These “remote but actually not” jobs are my pet hate. They clog up remote job listings and can never offer an actual reason why the employee must appear in person every week/month/quarter. It’s the worst of all possible worlds! No close connection with your coworkers or regular office benefits, no ability to work from anywhere, plus regular expensive/gruelling travel.

I actually got burned recently with something like this. The recruiter advertised the job as 100% remote except on the off-chance I need to go to the datacenter "which should be never, except during emergencies". So I was fine with the roughly 15% pay cut.

Turns out they have a monthly deployment after midnight Sunday AM where I needed to be, and in the 1st month the director basically said, oh by the way, after covid we'll need you to be in an office we're setting up there, and didn't even offer to renegotiate salary.

Wow, bait and switch. If the fit hadn't been so horrible I might have stayed if they took me up on a salary adjustment but needless to say, I got out of there as soon as I could.

Jerks.

For the vast majority of people getting rid of the commute is the main benefit. It's also good for the environment, for everyone's health and it reduces transit times for everyone specially during scholar season. If you are only required to travel once a month you can live almost every where, including other countries at least in Europe. If you are required once a week you certainly can afford better housing than the city center. So maybe you will not able to relocate to Thailand and work for Google (which would be great I admit if I were younger) but you are in the 0.01%. Most people I know prefer an hybrid model.

I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses.

I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.

The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.

And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.

It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.

Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

> And Sundar has needed to go for a long time... How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?)...

So Windows was made by... Google?

Disclaimer: I don't agree with it.

I think he/she confused Satya Nadella with Sundar Pichai. Just a hunch :-)

Goodness. Yup! Well, that's a wrap on a Monday.

> employers should be required to pay a cost of living differentia

They do pay this. It costs a heck of a lot more to hire in The Bay Area than it does outside, and much of this increased salary goes to landlords and rents.

At the same time conversely companies like Facebook are threatening to lower wages if people move outside the bay area.

I feel like if you're a remote employee they don't need to have a right to know where you are living, they only need to know your timezone for planning purposes. Your location should be abstracted out of the equation by remote work tools.

As far as they are concerned you are just an amorphous existence on the planet that is online to provide skills from some time UTC to some other time UTC and they shouldn't have a right to know anything more than that.

It’s likely companies may have been willing to pay extra for an employee who can colocate in a specific office, and if that is no longer required salaries may go down across the board since they can hire from a bigger pool. It’s odd that FB would resort to a punishment like this. They should just reduce everyone’s salaries and encourage them to move out of The Bay Area :).

Reducing everyone's salaries could temporarily backfire though as long as there are other bay area companies paying bay area salaries (even for remote workers), as those people would leave.

However, it may be beneficial for Facebook to do it that way, as they can then get decent talent around the world at a lower price.

A lot of people before would give the advice that if you come to The Bay Area to get a job or fund your startup, you'll eventually succeed because you can easily take meetings with people, find connections, rub shoulders, schmooze, etc, and this was largely true because being in this locale gave an inherent advantage. We're more likely to hire the guy that made a good impression at an event or house party than a random cold email from an anonymous person.

Once Bay Area tech engineer moves to some far off corner of the world, there won't be much differentiation except for raw talent, and there's plenty of raw talent out there in the world who were born in the wrong place.

Companies are required to know where you live for tax purposes.

I actually like those. For me it's strange to never see colleagues in real life, on the other hand I'm also a big fan of remote. Having a day every other week is great to keep a balance there.

May also be because I'm from Europe, even if the office is on the other side of the country I can just take the train and don't have to stay overnight for the non-remote day.

I’m in the UK which is objectively tiny, but going from the south to the north wouldn’t be a day trip. And if you basically spend 1 day travelling up, 1 day doing whatever team guff the company wants you to do, and 1 day going back (i.e. ~24 hours), you’ve wasted MORE time than you would have commuting an hour each workday for the whole month!

Not if you go to Scotland but Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool (to name the most common places remote workers for London companies appear to work from what I've seen) are easily done in a day trip. Prices can be hefty but compared to spending a night in the hotel it's still cheaper for the company to pay for busy times.

The train to London-New Castle is 3.5 hours. I have done that for a year.

