I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies.
This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.
My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones.
I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.
This conversation, when I've had it with people, usually ends up with the same conclusions: people would like to see their coworkers face-to-face like.... a couple times a month. People have deep relationships with others without needing to see them 5 times a day, after all!
I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.
> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
This is going to be the big struggle for teams who formed in person but are now hiring remote.
I joined my current company about six months prior to the pandemic and had ample time to get to know my colleagues face-to-face, making the transition to remote working very pleasant. I'm not sure if the experience has been the same for people we've onboarded remotely; they're productive but I'm unsure if it'll be easy for them to build up the same kinds of relationships.
You also tend to get into situations where there's a social divide between a subset of the team who have constantly worked together synchronously in the past and new starters who only appear in 2D on Zoom. This may not be a problem for some people, but it's a concern for someone like me who gets a lot of their daily social interactions via work.
There's definitely a social part of work that, IMHO, waxes and wanes as you go through life. In your 20s and pre-family it's a significant aspect of your social life. Then I think it wanes as you have a family and kids when you don't have enough time for everything and work socialization is a chore. Then I think once again after the kids move out work socialization becomes more important again.
> I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face.
One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year. Obviously not everyone can every join all of them, but I'd imagine most still would do 2. Ideally the families should also be invited.
I am sure it would still come out cheaper than maintaining office space and build stronger relationships than the mere coffee break talk.
> My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
None. I started 3 different consulting jobs during the pandemic and always felt very productive and very connected to my colleagues, even though I never met them.
One thing that I've expressed to my company and coworkers is that I'd like to see full remote become more of a norm but I'd also love to see team building events remain as well. If there are a few times a year where everyone congregates in one location (probably at less expense than actually keeping an office set aside for them for the year mind you) and has a picnic or hackday that sounds awesome to me.
The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
This rings true for me. I was in a very hectic workplace when the pandemic began and was able to function pretty much as effectively as I would in office.
Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.
Personally, I have joined a company and scaled the team from 12-52 engineers over the pandemic. Our productivity is through the roof and everyone is getting really well and forming good connections.
> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.
IME these relationships are a function of how much time you spend talking with people and not of physical proximity. At my last job the person I was closest too was on another continent. We worked quite closely so I spent way more time talking with them then some people that sat a few feet away from me. We knew each others lunch and break schedules better than the people we ate lunch with.
There is a tendency to talk more with people next to you and only zoom someone for direct work discussion, but in both scenarios there's room to force some socialization. In our line of work we even have tools like pair programming to enforce these relationships.
I was a good bit more productive over the first few months of the pandemic than since then, and I attribute some of that (though not all) to the fact that most of the work I was doing in March to June of 2020 was on projects that had been originated back when we were in the office, while the projects I've worked on since then were originated after we went remote.
This isn't quite about relationships because I knew the people involved before; it's more about not having information that you tend to get just from being around the office. I'm not saying this is an argument for going back into the office so much as being mindful about communication.
The team I was on had never met in person. I think fully remote can work for a large portion of the population, once the same effort and resources are provided to them as in office workers.
I feel in opposite way and my experience including few years of pre pandemic remote working.
At office you can work together with same peoples over years but not get any real clue about who they are truly, because lot of politics, pretending and fears included in office life. On remote work peoples usually more open, honest and direct, in most cases it easiest for them to share stuff that they have passion about or describe real issues in life (But I think that also not true if your work required to do lot of short projects with different peoples).
Also, if you already work with someone for a long time remotely it always nice to meet him in real life and get to know little more.
I wish society learned that there are things more important then corporate efficiency. Maybe optimizing for our quality of life should take precedence over squeezing out that last 10% of work effectiveness.
I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.
Europe seemed to have realized this a long time ago. Many Americans still make work much of their identity, and worshiping The Line (the stock market) is in direct conflict with labor rights.
I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing.
When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother.
I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.
I have also been working remotely for the past around 7 years.
After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC.
It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in.
Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh.
I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
Similar experience. Pandemic made everyone work the same way I do. That said, I worked in 100% remote teams the previous decade so the Pandemic just opened up the rest of the industry as a potential place to contribute.
I do think many of the WFH productivity gains seen can probably be attributed to 2 things:
1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom.
#1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen.
#2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.
>compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
A big problem with hybrid is that you're forced to live in the same locality as the office, and most companies aren't subsidizing rent, but at the same time you need a decent office setup at home to be effective and that isn't cheap.
I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.
My worry is: let’s say my employer finally gives in and lets me work full time remote. Great! I can finally move to the Nevada desert or somewhere with low cost of living. I will likely take a modest salary reduction. Still wonderful! What happens 3 years later when there is new leadership or something and they pull a Marissa Mayer and declare remote work “bad” again, and recalls everyone to the headquarters? Now I’m fucked. I need to move back to the Bay Area after 3 years of housing price inflation! It’ll never work out. I fear once I leave I’m never coming back if the company changes it’s mind about remote work.
As a junior engineer, this is how I felt. Before the pandemic, getting help was as easy as sending a ping and rolling my chair over. Now, ironically, it's far harder to get help, as getting into a meeting (even a short, impromptu one) is a significantly bigger deal.
I go into a minor state of social anxiety and just struggle to get anything done for a good 10 minutes before a meeting. Mainly because there's far more of a "I'm interrupting this person" feeling when I can't see their screen.
I think we're going to see a massive knowledge gap start to manifest itself within the next 1-3 years. Employees that are junior or started during WFH are going to find it difficult to stack up against senior engineers who have been around since before WFH.
Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.
I think that's an interesting point - most of us more senior folks either have an innate work ethic or have been trained for years to fear a boss looking over our shoulder when we're checking facebook or whatever... Training good work ethic into people who have never worked in an office is an interesting question society will face - but do bear in mind that there are plenty of jobs that are pretty much unsupervised from day one. While a super market might look really open and visible stockers can wander off for a bit without anyone noticing and a lot of the contractor-employee jobs (uber, lyft, roofing) have never had much on site oversight.
Why? I would think most tech related learning happens with out other people involved. Learning languages, self study, Stack over flow and simmiliar, reading books. Idk if junior employees need to coddled as much as people think. Maybe just the bottom doesn't cut it. Developing your knowledge on your own is a skill you need any way.
"but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions"
About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides.
My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen.
I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk.
I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.
> My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved.
I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned.
And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
We would basically get few people that will abuse it and slowly we will get back where we were. Worked in a company that was flexible about WFH but they had to change these policies because of those people.
Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.
I care much more about personal relationships than work relationships. For me, as a person who was already working from home my dating and socializing options got much better now that people don't have to work in the office. I can travel together with my significant other much easier as well.
My employer walked back all their remote work promises. In fact, the new policy is more restrictive than the old one, which allowed at least some flexibility in work arrangements between supervisors and their direct reports.
Yep. One of the FAANGs recently published a 2-weeks/year remote-working policy as part of going back to the office, whereas before the pandemic you could just ask your manager for permission and there was no 2 week limit. Kind of like the ever-increasing chocolate rations in 1984.
The whole 'matrix' of people vs productivity is interesting.
I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office.
I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity.
I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.
There is a right number of days per month where you have to meet people and socialize. It wasn't 22. It is not 0 either. But I believe it is closer to 0 than 22. Personally I feel about 5 days a month would be the right amount to trigger all the benefits of in person knowing.
i’ve worked remote full-time for eight years. The first year she was pretty weird, was a good employee? yes. But managing my home life and my work life was something I was still figuring out.
Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to.
I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point
I was mostly just referring to the fact that team/org/company productivity does not seem reduced compared to pre-pandemic times. As far as I know, no major tech company is dealing with more outages/incidents or slower product launches than they typically saw, unless their business model was directly impacted by spending pattern changes. I think most companies expected lower output from forced-all-remote teams but don't seem to be seeing it.
Replacing predictions with experienced reality. Seeing things continue as normal and at full pace while working from home which many expected was not possible.
Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it.
Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?"
Then, everyone will get to work from home.
Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office.
It's such a joke too.
My firm is letting us know they will be so benevolent as to give us 20% time WFH "hybrid" once we return but "you can't just all take Fridays" and "we will set the WFH schedule for you initially".
Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..
I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example, teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with local people for lunch and so on.
There will be a lot of opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside of work etc.
I think this will lift us out of depression and improve economy in many ways.
The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.
That last sentence has me baffled so I'm just going to ignore it - the rest of your post is interesting.
I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives.
The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working.
I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.
I've been back in my company's office in person (medium-sized tech company) for the last week with a small subset of employees before we all go back, and I've become pretty convinced that these hybrid models will not go well. Even while wearing masks and social distancing, I feel far more connected to the others that work in the office, and whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in collaborating effectively and deciding who gets what work, who gets promoted, etc. If everyone can choose whatever combination of remote and in-person they want, it seems impossible to me that there won't be extremely strong in-group/out-group effects that will cause big organizational problems for companies. But I'm saying this as a young person excited to work in person, so maybe others (parents, those with long commutes) feel it's still worth it.
TBH your personal experience has no bearing on mine. I can't help but feel like people with _opinions_ like yours are going to ruin it for the rest of us who are orders of magnitude more productive at home. "But I can't socialize"... I don't care. I would rather not work in tech anymore than return to an office full time.
I also think my point was about companies/organizations as a whole rather than individuals. Remote might be optimal for lots of individuals, maybe even the majority, but my guess is that the conditions it creates will cause an organizational problem. I don't think incentives between employees and companies are necessarily aligned here.
Where I last worked it was common to have your manager be in another country, sometimes with a pretty difficult time zone difference.
I was remote but many offices had a butts-in-seats policy because of unapologetically old-school top management. Fortunately there were quite a few middle managers who were able to creatively route around this inefficiency.
I don't know how long your commute is but I shudder at the notion of wasting my time physically travelling every day. Fortunately I am fully remote for at least the near future and I wouldn't mind travelling out every quarter for a week or something or some sort of periodic in-person work period. But sitting in traffic every day of your work week is no way to spend your life. Even taking mass transit means less flexibility in your day if it's not the automobile commute.
> whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in collaborating effectively and deciding who gets what work, who gets promoted, etc.
You're assuming a bunch of stuff here. There's something to be said for:
1. Having known people pre-covid, and so having a predefined "connection" with them.
2. The kinds of work that would or would not be more susceptible to personal bias. Web development, for example, is more impervious than people-management.
Ultimately what you're talking about is bias, and bias is shit and should be minimised. Remote working shouldn't be compromised as a result of people not being able to be impartial in their work.
Meanwhile I used to go into the office 3 days a week. That gave me enough face to face personal connection, while giving me two days without a commute to have a life, and get my head down and churn things out.
I hate the office but I will be back in as many days as possible as soon as possible. I am not going to be part of an out-group to an in-group that contains the people who decide promotions.
