
Beyond Remote - antgoldbloom
https://vimota.me/writing/beyond-remote
======
Cthulhu_
I wouldn't mind so much working from home I think, but I'm privileged in that
I'm a homeowner and have a desk in a bedroom away from the rest of the family;
a lot of people don't have this. So if remote-first becomes a thing, the
workers have to be able to afford and live somewhere comfortably.

But if I were to work for a remote-first company, I'd expect them to pay a
stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not
having office space. A quick Google indicates office space costs about
$500-$650 a month per person (in Amsterdam, according to Google's summarized
results from instantoffices.com), or between 150 and 450 euros / month per m².
With that money, as an individual, you could also afford a spot in a co-
working space if need be.

I think a $500 or €500 / month stipend or reward for working from home is
fair; it's a decent amount of money, and I'm pretty confident it's still
cheaper than renting an office - you don't just save on rent, but personnel as
well, and things like support and maintenance contracts on the utilities,
coffee machines, etc.

~~~
kees99
Given that "central" office expenses are taxed differently (more favorably)
than payroll, it might make sense to pay "remote/wfh" office expense
separately.

That being said, how do you calculate the amount? Say, if I rent a 3-bedroom
apartment for €1200/mo, and use one of the bedrooms as my home office, is
€400/mo reimbursement fair? What about if I work from a living room? What if I
own the place I live in? Can I include ISP expense too? etc...

~~~
dijit
Solved in other societies already;

In Sweden you can claim a tax deduction on the square meterage of a room that
is used exclusively for work, but it must have a locked door.

I live in an 82sqm apartment and I have a 2.5x2 (5sqm) room. So I can work out
the percentage of the apartment that is office and file that as a deduction.

In my case roughly 6%.

~~~
bregma
I don't have a door that locks anywhere in my home. Not even to the outside.

Where I live (Canada) there is a similar deduction for a home office but no
requirement about having a locking door. That would simple be unenforceable,
since tax auditors have no right to enter your home to ensure deduction
guidelines are being followed.

We do, however, have a mountain of paperwork to file for both you and your
employer to vouch that working from home is a necessary part of the job, and
you have to be swear that that portion of your home you claim is not used for
non-work activities more that some small amount of time. My estimate was
around 5% of my home.

I suspect there are going to be fireworks in the near future as tax
legislation changes are debated, with the never-homers trying to quash the
forward-thinkers and their changes to the system. I also foresee insurance
companies jumping in to take their cut.

~~~
dijit
This might be an example of the cart leading the horse.

Adding a lockable door is a reasonable requisite imo, if you're working from
home full time and you're reducing the tax then the tax authority would prefer
that you can't/won't use that space for personal use.

The Tax authority not being able to enter your home to ensure that does not
remove the requisite of at least having a physically separated room, obviously
there is give & take here. If you are given a bonus under the table from work
that is also tax fraud.

~~~
throw_away
Maybe solving this with a tax thing this way wasn't such a great idea after
all.

Heh, what about making employees who want to go to a real office pay for the
privilege (with pre-tax money, of course)? If a job must be done on-site, then
management must justify it in their budget and have the proper incentives to
avoid it if possible.

------
benatkin
"Beyond Remote" makes me think of dystopias. I think in the future much fewer
people will commute, so if it isn't remote, what will it be? I can think of
several possibilities:

1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps
company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that
people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that
is proposed to Basic Income.

2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR
system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by
people flying and driving less.

3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your
every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and
everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad.

4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like
people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of
"my cell phone" in the early 2000s.

~~~
ehnto
You weren't kidding when you said it reminded you of dystopias! Riffing on
your ideas in a not so serious way:

Guaranteed Jobs would be more like Mandatory Jobs, or "Work for Welfare", a
step toward government indentured workers maybe? Couple that with supplied
housing and we're basically at serfdom again. Sell their time to corporates to
add in that capitalist twist we know and love!

Remote but hooked into VR sounds like it's just another way to measure butts
in seats. Monitor peoples time and actions while they're on the clock. Fuck
it, sell that data too. How can we monetize knowing how often people pick
their noses?

The first step into a VR first society perhaps, all the better as the
environment around us collapses. We stop travelling thanks to various
catastrophes, then we stop noticing the world being further exploited.

While Australia was held captive by catastrophic fires, barely able to breath
the air in our cities, our government was fresh off the phones selling vast
forests to mining companies and opening up clearing rights to export farmers.

------
blunte
> perhaps in your twenties you prefer to be nomadic, but in your 40s you'd
> like to have the stable work hours of having teammates in your timezone

I think regardless of your age, you probably prefer to have teammates in your
timezone - or at least have the ability to communicate with them reasonably
easily (when you need them).

