>Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution so other companies can offer this flexibility as well.
I think this is a genius growth play for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Next, they should lobby to get US and EU to make short-term "tourism + wfh" visas more accessible so that this becomes even more popular. I think everyone wins here.
I'm not an immigration/tax lawyer and could be completely wrong but if you're from EU/US/UK/AUS etc I'm fairly sure you can work in another one of those countries for up to 90 days (and sometimes upto 183) without paying tax there or getting a work visa - as long as you're still resident and being paid in your home country under the Visa Waiver program.
I've worked in NY offices and got paid in UK (admittedly a while ago and for less than 90 days) - but can't see why working in an Airbnb would be different.
You can visit for 90 days but what you're allowed to do is restricted to tourism and "temporary business".
The US substantial presence test is actually something like 31 days in the current year, and ~180 calculated as a weighted sum of presence over all visits in the preceeding few years. That's just to determine if you should pay tax, and note that vacations to the US contribute. Whether you can legally work in the US is another matter. I had to get a a J1 visa for a two week stay in the US because I was being paid remotely by a US organisation. So in this case I was working but paying taxes elsewhere.
Most Europeans have access to things like cross border permits e.g. Switzerland/Germany and within the EU freedom of movement means it doesn't really matter much. You just register with the City Hall or wherever in your target country.
It comes down to how honest you are. Lots of digital nomads illegally claim they're on holiday, and who's checking? I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to pay a fee for a temporary work permit though.
90 days is the number agreed upon by company lawyers. Company lawyers do not have a sense of adventure, so this is a relatively watertight figure for most countries in the world and not dependent on your honesty.
Personally I'm curious about how they have rights to even know where you are at any given time.
If you're an in-office employee, your responsibilities are (a) show up at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.
If you're defined as a fully remote employee, your responsibilities are (a) be online and available at the expected work hours (b) get your tasks done.
Besides that you're just an amorphous black box, a person that has been placed in the cloud, much like a website placed on Cloudflare, where the input is money and the output is work. They don't need to know where you are, and I'd say they shouldn't even have a right to know -- that would be quite stalkerish, IMO. All that's really important is that this black box gets tasks done.
You can't just legally avoid taxes by not letting your employer know. Sure, they prob won't know and you'll get away with it, but you're technically breaking the law and an employer won't knowingly condone that.
So it's not that they have a right to know where you are, it's that if they do notice and not act on it that's a legal risk to them as well since they're enabling it. (IANAL but this feels common sense.)
I wasn't saying avoid taxes -- mostly just that the "90 day" thing is nonsense, because if you're a remote employee, you're effectively just a really intelligent amoeba on the face of the Earth without a well-defined location.
Pay your taxes, but if you say 153 days in Thailand or wherever you can get a long enough tourist visa, and use a VPN to the US and get your work done, I'm not sure why anyone would, should, or even has a right to care.
Thailand has a right to care. You're earning money and not paying taxes to their roads, police, fire department, etc—all the things govt provides. When you're a true tourist, you are likely making up for this by boosting the local economy.
Usually by being someone with money and spending it on rent, food, etc. you're already making up for this.
Countries with tourist visa stay limits are usually just to make sure you have the funds to leave. In general, if you come back the next day on another flight, with the intention of continuing to stay and spend money, they'll generally have no problem with it.
The company cares because they have legal obligations as well. Just because you pay for you taxes doesn't mean the employer is in compliance. Just like the US, many employers are obligated to pay additional fee/taxes/payments such as social security etc.
The simple answer is to do away with the notion that earning income should be taxable. Tax on the consumption side, it's easier to enforce and harder to avoid.
The problem with taxing consumption is that it's pretty regressive. Not to say that there aren't solutions, but the existing sales tax, gas tax, etc aren't it.
Taxing income is also regressive because most rich people have trust funds (and pay a flat 15% tax) or push luxury purchases under the guise of business expenses (and pay no tax).
Taxing consumption instead of investments and savings seems like it would guide society more towards saving and investment instead of short-term consumption, though, no? Personally I'd rather not have taxes at all, but if you forced me to pick on of the three I'd pick consumption every time.
Really depends on the person. I'm for privatizing all those things. No public spending on education, housing, roads, police, or military. Minarchists tend to prefer some services while anarchists may not want any government at all, thus no government expenditures.
Because the black box for legal purposes still presumes you are in-office. When you are remote, you are structured as working from your "home office" not anywhere.
Hm. What if my home office was a van, or a private jet?
Couldn't one just structure it as a consultancy? I mean, if I hire a consultant to do something for me, I could just pay them through PayPal or Venmo or even Ethereum and wouldn't need to know where their office is. Onus is on them to be legally able to work and pay their taxes.
That works because it’s a 1099 situation. But FICA, tax withholding and health care benefits are all tied up in your place of residence. Assuming you have a driver’s license and a voters registration, there is someplace you call home otherwise you are just a hobo
Surely it's not illegal to be homeless with a lot of money and skills.
(a) Let's say you spend 1 week in each state for 50 weeks of the year. Where do you file your taxes?
(b) Let's say you spend 1 week in each of 50 countries and work for AirBNB. You have no house, and no lease on a residence. Let's say it's mutual, e.g. you want to do this, and from their perspective, it's helping them because you're dogfooding their product. How do you deal with the legal side of it?
The government generally doesn't recognize having no fixed address whatsoever. I was caught 20 miles from the nearest road once 'illegally existing' in a wilderness area in Oregon 'without a permit.' The officer of course had nowhere to take me because there was no prison or way to extract me out, we literally randomly found each other on a mountain. When I told him I had no address he literally had no way to enter that on his form. He told me it was impossible and he had to put _something_. I'm not sure what he ultimately wrote. Of course he let me go, because what the hell are you going to do someone 20 miles from the nearest road short of calling a helicopter.
Having no address makes the government's brain explode.
Look at California residency requirements. They don't care if you're out of state for most of the year. If your license is from CA, or maybe you vote there, or you opened a bank account years back in CA, they will send you a tax bill.
My understanding is that it's not illegal but it basically makes it impossible to get government-issued ID, file taxes (which are legally required), open a bank account, get a credit card, etc.
So as a practical matter you probably get some traveling mailbox type service--in a state with no income tax presumably.
wrt b.
You're already a citizen somewhere. You'll still need an address there. See above. Then it's up to you and, perhaps to some degree, your employer to get appropriate visas. That said, for one week stays, an Airbnb stay during which you work an unknown amount of time remotely as opposed to being a tourist seems pretty doable so long as you keep a low profile and the company is cool with it.
And your home address is going to determine your default state/local tax situation in the US. (Though above certain thresholds you may be supposed to file multiple state taxes that are reconciled with each other. This mostly comes into play with business travel which companies are tracking.)
I'm not sure when this 90-day rule was written, but I imagine it was written in a time before now with high-performance laptops, video conferencing, common jet travel, and people wanting to work 30 days here, 90 days there, 120 days over there, etc.
This should be revisited. Also I think this is a good example of the need to have expiration dates on new laws and regulations. This should be something that expires and has to be changed to reflect how people live today.
> the need to have expiration dates on new laws and regulations.
This is a terrible idea. Here in the US the ever more hyper-partisan political environment makes it hard to do _anything_, even once. The idea that our Congress critters are going to re-pass all legislation for everything every (say) 5 years is ridiculous.
Those of us who like knowing that our food is safe to eat, our cars aren't firebomb death traps waiting to explode, that planes won't fall out of the sky onto our houses that aren't going to spontaneously collapse / flood from shitty plumbing / burn down from an electrical fire will disagree that all legislation should be repealed (either directly or via repeal-by-expiration), but please - let's be honest about what the effects of an 'expiration date' on legislation would actually accomplish.
Maybe this is an indicator that we need a legal infrastructure that supports a progressive, scientific governance
Rather than thumbing our noses at new approaches on behalf of defunct political parties
Visitors are permitted to undertake activities relating to their employment overseas remotely whilst they are in the UK, such as responding to emails or answering phone calls. However, you should check that the applicant’s main purpose of coming to the UK is to undertake a permitted activity, rather than specifically to work remotely from the UK. Where the applicant indicates that they intend to spend a large proportion of their time in the UK and will be doing some remote working, you should ensure that they are genuinely employed overseas and are not seeking to work in the UK.
PS: Actual rules are here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules but the general intent seems to be if your there to do something very temporary like compete in a sports tournament or do something for someone outside the UK that requires you to briefly visit the UK it’s fine.
"the applicant’s main purpose of coming to the UK is to undertake a permitted activity, rather than specifically to work remotely from the UK"
That's doesn't seem like an exception? That sounds like saying "hey, I'm going to fly to the UK and work remotely from there" is against the law.
What that paragraph says to me is "If someone comes to the UK as a visitor, and happens to do some work - responding to email and/or answering phone calls" that's ok. But actually work full time in the UK remotely, is not legal.
I believe this is the case in many countries; you can do some work like signing contracts and indeed answering emails and the phone for work purposes, but you cannot just take out the ol' laptop and write code for 90 days. Many people do because you cannot really check but it's not allowed, at least not in places I have been. Especially if you keep travelling (so 2-3 months here, 2-3 months there) then there is very little point in doing all this trouble unless you cannot stand technically doing something illegal although no-one will find out.
Anecdotal example; when I was young and naive (well, more naive than now), I went to Canada (Vancouver) to help some guys out with some software. I read up on it a bit, but not enough (naive!) so at the border I told that I was going to do a bit of sight seeing and a bit of 'work'. Wrong word; was immediately taken apart and spent 1 hour explaining that no, no not work, just a bit of light consultancy; no programming, no actual managing people etc and no money changing hands (this was all true, I just shouldn't have used the word 'work'). They let me enter and there were no further issues, but I guess most people would just say 'vacation!' even though this was allowed; it can/does add stress and you might be unlucky and be sent back.
>> But isn’t it illegal to work on a tourist visa anyway?
It’s clear there are many ways it’s legal to be working in the UK on a Visiter visa. That doesn’t mean it’s ok to go if your only reason to be in the Uk is to be a remote worker for 90 days.
> Most Europeans have access to things like cross border permits e.g. Switzerland/Germany and within the EU freedom of movement means it doesn't really matter much. You just register with the City Hall or wherever in your target country.
This isn't as easy as it seems, even inside the EU. There are talks going on about laws regarding what constitutes "local hiring".
Basically, the issue is that some companies hire people from Eastern Europe, and pay them EE salaries there. But those people are then physically working from Western Europe, where they are "visiting workers" (don't know the exact term). This allows the companies to, among others, 1. pay lower salaries than the local going rate and 2. avoid paying payroll taxes locally.
I don't know how this works when applied to freelancing or remote working, but, as others have said, it's probably best to ask a lawyer or two.
I don't see a problem with this if the visiting workers are there less time than it takes to be considered a tax resident, eg. you have 3 months on-site onboarding and then proceed to work remotely.
After some time you're considered a resident so it doesn't make a difference compared to a local hire ?
That's the thing, I don't think there's a clear duration after which you're automatically considered a tax resident.
The thing with these employees was that they never became local hires. So they would get their salary through their home country branch, with taxes paid over there, etc. The whole point is that these companies were trying to dance around the limits of employment law. What they were doing was technically legal, hence the will of the government to change the law.
In Poland you are a tax citizen automatically if you have been there more than 183 days[1]. The exact same 183 in Portugal[2]. It is an automatic thing so quite simple.
I beg to differ. Those look like the "default" rules. For the example of Poland (picked one of your two examples) it's not so simple.
The "default" rules for tax residency are superseded by a convention between the two countries, and there are a bunch of them, with many countries, on the site of the French government. There are specific conventions with Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, for example, that apply only to people living close to the border and working in the other country. If you take the train from Paris to work in Geneva, it doesn't apply.
Basically, it can be debated. It says that if you have a "permanent home" in both countries, you're a resident of the country "with which you have the most attachments". So for the hypothetical Polish worker who's "detached" in France, it could be argued that the "attachment" is to Poland, because their family is likely there, among other things. In the case of a freelance moving from country to country, who is likely unattached, this can probably be easily argued (though I'm not a lawyer).
Concerning remote-working freelance: For "independent workers", you're taxed in the country where you do business, except if you have a "fixed base" in the other country, from which you conduct your business. In that case, you're taxed in the country where the base is, but only for the part of income that is attributable to the work done from that base.
I propose people start reconsidering this imposed situation that exists between the people who do the work and the government, i.e. the parasitic ruling class. And to clarify, I say that as someone who is not at all “leftist” oriented, even though it may seem so at first glance of reading that to some.
This situation we currently essentially globally have, at least in the west, is quite an abusive system that is really just the bait and switch type pivot off what most people know as slavery, into a differently structured model of the same fundamental thing, one which really just spreads the total amount of enslavement across more people rather than getting rid of it altogether.
The parasitism of the ruling class that is far more obvious through slavery, is far harder to recognize in todays world because rather than taking, for argument’s sake, ~70% of 10% of people’s labor to support and enrich the ruling class; the shift/pivot off the slavery model was to introduce taking ~40% of the labor from 90% of the population and therefore enrich and empower the ruling parasitic class even more.
It’s precisely why a certain segment of the ruling class were all for “ending slavery”, because they knew “ending it”, i.e. spreading it over most people, would be far more lucrative and profitable. Life tip: Always be extremely leery of what the ruling class is promoting, and even more so re-examine things if they start supporting what you support.