I have no doubt the people who come back to the office the quickest and the most often will get better raises over the next few years on average vs THOSE remote people.
I don't know the term for this, but in-person contact is important for metagroups/in-groups at work. People who are coworkers, but also friends as well, to an extent. People that you trust more than others not part of the group, and who you might even become friends with outside of work. I've found developing relationships like this impossible while fully remote.
I personally felt more connected and more aware of what everyone was doing when we switched to remote because people had to overcommunicate and write docs instead of having private conversations I wasn’t invited to.
This is great news for some, but not for most. What will happen is that most employees will choose to return to onsite work because of the perks and deeper connections with colleagues.
If most of your team is not working remotely - let's be honest - it'll be hard for a remote worker to not feel disconnected with the rest of the team.
It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they didn't reduce my salary when I moved from an expensive city to a cheap mountain town, I just didn't get raises for a few years because my comp ratio was too high. I don't understand why people would rail against this kind of policy. It certainly didn't motivate me to move back to an expensive city.
I'm not sure how well this would work out for those geo-arbitrage digital nomads, but I don't think that companies should be particularly accommodating that corner case.
I don't understand this take at all, it's effectively saying that your pay should be driven by your needs as opposed to the value you create. I can see companies deciding that in-person value is different than remote, but where you are remotely doesn't matter. Especially in the same timezone. Working remotely from Kentucky vs Brooklyn makes no difference to the company, so why should they pay them differently? Do you ask people what their net worth is, and then pay high-nw people less since they clearly don't "need" it? What about DINKs?
I think companies will only get away with this as long as the supply of remote work is low. Once you start to see hard-to-recruit people leaving for higher paying remote work at another company rates will go right back up. Geo-Arbitraging digital nomads are only a corner case because most people don't realize it's an option. Once it becomes the norm then what?
Your compensation is driven by several factors, the two biggest being how much value you generate and how easy you are to replace. It has nothing to do with your needs. Even Google's official compensation policy explicitly notes that cost of living is not a factor and only local competition density is.
The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.
People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.
It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.
Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.
People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.
An element that is often missing from the conversation is the opportunity cost of the employee. A significant portion of a worker’s compensation should to go paying his opportunity cost. I think that despite similar productivity and the recent rise in remote work, an employee’s opportunity cost is reduced if they move to a remote mountain town.
It happens because pay is balancing employee demands with company number needed. Employees in lower cost areas will very often accept lower pay. It's still often very high pay for that area. I grew up in oklahoma where median entry pay for tech is roughly half of bay and fb is way above median pay in the bay. So to many people from back home even if fb gave an offer 30-50 percent less it'd still be much better than most local options. While I expect more companies being remote to put some pressure on salaries upward I do not expect it to ever be equal to hcol areas. I expect it'll converge to like 20-30 percent lower. Noticeable but still massive gain for those places.
The primary factor that defines compensation is competition; the market-clearing wage is a supply/demand thing - ask yourself whether junior developer productivity is that much higher now than a few years ago despite soaring pay.
Your value-added just represents a ceiling on how much its rational to pay you in some sort of vague career-adjusted terms; the vast majority of people don't even have jobs where that can be measured. Even those where it looks simple (say, sales) are actually much harder than you'd think.
This actually happened to one of my former teams. We lost 50% of the team in the space of a few months. As far as I know everyone got 10%+ raises from value-focused employers over the regionally paid company.
> I don't understand this take at all, it's effectively saying that your pay should be driven by your needs as opposed to the value you create.
Yes? Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?
Look, I'm all for less exploitation of workers, but I don't see how it's suddenly outrageous for American workers to experience employer relationships the same way those in India, Australia, or Vietnam do.
For new hires I suppose it's okay but to adjust the pay of an existing worker whose output remains the same afterwards because they relocated is a bit insulting to me. It's a pay cut, not a "COLA".
This is irrelevant, though. You aren't paid based on your output, you're paid based on how much you cost.
Think of how much you pay for water. In place A, you might pay $0.02 per gallon of water. You move to place B, and they only charge $0.01 gallon of water. Are you going to keep paying $0.02/gallon? The value that the water provides to you hasn't changed, but why would you keep paying $0.02 when you could get it for $0.01?
In FB's view, you aren't any different. Even if you provide the same value, there's no reason to keep paying you $300k when they could pay you (or someone who replaces you) $150k.
My experience with these kind of dislocations is that your HR department starts tracking your target number internally based on your new circumstances and you don't see any pay rises until that number exceeds your actual.
I think it would be reasonable to pay people extra if they live in an expensive place, and the company actually needs them to be in that place. Like maybe they have to be able to get on site at short notice, so they need to live right by the office, or the data center.
The CoL adjustment is max 15% within the US. If you’re moving out of SF or NY to a lower CoL area, you’re making bank just on the taxes, much less CoL.
My office before the pandemic was basically people looking at screens and slacking each other rather than lifting their head up an inch to speak - literally even if the person was one chair over from them.
When we went remote, nothing changed other than people no longer had to commute. The feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly and consistently positive. Nobody wants to go back full time - ever. The most they’ll concede is a day or two per week, but I strongly suspect reality will be less than that.
Speaking as someone who now works remotely permanently, this has been... life-changing.
So for 10 years I lived in NYC and--don't get me wrong--there are lots of things I liked about NYC but I'm so over the summers and the winters. Also bear in mind that I think NYC is infinitely better for most people to live in than the Bay Area.
But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
Add to that that for the same price as my 50 year old 1 bedroom in NYC I now live in a 3 bedroom duplex apartment. I spend a ton of time outside and this has greatly increased my mood and wellbeing.
