They want all their middle income job readers to feel comforted by the arguments made and studies cited. It's a shitty transition to go back to an office. I'm sure a lot of workplaces are going to abuse that notion and provide very bad workspaces. But you generalize on scale for such topics only when you know your audience is absolutely not discerning.
The amount of articles about living in tiny apartments (not to say pods), eating bugs and renting as opposed to owning is just disturbing. The way they all happen at the same time and seem to answer issues raised by other articles by other publications is just scary.
I guess it isn't, which is why I didn't say that.
I always suspected tech people live in an extremely privileged bubble but holy cow did this last year really open my eyes to how detached they are.
However, the lifestyle of the $400k/yr worker is probably closer in most important aspects to that of the VC than the janitor. Both drive expensive cars, live in expensive houses, and can set up their kids for success. They don't worry about the cost of food (even organic/local/etc.) or worry much about health care.
Put another way, there are probably some $40k/yr janitors who would give their left arms to be making $400k/yr. But I doubt there are any $400k/yr tech workers who would give their left arm to be making $4m/yr.
I'm a software dev, I don't make 6 figures. I'd probably give my left arm to make $4m/year, I could afford a robot arm with that I'm sure.
$4m/year means I could retire before I'm 40 and live the rest of my life with the lifestyle I have now with comfort. Even missing an arm that sounds way better than toiling in software for another 25-30 years.
I would be able to retire after 1 year, $4M is enough to just stick in an index fund and live the rest of your life on 4% a year, unless you live in a very high COL area.
Sounds like it's time to switch company or location!
Don't be silly. Well earning tech workers in SV make it into the top 15% (at the lower end its difficult to purchase a home where they work). Top 1% would be >$500k/a for a household, which is exceptionally rare for a techie. Not everyone is a rock-star developer working for Uber.
Now, for the world, you´ve got to make $58,000 USD yearly to be in the 1%
https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...
If the upper crust high income tech dudes are priced out of housing in their own city... imagine what it must be like to not be a SV tech worker living in those cities?
You're comparing individuals to households. You're right that not many tech workers make $500k/yr, but you're comparing that individual salary against the top 1% of household incomes.
Plenty of tech workers make $250k/yr and are married to people who make similar wages in tech/law/medicine/etc. That's not to say that most tech workers live super comfortable lives, especially in costly areas like SF/SV. But it's not appropriate to look at the salary of single workers and compare it to household income statistics.
Would like to see the actual numbers of that. It certainly feels right, that high earners would self-select for high earning partners, but wondering what the reality is. It also feels like there are more single tech workers than married couples.
If I'm giving up my one non-fungible resource, my time, it had better come with protections beyond the smile of the manager who insists they've got my back when they're really looking for the right place to stick the knife; if you haven't been burned by that one, that too is a kind of, as you put it, extreme privilege.
While there might be a "war" between people that want to continue WFH and people wanting to return for an office, portraying it as "management vs labor" is unfair to many, many people who are part of the conversation.
Further, there is no point delving into that entire argument when you have just made up this strawman and inserted it into a conversation about workplace attendance requirements. You assume that broader context applies directly to this problem. It does not. The person who wants you back in office, in many cases, is your immediate manager. Is he also "management" when he has is only one degree closer to the CEO on a (generally) 6-7 step ladder? Or did you just transpose workplace hierarchy from the days of factory work and just make a go with it because you cannot be bothered to tax your brain to see how it is entirely different? I'd wager it's the latter.
(FWIW, I'm a fan of fully remote companies; this article just doesn't pass as anything but opinion.)
I don’t care what anybody says, zoom and slack are not even remotely close to face to face interactions. Sure it may not always seem that way to a developer who just wants to write code and not care about anything else, but there are lots of important roles besides developer in any tech company worth its weight. Not many of those roles are very amenable to working from home full time. Even developers working on a team, I’d argue, can't contribute 100% working purely from home. Good developers do way more than just write code. They mentor, help shape the product with UX and business people, etc. All that requires face time.