The point is, we need to all start coming to a realization that the income tax and the whole tax system of fractional slavery enforcement needs to end. I do not claim to know the right answer, but I and any other rational and sane person know that this bait and switch slavery that exists needs to stop. What else do you call it, e.g. when hedge fund managers make billions per year and pay next to zero taxes, but some middle class person has huge sums of the value of their labor taken/ stolen to supply the hedge fund manager’s lifestyle?
Some have proposed things like the Fairfax.org, essentially a consumption tax through sales tax that captures taxes on illegal/harmful activities and ill begotten wealth, e.g., drug dealers buying their flashy things, while at the same time also taxing polluting activities in a direct correlation, e.g., buying new shiny-object over keeping something maintained and repaired. This would be a radical and arguably positive impact for all of humanity … except the parasitic ruling class which very much likes and has been working hard to expand its parasitism. See currency inflation at the press of a button for reference, which defrauds workers and savers through the worst tax, fraud.
> that exists between the people who do the work and the government, i.e. the parasitic ruling class. And to clarify, I say that as someone who is not at all “leftist” oriented, even though it may seem so at first glance of reading that to some
I definitely wouldn't say that criticising big inefficient government is a leftist talking point at all.
Using tax to build roads , fund schools , maintain community parks , allocating to providing care for the poor and defense funding is not “slavery” and there is no “ruling class”. You can be a burecrat or become a politician if you want. The system may not be perfect but certainly better that half assed solutions that makes no sense.
>You can be a burecrat or become a politician if you want.
You can become those things if you manage to navigate a social and possibly economic process and succeed in entering those positions. By using your own definition, a slave wasn't a slave because people like William Ellison [0] who were once slaves went on to become a slaveholder. A slave can become a slaveholder -- that doesn't cancel out them taking part in a system of slavery.
>there is no “ruling class”.
A couple weeks ago when I entered the US I was forcibly shackled and cuffed without being even 'arrested' nor formally charged with a crime and held for 16 hours while taken to hospitals against my will on the most flimsiest accusation of being suspected as a "drug mule." Do you really think a common armed citizen could have held me like that against my will without repercussion? There is most definitely a 'ruling class' who can get away with things others can't. The border patrol in fact is 'allowed' to violate the constitution within 100 miles of the 'border' (which debatably is either actual border or even just international airports) and stop people without probable cause of having committed a crime.
Perhaps 'debt bondage' is a better word to describe what the government imposes on its citizens (especially noted in the high percentage of black men thrown in debtor's jail for merely owing money a la child support enforcement). Debt bondage is considered a form of slavery by some, although distinct and perhaps less egregious from chattel slavery.
Sales taxes predominantly tax the lower paid more - who spend more of their earnings.
I'm not sure how this would make hedge fund managers who's net worth and amount invested might go up billions in a year but don't get paid or spend that amount.
I’m all for talking about tax policy but stop comparing our modern workforces to slavery (unless you are referring to the actual slaves of today). Slavery was/is barbaric and nothing even close to the relative bliss that is the modern workforce. I happily pay taxes, after stuffing every penny I have into tax advantaged investing accounts. At the end of the day I see a lot of government waste, but I also see the necessity of government. We can reign in government spending and taxation but don’t give me this garbage about how I’m in slavery.
If you want a perspective on how bad slavery was, search for this:
Hardcore History Ep68 - Human
Resources
Also, I knew immediately you were some libertarian/right, red pill person because I see this kind of talk all the time from old friends. Ya ya, the ruling class is so bad. Why are you preaching your gospel on HN? Do you want some ruling class VC money for your startup or not?
People work because they need money to survive (pay bills, rent, food, etc.), not because "the ruling class is imposing taxes through government".
A consumption tax will do nothing to reduce the power of the "ruling class" since their consumption is a much smaller fraction of their income compared to the working man.
Consumption as a fraction may be smaller but as a number it's much larger. Wealthy people own larger homes (often more than one), more and more expensive cars, boats, private aircraft, any number of other toys. They spend more on clothes, entertainment, virtually every other category of spending is higher if you are wealthy. Maybe they spend about the same amount on toilet paper.
> Consumption as a fraction may be smaller but as a number it's much larger.
The current status is one with progressive tax rates where people with higher incomes pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is still not enough due to loopholes, etc.
The person I replied to complains about "ruling class" and proposes (presumably as a way to mitigate the ruling class' accumulation of wealth) tax on consumption.
Since the fraction of income used for consumption decreases with income, a consumption tax corresponds to a regressive income tax (higher income -> lower tax rate). This is much worse, penalizes the poorest and leads to much worse wealth inequality than the existing system.
I get the analogy many others here intentionally miss. Usurping the value of your labor by force. Most of us in America work >4 months a year with all that value stolen by the parasite class. How many months will we accept until, instead of theft, we call it slavery?
Many others have chimed in, but this is very important to highlight. Meeting with clients, going to conference, having important meetings, these are things we consider work. However, from the eyes of the law, these are temporary things that need to be done in person for business that has already occurred. That is, if you come to a conference, meet a potential client, and then set up a sales meeting before you leave, you have conducted new business in the US and violated your B1 visa. See [1] for the actual exemptions. Technically, if you check your email while on B1, this could be construed that you are conducting unauthorized business in the US. Of course, these laws never foresaw technological progress and so the world governments look the other way because they do not know how/what to enforce.
I'm going to put it here as this is what an immigration person put it to me, just ask yourself "where are my feet?" That is the country/entity you should be paying your taxes to by default unless there is an explicit reciprocity agreement that may apply to you. So, if you're traveling Europe as an American while working remotely, you are violating tax law in every single country. From the law's point of view, there is no difference than as if you had contracted out your work to someone in each one of those countries. Don't worry, no one is going to come after you for those 10 hours but just know you are intentionally (or grossly negligent) making use of the inaction of enforcement.
> ...Of course, these laws never foresaw technological progress and so the world governments look the other way because they do not know how/what to enforce...
Other than the current scale of activity, the law has no "never foresaw technolo..." excuse for failing to cover such things. Centuries ago, it was perfectly normal for authors, composers, painters, etc. to travel to and work in other countries - "for their health" as they worked on their next masterpiece, or for inspiration, or to give paid lectures, or to perform or conduct music, or to paint portraits of locals, or several of those things.
It'd be rather interesting if a lawyer or few (who were fond of dusty tomes) did some real research on how those activities were handled back in the day, the old case law, etc.
I'm not sure I agree. With computers, people can literally teleport around the world which would have been ridiculed even 50 years ago. Probably something like "Haha, you think one day you'll be able to reach into the telephone and fix the thing on the other side, haha". I think it is an open question whether or not a sysadmin working on servers around the world is any different than paying the sysadmin to travel to each server and work locally while continuing to work on the global servers. The former is fine whereas the latter would legally require work authorization in each country.
Let's say it's 1937, and I'm a successful author enjoying life at a hotel in Italy. And writing my latest novel. Mailing chapter-by-chapter draft copies of that back and forth with my literary agent in London. Occasionally calling that agent on the (then-expensive) telephone with both questions, and instructions for him to execute on my behalf. Occasionally calling editors at various publishers (perhaps in several countries) to discuss business. Or to argue about how they destroyed the beautiful cadence of my dialog in Chapter 8 of my prior novel. Maybe I send telegrams to another agent I employ in New York, asking questions and giving instruction.
The modern, computerized version of this is faster, cooler, and sexier - but (IANAL) I see little basis for saying that there's a legal difference in kind.
The example you give is a clear violation, both in the past and the present. The author's feet are clearly in Italy and hence subject to Italian taxation (unless reciprocity agreement). That's not up for debate. This corresponds to the "latter" option I proposed before where the sysadmin travels around. This we are definitely aligned.
Upon reflection, I should not have said "an open question". Rather, I should have said that many feel that the spirit and intent of the law should be revisited. For many, the feet test is about resources utilization. Using electricity, internet, housing, etc. In the author example, the author is clearly making a choice to live at that hotel. Back when the law was written, I think this would have covered most cases. However, now, the modal case are "digital nomads" where the normal thing is to not spend more than 1 week - 1 month in a single place. Oftentimes, the destination doesn't matter, but the journey. In the extreme, imagine spending 2 days in every country in the world, in perpetual motion. This has always been a possibility and the law covers this case (as we both know) but I think people are beginning to question if it makes sense given the new distribution brought by the internet. To come back to the sysadmin example, the point was that the sysadmin is utilizing the same global resources except for maybe an additional epsilon as they move around to the different localities. Many feel that the locality does not provide anything in return for the right to tax the income.
That's an interesting case - if you write a book on holiday, but not on contract, and then sell it later when you return, where did the work occur? Where did the taxable event occur?
For that specific case, it is tempting to look to securities law, and the "when did something clearly become valuable?" concept.
If you're a well-established author of (say) steamy romances, writing yet another steamy romance - then the value is created (work is done) when you write the book.
If you're a nobody, dreaming of success as an author - then the work is done when you somehow convince a publisher to take a risk and buy your manuscript.
I bet the only industry that has some guidance on this is the movie/tv industry - and even then I bet a lot of it falls on the incomes of the employees actually filming on location, etc.
It would be interesting to watch California try to claim income tax on book royalties that were first started in CA but then the author moves elsewhere.
There must be some exception to this. I am a US citizen working for a London company and a few times a year I go over, explicitly telling the immigration officer it's for "business meetings," and that's explicitly allowed. I couldn't just go work for the hell of it but as a manager of a team it makes sense I make special occasion trips. Technically they could ask me to produce a letter from my employer explicitly confirming the reason for my travel but I've never had any friction at all. But my company was very explicit that I explain it's for "business meetings" and not regular work.
Yes, business meetings (and the things in this spirit) are the exceptions. However, you certainly cannot say "I feel like doing my normal job in London this week". Now, let's say you go to London for one important meeting and spend the rest of the day working as you don't want to waste your time, ok, no one is going to ask questions. But, if you go to London for one meeting and work there for the rest of the month, you are in clear violation. Is anyone going to hunt you down? Probably not. Are you breaking the intent of business visas? Definitely.
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
This is a legal loophole for digital nomads. If I am connected to my work via a VPN, I am technically still working in the country of employment. I am not producing any commercial output in the country I am staying that I or my employer benefits from beneficially. I am 100% confident this has been reviewed by well paid lawyers at AirBnb who have zero sense of adventure, and that this is all water tight.
I believe that’s not what government laws says (for any country). Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but pretty much all countries/states consider you working there if you are physically present there. Your VPN or where your “commercial output” is, is not considered a factor at all by governments.
Most countries only care if you are taking a job that a local could have done. That is clearly not the case if you work remotely. If anything you are increasing local jobs by paying for your accomodation and food.
Once again this has been reviewed by laywers at different companies who have deemed this risk to be acceptable.
There might be countries that will arrest you if you read your corporate mail while on holidays, however, these generally not on the green list of safe countries to travel too.
Mexico is one of the few countries that legally allows remote work on tourist visas and a common complaint is that remote workers are driving up rents.
Allowing unrestricted access to your country by remote workers will have economic impact.
I understand that it would make sense for governments to not care since it’s money coming in and not displacing local workers. But the laws are still there, saying it’s illegal. If they weren’t, governments wouldn’t come up with special “digital nomad visas” for that specific situation.
Acceptable to the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's acceptable to you, especially if penalties would primarily fall on you for illegally claiming the wrong immigration status.
There are several ways tax codes can categorize income:
- the country the person was hired in (e.g. US)
- the country for whom the work is complete for (say if US employee delivered code for a Canadian office)
- the country the company who hired the person is located in
- the country the company paying the employee is located in
- the country the person was originally hired in (same as #2)
- the country where the work is actually done
A lot of countries just look at the last one. Doesn't matter if you were hired in the US, paid in the US dollars and US taxes are taken from your pay check. If you complete your work in country X, country X wants their taxes according to their laws.
There is a separate aspect for the company. You as an employee might comply with all tax regulations - hired in the US, US taxes deducted, but you file your taxes in a separate country and pay taxes owed.
But your employer may be out of compliance as well - they may need to be registered in the that country, have obligations for employer tax and social security payments, etc.
It's mostly their own obligations companies are worried about. If the employee pisses off and breaks tax law in another country, well that's on them.
The reality of what the law says and what countries and companies do in this case are often very disconnected.
But when it's a big or noticeable deal, then things come into play. US baseball players have to file Canadian taxes when they play in Canada, and if an exposition game occurs in Japan or London, taxes are filed there, too.
If you're not trying to evade taxes, and aren't making much anyway, most places don't actually do anything, but if they decided they wanted to they could.
"If you're not trying to evade taxes, and aren't making much anyway, most places don't actually do anything, but if they decided they wanted to they could."
Skirting gray areas is fine - working while on a 3 week vacation is likely not worth chasing down.
Staying in a country for 4 months knowing that after 3 months you should pay taxes, but just pretending you're a tourist? That's pretty clearly trying to evade taxes.
> If I am connected to my work via a VPN, I am technically still working in the country of employment.
I hope this is sarcasm. A VPN is a technical detail that would never stand up, legally. The only situation where I can see a VPN being useful is within your own company: if they don't want you working remotely a VPN might help cover up the fact that you are. But aside from that it won't help you.
As far as I know this is incorrect. In most countries working is entirely different to touristing and ‘doing business’ (i.e. selling). Just ask musicians - they have to get performance work visas for every country.
As far as their tax authorities are concerned, yeah, you normally have 90 days or so where they don’t care about your income, but immigration? Almost never. Most digital nomads just get away with it because it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things that customs and immigration authorities have to care about - witness the Thai visa tours etc.
I don't think is true for the Schengen zone/Schengen adjacent countries.
