way to get things done not just in the team but also across teams. So code might get written but the overarching dynamics about how things happen in a workplace are changing big time. We don’t see the effects of them until sometime.
Hire anyone in the world at reasonable salaries.