If devs want to work remote, I highly recommend becoming a contractor / consultant. Remote and contract work go together like peas and carrots. You get fed largely spec’d work, don’t really need to care about office politics, etc… There are plenty of cons… you also become your own collection agency cause dudes can take months paying you. But if remote is what you want, contracting is the best.
Anyway, this became kind of a ramble.
Remote skills are the new “computer skills.” If your org sucks, yeah, remote isn’t going to work. That’s not an issue with a remote operating model, it’s because your org sucks to begin with (whether that’s due to ineffective line managers, failure of executive leadership to cultivate the appropriate culture, what have you). If your org sucks, I recommend voting with your feet.
Remote really requires a specific type of person, and a curated environment. Having a "place' separated just for work is a huge boon, and many people used to going into an office just don't have that. I think that is ultimately why orgs built around remote work perfectly fine - the people working there are already in the habit of creating their work/home separation, used to making their own meals, used to keeping their own desk clean (Without outside social pressure to do so.)
Not all companies are gonna be remote only. If you want fully remote, go find a place that is fully remote. They have existed for quite some time.
Personally I think we are gonna rapidly revert right back to the mean, which is what life was like back in 2019. The idea that this last year is somehow gonna usher in a new age of remote work is… wishful thinking. Tech companies invest a ton onto their office experience. There is a reason for that.
https://distantjob.com/blog/yeah-but-yahoo-learning-from-rem...
> Which brings us to the ban on remote working. Mayer took over as CEO at Yahoo! in July 2012, so calling everyone into the office in February wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction. The memo, authored by Jackie Reses, says, ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.’ In other words, this is the old water cooler myth rearing it’s ugly head again.
> It wasn’t just regular remote workers who got asked to stay in the office. The email also targeted those who stayed at home when needed, ‘for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration.’ For whatever reason, Mayer had decided that she wanted her staff in the offices at all times.
With regards to reverting back to the mean, I wish you the best if you’re trying to attract talent. They have options now.
And when she had a baby, she had Yahoo build a nursery for herself in the office, to give an extra Fuck You to all her employees. Mayer was a Machiavellian corporate climber from her first job out of college as Larry Page's Girlfriend at Google and getting installed as a senior exec before doing any substantial work of any kind.
It seems extra hostile and punitive because they didn’t necessarily want people to actually “come back”
Well, yeah. If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that having their time and attention isn't important to you.
As Aaron Burr in "Hamilton" so put it, you have to be in the room where it happens.
As an introvert, I flip that around. If I have to engage in social games to improve things, I am instead just not going to bother and will confine my ideas to my conversations with co-workers laughing at inefficiencies and failures.
This may be an uncharitable reading of what you said, but you're implying that introverts are special fragile people who can't be bothered to share their brilliant ideas.
If someone comes up with an idea, and they think it's a good idea, it's their responsibility to advocate for it. They're already that idea's #1 fan. They're uniquely motivated to get it out in the world. How can they get others to take them seriously when they can't even take the initiative to share it themselves?
Sure, maybe some people are true solitary geniuses. But that's a waste of genius if they can't effectively communicate their thoughts with other humans.
Ed: incidentally, suggestion boxes (mentioned nearby in the thread) are also probably not helpful. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, I assume those are ignored and don't bother.
Depending on your approach, you'll get differing amounts of information from different people. A more charitable reading of the post you replied to might be: You shouldn't be content getting information only from those who like to talk and volunteer information.
You have to be effective in managing people. Maybe some people like to socialize an idea in their in group before they find someone to champion it. Maybe others like to write up their thoughts and share the doc on chat. Maybe others like to whiteboard it out after talking to someone at the bar.
But all of them actively push change.
That being said, developers are in a very unique position because they are the ones who actually build the product. If you can’t sell your devs on an idea, it ain’t getting built.
The process of getting to saying what your idea is? Frequently, especially if it is very informal or reliant on social cred to get into the room.
I mean the agile manifesto is all about human interaction. People over process. Face to face conversation over piles of stale documents.
Are we done with agile? Is it time to embrace the waterfall?
Alternatives to hallway conversations in increasing depth:
* slack message
* README.md
* RFC
* Business plan
Plus there’s always zoom or the phone if you really want to shoot the shit.