I'm a musician and have toured Western Europe a couple of times (and know a lot of others who have). Apart from the UK noone I know ever gets working visas, and this is never a problem crossing borders honestly saying to immigration that we're there on tour in a van full of music equipment and merchandise.
> we're there on tour in a van full of music equipment and merchandise
There are separate arrangements for touring groups. However, if you're not from the EU then good luck. You'll notice that there are huge complications after brexit. That said, likely nobody will check, care or notice.
That said, likely nobody will check, care or notice.
Even if noone cared, relying on the apathy of others seems like a poor part of a business model. Unfortunately, they do seem to care at the US-Canadian border entering the US. There have been a few Canadian professional wrestlers, like Mike Bailey and Super Smash Bros., who were barred entry to the US entirely for 5 yrs because they were caught trying to work in the US without a visa.
I think this is all silly, of course, especially because American acts have seemingly no trouble working in Canada. I shouldn't take for granted when I saw the Canadian band badbadnotgood in the US last month...
Yes, but that is a case where they're getting paid in the US to work.
The one conference horror story I recall from a few years back was someone was going to speak at some small UK(?) conference and they were getting an honorarium or something like that. And they told immigration and I think were denied entry for that reason. But I've spoken at dozens of events for free and it's never been an issue.
Sorry should have clarified, I'm not from the EU. This is on an Australian passport on the visa waiver program, and American friends have had the same experience (including some biggish bands who tour Europe a couple of times a year).
Maybe it's a "noone cares" thing, but this includes some American friends who were caught with weed in their tour van at the Norwegian border and still didn't have any visa issues (and somehow still managed to get into the country!)
This only works if you are holder of passport of the origin country. As a third world country national, I cannot legally work anywhere except the country I got my work visa.
Laws are still written for those doing manual labor.
What's the difference if I do some work in the evening at home or during my holiday in e.g. Greece?
The only added cost in given country is energy.
Problems start to appear if I get sick, but that should be on myself - and in most cases (for EU citizen) it is most appropriate to return home to cure/hospitalize (unless it is something needing immediate help).
What with labor laws? Should you follow the laws from the country from where you work or where the company is located? Companies would just get a post box in the country with the weakest labour laws.
The simplest solution stays that the laws where you physically are apply.
The next time you try to enter or leave Japan after staying for 90 days, they would ask you how you are able to stay 3 months without working. If you cannot show significant savings, then you would get deported and banned for 10 years. Happens all the time.
You are showing a bit of naivete and entitlement - if you are visiting a foreign country, you often have to apply for a travel permit. If you are applying from Russia/China/Mongolia to UK/US they ask you for bank statements, evidence of having a stable job or holding any property in your home country, you travel itienary, and ask whether you are a person of good character. Lying on the application form results in a 10 uear or lifetime travel ban.
After all that, when you arrive at the border, they ask questions and US border guards in particular may ask for access to your phone and laptop.
So it does happen all the time, it's just thay typically rich tourists from America are subject to less scruitiny than folks from poorer or politically messier places
I've seen a student required to show a bank balance and withdraw sufficient money before being granted a tourist visa for a different country. (He was in front of me in the queue.)
The UK requires some visitors to show bank statements when applying for a visa.
Germany for example, requires a "Blocked Bank Account" for certain type of student, work and other kinds of visas.
This account is opened remotely from the students' home country in a German bank, before the visa applicstion. And savings cannot be withdrawn for a period of time.
I had an acquaintance that studied in Germany that had a visa problem for withdrawing more money than allowed from his "Blocked bank account".
Lol they're not gonna deport you on your way out. I'd like to see one example of deportation orders for someone already at the airport to leave the country, purely based on accusation of having worked remotely in Japan.
I've been to many nations including for months and including illegally overstaying. No one gave one fuck to ask whether I was working not. The only people that have ever grilled me like this is my own country, the USA, where returning as a citizen the last time I entered I was forcibly taken to a hospital to be anally probed (with even a warrant, although after 16 hours they could not find a doctor to execute it) based on a wild and false accusation they thought I was a drug smuggler. Only the USA and a few other insane nations are dumb enough to pull these kind of stunts.
Somewhere like Brazil/Paraguay/Mexico/Philippines/Iraq no one is gonna ask you if you worked remotely while on your way out. No one. Half the time they don't even bother to ask what you're doing while entering, they just stamp your passport and you're on your way. Japan may be different, but there is no way they're gonna deport you on your way out.
I'm sure some ask. The risk of being deported or caught seems incredibly low, especially if you pick a country in South America or southeast Asia. I cannot think of a nation there that ever asked me if I was working. When I was caught overstaying in Iraq they immigration guy was visibly pissed but he couldn't speak English so I juts handed him <fine for overstay>, and went on my way.
All European cointries have records of your entry/leaving, and if you overstay you will likely end up with a lifetime travel ban. The only exception would be like a medical emergency.
Hasn't infamous 'hacker' Weev been hiding out in European nations/territories of Transnistria/Maldova/Ukraine for like 4 or 5 years now without any residence authorization?
Same experience, sans probing. I have also, interestingly, overstayed in the West including using a residence permit to enter that was no longer valid. Japan they checked my baggage, same smuggler thing, but I only had my host of bootleg (not really, I just like being equipped so I just get them from generics factories) antibiotics + pharma and they don't really care about those personal quantities.
Of course not. Employers have regulations as well. If you are paying someone working in Japan your employer should follow Japan laws on employer regulations.
I do not know about Japan specifically, but some developed countries do quietly monitor people that spend significant amounts of time in their country for violations that would require a proper work visa. It is not safe to assume no one will know -- I know of cases like this where people were flagged.
Tangent, but it turns out terms like "third world" are no longer accurate. If memory serves, this is explained in the book Factfulness. A highly recommended read, by the way.
A few decades ago, there was a group of wealthy countries, a group of poor countries, and a large gap between them. Back then it made sense to see them as 2 separate groups, first world and third. Right now however, they're no longer separate groups - there's a continuous spectrum. A growing number of countries have been crawling out of poverty.
Some countries are rich, some are poor, and some are in between. They're no longer separate groups.
(This of course does not mean that there isn't a poverty problem in the world. Just that "third world" no longer accurately describes the situation.)
To clarify, I misremembered Factfulness. The book actually talks about "developed" versus "developing".
In my memory I jumbled that up with "third world".
I think you're wrong about this -- as I understood it, the term is a relic of the cold war. "First World" nations were aligned with the US, "Second World" were communist or communist-aligned, and "Third World" were not associated with either.
After the collapse of the USSR "Third World" became primarily associated with impoverished nations.
Some dude coined these terms, and they caught on for a while during the cold war. Third world typically being of little interest to first and second, and often poor.
So eventually "third world" came to just mean "poor countries". After all, there has now been as much time, post WWII, without the cold war, as there was with one!
In the EU and FoM countries you're still supposed to pay social contributions where you work. There are many complex rules for people who are regularly on the road (like truck drivers, artists on tour) and dispatched workers, but as the average tech worker you can definitely get your employer in trouble if you work more than 20% outside the country of employment. That's why cross-border commuters can't work from home more than one day of the week, technically.
The 20% rule only applies to Switzerland and the "Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen" with the neighbor countries or EU. This was the reason I quit my job in switzerland and moved back to germany (without taking a huge pay cut ;), more vacation days and only 35hour/week), now the 183day rule for social contributions and tax apply as long as I live in germany. So now I can work from portugal during winter :)
There's no EU-wide 183 day rule for social contributions. If you stay more than 3 months in a country you need to be registered as a posted worker, and there are some legal implications.
you're right, depending on the country/company there are some additional implications, in my case it helps that we have a subsidiary in most EU countries, so it can work via an "entsendung". I really hope that these things will change (social and tax wise) in the future within EU to make it easier for work setups like this.
The 35h workweek is quite common in companies with an "IG Metal Tarifvertrag" in place, most companies in the automotive industry and their supplying industries provide such contracts, but also a lot of medium size companies... Don't expect FANG salaries ;)
Aren't those IG Metal companies shit in the SW dev department due to outdated mentality thanks to German boomer management, heavily birocratic, with poor pay?
I'm asking since the companies in Austria with IG Metal equivalent are terrible in those regards: poor pay for SW devs as their main money making products are some automotive/mechanical widgets instead of SW, boomer management insists on commuting to the office to some remote village because if the guys in the machine shop need to be in the office to do their work then so should the devs and everyone else, outdated SW, tooling and dev practices, poor equipment (some cheapo underpowered Dell/HP/Lenovo bogged down by corporate spyware that the pensioners in IT insists everyone must have, including SW devs).
Kinda confusing to me, since you said you're getting nearly swiss money and it's not what I imagine at IG Metal companies :)
Hi, most of them yes, but they are und er pressure to good people and in a lot of companies a generation change happens with new ideas. But you're right for every innovative company there are dozen quite old fashioned :(. The big ones usually get it, Daimler, trumpf to name a few...
From my personal experience a lot of companies in Switzerland are more conservative
Like most law it’s vague and subject to whims, there’s no flow chart to give you a definite answer.
If you go to meet team members in your NY office, interview some new staff, and look for a new building to move the office to, that’s all fine.
If you happen to do some unrelated sysadmin work on your servers in london while you’re there, that’s probably fine too, as your primary reason to visit is quite clearly fine.
If you went for a holiday for 2 weeks(on a B2 or esta) and happened to answer a phone call from work that’s fine.
If you went on holiday for 2 weeks and spent 10 days working remotely that’s probably not fine. If you went on a family holiday for 4 weeks but did a few days work remotely that’s might be ok. If you did it several times a year though it probably wouldn’t be.
There’s no hard and fast rule in law, and doubly so in immigration where the power to allow you in sits with the guy at the airport.
My understanding is, for an American in a EU country, is they can go and work remotely there for the 90 days as long as they are not conducting business in said country. This means face to face business meetings with clients. When you log in remotely to your job based in the USA and not interacting with people directly during the tourist stay, you're in the clear... I think?
> My understanding is, for an American in a EU country, is they can go and work remotely there for the 90 days as long as they are not conducting business in said country.
That's not legal. To work in the EU you need a work visa. Though they ignore the business trips. What's legal and what's checked are different things.
E.g. new foreign colleagues need to get a tax id in The Netherlands before they do any work. Doesn't matter if they came from the US.
I (from US) can't speak to the actual laws. But with respect to "what's checked," I've been asked the purpose of my visit at immigration in countless countries around the world and I'm always completely open about attending conferences and meeting with customers and no one over decades has batted an eye. (Of course in the handful of countries I did explicitly need business visas--like China--I got one.)
Of course, there are a lot of unenforced laws on the books, but I'm a little skeptical that the millions and millions of people who travel cross-border on business trips every year are all mostly breaking immigration laws.
To be fair, my experiences are all on relatively short trips--a few weeks at most and usually less. Perhaps there would be more issues if I were staying 90 days and was open about workationing the whole time.
> I'm always completely open about attending conferences and meeting with customers and no one over decades has batted an eye.
Attending conferences is usually ok, but it's a complicated topic because it depends on the traveller's passport, the visited country and how strict rules are enforced.
As a foreign national, for example a U.S. B1 visa allows attending conferences and close business deals. But it doesn't explicitly allow working remotely for a non-US company.
Of course, even a B1 isn't a tourist visa. A B2 (US tourist visa) specifically doesn't include non-social events.
In any case, in most countries whether explicit or implicit that distinction is probably the right one. Of course, no one is going to care or know if you check some emails and do some work--just like no one cared if you made some phone calls and did some work years ago.
But, in most places, you probably shouldn't show up and say you'll be spending the next 90 days working remotely.
This is not correct. There is probably a special deal between the UK and USA, but there isn't anything similar for Americans working in most EU countries, and the rules are per country.
Why are the cities the losers? I travel a lot for work(300 days/year) and I don’t have an apartment, so when I’m not working I’m pretty much also traveling. Occasionally I use Airbnb and I think it’s a much nicer option than hotels.
Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now.
Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.
It seems like Airbnb is an easy scapegoat to use for the actual problem of not enough houses existing/being built. Another scapegoat is ‘foreign investors’ but I think this also isn’t true. In the US I think the people willing to make cash offers for houses in expensive cities are often the rich people who live there. There are also companies that will advance you the cash so that you can make a cash offer before going through the whole mortgage process, which seems a bit silly but if these companies exist then some people making cash offers must also be regularish wealthy home buyers who will use regular mortgages.
It's a symptom of viewing homes as investment properties. Building more just dilutes the value of their investments. Heavily tax or ban owning mulitple homes and watch as cities suddenly become affordable again.
I live in a city that is a major tourist destination worldwide. Tourism has always been a blessing and a curse; shops always suffered a pressure to become tourist oriented; some big buildings were converted to hotels.
With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved here from a different city has been forced to live for months in an AirBnB because there are no long term rentals in the city (ah!).
Since every wall-confined space can be an AirBnB, every wall-confined space becomes one. The lack of regulation makes a real difference, compared to shop and hotels.
Yep, i live in a country with massive housing issues in our cities (well... like most other countries), and banning airbnb is mentioned a couple of times a week now in mainstream media.
And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb).
I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).
I think banning airbnb outright is not a good idea. They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there, because otherwise it's not worth it. Might be a pain to control across multiple renting platforms, but it's possible and if you catch a couple of persons and condemn them to high fines, this will make the rounds and other short term renters will stop.
> They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there…
This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.
Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant. Just rent through Airbnb and then talk to the guy about a normal lease.
If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give you $10k. Gotta be anglophone, though and none of this long-term rent controlled shit because no one wants to get locked into that. My French is atrocious and my German worse and I can’t speak anything else.