Try Cornwall to Newcastle by train, more like 9-10 hours :) If I still have to pick remote jobs by which ones are close to my physical location, or pick my living area based on where jobs are, I don’t feel like the promise of remote work is really being fulfilled.

If you're all remote it's probably easiest to rent office space for those days close to a train station (or between those) in London. In that case it's probably not more than 4 hours for anyone based in the UK.

Same for other European countries. If you only need office space every other week for a day you can rent it in a central location that's easy to reach by train for anyone in the country.

After being work from home 100% right now, I really would prefer a hybrid 4 in and 1 out. I believe there was a Gallup poll that showed majority also do not want to work from home always.

4 and 1 does have benefits, commuting 1 hour once a week compared to 5 times a week is a big difference. The reason I would like to go to the office one time a week is really I feel extremely disconnected from my team when always being remote. Teams is good and all but just not the same as being in a room with people.

And what about spending the winter in some sunny island for a month? Getting to know the team when one starts is good, and then just working with the tools to meet and talk to them. But my impression is that most of the people who think like you do that because they miss the human contact with people outside of their household (not saying you in particular) and they feel isolated.

I have been working fully remote almost 2 years now, and it felt that way at the beginning. Until I started using the benefits that remote work provides. Going to a nearby gym with cheap prices at my convenience, staying in other places for a month without having to ask for holidays (or even ask for it), joining plans and trips with friends without worrying too much if I have enough holidays or even getting advantage of cheap prices for flights and trains to travel somewhere.

I think most people struggle with the reality that the only "downside" of remote work is not "being disconnected with the team", but having to put effort to meet friends (also make new ones) to have the human contact they usually miss.

You’re losing out on the ability to move to a much cheaper area. If you’re going to suffer the costs of remote work, you might as well also get the more of the benefits.

If I was 1 day in the office I’d live in midtown Sac instead of the Bay Area.

Or Napa. Or Santa Cruz. Etc. one ungodly commute a week is very doable.

Yeah, I think of it the same way :/

This will likely make hot-desking the norm (already is at plenty of places).

On a selfish note, I already have a house in a tech hub, so I'd love for things to go back to how they were pre-covid.

Ah hot desking building services wet dream -) only problem is people hate it, the human animal likes its own space and we each have our own preference.

And for the near future these desks will need cleaning after each use.

I would assume the grunt developer in SV probably will suffer from it at some point, if they don't already.

Glad that it is pretty unusual where I live, apart from sales where it already is quite established. Quite the fluctuation on these positions to be honest, but I don't see it for most engineering professions or even any higher position where organizing your work is more complicated.

The only advantage is cost of space and some failure safety for hardware defects, although many have secondary devices already.

And you get to do it, in addition to your commute, and anyway you'll also clean it up before you use it. I'm not sure why we all can't seem to jump to the foregone conclusion : COVID-19 will be with us for at least one year, and since many people won't trust vaccines, it's gonna take some time to be safe-safe.

Hot desking is another fuck-you to workers, a new low for people as 'interchangeable' cogs. Snowcrash prophecy.

Subsidizing for a simple cheap desk at home + electricity + Internet for 1 or 2 years is less expensive than any office redesign or move they'll attempt, just the price of the cardboard boxes and moving company exceeds it...

It feels like a psychological trap that no-one wants to switch to 'the new normal' and be done with it...

Ah a 250,000 a year SWE will be cleaning desks :-) and to hospital standards.

Yea I agree that one of the big problems with hot desks is not being able to leave things. If it's a public hot-desking situation you have also the problem of theft (it happens—even in Japan WeWorks).

Even in normal offices that do hot-desking stuff get stolen. Still don't understand why colleagues what to still stuff.

It's not always intentionally or done with malice, either. But the amount of kvetching over someone's specific type of post-its or their favorite chair being moved to another location was a constant issue at a hotdesking company I worked at. Also things like certain laptops needing different types of docks and cell phone chargers being there or being missing.

They ended up going to the same rotation of people shifting through the same space, which sort of cut down on the issue, but all the employees still hated it. I just wanted a drawer to keep some tylenol and my water bottle in. Once I moved to a different company and had my own personal assigned cube (which was big enough to do yoga in and had it's own sliding door!) I felt like I'd landed in paradise and my cube seemed so cozy and luxurious.

