https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/tech-workers-consider-escaping-silicon-valley-s-sky-high-rentsI have posted recently (today, yesterday, etc.) about what a dope-slap it is to realize how much is paid per employee in office space. I mean, why is it worth upwards of $12K per person to make someone be distracted and distracting in person, when they can be more productive at home, pay their own internet and phone costs, and feel grateful to you for not making them spend .75-2 plus hours of their day, five days a week, to come in and sit in that very expensive space and complain about it. Also, they pay their own TP costs, coffee / tea / sugar / creamer costs, and do not spread disease throughout the office. I mean, it has got to add up, right?
The Bloomberg article notes that a lot of people who are low on the ladder in the Bay Area (very expensive office rent and very expensive housing) are thinking they will be buying their house somewhere else and working remotely forever. Christy Lake of Tilio is quoted opining on the repercussions of this.
“It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says.”
What.
Why not pay Bay Area comps in Michigan? Why not promote remote workers MORE than local workers? If you can get several of your workers to relocate to roughly near each other but in a much cheaper part of the country, you can promote them and build a new satellite office to support them. Way, way, way cheaper than trying to bribe a bunch of people who stayed in the Bay Area and bought housing there to move to Michigan. Once people figure out that they can work for your snazzy company but live in Michigan — where they grew up — you get to hire absolutely everyone of any kind of quality in that area at all. It is the other meaning of rent, but it is Worthy. Instead of having to fight to get visas to import people, you can build out in another state. I mean, seriously. Let’s think proactively here.
I say this from the perspective of someone who grew up in Seattle, and experienced the impact of multiple waves of people moving from California to the PacNW. California has a history of exporting housing inflation. Wouldn’t it be nice if, for a change, they exported salary inflation? The housing is a one-time benefit for some family that sold their house, and a long-lasting hit to everyone else who now has to pay more for housing than before the arrival of the waves of people moving from California. The salary inflation would be a gift that keeps on giving to the local economy —- it would essentially export prosperity from the Bay Area to the rest of the country, in exchange for harvesting everyone willing and able to meet Bay Area corporate hiring standards.
ETA:
This is _hilarious_.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ntwe.12153Note the date published — November 2019!!!
We have sooooo many CEOs and other C-suite people in interviews — NOT anonymous! — being quoted as saying how surprised they were at how productive everyone has been able to be and blah blah blah. Double digit percentage increases in productivity being not at all uncommon — and this is with all the kids being at home, and no one being able to hire out the housework and so forth. Well, no wonder they were surprised. They were reading what the academic research on telework had to say, and if this is representative, it was All Bad for any amount of telework, and the more the worse.
I cannot EVEN. WTF, sociology.
I think the real problem here can be highlighted best by returning to my friend’s daughter’s remark about how the team members who are producing become absolutely obvious when everyone is working from home. The sociologists are basically looking at companies that are dipping a toe in the water of teleworking, and the instrument is a survey — all the performance metrics are completely subjective. If you listen to my cousin B., you would conclude from this that no one is doing any work anyway, and all those jobs should just Go Away. You can look at the the NYT Opinion piece about how we dump on the office, but will miss it when it is gone, and see, however, what is actually going on. The sociologists and the NYT opinion piece writer are all wildly in agreement: the organization and the job are only partly there to perform; they are mostly there to entertain the participants.
Which helps explain why people thought I would not stay retired. People thought I would get bored, and require the entertainment provided by a job.
Bwahahahahah.
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