EDIT: Fine, fuck it, give me a year to learn the Spanish and up the bet to $100k and I’ll do it. I find very often that things that are impossible for others are easy for me. But list your conditions up front here. I think I could manage anyhow.
You never heard of it, but there are plenty in Spain. I don't live in a tourist city but I go ofter to Madrid and Barcelona and it's a serious problem there.
It's not the primary source of the housing problem, but it definitey contributes to it.
>Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant.
or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore)
also, I believe most EU countries have some form of renter protection laws.
Well, at that point, it's that old HN adage: there's no shortage; you just refuse to pay enough. There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
well that adage is normally applied to employees under the naive assumption that you can pass the costs onto your customer (assumption generally made because you are looking for an employee because you have projects to finish with customers that pay for those projects), but when finding a place to live if you are middle class and not able to afford to live in the area it does not follow that a reasonable solution would be that you pay money that you do not possess and what, pass it on to your boss in the morning by saying 'guess what, you gotta give me a raise now!'
>There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.
Here in a coastal south spain city, the rule is pretty much this:
weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident.
So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would.
Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.
I'm pretty sure the claims are overstated so I'd want some skin in the game. I'd have to go learn conversational Spanish / able to read local cultural cues / travel there so that's going to cost me time.
Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.
Short term rentals can have significant advantages over long term - for example, it's painless to "evict" a short term renter in almost every jurisdiction, but once it passes 30 or 90 days in some areas it becomes a multi-month process.
In cities like NY, you can easily make more in a week of renting out your apartment via AirBnb than you would in a month via a traditional lease.
I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.
Oh, boy... go take a look at Greece more touristy spots. It's more profitable to keep the house closed for 8 months in the year and only rent in the season. It's much harder to avoid reporting income from normal lease, while with AirBNB you can just "forget" to report it, or even easier, just offer a small discount if they pay cash.
No, property management companies already did this to a limited extent - but airbnb has made it easy enough that it has reached a critical mass level resulting in home prices spiraling out of control to the point that homes are now relisted 6 months later at even 100% markup or greater.
The problem here in Atlanta is so bad that the core city has now banned airbnb without an explicit permit. We are hoping that gets adopted across the metro area.
Many major cities are clamping down hard. Mayors and politicians are under much more pressure from locals to stop their cities turning into, well, Amsterdam. Tourism is fine, but it has increasingly come at the cost of locals.
Well... a moderate amount of tourism is fine, even beneficial; but excessive tourism in any given location becomes a blight. Airbnb has contributed to that, by facilitating short-term profits for "hosts" and the company and ignoring the negative impact.
Tourism that overwhelms the location turns it into a tourist trap; whatever it had before becomes a veneer over the main industry, which will be tourism.
In some places this is incredibly visible (think Las Vegas Strip vs Las Vegas) but you can also see it in many famous tourist destinations.
Of course, large cities like Tokyo are quite resistant to tourism, just because of how big they are - certain areas and attractions may be tourist heavy but the city is still Tokyo.
Indeed, the entire city. In e.g. Amsterdam (a relatively tiny area, high tourism density) or Venice, in areas things have been pushed over. It's a spiral. E.g. something simple as "pharmacies" or "supermarkets". They leave/close because of less demand. Which decreases liveability, causing more locals to move out, causing more such businesses to close etc. These effects come next to "increasing house prices".
It really is so problematic that cities like Berlin, Amsterdam (and I believe Venice) and many more crack down on AirBnBs. Hard. You are allowed to rent out the apartment where you live, but for limited time and with high fines or even extradiction on renting out beyond the limits (e.g. 90 days per year). You are certainly no longer allowed to have AirBnBs for the sole purpose of renting out to AirBnb.
Edit: and in e.g. Berlin, AirBnB does not hand over the data of their users/renters (which Is good, I presume). So they have people scanning the renting-websites, visting homes and even posting outside to find evidence something is rented out beyond the allowed duration.
> You are certainly no longer allowed to have AirBnBs for the sole purpose of renting out to AirBnb.
That's a ridiculous requirement. Owning real estate for the sole purpose of renting has been an income source for ever. Just because Airbnb exploded this practice in popularity doesn't give governments the right to say what purpose owners can use their property for. If Airbnb is causing issues, then address those specifically, not ban the practice of owning property exclusively used for renting.
Ironically, the zoning in US is far, far more restrictive than in most of Europe.
So bad, that you often cannot even have a neighborhood café, corner pub, or local shop in modern suburbs. So bad, that you need to take the car to do shopping. For someone from western Europe, this is mind blowing insane: you need to take the car to buy your milk!
Well, sure, but you bought property in those areas depending on if you wanted to run a business or use it as a residence. Maybe there should be a separate residence-as-business zone used for Airbnbs.
Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.
> Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.
Seems more that you want government to facilitate running a business where it's not in the interest of that government, nor in the interest of the locals. Airbnb's aren't beneficial, plus they aren't checked as properly as a hotel.
Usually it isn't banned, what they're after is that it is limited (days/year), plus the AirBnB income is properly taxed.
That's a great requirement imo. For short term stay, we already have hotels, hostels and regular BnBs.
Apartments and houses should be reserved for long term stay and regulated accordingly.
The original idea of AirBnB was to easily rent your couch or guest room for a few nights and I think regulations should be made to keep it this way.
AirBnB is causing issues and the government is adressing it. I bet that many residents are asking for an outright ban of it. If I were in Madrid or Barcelona, I bet I'd do.
The main thing that is being handled is how to correctly handle/account for it - a long term rental and a house are basically identical from the purposes of what the government provides, both may have families with children going to school, need stores, etc.
But short-term rentals are basically identical with hotels which are commercial properties and have substantially different requirements - the people staying there will not frequent supermarkets, etc as much as they will restaurants, etc. They will not be sending their children to the local school, and so on.
Mixed use property can be (and should be!) encouraged, but it does have externalities that have to be handled and accounted for.
If you want to enrich locals at the expense of tourists, the straightforward way to do that is just raise property/sales taxes and payout the revenue to locals.
Are you a housing planner? Do you have a degree in economics/market studies?
Also, building apartments has a huge environmental impact? Ok?.... So does rural sprawl? So does... everything? There is nothing inherently more damaging about those.
Beauty of a city? Cities are cities because of apartments. And you want.. fewer of them? Perhaps you would enjoy the suburbs more?
This is an underutilized solution in general, but is actually not even close to one at this point in time. Construction is incredibly hard at the moment (at least in the US) due to supply and labor shortages. It’s actually not clear when or even if these will be alleviated.
90 days is safe limit as advised by lawyers. In some countries you can stay much longer without incurring any tax implications, however, as a company you want to avoid your staff getting into legal difficulties if they stay overstay by one day for whatever reason (oversight, delayed flight, etc).
Very few staff tend to take 90 days in one chunk. It is often used for 4-6 weeks to either visit family, or have a working holiday in a tropical holiday location.
Timezones can be an issue for some job roles, however, you can ask staff to mostly keep working according their original timezone if there is a time critical element to their job role. However, in most cases it is actually great to have someone working either earlier or later than the rest of your staff. It reduces the window for out of hours support.
>> I think this is a genius move for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb!
Yes. Like the story of Ford doubling the wages it paid to factory workers in 1920s. So that those workers could afford a car, and the whole economy eventually followed suit.
I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary.
You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
>I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary.
You'd be hard pressed to provide a search pattern in any search engine that would provide a top 5 result that isn't about Ford wage raises in 1914 being about anything else than worker retention.
> You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
Nor did you provide any substantial point. What is it with double standards today? My point was that you are spreading falsehoods.
Both reasons are in fact correct, but only one person here is accusing the other of being wrong and spreading lies. Please be more circumspect in your language.
Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.
But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
One theory I have (and it may be wrong): is that part of the rise we've seen in housing prices is due to WFH and AirBnB.
Lots of people I've worked with who were WFH in the pandemic would spend a week (or a month) in a rental while they work, here and there. And during that time, their house/apartment would be empty.
Imagine everyone does that for (say) 3 weeks a year. That's a 6% increase in "housing usage". A 6% shock to the housing market is significant when supplies can't react quickly to the rise in demand.
Even if they could be converted (and most buildings after a certain height are basically the same except for the interior) they'd likely be torn down and rebuilt; if they even can be due to zoning.
People love to hate on zoning but there are reasons for it, even if the way it's done isn't perfect by a long shot.
Commercial leases can't be repurposed that quickly, and I suspect a lot of companies are holding off on doing anything different with their office space. If the past two years have resulted in permanent change, then some office space will likely get repurposed, but it's too early to tell whether it's permanent, and nobody wants to jump the gun and get it wrong.
Many young European countries reliant on tourism, like Croatia, introduced digital nomad/remote working visas mid-COVID to encourage people to stimulate their local economies when tourism suffered the most.
Can't you do that on a normal tourist visa? As long as you're not getting paid by a US company or to a US bank account, you're not employed in the US, so as long as your company allows you to be remote, I don't see an issue with it.
Yeah, eventually everyone will be staying in AirBnb's hotel and paying all the mortgage/upkeep on their own property to rent it to AirBnb. "It's like Uber for real estate".
The airline industry surely will. The environment likely won't. (But who cares about a few polar bears if you can just work from Shanghai for a few weeks, right? /s)
Hm, I don't think one should be contrasted with the other. That is, WFH somewhere in your home city is independent of traveling the world. We can promote the former without encouraging the latter, but Airbnb is mostly doing the latter. (It's their business model after all to provide services for people who do not stay at home.)
It's funny how this is meant to be interpreted as a work/life benefit for employees when it is clearly a removal of labor restrictions for the company. If you can hire anyone from anywhere your cost of labor will decrease overall. Yes "you can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change", so future salaries don't have to reflect local expenditures. You can offer flat rates that encourages people to move out of high cost cities and decrease your overall labor costs. The idea that this is a win/win is seductive but it won't be. Increasing the labor pool chips away the leverage an employee has at the negotiation table.
You can't imagine how much better Rome has been in these last two years without Americans coming to colonize our historical districts.
It's not entirely Americans fault, they do not belong here, don't know the language, the traditions, but they gather together all in the same place and suddenly it's not Rome anymore and obviously prices skyrocket up to the point that locals can't afford to live there anymore, after generations many have been forced to leave their family houses.
Big cities are by nature cosmopolitan, it’s very strange to say only some people “belong” and others don’t. Would you prefer the world isolate into pockets of belonging based on generational inheritance as it has been and we crank back globalization? Certainly there are growing pains, but I would view more globalization as the direction we want to go.
but most rich tech workers, especially from US, especially from SV, are not.
It's time to accept it.
We don't want them.
Not at this rate, not at these (their) conditions.
They only bring problems.
One thing is immigrants coming to work, another thing entirely is people that go somewhere because "it's cheap" or "it's beautiful" but work and pay taxes elsewhere.
They also have the habit of paying more than the average prices, so housing becomes more expensive, activities have to pay higher rents to survive or adapt to the kind of entertainment that the "new people" like, which is more often than not not what they wanted to do, people that used to live near their workplace had to move elsewhere because they could not afford to live in the district anymore, they end up closing shops and move their activities elsewhere (people like to have a life, besides work and commute) disrupting the life of many other that used to go there.
So when these people start buying drugs, dealers compete for their money and criminality rate increase.
Last but not least, not being part of the community makes them detached.
This[1] had never happened before Americans invaded Trastevere.
Of course this is in general, individually people are perfectly fine, but this trend is killing the fabric of cities with centuries of history, for nothing.
Of course it's not, but characterizing tech workers in foreign cities as "colonizing" makes little sense, even if the various problems you're pointing to can be laid entirely at their feet (which, without knowing enough about Rome to have a high degree of confidence, I would suspect is inaccurate, you could just as easily be describing general gentrification which has good and bad components).
All in all this attitude seems to me to be more or less typical NIMBY-ism, just with a focus on tech workers likely due to your purview (we're on hackernews after all). And to be sure NIMBY-ism is not usually without good reason, it's absolutely a worthwhile and reasonable goal to preserve culture you hold as valuable, and indeed in the case of Rome there is some very special culture there worth preserving. But it should be noted that change is inevitable, and cultural isolation is not a reasonable way to accomplish this goal conducive to the kind of world we want to have (or I should say I want to have, highly mobile and integrated so your origins have little bearing on your potential trajectories, much more unified than it is today as a species rather than provincial squabbling).
Rather we want solutions wherein people can move freely and be accepted wherever they go, while also preserving cultures and spreading economic benefits in a more efficient way. For instance better taxation so nomads pay taxes where they are not where they're from.
"Earlier this year, a report by the president of Rome’s Appeals Court, Giorgio Santacroce, found that criminal organizations essentially have divided up the capital into areas under their control."
> That's only because your community refuses to tax the visitors.
no, that's because they come here with a tourist permit and hide from authorities.
And if some problem arise, they go crying to their embassy.
> then they are in fact paying taxes (or paying locals -- skipping the government middle-person) to the community.
you mean they are skipping the community by paying some greedy multi-building-owner-speculator or mega-supermarket-chain and not giving back to the community in the form of taxes that pay for: hospitals, schools, police, roads, road cleaning, etc. etc.
You know, everything is public here, taxes pay for it, no matter if you're rich or poor, you get the same medical care here.
That's why we don't want them.
They completely disregard what's important for us, which is giving back to the people, not to the rich.
I've seen many of these people complaining that in the city center there are homeless living close to the historical monuments, while we people living in those neighborhoods have know them forever, they are part of the community, we give them food, shelter, blanket for the winter, call an ambulance if they are sick or it rained too much and they don't know where to spend the night.