Slack is good for easy questions where you already know how to convert your thoughts into words. If you don’t because your thoughts are currently encoded visually… slack (or any online medium) doesn’t work. In the real world I would almost always abandon the slack conversation and go visit the person / people.
Email is crap for communication, at least for my working style.
The rest are okay when you’ve got a lot of clarity already but not so hot when you are very early in the ideation phases.
All of your substitutes are significantly lower bandwidth, much more latent mediums.
You can’t replace face time with online. You just can’t.
I’ve long held that the secret to FAANG company success wasn’t their technical prowess or even their products. Is that they have superior software development processes. Their secret sauce is their process. Companies with shitty offices, crappy untrusting management, and heavyweight processes get beat by those with processes similar to FB or Google.
You’ll note that all the companies in FAANG invest a shit ton into their office experiences… well except Amazon.
Give it a year and life will look much as it did back in 2019.
For instance, I would never work in an office again and because there is a developer shortage, that requirement hasn’t impacted my market rate, which is on par for the valley.
Having worked at one of the FAANGs I would definitely not say they have a superior development process. Waaaaay too much middle management baggage and drag. They are successful due to first mover advantages, network effects, regulatory capture and in some cases a literal monopoly.
Zero of the FAANG companies had a first mover advantage.
* Facebook replaced MySpace within the course of like a year. Today TikTok and other things threaten them.
* Apple... well... it was for a long time a huge underdog.
* Amazon... born in the dot com era. At the time lots of people thought the company was gonna implode any day. It took like a decade before they even remotely generated something other than a loss.
* Netflix... was DVD's, competed against brick & mortor and companies like Kozmo. Today it competes with media companies offering their own streaming service.
* Google... plenty of search engines came before google.
Not sure how any of these companies became successful because of regulatory capture, network effects or even literal monopolies. None of these companies could be successful in the long haul if their products sucked. Building non-sucky products involves a hell of a lot more than just developers sitting at home writing code 24/7. Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.
Network effects are all over the place, mainly FB and Google.
> Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.
For the most part, large companies “innovate” via acquisition.
The Hiptop/Sidekick and Palm Pilots were already popular long before the iPhone came out. They just weren't nearly as good and the companies couldn't overcome the carriers' poor business plans.
If you can’t take a step back and make a paragraph, and instead attempt to just bombard others with your thought-stream and let them sort it out, then maybe YOU are the problem - face-to-face or not.
Untrue. My DMs are open.
If introverts aren't voicing their ideas, what are we supposed to do, read minds?
For example, something where folks ask "please post your papers and ideas to this shared document repository where they can each then be read by the team at whatever pace is required."
A collection of folks read the documents, write about which ideas they like, then make a decision based on the contents raised in said papers, all over text mediums.
Something like that is an alternative to a world where whoever speaks loudly fastest, and to the right people, has their idea taken seriously.
Hallway conversations are temporal noise, at best.
But, say you have some half-baked idea and want to talk it out with a coworker next to you. You both roll over to the whiteboard in your pod and start scribbling, both of you exchanging high-bandwidth information via utterances, gestures, and facial expressions with millisecond roundtrips. Third teammate overhears and rolls over, contributing further. This scenario IME used to happen a lot, created a lot of value, and is hard to replicate with a scheduled meeting or documents because the communication roundtrips and bandwidths are atrocious.
Half the time I don’t need to ask for help because in the comfort and focus of my home office I can figure out much more difficult problems then I could when a sales dude was closing a deal next to my desk, or having half the devs at my table coughing and sick.
Documents are useful when the volume of details is too much to remember in a conversation, and to communicate with wider audiences, but for communicating key points in a small group, conversation is vastly more efficient.
In person can truly make a difference. You're all subject to the same distractions, can keep each other on task, and pound through collective decisions in a way even a video chat can never facilitate well.
A hallway conversation is a random happenstance between a couple of people. Any decisions made are going to have to be communicated more broadly as a next step anyway, which will require written communication.
It’s pretty hard to read and comment on HN when you’re in the office. Especially an open office where everyone can see your screen.
