But if I were to work for a remote-first company, I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space. A quick Google indicates office space costs about $500-$650 a month per person (in Amsterdam, according to Google's summarized results from instantoffices.com), or between 150 and 450 euros / month per m². With that money, as an individual, you could also afford a spot in a co-working space if need be.
I think a $500 or €500 / month stipend or reward for working from home is fair; it's a decent amount of money, and I'm pretty confident it's still cheaper than renting an office - you don't just save on rent, but personnel as well, and things like support and maintenance contracts on the utilities, coffee machines, etc.
Now account for the money you don't spend commuting, and far more valuable, your lifetime saved by not spent commuting.
Your wage is already arbitrary so you can just assume that it includes this stipend.
Holy sense of entitlement. No, that's not going to happen. That's not how any of this works. You don't see companies paying outsourced workers $150k/yr due to the "amount of money they save by not hiring expensive talent in SF"
That being said, how do you calculate the amount? Say, if I rent a 3-bedroom apartment for €1200/mo, and use one of the bedrooms as my home office, is €400/mo reimbursement fair? What about if I work from a living room? What if I own the place I live in? Can I include ISP expense too? etc...
In Sweden you can claim a tax deduction on the square meterage of a room that is used exclusively for work, but it must have a locked door.
I live in an 82sqm apartment and I have a 2.5x2 (5sqm) room. So I can work out the percentage of the apartment that is office and file that as a deduction.
In my case roughly 6%.
On the other hand, whether companies should have to pay for individual home office space is a reasonable question (They don't have to provide free lunch at work, they don't have to pay for the commute, both of which are just as or more important for you to be able to work in an office) and will probably largely come down to regulation and, in the absence of that, market forces.
Every organisation inevitably ends up producing a quantity of what I'm going to call "boss-ness" for those in charge. It's a significant factor in compensation. This holds true across capitalist, communist, distributed, and even voluntary organisations, and can be seen in groups as small as a single person.
All sorts of previously inexplicable things, such as executive travel, become easier to understand through this lens. Micromanagement and abuse of employees as well. Linus Torvald's free pass to be rude to people was also a part of his compensation, until it became far too expensive. As was sexual harassment of the female staff until that got mostly stamped out in the West; see Parton, D "Nine To Five" (1980), or the more recent Rubin case.
Remote employees produce less "boss-ness"; you can't look out across your desk farm and see them, you can't look over their shoulders (unless you go for the "desktop sharing and webcam at all times" model, which some places have).
I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly productive.
Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality.
Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work is generally fantastic?
The cost savings are often overestimated and many companies can't evaluate quality well in the first place.
Also outsourcing doesn't always mean remote, lots of companies hiring consultants (developers, or even teams of developers) require them to be on-site.
The problem is often the outsourced and the company doing the outsourcing have incentives which don't line up.
Or by "outsourcing" you mean simply hiring remote people? Because comparing with the one above makes little sense, yet I don't think many people use that second meaning.
There is a massive selection effect occurring here.
Where this lost me was on this claim about salaries:
> I suspect the multipliers companies use to determine wage per city will even out to the efficient frontier of wage to cost of living as employees allocate themselves to the optimal locations.
I think this is a temporary situation until there is a critical mass of remote roles/companies. If I live in a lower COL region but looking at remote roles I'm not competing with people near me, and the employers are not competing with employers near me. I'm competing with people who can do the work I do, and the employer is competing with all other remote-capable companies. I think the only shape of this that might work is treating the target time zone as a single market. Assuming comparable skills, a worker in Boston, Atlanta, NYC, Toronto, Nassau or Bogota shouldn't have wide compensation differences.
It's possible that this leads to a net reduction in salary for many, as big companies "figuring out" remote might make formerly-painful offshoring more workable and attractively inexpensive.
My personal expectation is that there is a lot of developers out there and at least at non-junior levels the differentiating factor is skill, experience and timezone, as you say.
However one thing that I dislike is this talk, mostly started by Facebook as far as I can tell, about reducing salaries for employees who move to cheaper places to live.
Sorry but that is BULLSHIT.
When I take on work I have my fixed daily rate that I charge whether I am working from Paris, SF, London or the Welsh Highlands.
My employer is paying for my time, expertise, knowledge, experience and delivery quality.
I am not worth more or less because of where I work.
This is typical of employers trying to maintain that dominant position over the employee because suddenly they have been forced to adapt to this changing world and they don't like.
My wife works a normal office job for a big, global company. Like most others they had to adapt to 100% WFH with a few days notice and after some teething problems it is working exceptionally well.
This realisation has upset a lot of middle managers and "old school" types who live for the office.
However the facts don't lie. Meetings still happen. Everything has been delivered on time. All of the things middle managers say require being in the office continue to happen with an issue.
It is almost as if all of these middle managers and old school thinkers are suddenly scared everyone will see through their bullshit and that flexibility works best for everyone.
Now I feel this evidence gives employees a lot of leverage to push for more flexibility in where they work. This upsets the employer/employee dynamic.
It may well be much easier for an employee to find another job for a better salary at a company the other side of the country and that is a risk for the employer.
