WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs A web developer is the tech role most likely to be offered to work from home and also gets 39 percent more pay for the arrangement than other jobs, according to research. Looking at six million data points from Glassdoor, the employer comparison service, HR software biz Remote found 31 percent of web developer jobs say they …
The only reason business leaders are getting paranoid is because staff who work from home tend to expose the superficial management requirement that can happen in some work places .
Managers who are "nervous" must be wondering if the game is up, so to speak.
Luckily, I work with a manager who wants to WFH and we all get on splendidly.
It's weird that managers are not milking this whole WFH situation to their benefit.
If they feel they have not much to "manage", then what stops them to sign on multiple gigs at once?
They should just get them in different time zones so that the stand ups don't clash.
I've said this a number of times; I'm really interested to see what the face of the tech industry looks like in about five to ten years time, and what correlation there might be between the leading companies and companies that pushed to get their people back in the office.
Spontaneous innovation doesn't happen when every conversation is to a schedule. Learning by osmosis is certainly slowed, if not stalled, when people aren't talking freely. And while we might be alright with our skillsets, I've already seen new joiners struggling to pick up the necessary domain knowledge to do their job in a completely remote environment.
Some companies will adapt, of course - but others I can see struggling and possibly folding as those with the knowledge move on and those who replace them take longer to get up to speed.
The flip side to that is that distractions from loud and obnoxious colleagues are kept to a minimum when you aren't forced to share an open workspace with them. People can still collaborate via Teams, but doing it in a more structured way reduces interruptions, which in turn reduces coding errors and budget overrun. 5 minutes of distraction costs 30 minutes of productivity.
"Learning by osmosis" is another way of saying "picking up working practices from your co-workers rather than learning them properly," and in my field, people are just as likely to pick up bad habits rather than good ones. What is more valuable is having the time and opportunity to go off and research the correct way of architecting or implementing something. Google is pretty good at finding examples of best practice, and helping you avoid anti-patterns, as is Stack Overflow, which, if used properly, is a tool to find out how to do something, not what piece of code to copy and paste to get your project to compile.
Yes, there is a place for colleagues guiding and mentoring each other, and new hires may benefit from being in the office if they are very green and need constant supervision. For everything else, online collaborative tools and Teams chats and calls provide all the interaction experienced developers need. I'm not prevented from asking questions of my colleagues if I do it through dropping them a message on Teams, or via an email, it just means that their response will be at a time when they don't have their heads in something else, and is likely to be more considered.
If we're talking about which tech companies will be around in ten years' time, then it is going to be the ones that work with their employees to allow them to be flexible, which in turn leads to better productivity, and happier employees. Some will want to be in the office every day, some never. It turns out everyone is different, whodathunkit?
The tech companies that won't be around will be the ones run by the Elon Musks and the Alan Sugars of this world, who have a one-size-fits-all-fits-me attitude.
"Learning by osmosis" is also a way of being told "that's not the way things are done round here" - soul crushing for new blood entering the workforce (particularly new graduates who can suggest improved ways of working).
And the other big advantage of WFH is the lack of office politics, back stabbing and office cliques.
Remote working doesn't prevent any of the "that's not the way things are done round here" culture. In fact, I think it's slightly more likely to kill suggested improvements, because there is less of an opportunity to suggest the improvement casually to individual colleagues to get their thoughts before bringing it up to everyone in a larger team meeting. No matter where people are working, a workplace that doesn't want to change won't.
These things you speak of rarely happen in-office as well.
Why go above and beyond when you get the same departmental pay rise irregradless of performance, promotions are just excuses to allocate more work and the cost of having a house rapidly goes further out of reach.
Sadly the UK is choc full of out of touch boomers running the political system and most of the businesses.
But every conversation doesn't have to be on a schedule unless you're doing it wrong. You can message someone or put a question into a Slack channel or Teams and figure it out from there, whether that ends up being a one-on-one conferencing/screen-sharing session or maybe just a link to a doc or a code repo or whatever. People who've been working in a company with more than 1 office in more than 1 time zone have been doing this for years, long before this pandemic.
People who've been working in a company with more than 1 office in more than 1 time zone have been doing this for years, long before this pandemic.
Exactly. We've had geographically distributed offices and home workers for decades. It hasn't been a problem. Organizations with decent cultures can easily continue to innovate and share information informally in those environments.
Top companies pay top salaries and allow people to WFH. Unless the article is accounting for the same role in the same organisation then the research only tells us what we already know.