I know "cubical hell" and "cube farms" were the example old fashioned out of style business layouts, but I really loved working in my cube and was so productive there. If a coworker was being loud or I wanted to have a small team meeting I could just hold it in my cube and we can closed the door. Now that I wfh full time, I miss it!

That introduces a host of new problems. Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months. And where will they stay during office-week?

> Workers will likely have to leave their families behind for a week every 2 months.

Yes, or they could continue to live locally. It's about more flexibility for what is the right choice for each family. I don't see this as a problem.

> And where will they stay during office-week? Hotel, AirBnb, corporate short-term housing? People travel for work all the time and it's not an issue. If hotel capacity becomes insufficient other solutions will pop up - like furnished apartment rentals. I don't see this as a large issue either.

Well, with all due respect, that doesn't result in me (or I would argue, most workers) being able to live wherever they want. Plus you would still have to live relatively close to a major airport or something (and I don't even know what that's going to look like yet post-covid).

MAYBE it makes things better for a handful of relatively rich, highly paid workers/companies who don't mind spending significant time away from their families/homes, are happy to travel and who are willing to spring for regular accommodation for their workers, but I think for most workers springing for an office at home would be widely preferable.

And I say that as someone who, pre-covid, had to do a couple of nights per couple-of-months away from my family because my employer's work was already distributed around the nation...(honestly, the travel was personally one of the worst aspects of my job, though I know other people loved it).

Now with covid, i'm bitten with the "not enough space at home" problem (though thank god we got an in-built study put in beforehand), but I no longer have to travel long distances or stay overnight at any of the interstate offices, which i personally find a blessing.

But i'd take the all-remote or "two days in" model in preference...

> live relatively close to a major airport

Also not to mention that flying even ONCE per year round-trip across the country will likely emit more carbon than a full year's worth of local commutes. Now multiply that by 6 for every 2 months.

Everything everyone says about greenhouse gas benefits of remote work just went out the window as soon as air travel is mentioned.

>Everything everyone says about greenhouse gas benefits of remote work just went out the window as soon as air travel is mentioned.

Well, but that kind of criticism applies to anything and everything. For e.g. Do you also judge whether to buy a particular computer based on the amount of greenhouse gas or chemical pollutants in the supply chain that were caused due to its manufacture? Or do you also consider the fact that every-time you make a purchase it has to be put on a ship or a truck or a plane so that it gets to you? If you live in a remote area with low pop. density, there is more fuel being wasted bringing things to fewer people, etc, etc. Trying to reconcile Whats good for the planet vs Whats good for me/everyone is going to involve compromises.

Not sure why you’ve been downvoted, you’re absolutely correct.

Would you please not break the site guidelines like this? If you read them to the end, you'll notice that they explicitly ask you not to post this kind of comment.

One reason is that users frequently give corrective upvotes (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=...), which leaves a complaint like this dangling as uncollected garbage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm guessing it's a uncomfortable fact for the hackernews crowd who seem to travel a lot and also claim to care for climate change.

Would you please stop posting these off-topic meta complaints? They're pure noise, you've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately, and they're against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your other comments are great, so it would be nice if you would fix this.

pure noise? because you are always right, of course.

Transatlantic flight generates under 1000kg of CO2 per passenger. Cars generate 0.12kg per km. A short commute is 30 km per day, so about a 1000 kg per year - a wash.

A longer commute will generate more, being stuck in traffic will generate more, building new roads will generate more. A flight that is not cross-Atlantic will generate much less.

It’s not clear which way the balance will tilt, but you can’t just make blanket statement that planes will be worse than cars - you have to show your math.

The average american commute is about 15 miles [0] which is 24 km.

A round trip from JFK to FRA emits about 0.91 t (910 kg) CO2 but if you account for radiative forcing [1] it is equivalent to 1.62 t (1620 kg) [2].

That's not to mention multiplying all these figures by 6 (for every 2 months), so that's 9720 kg.

I don't think it's a wash.

[0] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

[2] https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx

1. 15 miles one way. 30miles x 1.6km x 1.12kg/km x 250 days = 1440 kg

2. Few people will move form US to Germany. It's more likely someone will move e.g. from Portland to San Diego. 275kg roundtrip, 550kg adjusted for radiative forcing.