Sure you can say "yes but now that employee is competing with people all over the country as well!" and that us true. However it is easier for an employee to change job than it is for an employer to recruit and get a new employee up to speed. This gives the employee a much better deal hence this bullshit display of "we're still the ones with power damnit!" from companies needing to change but being scared shitless about the advantages that gives all their employees.
As I said at the beginning I have been a remote worker for a number of years now and for me it is perfect. I can (and do) pop into the office when needed but I get to live in a nicer, cheaper area with more space and an overall nicer environment. Where I live suddenly wasn't restricted to "how long will it take me to get to work from here?" and that is fucking freedom.
I fully appreciate I am not like everyone else. There are people who need an office. That's fine, nobody is saying ditch all the offices and we all work from home. Just that it should be an option rather than being forced into a single location for no quantifiable reason.
For all the crap companies talk about the environment, quality of life, etc. there needs to be a serious change to how we work.
Forgetting everything else, just reducing the number of cars on the road every day for a pointless commute to the office would be worth it from an environmental standpoint.
You're worth less now because the job applicant pool just became worldwide instead of just where you work.
It sounds like you you do contract work ("daily rate") as opposed to being an employee. Do you charge the same rate regardless of where your customer is located, or do you charge more for a company located in Paris/SF/London vs one located in Arkansas?
Enjoyed your post, and as someone who has worked remote-only for >5 years, can only agree with "not enough [focus] on what work will actually look like and how culture needs to adapt".
One area you didn't touch on, which I find most interesting in these present (challenging) times is, "How do we improve the tools?"
Right now, experienced remote-workers know to do things like explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." -- all that much-needed overcommunication that is necessary to replace face- and body-language cues. Is it just a question of aculturation as remote-work undergoes its own Endless September, or could we build better, richer, more intuitive tools? (And not just for devs/knowledge workers! Think of all the GPs triaging their patients with Zoom right now. There have to better tools for them!)
I guess it depends. I don't do development but none of the people I work with have any expectation that if they send me a chat message/SMS/email that I'll respond to them this very second.
As these tools for communication, creation and management become the substrate of the team (the new "office" in some ways), it'll be interesting to see how the tool designers change. Shouldn't product managers for tools like Slack work with organizational researchers, sociologists, and psychologists to determine the impact of features on organizational behaviour (if they don't already).
I think regardless of your age, you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone - or at least have the ability to communicate with them reasonably easily (when you need them).
Regarding nomadic vs stable, I suspect that's more of a family/relationship factor rather than an age factor. With family and kids, stability is just easier. Just having a family with kids is a special challenge, so being a traveling family is a special challenge that few people seem to do (although I admire the ones who pull it off well! their kids get such a broad and dynamic taste of life early).
When you're single it's OK to work late at night for meetings with a far away team, when you have kids and they go to school:
- the 5pm-8pm time when they're awake and at home is a time you want to spend with your kids. Can be challenging when you're in Europe working with the US west coast, because that's precisely the best overlap time
- you have to wake up anyway to send them to school, so you can't just move your sleep schedule
However, when you do have this flexibility, sometimes the timezone difference can be helpful by splitting you day between one "communication period" (timezone overlap) and "no distraction period" (coworkers are asleep)
Probably, but not everyone at one location actually lives in the same timezone
My personal timezone is shifted three hours to the west from everyone else here
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
It's about complete offices/teams in Europe earning much less than if they were in the US. Which is, indeed, one of the reasons (though not the only one) that many larger companies have significant software development offices in places like Eastern Europe and India.
That post is about work done remotely, nothing more nothing less. It is merely an artifact of the current implementation that some can be vastly undercompensated due to their lack of bargaining power. Or you can say it is engineered to be that way if you are less generous.
If covid makes companies transition to remote first, what advantage remains over overseas workers? Will it justify the much higher salaries? That is what makes people uneasy imo, not that they have to do standups over zoom, I don't buy that. The answer is obviously not much, but it has been the case for quite some time. Personally I don't think this mass transition will happen this time either.
Timezone differences make a big difference in day to day collaboration.
Other things may also pertain, for example working on government projects requiring security clearance or at least no criminal record.
1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that is proposed to Basic Income.
2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by people flying and driving less.
3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad.
4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of "my cell phone" in the early 2000s.
Guaranteed Jobs would be more like Mandatory Jobs, or "Work for Welfare", a step toward government indentured workers maybe? Couple that with supplied housing and we're basically at serfdom again. Sell their time to corporates to add in that capitalist twist we know and love!
Remote but hooked into VR sounds like it's just another way to measure butts in seats. Monitor peoples time and actions while they're on the clock. Fuck it, sell that data too. How can we monetize knowing how often people pick their noses?
The first step into a VR first society perhaps, all the better as the environment around us collapses. We stop travelling thanks to various catastrophes, then we stop noticing the world being further exploited.
While Australia was held captive by catastrophic fires, barely able to breath the air in our cities, our government was fresh off the phones selling vast forests to mining companies and opening up clearing rights to export farmers.
I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about.
Working from a big corporate campus: gee, this team member is in another floor, I better talk to him via IM and email.
Working from small startup open office: gee, this team member is opposite myself from this small common table, better talk to him via IM, we don't want to bother every single person in the open-plan office.