The only companies in the UK tech field not allowing WFH are the poor performing ones that uncoincidentally are choc full of washed up boomers that don't understand inflation or why people are looking to WFH in the first place.
I think you'll find that so-called boomers have lived through more than one financial "crisis" and periods of higher inflation and much higher interest rates than we currently have. The very act of naming an entire generation as "boomers" and lumping the blame onto all of them is pointless and just leads to antagonism.
There are a lot of people currently struggling through no fault of there own and they have my sympathy, but there also a lot of post-boomers struggling because they are living above their means on credit and have debts to service and little to no savings, which has been ok through years of low interest rates but is biting them now. How much blame they should shoulder for that is debatable since credit has been, IMHO, a bit too easy to get and may also be party blamed on the historically low interest rates and social pressure. After all, why save for a rainy day when money in the banks is just sitting accruing nothing and why not take out credit when it's free or almost free? There's a lot of blame to go around, but it's not all on one single ENTIRE generation.
You're gonna shit when you find out that 20% of UK pensioners live in poverty, and that poverty levels among single pensioners rose 22% over the pandemic. (The youngest boomer is 60 years old).
The idea that boomers are all living in fully paid-off 3 bedroom houses and enjoying luxurious defined benefits pensions is just pernicious bullshit sucked up by credulous morons.
20% of pensioners in poverty. Ok, quick google... 22% of the UK population as a whole are in poverty. That works out as 2% better than average. Ok, that's still not great, but it also demonstrates how easy it is to abuse statistics.
It's the government's fault that the average is shit poor in one of the world's supposedly richest countries. A government run by (checks notes) "the generation that came before generation X", if you don't like the term "boomers".
The poor are the poor, well, because they are poor.
Did the Soviets end poverty? no, Have the Chinese ended poverty? No. Poverty is the result of individual actions! Many people around the world have pulled themselves out of their parents poverty. Just because a country is Rich doesn't mean they can end poverty. Trying to do so only results in more people becoming poor!
The old saying is still true "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day (that is, in our world unless he sells the fish for drugs), teach a man to fish and you feed him for life!"
We tried a "War on Poverty" in the US. The result was the destruction of the very communities they "said" they were trying to help. Unfortunately, there are those who still refuse to admit this devistating mistake!
Ah yes, the Soviet Union, a great example of a rich nation, and as for China, take a look at the growing and increasingly affluent Chinese middle classes, and they started from a baseline of almost universal poverty.
As for the US approach of "a war on X"; none of the US wars on things have ever yielded a success. All this demonstrates is that declaring war on abstract concepts is a load of old bollocks. If anything, your political system is even more screwed and unrepresentative than ours.
The poor are, on the whole in the UK, poor because their income is low and cost of living is high. Minimum wages and regulation of essential utilities are well within the control of the government, but ours wants to go down the route of neoliberalism, with its concomitant deregulation and privatisation, which drives poverty. By the way, there's a reason it's called Neoliberalism and not Liberalism; a look back at history and what happened as a consequence of liberal economic theory might enlighten you.
Why would companies be willing to pay MORE for WFH, when employees want that enough they'd be willing to take less pay to get it?
I think there must be some selection bias here - i.e. companies are willing to pay more for top candidates, and top candidates are able to demand permanent WFH status. Meanwhile the lower level grunts are paid less and aren't in a position to dictate terms of employment to their employer so they have to report to the office.
Because those with the skills are now in a global market, not just in the town where they live.
Anathema for many companies, whose HR departments still haven't (/ don't want to) realised this, despite the evidence from the past 3 years and who are desperately fighting to maintain the status quo. For them, the workplace of the future looks exactly like it did 3 years ago, with a dash of home working for employees as a sop. Eventually, they start offering seriously inflated salaries to new starts, and continue screwing existing employees, whilst hypocritically parading their equality credentials.
Hi. Nice to meet you. It's Me. I would.
I mean, I already work from home so I don't have to, but if I had ever been offered it I'd have taken it. I was easily spending 3K a year on commuting which I now don't, so it would have been worth a 3K pay cut to WFH because not only would it make no financial difference to me once it all shook out, but I'd also be getting two hours a day of commuting time back. That's even more valuable to than the "dollar value".
In September last year, Microsoft found employers still don't know just how fruitful their staff are when away from the office, leading to "productivity paranoia." Some 85 percent of biz leaders say they have a "hard time knowing for sure that their people are being productive," the study found.
How do they measure their staff productivity when they are in the office? Or does being in the office instantly mean you are productive?
You measure productivity the same regardless of where someone is working, surely?!
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