That's the difference and what people like you don't and won't ever understand.
We are different from you, but you're coming to our house, so you are the ones that should adapt, not us!
> "Earlier this year, a report by the president of Rome’s Appeals Court, Giorgio Santacroce, found that criminal organizations essentially have divided up the capital into areas under their control."
Lol, you don't even know what you're talking about! [1]
He's been acquitted for that murder.
And you are comparing an homeless with mental health problems with 2 rich American students on holiday who *stabbed to death an Italian POLICE OFFICER WHILE BUYING COCAINE ON THE SREETS* ...
That says a lot about what you think about Americans, LOL.
Now compare it this, "Italian student was stabbed to death Thursday evening not far from the campus of the elite New York university, the dean said Friday."[2] ot to this "Twenty people were killed when a United States Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler aircraft, flying too low and against regulations, in order for the pilots to "have fun" and "take videos of the scenery", cut a cable supporting a cable car of an aerial lift" [3]
In the meantime, in NY there have been 485 homicides in 2021, in the whole Italy, 59 million of people, "only" 276.
Cosmopolitanism is historically largely a consequence of colonialism, and the draw of labor (both cheap mass and elite skilled) from the peripheries to the core.
The problem is that people move to Rome because it is Rome and not LA, and then proceed to turn it into LA.
Even a hundred years ago traveling somewhere brought you to a very different world, now it's hard to tell the difference between some cities since they're all covered in McDonald's and Starbucks anyway.
And it's not just the companies, either.
Part of the problem is our American way-of-life covers everything in a think blanket; you can easily move to anywhere in the world and remain an American as long as you want, the pressures that would bring you more in-line with those who live there are almost entirely gone.
I too lament some of the homogeneity of culture brought about by globalization. But I think the benefits are well worth it. Indeed in the future I would expect (or hope) for people to feel as though they are world citizens, and never feel too far from home wherever they go. The world gets smaller as we integrate it, and though we’ll lose remnants of the past I think it is the only way we can hope to have a future.
It's only bad if it's Americans moving abroad, it's actually racist and/or fascist and/or xenophobic if Americans complain about foreigners moving to their cities legally or otherwise and not adapting culturally.
It's bad when the power imbalance favours foreigners over locals.
There's nothing bad with Americans coming here, I love them, but there's a particular kind of people that don't integrate and think that having much more money than the average puts them in charge.
I've made some example about tech workers from USA because they are the larger and richer group I know of and it's crystal clear that most of them aren't here to make the city better or become citizens.
Also they are the ones who send their kids to "study abroad", but here you can drink when you are 16 or older, you can imagine what happens when you put young people with a lot of money in their pickets in a place where the rules of their country do not apply and the police is friendly (meaning they usually do not carry guns with them and don't arrest you for being drunk).
But it's not only them, of course and I'm sorry if I made it look like that.
But this isn’t something you can just blame on tech workers. Big cities go through this constantly not only from tech expats but also from better paid local workers.
I'm curious to know if short term rentals are an actual problem, compared to the much bigger, largely proven, and much less publicised, issue of hedge and investment funds buying out entire blocks of buildings.
I myself lived in Madrid for 5-6 years, and what seemed to drive the cost of living up weren't the people owning one or two rental apartments, but corporations and banks buying entire buildings up. At least in Spain, there has been a connection between banks not making large chunks of their real estate stock available, and investment funds buying on the scarcity.
> Anyway, cities are for citizens, not for freeloaders.
This feels like a bit narrow sighted.
While these workers you are talking about don't pay income taxes in these cities, they do pay other taxes (utilities, consumer products, etc.), and other than public infrastructure, they usually do not have free access to most services without paying (education, most healthcare).
So who's "freeloading" here? I would admit that they pay less taxes, but that doesn't mean that they pay zero taxes.
And another question arises. I myself am a Spaniard residing in the US. Would I be considered a "freeloader" if I go back to Spain and work for my employer in the US for a month or two? Do nationals get that consideration?
I don't believe NY is being "italianized", Italians have been there for so long that the idea if Italians in NY it's almost a meme nowadays, even in Italy we mock them.
Anyway, it's not about where people come from, but how.
Italians didn't go to NY through Airbnb, profiting of their much higher salaries.
They went there to work and lived at "the bottom of the ladder" level (my grand-grand father is one of them, he left Italy soon after the first World war).
NY is also the most no-one-true-identity city I've ever lived in.
First time I wenr there more than 20 years ago my biggest cultural shock was going to visit the Brooklyn zoo, catching a bus and being the only white person on the bus (well almost, I look more like a Northern African, but still).
But I'm sure many in NY too aren't happy of the process that's going on.
It is, in my opinion, a massive and near total loss for all the renters, first-time homebuyers, existing families, and the sense of community in areas affected by AirBnB's cancerous growth.
Not who you were asking, but I can take a stab at this.
Short Term rentals of homes or condo units can erode a sense of community in an area where that's a common behavior. AirBnB renters aren't going to be around long so they have no incentive to be respectful to common areas, or respectful of noise levels or whatever else.
Imagine buying a condo and all of the units around you are AirBnBs, or otherwise short term rentals. I think you would want to eventually get to know your neighbors a bit, but in this case they are constantly cycling in and out instead.
I think weakening communities is something we're already seeing a lot of. Maybe it's a problem, maybe not, but I think AirBnB could potentially be contributing to this and it is worth considering the impact that might have.
My city is the apparently the "Bachelorette Party Capital" of the world. So, of course, AirBnB would not pass up such a golden opportunity.
According to a recent bit of data from AirBnB, approx. 65% of hosts on AirBnB own two or more short-term rentals [1]. Such ownership has strongly impacted our housing market, albeit it is not the only factor, but still a major contributor to the erosion of our housing market.
Many of the anecdotal complaints I have heard are things like:
1. Obnoxiously loud and large parties/gatherings at inconsiderate times of day.
2. Unfamiliar cars and strangers in your community e.g. if the house next to yours is listed on AirBnB who knows what type of people are staying next to you -- they could be upstanding citizens or violent/non-violent thieves scouting out your neighborhood. People renting the unit are not always the only ones to stay there, and who are the police going to question when they have no idea who was there or when they up and left to return back home?
3. Vandalism and/or littering of surrounding properties.
4. Lack of community like the OP posted above.
It also appears as of recently, that AirBnB's are being targeted for crime [2]. If one chooses to burglarize an AirBnB in my city, you have a pretty high chance of preying upon an n > 1 group of unsuspecting, young, unarmed women in an unfamiliar city who are more than likely not in the rental most of the time i.e. the perfect target for thieves.
There are allegations that thieves are working with Uber/Lyft drivers to find out which addresses are AirBnBs or not and which ones the renters are currently away from. Such actions are absolutely horrible, but honestly rather clever. Think of it this way -- it's easy as being a driver for Uber/Lyft, picking the group of renters up, text your buddy the address, and boom -- a thief's dream come true. Neighbors won't call the cops because so many people are in/out of the rentals, they can't keep track of what is normal or suspicious activity.
> Imagine buying a condo and all of the units around you are AirBnBs
All of my recent research into condos showed any building where this could be an issue has explicit prohibition on short term rentals as part of the HOA. The more egregious HOAs even have prohibition on long-term rentals without a permit which can be denied by the HOA.
I refer to this as the Singapore solution. Singapore is nice, but you can’t buy chewing gum and caning is acceptable punishment for minor infractions. Many HOA’s are similar
Imagine living in a nice forest home near Tahoe. 20 years ago you had neighbors you talked to and could borrow a tool from. Now you have a never ending flow of new tourists visiting Tahoe staying at the Airbnb next to your house.
I assume you are being facetious. Tahoe has always been primarily second home owners. 20 years ago you rented through an agency, craigslist, or word of mouth if you were doing short term rentals. AirBnb just means it is easier to fill them so they rent more frequently which makes renting long term financially unattractive.
The issue isn't who is staying there, it's the fact that they are just random people that don't have any stake in the surrounding community except for their 2-night stay there.
> The idea that a neighborhood's character needs to be preserved is exactly the kind of logic used to justify redlining.
Who is talking about preserving a neighborhood's "character"? We're talking about preserving the concept of a residential area as opposed to abundance of homes being used as commercial hotel-like spaces.
> "Random" people should be able to buy property and use it in the same way that existing owners can.
They're not "random people". They're human beings.
What's optimal time of stay? Maybe ban students or renters as well. Might stay longer than 2 nights but certainly they dont have a "stake in the surrounding community". Might as well ban hotels while you're at it.
Again, trying to engineer who lives in your community is wrong IMO
I'm sorry, but given the unwarranted extreme language you're using, this is clearly a trigger issue for you independent of what the parent comment was saying.
No one is talking about "rights", "control", "redlining", or dehumanization.
All they are doing is observing that people like to live next to human beings they can form longer-term relationships with. This is the fundamental fabric of human society and there is nothing wrong with people desiring that. That doesn't necessarily mean they have any "right" to "control" or "engineer" it. But people who want to have deeper ties to a community (which has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success) have every reason to try to influence their neighborhood to enable that.
If you're trying to "control" who I can allow stay at my house and for how long, you're infringing on what I deem to be my "rights". I don't get how its not about these things?
> All they are doing is observing that people like to live next to human beings they can form longer-term relationships with.
Maybe we should ban renters as well. Higher home ownership rates has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success. So why not nudge out renters? Curious where you draw the line and why.
> If you're trying to "control" who I can allow stay at my house and for how long, you're infringing on what I deem to be my "rights". I don't get how its not about these things?
If you were to demolish your house and build a 3-story building in its place with a number of identical units within it and then ran it as a hotel, you would be in violation of zoning laws and would be required to stop. Would the enforcement of that law be an infringement on your rights? Should this behavior be allowed? If not, what is the fundamental difference between doing this and running an airbnb with a rotating door of extremely short-term visitors?
> Maybe we should ban renters as well. Higher home ownership rates has been shown time and time again to be critical for psychological health and societal success. So why not nudge out renters?
Don't blame the renters. Blame the landlords that hoard homes and make it impossible for renters to afford to make the transition to home ownership.
Honestly this feels a bit odd to read - I think the point is clear that communities benefit from having long-term residents, regardless of who they are.
If my neighbor makes too much noise, I can go talk to them and we will have an understanding. If an airbnb makes too much noise, I can tell the current residents to quiet down but there will be new ones in a few days. The residents don't stand to face any meaningful consequences for being a disturbance to the neighbors, and the owner of the house likely doesn't live in the community either so if I talk to them, there's no incentive for them to try and reduce the disturbances. Airbnbs around my house are known for this being a big problem. This is the reason that zoning laws put hotels in commercial space instead of residential.
I am not trying to "engineer who lives in my community", I am trying to engineer a community.
I don't want to control who comes into my neighborhood really. But I don't really want my residential neighborhood to turn into hotel alley. The city has specific zoned areas for that.
How would you like if your neighbor started an aluminum can recycling center next door? A strip club? A nightclub?
It's bad for the people living there for the same reason city councils don't allow hotels to be built anywhere.
Short term rentals aren't a bad thing in of itself, but the purpose of zoning is that different locations serve different needs better. When you live in a neighborhood you expect there to be elementary schools near your house, and that there's quiet hours so that you can sleep during the night. ect.
Hotels and by extension air bnb's disrupt this balance. If the five condo towers surrounding the school suddenly become short term rentals overnight, either the school needs to move or kids have to travel farther. And no amount of police presence is going to make tourists not party during 1 am. You tell one group to stop, well the next is coming in 3 days.
And it goes the other way too. Having night life congregated together makes it easier for public services to their job. You can have more paramedics prepared for overdoses - enhanced police presence because drunk people are stupid, ect.
Even if air bnb's aren't a net negative on the economy, skirting of local regulations have qualitative effects on the the city that shouldn't be discounted.
because supply and demand matter, and units that are AirBnB'ed are taken off the market for long term rentals, leading to rents for locals rising higher than trend. Even given that in the perfect economy construction would keep up with demand, there is a ~5-10 year lag between demand signal and correction in construction (prices rise, new construction breaks ground, new construction opens, new constructions absorbs marginal demand, filtering from less expensive units to more expensive units, rent prices stabilize/decrease). 5-10 years is a sizeable chunk of my life and I would strongly prefer to not have a 5-10 year chunk of my life with elevated rents due to airbnb listings.
You're missing the forest for the trees here. AirBnB only makes problems because we're all forced to work in designated commercial zones, and they "subverted" zoning laws.
Now we're "subverting" zoning laws by allowing people to work from rural areas or wherever. People can then use market pressures to live wherever is cheapest and has the amenities they want! That will decrease demand for hot cities and should make it easier to live in them.
Of course, that is presuming that our current demand craze has anything to do with residency at all, and isn't being driven by corporations like Blackstone buying up properties as investments, and Russian/Chinese oligarchs buying properties as wealth shelters. Funny how the Canadian market has suddenly chilled a little since the government banned foreign buyers. Must be a coincidence.
Apply this logic of maintaining the status quo historically. Imagine someone creates something to do (Y) with good X. Price of good X goes up due to increase demand. Consumers of good X lobby that this is bad and there should be laws to prevent good X to be used for Y.
Also why are you optimizing for lower rents (as long as they are not AirBNB short term rentals)? What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property? Or the people that are coming to stay short term?
> Also why are you optimizing for lower rents... What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property?
Because basic shelter is WAY lower on the hierarchy of needs than rental income, and shelter is not a need that the US is adequately meeting even for its middle class.