So if you fly 3 times per year it's a wash, if you fly 6 times a year it's double the CO2 emission.

If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office.

But the point is that you are now also flexible to go live wherever you want.

For people who live close, they still have to work from home, thus not avoiding the cost of it (higher utility fee, no company dining, need more space). For them, this is definitely more expensive than work onsite all the time.

> If you don't want to leave your family for a couple days every quarter, you can still live close to the office.

And now, they have to live in a very expensive area and have to work from home except for a week every two monts?

No, if you live in the same region then you can make the trip in less time and not need to be away for a while week at once.

In a hotel? Also, a week every couple of months isn't a bad trade off at all. Many people who drive trucks or are in sales or consulting travel every week for the whole work week.

What if you're married? A week every 2 months means that you don't see your partner for likely 25% of the time, since your office weeks will likely not coincide.

It's obviously personal to each person, but I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time.

A bit like working from home helps with "deep work" away from the office, being at home with partner off on some travel helps with "deep home", to really appreciate a quiet place, and be full of love and welcome when they come back.

> I think it's quite healthy to spend a little while away from one's partner from time to time.

I fully agree with this, though I'd prefer it be more on a voluntary basis, e.g. by travelling alone from time to time, having a couple of hobbies separate from your partner, and friends that you hang out with. Not forced upon you by work.

Being forced to be away from your partner 25% of the time by work is a bit much, unless you're a travelling consultant or flight attendant or something.

Compared to a daily commute, 1 week every 2 months seems great. I commute 2 hours each way, plus 8 hours of work = 12 hours of each 24 hour day away from my family, in other words 50% of the time. I'd accept 1 week every 2 months in a heartbeat.

It sucks, but there's a lot of people that have a lifestyle like that - the military, long-distance truckers, airline staff, people that travel internationally for their job, etc. It works for a lot of people.

> It sucks, but there's a lot of people that have a lifestyle like that - the military, long-distance truckers, airline staff, people that travel internationally for their job, etc

Yes, and its generally considered one of the most unappealing aspects of those jobs. Its one thing when the job requires it, as is the case with the examples you gave. When it is completely avoidable as it would be with many of the white collar jobs that are the focus of this thread, it's a weak justification that long-distance truckers also have to put up with it.

Or people just accept it - I knew a lot of people in the area I grew up who were fishermen and were away from Sunday evening to Friday most weeks or worked on the North Sea rigs and were working two weeks on and two weeks off. Nobody seems to regard that as unusual and families coped.

As it was said above: it is a requirement of the job. But making it a requirement without actually being one, that's bogus.

Do you mean 12.5% ?

No, the poster means 25%. 2 months is approximately 8 weeks, and they are presuming that you and your SO's "week" don't overlap, which is likely, so there will be 2 weeks every 2 months where you don't see each other: the week you travel, and the week your SO travels. 2 weeks / 8 weeks is 25%.

My initial reaction is that two months is a pretty awkward interval. It's long enough that you still need to fully optimize for remote communication and teamwork, but frequent enough to feel like an unwelcome regular disruption of people's lives.

The SAFE model of onsites once a quarter seem fine. The company can fly everyone to one spot for 3-4 days.

Just do it...

I moved 3 hours from the CBD and still did 2 days a week, you just need a friend place to crash at one night a week.

No more excuses.

it looks like the "on-sites" are only relevant in the first weeks when someone is hired. If an employee has learned to work consistently remotely, what's the point of having the burden of flying in every few months.

The point is for companies that want their employees to grow and invent, not just be consistent in a narrowly scoped role

And how is that not doable remotely? "Learning new technology" can be done at home (or whenever the employee decides) and deployment will happen in a remote server or in the cloud. So, again, how this full remote prevents grow and invent for employees?

Why does this involve the office? It's just my experience, RL meetings are useful for 'breaking the ice' with colleagues, but otherwise remote collaboration = in office collab. This excludes all meta-issues and politics

The market hasn’t fully adjusted yet, but once a lot more people are remote, salaries might also fluctuate depending on how far(cheap) you are allowed to live, with a higher price tag if you are required to be close to the office.

For now some companies use your local area salary average as a proxy for that adjustment, but I’d expect they come up with a more straight and easy to justify scaling rule in the future.