<story><title>Coinbase will be a remote-first company</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-remote-first-company-cdac6e621df7?gi=97cf312cab0b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LB232323</author><text>I have been working remote by choice for years. You don&amp;#x27;t have to stay at home, you just need internet access. This means you have the freedom to work from anywhere on the globe as long as you can access the web.&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty straightforward advantage of the internet. Some jobs have always been &amp;quot;remote&amp;quot;. For example, writers still type their manuscripts from anywhere and mail them to editors. However, only some jobs work like this. When I did service or blue collar work I always had to be on the site to physically work the capital.&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;career ambition&amp;quot;, you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.&lt;p&gt;Instead, you have the freedom to actually live your life. Be with you family, friends, pursue your passions, even something as simple as being able access nature or travel freely. Whatever living means to you beyond working.&lt;p&gt;From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult. I understand the power balance as a worker. In any job, I want to put in my time and hard work, earn an honest living, and then be free to live as a real human being.</text></item><item><author>Cookingboy</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted.&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to stay home forever I&amp;#x27;d have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don&amp;#x27;t get from being remote 100%. I&amp;#x27;ve also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests.&lt;p&gt;But again, maybe I&amp;#x27;m the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I&amp;#x27;ll likely cross it out from my list of places to work.&lt;p&gt;Also I saw this from the blog post:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are.&lt;p&gt;Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don&amp;#x27;t see how that&amp;#x27;s possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition.&lt;p&gt;From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway&amp;#x2F;micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that&amp;#x27;s already made.&lt;p&gt;The cynical part of me thinks all this &amp;quot;WFH Permanently&amp;quot; initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k&amp;#x2F;yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sverhagen</author><text>&amp;gt; I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult.&lt;p&gt;Notice taken. Good for you (not sarcastic). This is why you &amp;quot;have been working remote by choice for years&amp;quot;. But as the OP said:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If I wanted to stay home forever I&amp;#x27;d have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago&lt;p&gt;...and he didn&amp;#x27;t. Neither did I. In the past I have worked remotely for about a year, it wasn&amp;#x27;t great (admitted that company wasn&amp;#x27;t set up for it). I am doing it now, and I&amp;#x27;m miserable about it.&lt;p&gt;So, OP&amp;#x27;s point seems not that something is inherently wrong or bad with either mode of working, rather that people who used to be going to the office may not necessarily be happy, or interested, to become remote workers. (Not even because it works well for you.)&lt;p&gt;I did a nothing little survey during our past team retrospective, and from a dozen of folks 1) most of them want more days working from home than pre-pandemic, 2) most of them would then want more work time in the office than from home, and 3) all of them are desperately looking forward to going into the office again for any sort of time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Coinbase will be a remote-first company</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-remote-first-company-cdac6e621df7?gi=97cf312cab0b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LB232323</author><text>I have been working remote by choice for years. You don&amp;#x27;t have to stay at home, you just need internet access. This means you have the freedom to work from anywhere on the globe as long as you can access the web.&lt;p&gt;This is a pretty straightforward advantage of the internet. Some jobs have always been &amp;quot;remote&amp;quot;. For example, writers still type their manuscripts from anywhere and mail them to editors. However, only some jobs work like this. When I did service or blue collar work I always had to be on the site to physically work the capital.&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;career ambition&amp;quot;, you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.&lt;p&gt;Instead, you have the freedom to actually live your life. Be with you family, friends, pursue your passions, even something as simple as being able access nature or travel freely. Whatever living means to you beyond working.&lt;p&gt;From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult. I understand the power balance as a worker. In any job, I want to put in my time and hard work, earn an honest living, and then be free to live as a real human being.</text></item><item><author>Cookingboy</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted.&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to stay home forever I&amp;#x27;d have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don&amp;#x27;t get from being remote 100%. I&amp;#x27;ve also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests.&lt;p&gt;But again, maybe I&amp;#x27;m the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I&amp;#x27;ll likely cross it out from my list of places to work.&lt;p&gt;Also I saw this from the blog post:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are.&lt;p&gt;Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don&amp;#x27;t see how that&amp;#x27;s possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition.&lt;p&gt;From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway&amp;#x2F;micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that&amp;#x27;s already made.&lt;p&gt;The cynical part of me thinks all this &amp;quot;WFH Permanently&amp;quot; initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k&amp;#x2F;yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cookingboy</author><text>&amp;gt;As for &amp;quot;career ambition&amp;quot;, you can make plenty of money or a modest income from remote jobs. Beyond jobs, you can easily own an online business or some other digital capital through the same infrastructure. There is more to life and to work than a high salary. Greed is not a virtue.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;You don&amp;#x27;t have to sell your soul and most of the waking hours of your life to commute to an office, deal with the attached bullshit, and integrate yourself into the corporate machine.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sorry but that came across as both condescending and judgmental. I know plenty of people chose the life they have here because they &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to, not because they &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to sell their soul or what not. There is a lot more perks from having a fulfilling job other than making a big paycheck, it ranges from working closely with amazing people to tackling challenging and fun problems.&lt;p&gt;I know for sure the reason I go to work these days isn&amp;#x27;t because of money, since I&amp;#x27;m past the point where I care too much about it.&lt;p&gt;Finally there is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing financial success. Having desire to &amp;quot;enjoy nature&amp;quot; and having desire to &amp;quot;have money&amp;quot; are both greed, just in different forms. I definitely do not consider myself morally superior just because I enjoy hiking...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;From the outside looking in, the mirage of SV corporate culture seems really fake and hollow. I do not want a hip fancy office full of zany perks and a weird cult.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been both inside and outside of SV (worked in Texas, Bay Area, and now in Seattle), and I have to say your understanding of SV culture is extremely superficial, likely augmented by the cherry-picking examples and sensationalized media portrayal.</text></comment>