There are things I definitely miss: camaraderie with my coworkers, free food and the like but honestly I'm just over going into the office. I'm not sure I'll ever do that again.
The ability to live anywhere in the country just opens up so many possibilities.
It's worth noting that this doesn't enable a true digital nomad lifestyle if that's what you want. That's because you still need to be employed somewhere and you and the company are subject to the employment rules (and taxes) in that locale. Maybe that will change in the future.
> NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity
That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical. The city comes alive in such a unique way, people are outside relaxing in the parks, having backyard and rooftop parties, heading out to the beach on the weekends. There are a bunch of great weekend trips to be had a few hours away by train in Long Island or Connecticut or upstate NY. You can join an after work rec league with friends. There's concerts in the park once or twice a week, and free movie showings on the waterfront. The bars and restaurants are more lively.
One of the best parts of NYC in general is just how much there is to do if you like getting out and being social, and in the summer it's just turned up to the max.
Most apartments don't come with AC, but as long as you can afford $300 for a good floor unit to put in front of the window you can keep your home temperature very comfortable.
>> NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity
> That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
This, to me, is a perfect illustration of why the future of work is neither everyone staying remote nor everyone returning to the office. Some individuals thrive in close, convivial environments, others thrive when given the space that only comes with remote working; still others are at their best with a balance of the two.
Acknowledging and embracing this social diversity will be key to employers attracting and retaining the best talent in the post-pandemic world.
> I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
Summers in NYC can be quite mild. If memory serves 2016-2019 were all quite mild with only very brief hellish patches. Some earlier summers though were... horrible.
For me, the magical time in NYC is spring and fall, specifically May and September-October. Those are my favourite times in the city. The days are still relatively long. The weather is nice and mild.
But there is something about the oppressive heat radiating off the sidewalk and the buildings and the air is humid and completely still that is just completely draining to me, in the height of a bad summer.
Did you commute every day on the subway? If so how long?
I lived in NYC for 10 years and I hated the summer daily commute because all that aliveness led to hangovers and me sweating all that magicalness out daily on my walk and wait on the platform.
You aren't wrong that NYC is great in the summer but it's also a special kind of hell with heat and humidity. Both can be true.
FWIW I was shocked how brutal the NYC summer was, and I’ve spent most of my life in Arizona and Texas. I’d guess it’s mostly the humidity and the stagnant airflow.
> But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
You're comparing FL winters to NYC summers? I'm not sure exactly where you are in FL, but... in most of the state, it gets as hot or hotter than NYC in the summer!
Well it's June now. We're pretty close to what summer is.
For the record, I'm in the Miami area. I think it's a little cooler here than some places more inland and upstate. Or maybe I'm imagining things. But what a difference the trade winds make (to me at least).
Like I said, it's June and I'm still not using the AC. I just open up my house and enjoy the breeze. Some people, particularly up north, like the have their AC on 60 and wear layers indoors. For me that's a meat locker. I'm all about it being 75F with a breeze inside.
I've never lived or spent significant summer time in Florida or New York City, but your descriptions of summer weather sounded surprising to me. I looked up weather data, and Jacksonville, Miami, and Tampa all get significantly hotter (4-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher average temperatures in the hottest part of summer), muggier, and cloudier in the summer. Only Miami is consistently windier in the summer than NYC. Is the wind the only difference you're talking about? At least on paper, it looks like I would vastly prefer the summer weather in NYC.
Not op but have lived in Florida and NYC. I suspect the gap partially relates to the "constructed"/human/social aspects, and not the raw weather itself.
A NYC subway car without AC when it's 87 degrees outside is worse than 100° in Florida; Florida is a lot more effective AC, pools/lanais, open spaces.
If you’re moving from NYC to Florida as a techie you’re making some bank and are in a nice, modern place with central air near the water, golf course, or whatever your thing is.
In NYC, you’re almost certainly in an older, smaller building and likely have lousy HVAC. The subway is great, but in many stations you learn to love the unique aroma of garbage juice mixed with hot piss that tends to be a thing.
My guess is that a large part of the difference in indoor environments would be humidity + CO2 levels. Florida buildings are designed for a lot more airflow and have more attention paid to up-front HVAC design, so there's less "sick building syndrome" type stuff going on.
In a Florida summer, the outdoors is a swamp, but you don't have to spend much time there. The whole place is built for cars; you can (if you wish) go straight from building A, to your car, to building B. Presuming underground parking, you might never even touch non-air-conditioned air.
In an NYC summer, meanwhile, in many buildings, the indoors is the swamp. (And often their attached yards / alleyways as well, if they're enclosed around by tall buildings.)
15 year NYC resident, spend many long weekends going down fo FL in summer.
In NYC it may be a little cooler, but your exposure to the elements is constant. You walk to the train, lunch, coffee, dinner, groceries, etc out on the sweaty sidewalk.
When it's 90F, the train station might be 100F and train at best 80F though often much higher.
You can live in a $2-3 million apartment yet have a lobby not be air conditioned, nor the hallways or elevator. No one has pools. You can go down to the park by the rivers, but you aren't going in for a swim. All the concrete & asphalt absorb and radiate the heat.
I'd go down to FL in summer since if it's going to be 90F+ and humid, I'd rather be able to jump in the ocean or a pool.
Imo focusing on weather is overrated. I worked in the bay area for 3 years, and year the constant weather is cool but for me, far more important is where my friends, family and the things I want to be near are. A nice house, cool activities, vibrant community and stores, etc.