If you think the US should be doing more the shelter people without adequate shelter it should do so directly. Creating market distortions that purposely reduces the value of property and discourages production of the good is not the way to go. That would be like banning expensive restaurants because they're running up rent on inexpensive restaurants and soup kitchens. After all, desert is way lower on the hierarchy of needs than basic sustenance and food is not a need that the US is adequately meeting even for its middle class
What kind of actions are you considering that do not affect the market? Government housing affects the market by creating artificial supply. Regulations affect the market. just about anything that the government does will affect the market.
If you believe that housing is a basic right and everyone should be housed, then relying on supply and demand is not going to work. There's nothing inherent about a market that would house everyone, if anything, a market would reach an equilibrium where supply meets demand at some point where some people are not able to afford the supply and suppliers do not have an incentive/are unable to meet the price point of the remaining demand.
> Creating market distortions that purposely reduces the value of property and discourages production of the good is not the way to go.
Zoning laws already create market distortions. A zoning law that prevents building denser residential property is no more or less distortionary than a policy that prohibits short-term rentals.
Also, reducing the future expected value of property does not discourage builders; they only care about the sale price today (or, today + build time).
> That would be like banning expensive restaurants because they're running up rent on inexpensive restaurants and soup kitchens.
Restaurants are also far higher on the hierarchy of needs than shelter.
We do distort the market in favor of soup kitchens -- they have substantial tax benefits and in many places they can operate out of differently zoned property.
I like that he specifically mentioned open floor plans. This is the number one reason why I don't want to return to the office. I kinda do want to go back. But I need my privacy and some quiet. I can't do the open floor plan ever again.
It always annoyed me that they couldn't even be honest and say it was save rent, they had to make it seem like open floor plan was a positive thing because it "increases collaboration"
It's not enough you want to be cheap but you want to make it seem like you're doing it for our benefit.
I think a lot of founders and their friends are using the office as a replacement for a healthier separate social circle and social life that they lack (a lot of people lack that, and they do too), so for them they're really just hanging out and like the potential for “increased collaboration” for that reason
(1) Healthiest = great social circle at work that bleeds into social circle out of work
(2) Less healthy = great social circle at work, separate great social circle outside of work
(3) Even less healthy = no social circle at work (just a job), great social circle outside work
(4) Worse = great social circle at work, no social circle outside of work (I never seen this situation. If you have a great social circle at work it's practically inevitable you'll do things outside of work)
(5) No social circle anywhere
This being HN I know lots of people will rebel against (1) but there are tons of stories about friends starting companies together and you can be sure they loved spending time together both at work and outside of work.
Just to make it more concrete I can't personally imagine The Beatles just calling their music "a job" and not getting close to their fellow band members. Sure that's a band but it's not really different from other famous business friend founders. I'm pretty confident Larry and Sergei socialized with each other outside of work. Hewlett and Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were certainly friends when starting Apple and socialized outside work.
(4) is common among people who move internationally more than once or twice. Making friends as an adult is already difficult, and knowing that you will move on after a couple of years makes it even more difficult. You have a reason to socialize with your coworkers, so they will become the center of your new social life. If you moved to a popular expat destination, you may be able to find other expats who are similarly disconnected from normal life. Beyond that, making friends requires crossing cultural barriers, which takes a lot of effort and extraversion.
Your rankings make no sense to me. I don't understand why you deem someone who has separate social circles inside and outside of work as "less healthy".
Agreed. This appears to be the most best, and also most resilient option.
God forbid you run into issues with your outside social circle, you've still got your work circle, and the other way around.
I've only had option #1 happen once, and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company, and even then, it didn't really merge the social circles, I just had some people which were in both. I wouldn't do it again, either.
It's great to have multiple groups of friends, they don't all need to be related through work.
Yeah; the few times I've suggested friends apply for jobs where I work, it's always been with the understanding "in a department different than mine". It's "hey, the culture, comp, and work here is pretty good, you might like it", not "let's work together".
I think what they suggested is actually the reverse: coworkers becoming friends, not friends becoming coworkers.
It makes sense in a way, when you spend 7+ hours a day with those people, you're bound to find some common interests that could bring you closer. What's hard is maintaining those friendships once they're no longer coworkers, as usually those "common interests" are mostly about the company's.
The comment I was responding to listed "and it was when I encouraged a few friends to apply at my company" as the only time they had #1 happen. I was responding to that.
100%. I've had...three people in my life who I stayed close to after changing jobs. Two of them I worked with in two different workplaces, which I think is a large reason why (the relationship necessarily was > a single workplace), but even then, I'm not working with them, have in fact moved across the country from them, and so the relationships have atrophied some (though we still talk periodically).
This seems a little too idealistic, I'm afraid. It'd be amazing to have friends from work with whom one could start companies outside etc. But most folks perceive a job as just "a source of income", nothing more. And that is healthy on its own, otherwise we're in a perpetual servitude of the employers, because we link our personal happiness to "the job".
Are you under 40? I think when I was in my 20s and early 30s I would agree on (1). But when I got married and had kids case (2) became optimal, because my social circle filled up with people who had kids of the same age / went to the same school.
The pandemic then pushed me between (2) and (3) - good social circle at work etc.
(4) is me, as I have a wife and young son. I have great friendships and relationships in work, but my non-work time is with my family. Not as rare as you’d think.
I couldnt disagree more. Maybe if your goal is to start a company with the people you work with this might be true...
But work friends should not be your main friends. It's like saying your main friends should be a group of bowlers but at any moment on any day your local bowling alley could decide you are banned or that if you decide another bowling alley is better you dont get to bring your new friends to it.
Having a social group at work is great but having boundaries between work and personal is much healthier.
Introversion/extroversion isn't a distinctive feature of Myers-Briggs - it shows up in more scientifically-respectable personality measures, like the five-factor (OCEAN) model.
Yes, it features prominently in the MBTI, but my point is that "Whatever people think of Myers-Briggs [my experience is that extroversion is important]" doesn't make a lot of sense because introversion/extroversion is a widely-accepted concept that the MBTI uses, not a concept that comes from the MBTI.
I guess the point of that post is that the same type of managers who want to keep the cube seat warm are the same type of managers who'll want to micromanage WFH; switching to remote won't change their desires and expectations.
Teams can thrive in same room. High cadence communication needs same room (NASA flight control). If the work is not actually about a team delivering value together - concretely, and the only rationale for open space is "hypothetically it would be nice if they collaborated more" open office will create negative multipliers to everything (except facility costs).
The pathology is statistical. On average open offices are bad. Individuals can love and thrive in open offices. I suppose that's why it's so hard to kill them - you can always find a few persons who claim honestly it's the best place for them.
The benefit of open floor plan is very well established: you can get far more employees into a given amount of space (and therefore rent) than you can with cubes or offices.
Pretty sure the open office was a response to the cubicle hell that was prevalent in so many offices. As a child my dad took me to his bring your kid to work day. We sat in his cubicle all day and I felt like I was in prison.
I feel bad that my dad had to deal with that BS. He went full remote as soon as he was able.
Man I'd love a return to cubicles at the least. With enough space open floor plans can feel less terrible but sound just carries across these big open rooms.
I went to this office one day a week. But guys in the neighboring cubicles were playing soccer. Not all day but during times of the day. They seriously had a soccer-ball they played with. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry but it was definitely a detriment to productivity. Collaboration. Soccer yeah
Or maybe he already knows that the only thing worse than annoying co-workers are co-workers you have asked to keep quiet?
I once shared a space with a girl who played dance music quite loudly. I asked her to turn it down a bit and from her reaction you would think I had just kicked her new puppy to death.
The following few weeks were frosty, to say the least, and I ended up moving elsewhere.
Right in general you don't want people to hate you. You want to be polite. You don't want enemies. But if they behave that way to begin with it's not like a simple plea will change their behavior much except for a little while perhaps.
Soon they'll be back to their antics playing maybe baseball (just kidding, sounds crazy right but so does playing soccer in the office). They're just not concerned about other people's productivity. The general point is that open-office floor-plan easily leads to distractions like these and can even lead to animosity between co-workers.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. The kind of people who play soccer at work will definitely listen to you when you ask them not to do that.
These days I’ve found the office is so empty that none of the normal downsides apply. It seems like an unstable equilibrium because why would they keep paying rent for this giant office but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
Honestly I started doing push ups and pull ups and squats at home during the pandemic. Not a ton. 6 sets of 8-12 during the day. A set takes me a minute or two. At this point I rarely break a sweat and just do them during the day whenever I get up for water or the bathroom.
My health is significantly better overall because of this. I would feel very odd doing this in an office. I have lots of other reasons why I don't like going into an office (mostly losing 1-2 hours a day to commuting) but this is at the top of the list of why I wont go back.
It must be possible for all the remote workers to gather together and actually rent/make an office like this right (with like, 10 people in, 10 small offices and a shared lunchroom/kitchen)? If you’re not looking for a bunch of profit the rent would sort of remain bearable too.
Depends on the company, I think. Some companies are geographically remote, so that's not quite possible. For others yes, things like WeWork exist although might be a little pricey (but probably worth it!). Or just a warehouse-type location equipped with temporary walls that could be rented too :-)
Every picture I've ever seen of a place like WeWork has shown an open floor plan. They might have offices, but they're going to be extra expensive.
And since there's no such thing as "your desk" there, you will never feel at ease. Every day might bring someone that's incredibly annoying, and collaborating with your coworkers would mean either annoying others or booking a conference room.
In the end, it's easier to collaborate with them via video from home.
I think there are advantages to having an office, but I don't think collab work places have those advantages.
On their front-page, they advertise "Private, move-in ready offices" for "1-20+" people as one of the options, which is why I mentioned them. Of course, that could just mean "open-office space private to a particular company", and that's what makes it a bit confusing. But yes, other options are clearly just open-office space.
Start your own company. Get your “boss” office, and roam the staff shared office when you want. Problem solved. Don’t ask your employer to fulfill your capricious dreams.
Exactly my thoughts, thanks for noting it! The only thing I don't agree on is that these dreams are somehow "capricious" (esp. given they were the norm just a little over 10 years ago or so; in that respect, "open office" is the capricious dream of the "modern" management) ;)
I have been blessed to have a private office for the first 10 years of my career and wfh the last 10. Neither is perfect and I’d really like to work from an office 1-2 days per week. If I did, I wouldn’t mind open plan tbh. The whole reason to come in one day per week would be to be interrupted and interrupt others. And meetings. I still have 4 days for focus work, it would be ok. Going to be office to sit alone used to feel great, now it seems pointless. I’d plan for zero peace and quiet and zero privacy at the office but I’d see it as the whole point of going there.
2016 to 2018 I was at a company where most of the office was in person, but I was allowed hybrid unofficially. I'd end up coming in on most days, but usually around 11 or 12. And I'd occasionally leave early. When I was in the office I cherished seeing my coworkers, socializing, and solving problems together. I think that was my ideal work arrangement. Now I'm fully remote but it feels like I'm just paying the rent on my own office space. I'm chained to my desk for video calls and frequent Teams pings. My office is 2hrs away and I can't just go in. There's almost no camaraderie on the team. People do their jobs and log off. Not even basic water cooler discussion type stuff.
This is how I’m working currently. I go into the office 0-2 times a week depending on work load. When deadlines are really tight I work from home completely for focus when it’s more relaxed i go into the office once or twice a week which I enjoy because I get to spend time with my colleagues e.g having lunch together, shooting the breeze or even collaborating on work stuff.
My company reduced floor space in 2020, so the open-floor office I was sitting in previously doesn't exist anymore, but after working from home for some time, you notice just how noisy an office building really is - even when you are alone in a smaller room, you can hear people talking in the hallway, in the office next to you etc. etc. So that needs some getting used to too...
I'm in a situation right now where my office is near by and open, but attendance is mostly optional and ad hoc. I find that days when I have lots of meetings are the best days to WFH because it's so much easier to talk over Zoom and not have to rush back and forth to meeting rooms. Having a chat window secondary to the out loud talking is also invaluable. The in-person situation is most valuable when I'm working on some tactical problem (ie coding) and want a second set of eyes or just to complain for a minute. It can be done over Slack, but it's less natural.
I hate open floor plans! Give me a proper cube, yes SPEND the money on your workers, don't just cheap out and throw in a picnic table in a big room and call it 'Collaboration', BS!
If you’ve ever been to AirBnb’s office you’d know it’s nothing like that. The AirBnb office is fairly open but it’s way nicer than most people’s homes.
For sure - although it's always interesting to hear what people like or not about it, and how they work around issues like distractions/attention scatter and the pure "don't watch over my shoulder when I need to check HN". Maybe it all depends on personal sensitivity to such things and the ability to focus/zone in to the music, but that still feels like a coping mechanism rather than something that naturally comes to most (and I'm saying that despite being able to hyper-focus myself, after many years in an open environment).
I think it depends a lot on your emotional approach to work. For me, I'm a decently good engineer, but at my heart I'm quite extroverted and the thing I like most about working is being around smart people and making friends and stuff. The engineering itself is not the core of my existence, it's getting to live the role of the engineer. I guess I also don't mind putting headphones on and focusing, and I really like getting distracted out of that because, well, I like human interaction and helping people and stuff.
That's a good way to put it, thanks for sharing! Agreed that it may not be the same for extroverts vs introverts. I think it doesn't have to be "either-or" - both open-office and private-office plans need to co-exist, the trouble starts when everyone is bound to the same requirements.
“don’t mind focusing [but] really like getting distracted out of that … interaction … helping … and stuff”
This sounds annoying to at least 50% of your peers, and destructive to focus for almost everyone.
Engineering (as opposed to, say, “coding” that just transcribes requirements into code) usually requires building systems in one’s mind then factoring them into well-architected structure and describing that literately in code. This is not a social hang-out (“hey, wassup, can I help w anything?”) activity.