Regarding nomadic vs stable, I suspect that's more of a family/relationship
factor rather than an age factor. With family and kids, stability is just
easier. Just having a family with kids is a special challenge, so being a
traveling family is a special challenge that few people seem to do (although I
admire the ones who pull it off well! their kids get such a broad and dynamic
taste of life early).

~~~
eloisant
The timezone question is also about your family status.

When you're single it's OK to work late at night for meetings with a far away
team, when you have kids and they go to school:

\- the 5pm-8pm time when they're awake and at home is a time you want to spend
with your kids. Can be challenging when you're in Europe working with the US
west coast, because that's precisely the best overlap time

\- you have to wake up anyway to send them to school, so you can't just move
your sleep schedule

However, when you do have this flexibility, sometimes the timezone difference
can be helpful by splitting you day between one "communication period"
(timezone overlap) and "no distraction period" (coworkers are asleep)

------
zcw100
Everyone is trying to understand what wfh is going to look like but I don't
think they really understood what working from an office was really all about.
Working from home is going to involve some very minor and inconsequential
technical issues. WFH is really about power and control. Being able to
physically control your body is a large part of that. It also severely
curtails your alternative employment options. It isn't very easy to buy a home
or even to break a lease which limits you to about a 120mi radius. Now compete
with opportunities offered by the world. That's the problem. What's really
going to keep employers up at night is the thought that their work from home
employees realize that they're more like free agents than employees and there
really isn't a need for middle management.

~~~
bernawil

      I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about.
    

So right.

Working from a big corporate campus: gee, this team member is in another
floor, I better talk to him via IM and email.

Working from small startup open office: gee, this team member is opposite
myself from this small common table, better talk to him via IM, we don't want
to bother every single person in the open-plan office.

------
vimota
Author of the post here. Most of this is speculation obviously so I expect
lots of opposing opinions - happy to discuss or answer any questions about my
perspective!

~~~
mikro2nd
Hi Victor,

Enjoyed your post, and as someone who has worked remote-only for >5 years, can
only agree with "not enough [focus] on what work will actually look like and
how culture needs to adapt".

One area you didn't touch on, which I find most interesting in these present
(challenging) times is, "How do we improve the tools?"

Right now, experienced remote-workers _know_ to do things like _explicitly
tell co-workers_ stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." \-- all that much-needed
overcommunication that is necessary to replace face- and body-language cues.
Is it just a question of aculturation as remote-work undergoes its own Endless
September, or could we build better, richer, more intuitive tools? (And not
just for devs/knowledge workers! Think of all the GPs triaging their patients
with Zoom right now. There have to better tools for them!)

~~~
ghaff
>explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min."

I guess it depends. I don't do development but none of the people I work with
have any expectation that if they send me a chat message/SMS/email that I'll
respond to them this very second.

~~~
mikro2nd
Yep, it's very context-dependent. I was just pulling an example from a hat.
Point being that, in general, you learn to communicate a lot more and a lot
more explicitly than people are generally used to doing.

------
a_imho
Might be projecting here but I find this minutiae regarding embracing remote
as a first class is just beating around the bush, people are pro/con depending
on how they expect it would affect their salary.

[https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-
a-w...](https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-
look-like/)

~~~
ghaff
That post isn't really about remote work as such though. (Which tends to focus
on a desire for people working remotely for SV companies to earn SV developer
compensation while living in Des Moines.)

It's about complete offices/teams in Europe earning much less than if they
were in the US. Which is, indeed, one of the reasons (though not the only one)
that many larger companies have significant software development offices in
places like Eastern Europe and India.

~~~
a_imho
Do you think there is a difference between remote and remote in the US?

That post is about work done remotely, nothing more nothing less. It is merely
an artifact of the current implementation that some can be vastly
undercompensated due to their lack of bargaining power. Or you can say it is
engineered to be that way if you are less generous.

If covid makes companies transition to remote first, what advantage remains
over overseas workers? Will it justify the much higher salaries? That is what
makes people uneasy imo, not that they have to do standups over zoom, I don't
buy that. The answer is obviously not much, but it has been the case for quite
some time. Personally I don't think this mass transition will happen this time
either.

------
bfdm
I think the points about challenges or switching and the likely future of
heterogeneous office/remote balances are all strong.

Where this lost me was on this claim about salaries:

> I suspect the multipliers companies use to determine wage per city will even
> out to the efficient frontier of wage to cost of living as employees
> allocate themselves to the optimal locations.

I think this is a temporary situation until there is a critical mass of remote
roles/companies. If I live in a lower COL region but looking at remote roles
I'm not competing with people near me, and the employers are not competing
with employers near me. I'm competing with people who can do the work I do,
and the employer is competing with all other remote-capable companies. I think
the only shape of this that might work is treating the target time zone as a
single market. Assuming comparable skills, a worker in Boston, Atlanta, NYC,
Toronto, Nassau or Bogota shouldn't have wide compensation differences.

It's possible that this leads to a net reduction in salary for many, as big
companies "figuring out" remote might make formerly-painful offshoring more
workable and attractively inexpensive.