Not saying those things are in NYC, there's many other great cities, but I definitely wouldn't pick a place just for the weather.
IIRC part of South Florida (around Ft. Lauderdale) is the only tropical rainforest climate in the CONUS.
I've spent time in the mid-Atlantic region and time in South Florida. Miami in July is the closest thing to hell on Earth. But I'd rather deal with that and live in a beautiful climate year-round than deal with north eastern winters.
> But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F.
What part of Florida? It generally starts hitting 90 in May most of the state and stays there into November.
I've lived in NYC and yes, January-March can be tough and a few weeks in September are awful but Florida is just oppressively hot for six+ months of the year. The worst part is it doesn't cool down at night so you don't even get early morning or late night comfortable outside time
Miami. I'm not sure it's hit 90F hit but it's definitely hit 85-88F. So close. I'm not sure how much hotter it'll get but I'm all about it still.
I've thought about why this is. Not commuting I think is a big part of it. So the weather doesn't have to bother me if I don't want it to. Like I literally don't have to go anywhere.
I think the trade winds are a big factor too. Hot, humid and still is a special kind of hell.
Another is expectations. Like if you live in Miami you just assume it's going to be relatively warm (even hot) and humid. It's not a surprise.
Lastly, I have more space here and more facilities where I live. I can go for a swim easily even if I don't want to go to the beach.
I have been to Tampa in June/July years ago and that was hell. My circumstances were different and I'm sure my attitude was too. It actually turned me off Florida for years. Up until last year actually.
Funny story: when deciding where to work remotely last year I was strongly considering Dallas (maybe Austin) and decided on a whim to go to Miami instead. I said if I don't like it I'll just go to Texas. I haven't left. Funnily enough, in that time Texas had the big arctic storm and a foot of snow in Austin. I think I made the right choice.
It’s possible if you become a contractor. That’s what I am now, and I have worked for two companies so far. I live outside the states now.
But it does mean dealing with your own taxes, charging a higher rate to compensate for those taxes and other bills, etc. however, I’ve found that I can charge higher and the company can still save money simply because they don’t have to pay for things they would normally pay a permanent employee.
But, it does come with a risk of losing your job more easily.
I grew up in Naples. If you have only been there 6 months, you haven’t lived there during the summer yet.
That said, I actually love Florida’s climate. The problem with Florida for me is the lack of outdoor activities, especially in the summer except for the beach and boat.
I personally prefer the bay areas hiking, access to park, playgrounds etc, but if you prefer beach, Florida is amazing and you adjust quickly to shorts 320 days a year.
It's the best. I was able to move out of the place I was in, which was a traffic-dominated hellscape and a complete "non-place" and the ultimate marriage of convenience (and not even that convenient), and move to a great place with fresh air near a great beach for a similar price. I've got a tan this year already. Not because I'm trying, but because I went from trying my damnedest to never leave the house (the surroundings were that boring and unpleasant) to now getting outside every chance I get, because I want to. It's so obvious - spend your life in a place where you want to be. But it took a pandemic to give me and my employer the nerve to do it.
This is a work policy. These are things I tend to take pretty seriously (YMMV). So, if the policy doesn't allow that that's the standard I'm going to live by rather than playing the game of "will I get caught?"
It's also why I've never taken a single document or line of source code from any company I've worked at.
Never been to Florida, but from all the cyclists I know, it sounds like the third circle of hell from about May to October. Between the humidity and the bugs and the rain (rain? in the summer? crazy to this west coaster!), I couldn't do it.
I've honestly been thinking through what it would be like to have a second full-time job. And by that, I mean actually executing satisfactory work for two organizations for the long-term. I work in a relatively niche space and am able to operate at a more efficient level than the type of employee most companies are looking to hire for the salary the employer wants to pay.
I make good money but if I ran at 100% capacity, I'd run out of things to do. Unfortunately at this point, there aren't a ton of opportunities to lead larger teams at larger organizations so I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just pick up a second job doing what I'm doing now.
Effort and execution-wise, I can't imagine it being a problem. If it were, I'm pretty sure I could outsource certain tasks to overcome those hurdles.
The part I'm not so sure about is maintaining visibility and how on earth you could coordinate meetings to avoid being double-booked while still maintaining at least the appearance of availability. I guess the difficult part with what I do is the fact that I do need to communicate with a fair number of people within the organization.
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This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people work remotely.
A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and the in-person ones.
I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental break between home & work has increased my productivity.
I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.
This is going to be the big struggle for teams who formed in person but are now hiring remote.
I joined my current company about six months prior to the pandemic and had ample time to get to know my colleagues face-to-face, making the transition to remote working very pleasant. I'm not sure if the experience has been the same for people we've onboarded remotely; they're productive but I'm unsure if it'll be easy for them to build up the same kinds of relationships.
You also tend to get into situations where there's a social divide between a subset of the team who have constantly worked together synchronously in the past and new starters who only appear in 2D on Zoom. This may not be a problem for some people, but it's a concern for someone like me who gets a lot of their daily social interactions via work.
Of course thats just a generalization.
One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year. Obviously not everyone can every join all of them, but I'd imagine most still would do 2. Ideally the families should also be invited.
I am sure it would still come out cheaper than maintaining office space and build stronger relationships than the mere coffee break talk.
None. I started 3 different consulting jobs during the pandemic and always felt very productive and very connected to my colleagues, even though I never met them.
The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.
Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.