Certainly system conception and architecture can happen great at a whiteboard, but the steps after that tend to go better focused, alternating with iterative collaborative feedback syncs that don’t break concentration for anyone in the system-to-literate-artifact time consuming phase.
Think 3 to 4 hour cycles: 2 to 3 hrs uninterrupted focus, 30 mins break, 30 mins collab for ideation and review, back into focus. Shorten either the morning or afternoon focus cycle depending when you focus most productively, allocate the extra to lunch/learn/whatever. 2x3hrs+1hr lunch = 30 hr work, 5 hrs lunch, per week. Beyond that you probably don’t engineer productively and should enjoy non workplace environments to recharge / defrag.
Since focus time is the phase with most time, it means at any given moment most people need library quiet, and the reflective syncs should be elsewhere.
- Privacy by default with collab spaces allows focus and interaction, without interaction annoying or destructive to anyone. (It’s by-and-large only annoying to (a) profit-over-productivity accountants who think it’s expensive, (b) micro-managers who adore management by walking around, aka getting paid executive pay to chit chat everyone’s focus away, and (c) people who haven’t yet learned how to deep focus consistently.)
- Collab by default without (or with only limited) private focus space prevents this beyond whatever threshold of private space availability. That said, allowing people to pick their own work-start times helps distribute focus and collab usage. The less private space, the more flexible working hours and location must be.
Effectively zero people can translate systems to code while “human-interacting and helping people and such” the way you describe, advocating for that as default is literally counter productivity.
There’s a solution though: devs craving continuous interaction can seek out a company (correctly) believing in “XP” aka eXtreme Programming or paired programming. In this model, the default private spaces have two engineers who program symbiotically. Research suggests 1+1 = 2.5 or 3 or more. For some problems, 10x.
Not only co-thinkers thrive in XP. Standard deviations of engineers need fewer iterations till correctness, meaning, produce higher quality faster. It’s been shown this helps introverted thinkers too, even if they only pair with a rubber duck to explain their thinking aloud to!
It is really strange to me that anti-open-office people (and in general anti-office people) often don't understand (or don't believe?) that other people just have radically different preferences to them.
A “closed” office design includes private inner sanctums, small group common areas, and large group common areas. Think academia: my grad student friends have shared or sometimes private offices in little clusters of 5 that surround a small conference room or lounge. Then down the hall is the big department lounge. A much greater range of preferences are satisfiable with this layout. The same people are also allowed to have varying preferences depending on the time of day or phase of project, and to wander with their laptops.
I'm not arguing that offices shouldn't have closed spaces, I'm arguing that there exist people who like open offices, despite the weird remarks in this thread from people who think that, like, only managers would.
The person to whom you're responding probably made that comment because of GP's statement "I think a lot of people who spend work hours browsing the web don't like them." Which in itself is pretty cynical.
As a fellow dev, I dislike open office plans, but not because I spend my day browsing the web. I dislike them because I'm rather noise-sensitive, and it's hard for me to tune out the sound of ping-pong balls being batted back and forth. I can't just put on headphones, because my team pair-programs extensively. With WFH, I can pair program and not deal with that or the myriad of other aural distractions.
That said, I appreciate your comments on this post and yes, I wholeheartedly agree that the preferences of folks who prefer WFO are just as valid as those of us who prefer WHF. Plenty of room for both in the world. :-)
And with that, I'm off to play today's Wordle while half-listening to a Zoom meeting.
Sooo.. w/o getting into my history too deeply, my ex and I left the US in 2006 and worked freelance/remote. Wired did an article about us in 2008 living in a solar van when that was, like, unheard of. It seems like every few years a new batch of people want to try this approach, and it's always popular with the press to write about it. Sometimes it works out. I think it's a great way to live, and it teaches you a lot about yourself.
We used to just find vacation rentals. One of the key tricks I used when AirBnb came out was figuring out who the owner was and contacting them directly with a cash offer for 3 months rent with ~25% (sometimes 50%) knocked off if I pay in USD up front. So I'd say most of the places I lived from 2009 on (about 20 places?) I found on AirBnb, thanks guys, and then paid cash to the owner. Only once or twice, for a couple days at most, have I ever actually used AirBnb to run a transaction for me.
Not for nothing, I now live in a house I own in Portland with an AirBnb right next to me whose owners are off living in some other AirBnb out of the country, and I'm pissed as fuck that I'm living next to what's turned into a goddamn motel. But it's wonderful that the AirBnb staff now get the same in-system privileges that unionized airline employees have had for decades. It would be better if it wasn't literally gutting every city from Amsterdam to Bangkok in the process and turning them into hipster slums.
I guess you did consider the possibility that by using Airbnb to find accommodation you were nonetheless perpetuating the system by which they have turned cities into "hipster slums"?
The three months doesn't make much difference. I might be a responsible tenant when I use airbnb, whether in lots of short stays or one big one, but that doesn't stop other guests being awful.
Your three months just incentivised the owners to keep it as a short-term let.
To clarify, the landlords always gave me a receipt for payment, and in most cases had me sign a rental agreement. There are some countries that come to mind where squatters' rights are particularly strong (Spain, for instance).
In general, most of these places were already vacation rentals before Airbnb came along, and the landlords were well prepared to rent them independently of the platform.
Precisely, try that shit in Brazil or something. The government isn't going to give two fucks about your "squatters rights" and you can bet if you tried that on the wrong landlord that landlord is going to send out the pipe-hitters. Not advised.
I mean, this is the way; I don't believe people actually want to go through companies like AirBnB, Uber and Uber Eats, all those in between parties if they can help it; if they can skip the fees, and especially if they can get long term tenants, then great. And if by paying with cash you can avoid taxes as well, great.
The only thing there is that it's a risk, e.g. what if they thrash the place, but airbnb may not even give a shit about that and accuse you (the owner) of fraud. That risk is also mitigated by paying up front like you said.
Well as the renter in these situations, at least with cash you can see the place first. If you pre-pay into a dirty airbnb, good luck getting your money back.
Yes, I did. The whole point is that I wasn't just a one-or-two-day ghost. I lived in these places for as I said 3-6 months (in one case almost a year). So I knew my neighbors, and treated them as I would neighbors in any other apartment I rented as a regular tenant.
[edit]
I should just add that I'm as embarrassed to make noise or screw with anyone's living space as a homeowner as I was as a tenant. I could make $400/nt renting my own house on Airbnb and go live in Morocco or Chile and just live off the fat of the land (read: being an American with access to credit). I frankly would never do it. I'd rent it to long-term tenants, or I'd sell it, before I'd subject my neighbors on the other side to what the airbnb jerks have subjected me to. And as a tenant, even with a piano that's calling me to play at 2am, I'm not going to wake anyone up.
What it is that leads you to believe the 3-6 months thing is so significant? There are (a very small proportion of) AirBnB guests who are awful. There are (a very small proportion of) longer-term tenants who are awful. At least with AirBnB, the awful guests are gone after a couple of nights.
I know some AirBnBs are used as party destinations, and that's different -- but it's a problem with those hosts, not with the platform. AirBnB make it pretty easy to telegraph that your property is completely unsuitable for loud gatherings, and anyone who puts a piano in a short-term rental is an idiot.
There's no magical cutoff at 3-6 months, but the game theory is that the longer the relationship, the more of a repeated game there is, and the less socially destructive things you'll likely do.
If I'm going to live with a neighbor for ten years, in addition to purely friendly reasons, I'm going to say hi to her and get to know her. Whereas at a hotel I'm overnighting at, if I'm not in a chatty mood, I don't see the reason to oblige a neighbor's request for a 20 minute chat.
If you’ve ever lived next to an active Airbnb I don’t think you’d ask this question. The issues with an endless stream of short term guests are like in your face obvious.
You’re getting people who are in a leisure situation basically 100% of the time. Your normal neighbors aren’t like this.
Even just the transitions are disruptive. Picture a European couple unable to figure out how to open the door with 4 suitcases completely blocking the entrance to your building and making it impossible to go in and out every single time you come home, for one highly specific example plucked from the real world.
Exactly. It's not even that the people mean to be disrespectful, they just don't understand that they're talking loudly 6" from your bedroom window, and this happens every day. Sometimes I used to live in motels where I would wake up every morning to people dragging their luggage out. I used to rent apartments. Finally I bought a house. And now... it's like I'm back in the motel.
Where I live, many (perhaps even majority of) buildings have apartments that are rented as short-term tourist rentals, and I've lived in many such buildings. I never perceived any issues with short term guests.
I unfortunately live underneath a floor that is rented out on vacasa. During the week I have to get up earlyish for work, and it's only occasionally annoying. But since these people are vacationing or just visiting, especially on the weekends, they'll often violate the building's noise ordinances Friday and Saturday night. So the only two days I ought to be able to sleep in, they're partying till 3am, banging around, stomping on the floor, and then sometimes getting up at 6am and banging around to go be a tourist. I've had to call the police multiple times.
It's not the 3-6 months thing that's difference. It's that you signed up to live in an apartment with neighbors and instead you find yourself in an unstaffed hotel where there is no one on site to manage unruly guests violating lease agreements. And all they'll do if you call them (Vacasa at least) is to text the people causing the problem.
Even simple examples can come to light - someone who lives next door for 3 months is unlikely to be able to perpetually party every single night; but an AirBNB on the coast could see a party each night.
Another huge thing is people learn to live with consistent annoyances; if your neighbor runs a leaf blower at 8 AM every Saturday, you may hate it but you learn to live around it. If instead, he were to run a leaf blower randomly at different times it would get really annoying.
I think the fact that the 3-6 months was negotiated directly with the landlord is more significant than the length of time itself. They essentially had to take their listing off Airbnb and rent it as a regular furnished apartment. This enforces a mutual sense of responsibility and respect on myself and them which is perhaps even more than would exist in a typical lease agreement, because it's done under "special circumstances". Whether you blame the hosts or the platform or the guests, that sort of respect for a place and a host just is not possible when everything is done through a giant corporate medium; and it's also not possible if it's only done for a short period of time, since there's limited accountability.
3-6 months isn't so important, but it's about where things start to be serious. Water pipes leak. Refrigerators break. You get to know people.
that sort of respect for a place and a host just is not possible when everything is done through a giant corporate medium
I find the claim that you can't respect someone else's property just because you rent it through an intermediary... strange.
Whenever I'm in an AirBnB, I'm well aware that this is someone else's stuff and that (at least) common decency requires me to treat it with care and respect.
I think for me it's less about how well the renter behaves and more about the turnover rate: how often will I, as a neighbor, see a new face next door?
At 3-6 months, not often. At 1-7 days, quite often, which may give the feel of it being a hotel.
Can you tell me more about what you mean by "airbnb jerks have subjected me to" ?
Honestly, my family and I use airbnb pretty frequently, and I would like to think that we're considerate guests... but, maybe there's something we're missing? What makes the guests next-door to you bad ones (or great ones) ?
I was referring more to the owners than to the guests. Most of the guests are polite and quiet, although it's impossible for them not to wake me up when they're leaving with their luggage, which is 3-4 times per week. This simply wouldn't happen with longer-term tenants. But it's also due to the way the neighboring property owner set up their Airbnb. Essentially, they spent 2 years building a tall, narrow cottage directly up to the property line, using every available inch of their yard, which blocked off my terrace from the sun. This is allowed here under loosened building restrictions because of the acute housing shortage, but the intent of the scheme was to provide more housing for local working families, not additional airbnb income for absentee landlords. So after they put me through a couple years of construction and loss of the sun, they rented their main house to long-term tenants, posted the cottage up through a management company for $300/night and f*cked off to Europe. And now I wake up to people leaving, and again to someone knocking and saying "housekeeping" every weekend.
> and I'm pissed as fuck that I'm living next to what's turned into a goddamn motel.
Is your anger directed at Airbnb or at the tourists? Both parties just do what's in their best interest. It's a typical economical transaction which makes both sides better-off.
The problem is that the Airbnb situation creates externalities. In your case it's annoying neighbours and, in the broader sense, it's e.g. the gentrification.
Local governments are the ones to blame here and the ones who should be responsible to manage the externalities. There must be some clever policies to mitigate the problems.
No, I don't think that's fair at all, since I didn't live in central cities for one thing (more often villages and small towns, or suburbs where I would be the only foreigner), but also because like I said above, the small number of long-term nomads who move to a place to live and work is absolutely dwarfed by the vast number of tourists who are now using up to 50% of apartments in places like Lisbon as if they were hotel rooms. I think there are sustainable forms of travel that don't place undue stress on local housing markets and economies. Your assumption is incorrect.
Eh, no. Airbnb rentals don't go for 3-6 months. (So what I was doing wouldn't have even been possible via their website). I wasn't "living like a hipster", I wasn't on a work-vacation. There was no "cheating" involved, since all the people who post on Airbnb also post on other websites, local and international. Airbnb just had a nicer map.
It ain't cheating Airbnb if the landlord is happy to cut out the middleman. And when I stay in a place I learn the language and live there and try to integrate into society. I'm not there to party for a weekend. What I'm referring to with the hollowing out of city centers like Lisbon, Prague, Amsterdam... people like me renting there for 3-6 months are not a threat to people who live and work there, because I'm negotiating close-to standard price for a furnished apartment (and the owner knows that the stability of being paid up front makes up for the extra they might make if their Airbnb were booked every day). So no, I wouldn't be treating the place as a tourist destination or undermining the locals, or partying and reducing their quality of life in their own places next door.