~~~
satysin
As someone who has worked remotely (from home) for many years now I find this
whole enlightenment employers and employees are having right now quite
interesting/entertaining.

However one thing that I dislike is this talk, mostly started by Facebook as
far as I can tell, about reducing salaries for employees who move to cheaper
places to live.

Sorry but that is _BULLSHIT_.

When I take on work I have my fixed daily rate that I charge whether I am
working from Paris, SF, London or the Welsh Highlands.

My employer is paying for my time, expertise, knowledge, experience and
delivery quality.

I am _not_ worth more or less because of _where_ I work.

This is typical of employers trying to maintain that dominant position over
the employee because suddenly they have been forced to adapt to this changing
world and they don't like.

My wife works a normal office job for a big, global company. Like most others
they had to adapt to 100% WFH with a few days notice and after some teething
problems it is working exceptionally well.

This realisation has upset a lot of middle managers and "old school" types who
_live_ for the office.

However the facts don't lie. Meetings still happen. Everything has been
delivered on time. All of the things middle managers say _require_ being in
the office continue to happen with an issue.

It is almost as if all of these middle managers and old school thinkers are
suddenly scared everyone will see through their bullshit and that flexibility
works best for everyone.

Now I feel this evidence gives employees a lot of leverage to push for more
flexibility in where they work. This upsets the employer/employee dynamic.

It may well be much easier for an employee to find another job for a better
salary at a company the other side of the country and that is a risk for the
employer.

Sure you can say "yes but now that employee is competing with people all over
the country as well!" and that us true. However it is easier for an employee
to change job than it is for an employer to recruit and get a new employee up
to speed. This gives the employee a much better deal hence this bullshit
display of "we're still the ones with power damnit!" from companies needing to
change but being scared shitless about the advantages that gives all their
employees.

As I said at the beginning I have been a remote worker for a number of years
now and for _me_ it is perfect. I can (and do) pop into the office when needed
but I get to live in a nicer, cheaper area with more space and an overall
nicer environment. Where I live suddenly wasn't restricted to "how long will
it take me to get to work from here?" and _that_ is fucking freedom.

I fully appreciate I am not like everyone else. There are people who _need_ an
office. That's fine, nobody is saying ditch all the offices and we all work
from home. Just that it should be an option rather than being forced into a
single location for no quantifiable reason.

For all the crap companies talk about the environment, quality of life, etc.
there needs to be a serious change to how we work.

Forgetting everything else, just reducing the number of cars on the road every
day for a pointless commute to the office would be worth it from an
environmental standpoint.

~~~
fermienrico
> I am not worth more or less because of where I work.

You're worth less now because the job applicant pool just became worldwide
instead of just where you work.

~~~
_ZeD_
AT MOST, the pool is the same timezone part of the world.

I saw too many problems when you are +8 or -4 hours of the rest of your team.

~~~
bregma
I manager a medium-sized team that spanned from UTC+3 to UTC+8 with me in the
middle at UTC-5. It was great.

Of course, it depends on what you do and how you work. If you job is to sing
choral music, then yeah, there's going to be trouble. We were software
developers.

------
29athrowaway
One important aspect is missing in this analysis: Timezones.

Timezone differences make a big difference in day to day collaboration.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
another possible difference is language competency on a project basis, not
everyone speaks English that well, which means local work may have a benefit
over remote work if customer default language is not English.

Other things may also pertain, for example working on government projects
requiring security clearance or at least no criminal record.

~~~
29athrowaway
There's proficiency and fluency, and they may not be the same for written and
spoken English.

------
bryanrasmussen
Ok a question about all this remote work - why hasn't outsourcing generally
been that great an experience for companies?

I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly
productive.

Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some
people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were
generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India
in India seemed lower quality.

Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work
is generally fantastic?

~~~
marcosdumay
You mean literal "outsourcing" where you send requests to companies whose
incentives aren't aligned with yours and expect them to fill the details on
your best interest?

Or by "outsourcing" you mean simply hiring remote people? Because comparing
with the one above makes little sense, yet I don't think many people use that
second meaning.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Outsourcing in the first sense, I think your answer is the best one for
clarifying why this is different than the whole outsourcing movement was - and
why this seems to be working while outsourcing did not.

------
dependsontheq
I think it's pretty funny that people seem to miss some central rules of the
internet. The more connected something becomes the more centralized it
becomes. So having more remote work will shift the best people even more to
the GAFAM job opportunities and that's the main reason why they are doing
this.