IME these relationships are a function of how much time you spend talking with people and not of physical proximity. At my last job the person I was closest too was on another continent. We worked quite closely so I spent way more time talking with them then some people that sat a few feet away from me. We knew each others lunch and break schedules better than the people we ate lunch with.
There is a tendency to talk more with people next to you and only zoom someone for direct work discussion, but in both scenarios there's room to force some socialization. In our line of work we even have tools like pair programming to enforce these relationships.
This isn't quite about relationships because I knew the people involved before; it's more about not having information that you tend to get just from being around the office. I'm not saying this is an argument for going back into the office so much as being mindful about communication.
At office you can work together with same peoples over years but not get any real clue about who they are truly, because lot of politics, pretending and fears included in office life. On remote work peoples usually more open, honest and direct, in most cases it easiest for them to share stuff that they have passion about or describe real issues in life (But I think that also not true if your work required to do lot of short projects with different peoples).
Also, if you already work with someone for a long time remotely it always nice to meet him in real life and get to know little more.
I recently read Russel Bertrand's essay "In praise of idleness", he made this observation that work efficiency dropped during the world war but life still went on. This was from switching to production for the world war over consumer stuff. His overall point was we should have kept the same amount of consumer work we were doing but get rid of the war production and just kind of chill and enjoy life. I think there's a parallel to the pandemic, where we made this big adjustment, maybe we were less productive, but with wfh quality of life went up in a way. Maybe we are OK with less effectiveness. The world as we can see didn't end, despite a decent effort.
I've been remote most of my professional life. The only hang up was meetings where half team was in office other half was remote. It created an odd "legs in two boats / chasing two rabbits and catching none" vibe. Now with everyone Zooming together it's smooth sailing.
When the pandemic is over. Kids are full time in school. Restaurants, bars, stores, and life is normal... It will be even smoother.
I am concerned for real estate because those values could plummet in traditionally high cost of living areas which may put pressure on companies to bring employees back inhouse to keep land value high.
After my initial experiences I have decided that remote only works under certain conditions and the most important is that all meetings are from your personal (office or home) PC.
It doesn't work when the team has meetings on site but don't bother to invite the odd one remote guy. It likewise doesn't work when people sit together in a conference room but you are one of the few calling in.
Bad audio both ways, problems phoning in, people just plain deciding to not bother setting it up... ugh.
I am happy there is now no shortage of remote options.
1) Many workers (but certainly not ALL workers) had a much more quiet and focused work environment at home, compared to their buzzing open-plan desk in the office, making them more productive.
2) COVID severely limited socializing, so some people poured that time into work out of boredom.
#1 is constant, and might get better for some when schools and daycares fully reopen.
#2 is starting to go away and will be gone by next year.
I think this point gets really overblown by people who put too much of a tech lens on things. I've been in many, many different offices (I'm a consultant) and open plan offices are very rare outside of tech, and on top of that, most non-tech workers do not see "more quiet and focused" as a good thing. Most of my non-tech clients have constant back-and-forth dialog in the office, and removing that has, at least in my experience with these companies, made them less productive.
Of course managers want to "wfh" taking calls by their pool and outdoor bar
I moved apartments (from a studio to a 1-bedroom) at the start of COVID because it was basically impossible to work out of my bay area studio for a full day. I didn't even have a desk, because prior to COVID I basically only used it to sleep and rest, not work. I got a good rent price on the 1-bedroom because of COVID, but rental prices are going back up already.
I go into a minor state of social anxiety and just struggle to get anything done for a good 10 minutes before a meeting. Mainly because there's far more of a "I'm interrupting this person" feeling when I can't see their screen.
Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.
About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides.
My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortable or large enough. Your internets are shit and you only have a small laptop screen.
I have forked out on a shit load of screens, wireless keyboards and mice. You want a docking station - OK. Whatever you want. Yes I have sent the phone and yes just plug it in ... the VPN adds a bit of latency, just slow down a bit when you talk.
I am not just quite good with deploying VPNs, I'm a fucking ... OK, I can make VPNs work quite well. I've seen a few use cases recently.
I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned.
And it's driving my depression insane knowing my work and personal are all in the same room. WFH works if you can separate yourself from your person quarters but when you can't it really bites.
Also people in managerial positions absolutely like being in office, so they will also add more pressure for going back.
I thought that I'd be more productive working from home, and initially I was. But now I'm interrupted more by my family than I probably was in the office.
I'd assume that people living alone are 'interruption free', but that doesn't necessarily equate to better productivity.
I never thought I'd be back in the office and more productive than being at home, but, well, here we are a year on.
Are people.. better humans when spending more time in solitude & less around others where cognitively-draining politics is inevitable?
Am I better am I a better employee now? I think I am, because I can always make time for work if I have to, and I know how to make time for my family if I have to.
I think I would work better at home than I would at the office at this point
Curious, what are the outcomes?
Our company was quite restrictive of working from home previously but after last year seeing that we had our most productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
All these millionaires will immediately realize that the vaccine that is 99.999% is still not worth their kids' lives. No matter how low known risk is, it's not worth it.
Cough and whisper "why can't I taste anything?"
Then, everyone will get to work from home.
Nobody will get an advantage of being at the office.
Keep coughing.
Well the CTO & half of his reports were already doing Friday WFH before the pandemic, so.. clearly some people can all take Fridays off, and 20% is nothing new for some people..
The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging cafes and "restaurants" is over.
I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives.
The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working.
I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.
Dead Comment
I guess we will find out in the next couple years who just has a terrible _opinion_ and who is 'the rest of us.' You may not like how that turns out.