I feel all these "solutions" just tell the other type of 'verts' to suck it up and adapt to the other style.
Think Lex Friedman in a one-on-one vs. Joe Rogan with 2 guests at the same time.
Here's the thing: Data on serendipitous meetings is going to exist primarily in the form of anecdotes! Fundamentally.
And I really take issue with the racial angle that feels like it is basically part of every single NYT article these days. A lot of the issues reported here feel valid, but just zooming back out (maybe pun intended?) for a second, this reporter seems to be arguing that actual face-to-face interactions are so fraught with racism that minorities need to be "protected" by remote work
Historically, here's how it has worked throughout history: To break into a field as a member of an under-represented identity group in that field, you had to be "So good, they can't ignore you." In fact, there are many areas of human endeavor where "So good, they can't ignore you," is just the regular price of entry. It is, in fact, the standard price of entry for those entities known as "startups."
Is this, in an absolute sense, fair? No. There are always going to be proxies to actual merit used in evaluation. That's just the reality of how non-omniscient beings work. We can only strive to make things as fair and accurate as we can. That certainly does not mean seeing that the lever is thrown one way, then wrenching the lever the other way. The lever needs to be changed from being a dumb lever and hooked up to meaningful data.
https://www.brandeis.edu/parc/accountability/oppressivelangu...
[edit] They just removed it. Here's what they had previously: https://archive.is/NR0Zj
> The term picnic is often associated with lynchings of Black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against Black people.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
I don't even click on NYT articles any more (and no, I didn't read this article either, just curious about the comment section).
Maybe racial issues are that present? Should the NYT hide them or report them?
Many believe (without putting too fine a point on who) racism has always been that present, but was ignored by those who could ignore it, who it didn't affect, or who didn't care or wanted to perpetuate it. In part, that was because the media, from news to entertainment, could ignore it and didn't want to annoy its white consumers. That perpetuated ignorance - white people rarely talk to black people, especially about racism; they rarely see it in their media; and therefore they didn't know how bad the problem was. Then, when it's reported, white people think it must be exaggerated, because it doesn't match their prior mental model - a viscous circle.
That's my experience: I had no idea how omnipresent race issues were until some experiences in my life (unrelated to mass media) changed that. Then I realized it was being covered up, with varying degrees of intention and ignorance.
Note also that it's a common response to issues of racism: Do nothing about the racism and attack the messenger. That's arguably the biggest way it's perpetuated. So let's not focus on reporting on racism; what do we do about the much larger issue of racism itself? The former seems discussed on HN much more commonly than the latter.
Yes. There are smart people with compelling anecdotes on both sides of the debate.
1. Monitoring/counting "spontaneous interactions" is extremely difficult.
2. Simple "counting" of spontaneous interactions seems like exactly the wrong approach, because one would probably expect that 99% of interactions would be mundane but then 1% would be important.
3. How do you define "innovation"?
4. One might suspect that the benefits of in-person interaction would show up on longer timescales rather than shorter timescales. For example, this article is long on pointing out that how in-person interactions can be detrimental to minorities and women, but my opinion (not fact, just opinion) is that basically all of my closest business connections were formed in person. Now that I'm late in my career remote vs. in-person is not as critical to me because I have a strong network, but right out of college it was critical, and my career would have suffered greatly had I not forged those relationships early. I got every single one of my jobs after my first through my network that started in my first job (not necessarily directly, but often times through the "hey, I heard from someone they are looking for XYZ, and I heard you might be looking" channel).
Sounds a lot like masks.
If you care to open your eyes the data is easily locatable from reputable sources online. One overview article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
And I really take issue with the racial angle that feels like it is basically part of every single NYT article these days. A lot of the issues reported here feel valid, but just zooming back out (maybe pun intended?) for a second, this reporter seems to be arguing that actual face-to-face interactions are so fraught with racism that minorities need to be "protected" by remote work to be on equal footing. If that is the case then we should address the root cause, not put everyone in their home office "safe space".
And to clarify, I'm not even commenting on the pros/cons of in-person interactions. I'm just commenting on yet another media piece that cherry picks some research and quotes to make their own opinion sound like it has more backing than it actually does.