Parent of three, going on four. Get me out of here!
I'm in SF, but my manager has been in NY for the last 3 years. Being managed from a different office seems to be common in large companies.
I was remote but many offices had a butts-in-seats policy because of unapologetically old-school top management. Fortunately there were quite a few middle managers who were able to creatively route around this inefficiency.
Just let there be a relatively permanent core and the rest of us can just shop on the open market for advancement.
You're assuming a bunch of stuff here. There's something to be said for:
1. Having known people pre-covid, and so having a predefined "connection" with them. 2. The kinds of work that would or would not be more susceptible to personal bias. Web development, for example, is more impervious than people-management.
Ultimately what you're talking about is bias, and bias is shit and should be minimised. Remote working shouldn't be compromised as a result of people not being able to be impartial in their work.
I hate the office but I will be back in as many days as possible as soon as possible. I am not going to be part of an out-group to an in-group that contains the people who decide promotions.
I have no doubt the people who come back to the office the quickest and the most often will get better raises over the next few years on average vs THOSE remote people.
The dynamics here are pretty much face up.
For some Facebook employees, definitely. Personally, I think I'll be finding a job elsewhere now.
If most of your team is not working remotely - let's be honest - it'll be hard for a remote worker to not feel disconnected with the rest of the team.
Roughly, "senior" at a lot of places.
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It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they didn't reduce my salary when I moved from an expensive city to a cheap mountain town, I just didn't get raises for a few years because my comp ratio was too high. I don't understand why people would rail against this kind of policy. It certainly didn't motivate me to move back to an expensive city.
I'm not sure how well this would work out for those geo-arbitrage digital nomads, but I don't think that companies should be particularly accommodating that corner case.
I think companies will only get away with this as long as the supply of remote work is low. Once you start to see hard-to-recruit people leaving for higher paying remote work at another company rates will go right back up. Geo-Arbitraging digital nomads are only a corner case because most people don't realize it's an option. Once it becomes the norm then what?
The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.
People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.
It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.
Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.
People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.
Your value-added just represents a ceiling on how much its rational to pay you in some sort of vague career-adjusted terms; the vast majority of people don't even have jobs where that can be measured. Even those where it looks simple (say, sales) are actually much harder than you'd think.
tl;dr: because they can. You’re not paid based on how much value you provide - you’re paid the smallest amount possible to stop you from quitting.
Yes? Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?
Look, I'm all for less exploitation of workers, but I don't see how it's suddenly outrageous for American workers to experience employer relationships the same way those in India, Australia, or Vietnam do.
This is irrelevant, though. You aren't paid based on your output, you're paid based on how much you cost.
Think of how much you pay for water. In place A, you might pay $0.02 per gallon of water. You move to place B, and they only charge $0.01 gallon of water. Are you going to keep paying $0.02/gallon? The value that the water provides to you hasn't changed, but why would you keep paying $0.02 when you could get it for $0.01?
In FB's view, you aren't any different. Even if you provide the same value, there's no reason to keep paying you $300k when they could pay you (or someone who replaces you) $150k.
I don't understand why you would accept this if you don't have to?
When we went remote, nothing changed other than people no longer had to commute. The feedback from the team has been overwhelmingly and consistently positive. Nobody wants to go back full time - ever. The most they’ll concede is a day or two per week, but I strongly suspect reality will be less than that.
So for 10 years I lived in NYC and--don't get me wrong--there are lots of things I liked about NYC but I'm so over the summers and the winters. Also bear in mind that I think NYC is infinitely better for most people to live in than the Bay Area.
But I now live in Florida. It's about the 182nd day in a row where it's been 70-80F. Sure it's humid and that may sound weird after the comment about NYC summers but NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity. Here there's usually a breeze. I've been here 6 months and I don't even use the AC.
Add to that that for the same price as my 50 year old 1 bedroom in NYC I now live in a 3 bedroom duplex apartment. I spend a ton of time outside and this has greatly increased my mood and wellbeing.
There are things I definitely miss: camaraderie with my coworkers, free food and the like but honestly I'm just over going into the office. I'm not sure I'll ever do that again.
The ability to live anywhere in the country just opens up so many possibilities.
It's worth noting that this doesn't enable a true digital nomad lifestyle if that's what you want. That's because you still need to be employed somewhere and you and the company are subject to the employment rules (and taxes) in that locale. Maybe that will change in the future.
That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical. The city comes alive in such a unique way, people are outside relaxing in the parks, having backyard and rooftop parties, heading out to the beach on the weekends. There are a bunch of great weekend trips to be had a few hours away by train in Long Island or Connecticut or upstate NY. You can join an after work rec league with friends. There's concerts in the park once or twice a week, and free movie showings on the waterfront. The bars and restaurants are more lively.
One of the best parts of NYC in general is just how much there is to do if you like getting out and being social, and in the summer it's just turned up to the max.
Most apartments don't come with AC, but as long as you can afford $300 for a good floor unit to put in front of the window you can keep your home temperature very comfortable.
> That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical.
This, to me, is a perfect illustration of why the future of work is neither everyone staying remote nor everyone returning to the office. Some individuals thrive in close, convivial environments, others thrive when given the space that only comes with remote working; still others are at their best with a balance of the two.
Acknowledging and embracing this social diversity will be key to employers attracting and retaining the best talent in the post-pandemic world.
Summers in NYC can be quite mild. If memory serves 2016-2019 were all quite mild with only very brief hellish patches. Some earlier summers though were... horrible.
For me, the magical time in NYC is spring and fall, specifically May and September-October. Those are my favourite times in the city. The days are still relatively long. The weather is nice and mild.
But there is something about the oppressive heat radiating off the sidewalk and the buildings and the air is humid and completely still that is just completely draining to me, in the height of a bad summer.
I lived in NYC for 10 years and I hated the summer daily commute because all that aliveness led to hangovers and me sweating all that magicalness out daily on my walk and wait on the platform.
You aren't wrong that NYC is great in the summer but it's also a special kind of hell with heat and humidity. Both can be true.
You're comparing FL winters to NYC summers? I'm not sure exactly where you are in FL, but... in most of the state, it gets as hot or hotter than NYC in the summer!
For the record, I'm in the Miami area. I think it's a little cooler here than some places more inland and upstate. Or maybe I'm imagining things. But what a difference the trade winds make (to me at least).
Like I said, it's June and I'm still not using the AC. I just open up my house and enjoy the breeze. Some people, particularly up north, like the have their AC on 60 and wear layers indoors. For me that's a meat locker. I'm all about it being 75F with a breeze inside.
A NYC subway car without AC when it's 87 degrees outside is worse than 100° in Florida; Florida is a lot more effective AC, pools/lanais, open spaces.
In NYC, you’re almost certainly in an older, smaller building and likely have lousy HVAC. The subway is great, but in many stations you learn to love the unique aroma of garbage juice mixed with hot piss that tends to be a thing.
In a Florida summer, the outdoors is a swamp, but you don't have to spend much time there. The whole place is built for cars; you can (if you wish) go straight from building A, to your car, to building B. Presuming underground parking, you might never even touch non-air-conditioned air.
In an NYC summer, meanwhile, in many buildings, the indoors is the swamp. (And often their attached yards / alleyways as well, if they're enclosed around by tall buildings.)
In NYC it may be a little cooler, but your exposure to the elements is constant. You walk to the train, lunch, coffee, dinner, groceries, etc out on the sweaty sidewalk.
When it's 90F, the train station might be 100F and train at best 80F though often much higher.
You can live in a $2-3 million apartment yet have a lobby not be air conditioned, nor the hallways or elevator. No one has pools. You can go down to the park by the rivers, but you aren't going in for a swim. All the concrete & asphalt absorb and radiate the heat.
I'd go down to FL in summer since if it's going to be 90F+ and humid, I'd rather be able to jump in the ocean or a pool.
Not saying those things are in NYC, there's many other great cities, but I definitely wouldn't pick a place just for the weather.
I've spent time in the mid-Atlantic region and time in South Florida. Miami in July is the closest thing to hell on Earth. But I'd rather deal with that and live in a beautiful climate year-round than deal with north eastern winters.
What part of Florida? It generally starts hitting 90 in May most of the state and stays there into November.
I've lived in NYC and yes, January-March can be tough and a few weeks in September are awful but Florida is just oppressively hot for six+ months of the year. The worst part is it doesn't cool down at night so you don't even get early morning or late night comfortable outside time
I've thought about why this is. Not commuting I think is a big part of it. So the weather doesn't have to bother me if I don't want it to. Like I literally don't have to go anywhere.
I think the trade winds are a big factor too. Hot, humid and still is a special kind of hell.
Another is expectations. Like if you live in Miami you just assume it's going to be relatively warm (even hot) and humid. It's not a surprise.
Lastly, I have more space here and more facilities where I live. I can go for a swim easily even if I don't want to go to the beach.
I have been to Tampa in June/July years ago and that was hell. My circumstances were different and I'm sure my attitude was too. It actually turned me off Florida for years. Up until last year actually.
Funny story: when deciding where to work remotely last year I was strongly considering Dallas (maybe Austin) and decided on a whim to go to Miami instead. I said if I don't like it I'll just go to Texas. I haven't left. Funnily enough, in that time Texas had the big arctic storm and a foot of snow in Austin. I think I made the right choice.
But it does mean dealing with your own taxes, charging a higher rate to compensate for those taxes and other bills, etc. however, I’ve found that I can charge higher and the company can still save money simply because they don’t have to pay for things they would normally pay a permanent employee.
But, it does come with a risk of losing your job more easily.
That said, I actually love Florida’s climate. The problem with Florida for me is the lack of outdoor activities, especially in the summer except for the beach and boat.
I personally prefer the bay areas hiking, access to park, playgrounds etc, but if you prefer beach, Florida is amazing and you adjust quickly to shorts 320 days a year.
This isn't that hard to circumvent with a mailing address. The real blocker has been pre-covid management not being comfortable with 100% remote.
Ps - great baldurs gate 2 ref in your username :)
It's also why I've never taken a single document or line of source code from any company I've worked at.
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I make good money but if I ran at 100% capacity, I'd run out of things to do. Unfortunately at this point, there aren't a ton of opportunities to lead larger teams at larger organizations so I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just pick up a second job doing what I'm doing now.
Effort and execution-wise, I can't imagine it being a problem. If it were, I'm pretty sure I could outsource certain tasks to overcome those hurdles.
The part I'm not so sure about is maintaining visibility and how on earth you could coordinate meetings to avoid being double-booked while still maintaining at least the appearance of availability. I guess the difficult part with what I do is the fact that I do need to communicate with a fair number of people within the organization.
He essentially lives in a hacker commune, has been pulling in a half million a year, and plans to retire in his mid 30's and live off of the interest.
I envy his resolve, but it's certainly not the life for me.
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