I agree with some of the criticism towards you and also with some of your rebuttals, but one thing your above comment doesn't take into account is that you effectively are part of the problem still.
I've been a nomad for over a dozen years and usually find ways to rent medium-term, ex. 6-12 months (and in some cases, long-term). I do as you do, and integrate into society, speak the local language, etc. But even so, I am participating in taking local housing from locals because in some cases I know I'm paying an increased rate (vs local rate), or I'm using what otherwise would be used as an Airbnb for living.
I spent 5 yrs in Lisbon, while renting at local rates, as the city went from ungentrified to gentrified, so I considered it my home and loved the city. But I sat there and watched as it was ruined by tourism and the hoards of short-term visitors. That quality of life I loved so much was destroyed in front of my eyes. I even went back a few years later to try living there again and it was even worse than when I left. All I mean to say is that there is no winning as a nomad, either I'm greatly affected by short-term housing, tourism and gentrification or I'm helping it along.
That's valid - and Lisbon is an extreme, and heartbreaking example. It's been a victim of its own beauty. It's also extremely compact, making all the central real estate wildly more expensive. There's an unavoidable truth to the fact that when everyone wants to go to a place - often because of its local charm and reputation as a "real" living, walkable city (an anachronism in America) - prices go up, local people are displaced, and the place turns into a gentrified theme park, a shadow of what it once was. It's happening here in Portland. I saw it in Granada. Prague is a desperate example. I don't have an answer for it. I personally draw the line at allowing normal apartment units to be used as one- or two-night hotel rooms. Prior to Airbnb, short term furnished rentals existed but generally had to be sought through local property management companies, and the incentives for landlords still favored finding tenants who would stay as long as possible, if only because the scheduling and turnover system was so much less efficient.
Bottom line: I don't think it's necessarily destructive for people to go live in a foreign place, get to know the culture and try it out for the mid- to long-term. But I think that's in a wholly different category from tourists who use airbnb in lieu of hotels. And the tourist contingent is orders of magnitude larger and more disruptive to cities than long-term nomads who tend to spread out.
Just for instance; when we lived in Saigon, we lived way out in District 5. In Bangkok we lived in On Nut, at that time the end of the sky train. In both places we were the only farang we would normally see unless we went to the tourist areas for some reason. And in Europe, we lived mainly in villages of a few thousand people, not in cities. When staying somewhere for a few nights or even a few weeks, we stayed in hotels, not airbnb (I'm personally not comfortable with staying in airbnb's short-term because I don't like being in someone's private space, don't trust the quality, don't want to deal with individual landlords' rules and quirks, am wary of hidden cameras, etc., but that's just me).
There's no winning as a nomad, it's true. But I think most of us are keenly aware that we don't want to contribute to the destruction of the places we visit and live, and in fact tend not to cluster in the touristic town centers where housing is already scarce.
3-6 months rentals are not what people usually lease for, at least here it's 3 to 5 years contracts and then keep extending for one year periods. Any flat here rented for 3 to 6 months is a holiday rental and besides being more expensive it's one flat less available for the people that actually want to live in the city.
Typically I was only paying about 20% more than unfurnished neighboring apartments per month, which is fair since utilities were included. There will always be furnished apartments with shorter leases for business travelers. I think I provided a good case for why it's better to accept a reasonable, lower rate to have long-term, stable tenants. I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to freely travel, but hotels are for weekends and vacations. "Holiday apartment" is somewhere in the middle. Those will always exist, too. It's fine as long as they don't eviscerate the city. There is a balance.
One of the most successful pushes against Airbnb taking over whole neighborhoods has been in cities which set a floor on the minimum number of nights. This at least changes the economic calculus enough to persuade landlords to consider long term local renters a little bit more.
I mean, AirBnb helped destroy housing for citizens where I live. It's now almost impossible for a local to find decent housing in my city. I know this is also fault of the administration and the landlords themselves, but I won't certainly ever feel any pity for this multinational.
AirBnb is basically another mean of accruing wealth in the hands of landowners, while people who don't own anything are now in an even harder situation, so I'm happy someone is stealing something from AirBnb, they negatively "disrupted" the lives of milions in order to create their market.
If you only have positive opinions about AirBnb, congratulations, you live in a bubble.
It's not just your city. It's happening everywhere. I'm a homeowner and I absolutely hate it. It destroys daily life and livability. I would never rent my house on it - or, frankly, to anyone who wasn't like me and wanted to stay a long time and live there and respect the place. People see a quick buck and take it, and don't give a shit, but they're driving their own property values down.
[edit] What I mean is, I don't see it as really accruing value for landowners either. I see a lot of short-sighted landowners making money from a system that is going to drive them to ruin in the long term when there is no functional city left in the place they own their property... ultimately the only people who profit from flipping the geography of a city into a hotel are airbnb investors and absentee landlords in the short run.
Here at least in Portland, we sort of differentiate between people who live in the houses they own, versus people or companies who own property for speculation/rent collection. Most of the homeowners I know are simply happy to finally own a place they live in and stop paying rent.
It's still somewhat possible here; for example, last month, a friend who's a 42 year old bartender and just had a baby finally bought a house only about 30 blocks east (east is cheaper); if he'd had enough money for a down payment 5 years ago we would be living on the same block. I make about twice as much as he does. I want him to be living on my block. That's the kind of city that I want to live in, that's why people want to live in Portland in the first place. That's why I decided to buy my house here.
Airbnb is extremely corrosive to a "working city" environment where people of different social / income classes are able to live and work in the same neighborhoods, because it encourages petit homeowners like me to take a paycheck to abandon our properties so the hoteliers extract rent. Yet it's exactly the mixture of working class life which made Airbnb's most attractive tourist cities like Madrid and Lisbon, Portland and Amsterdam so popular with tourists.
IMHO Airbnb is a blight for landlords and renters and there's a very good argument to be made that no property outside a city-bonded hotel should be rented for less than 3-6 months. I said this about taxis not being driven by civilians back when I was a cab driver and Uber showed up, so, I can see I'm on the wrong side of history...
> AirBnb is basically another mean of accruing wealth in the hands of landowners, while people who don't own anything are now in an even harder situation, so I'm happy someone is stealing something from AirBnb, they negatively "disrupted" the lives of milions in order to create their market.
Wait, in whose pockets did tourists's money end up before Airbnb? In the pockets of non-landowners? No, in the pockets of hoteliers, so still landowners.
Airbnb took a chunk of hoteliers' market (so good, right?) but also created a new market. A new market in which people who previously couldn't rent (because not enough capital to be a hotelier) can now do it and thus new market for tourists who previously couldn't travel (because less competition and possibilities).
But it did so in the same way Uber turned the taxi business into a casual labor market which is bad for both workers and customers - by breaking local ordinances designed to maintain professional and community standards, circumventing attempts to regulate it, battling and overwhelming city councils and local residents' groups one jurisdiction at a time, with hedge fund financed legal battles to overturn laws that existed specifically because people who lived in those places had voted for them, and then essentially turn those people into a minority vote in their own communities.
Actually the guy we bought the van from before we added the solar panels was this suuuper tall Swiss guy, like 6'4 at least, and somehow he fit in there with his girlfriend and a whole six boxes of survival kit, maps, cooking equipment and such, neatly stacked under the bed platform. I always wondered how he handled it, but you can do a lot of things for love ;)
In my experience having gone on vacation in a caravan, generally you don't live inside the van for very long; it's where you sleep or take shelter from the weather, the rest of the time you're outside, or (in the case of a caravan) in a tent attached to the front that's usually 2.5-3 meters high up.
Yeah, it was a bit like that. We lived in/out of it for a year, it was a little Mitsubishi box van from the 1980s; and pretty much we lived outside it with tarps and tent-poles, set up camp out the side and slept inside. It was in Australia, so you wouldn't want to sleep on the ground, and occasionally kangaroos would come through and tear down the tent..(I got into a stand-off with one that knocked over our table in the middle of the night once, thought someone was going through our stuff, jumped out bare naked in the desert with a samurai katana I kept under the bed - but I was drunk enough I saw the beast and retreated into the van and let the thing be)
Ive worked for a coding bootcamp since before covid. We used to be in person only and Ive gotten to see the ups and downs of the full-remote transition for at this point hundreds of jr devs entering the field.
Long story short everything I thought would get negative blowback or go up in flames didnt. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never does.
Our students work through around 1000 hours of computer science fundamentals remotely, build a portfolio of fullstack applications remotely, get hired at FAANG companies and startups remotely, make their employers happy remotely and get more of our graduates hired remotely.
As someone who used to work in and believe in traditional academia I still can't believe there's no catch. But increasingly it's becoming clear that there's not.
Except that the students can't hook up with eachother and there's no free bad coffee.
Also society could still totally collapse at any moment I guess.
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PS I love the green futurism manifesto vibe of airbnbs statement, I wana work there now
I know someone who became mentally ill when the bootcamp switched from in-person to remote and had enough stress to develop schizophrenia from the stresses of trying to apply for jobs remotely and alone in 2020.
There's downsides to both. When schools switched to remote I was able to travel home and study next to my partner, instead of being in a depressed state on-campus.
I think the general rule is that going remote increases variance.
That can be good when it lets people tailor their environment to their own peculiar interests. And it can be bad for people where the normalizing environment of a shared social space helps them drag some deficient attribute back up to a healthy level.
I think this depends largely on whether you live alone. I would never go back to an office, even part time. One of my best friends lives by himself and struggled hard during the covid-induced requirement to work from home.
Much like schools double as a day care for children, work often doubles as a social club for adults.
I've lived by myself for years now and haven't had a huge problem with the working from home part of things, but I also had a fairly healthy online/non-work social life beforehand.
What full remote has done is made it harder for me to consider moving. Sure, I could move anywhere, but I'll show up there knowing essentially no one and have to just go out and meet people by force of will. There's no group of people at my new office I could connect with and at minimum get some recommendations of places to go. Even if you don't become friends with your coworkers, having some amount of in-person social contact is important for most folks, and knowing you have to build that yourself is daunting.
Even then, I think remote work can be a gain...but companies should be providing stipends/reimbursement for coworking spaces rather than investing in offices. Then the org still has to learn to function remotely, but enables people to connect with others through the social construct of 'work', without most of the downsides, a bunch of new upsides,and missing few of the upsides of being in an office with your actual colleagues.
I didn't mean to imply a value judgement either way; the concept seems to be somewhat underappreciated by people who haven't worked remote before. There's a massive dropoff in interpersonal relationship building, largely owing to the watercooler type conversations, overhearing a conversation in a hallway and chiming in, or (if you're a smoker) standing around outside with the other smokers musing over work issues or after work plans.
I think it will be worse for people who uses their work as main source of connections with other people. I guess society should take loneliness seriously for once, as it has a very negative impact on people's health.
definitely, my best friend cant stand it and another engineer mentor friend has suffered really legitimately from it, but honestly its a good reminder, and a privilege check on being in a relationship and living in a walkable mixed-zoning area
i think academia's future is remote. school too - especially if people want to travel nomadically.
Academia has actually had this model for a long time - people moving with their families for postdocs every few years and keeping in touch remotely with old colleagues
while this sentiment may be popular here, there are numerous, well-understood and well-documented benefits of human interaction that are not possible via a screen.
This is super cool and I'm glad someone's trying it. The digital nomad lifestyle is really fun and worth trying for a lot of people, at least for a few years.
I'm skeptical this will work out for Airbnb though. My personal experience is that people who self-select into this type of lifestyle are not going to be as productive. There's too much to do and see in a new city, people to meet, foods to try, parties to go to, coupled with much less oversight.
A critical component for remote work productivity is having a routine that somewhat mimics the routine of going in to the office. That said, it can be really hard to detect low performers, and the market is really tight right now so this might be around for a while.
> A critical component for remote work productivity is having a routine that somewhat mimics the routine of going in to the office.
This is what I found, ended up renting an office because there are far too many distractions and random annoyances. For example, a lot of vacation locations have building work going on constantly and, in many Mediterranean countries, leaving a barking dog out on your balcony all day and night is considered normal and neighbourly.
Also finding a location with a decent internet connection, reliable electric & plumbing, and decent furniture seems to be expecting too much?
> While you’ll be responsible for getting proper work authorization, we’re actively partnering with local governments to make it easier for more people to travel and work around the world. Today, 20+ countries offer remote work visas, and more are in the works. While working from different locations isn’t possible for everyone, I hope everyone can benefit from this flexibility when the time is right.
I think currently this is a big caveat. Getting a work permit in other countries is not that easy, even for Americans or other countries with more prestigious passports. Maybe with AirBnB clout it is easier than without but I'd say it's still quite an issue.
That being said, I'm really excited for what the future could provide with AirBnB focusing on this. Maybe it will be easier not just for Americans and the like to work in other countries but I really hope it will be easier for others from places such as Africa and Latin America to work in Europe and the US as well.
I don’t think they even try to get work visas. A lot of countries have tourist visas up to 90 days. And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
I think this is what AirBnB are doing. A lot of countries have a requirement for you to reside in it for at least half the year to be able to be taxed there and be considered an employee. A lot of countries allow people to visit for limited time, as long as you don’t interfere with the local job market - e.g being a tourist. Those two are not in conflict and you can do what AirBnB are doing right now, without much more accounting difficulties. Though I’m not an accountant and take my words with a grain of salt.
Maybe someone with more knowledge of the law could chime in, but
>And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
seems wrong to me. If I work in another country I'm still working, which means I need to pay taxes in my host country after a certain time (in Norway it's the first day afaik, in some European countries it's after a few months).
It's annoying, of course, but I'm using the resources of the host country while earning money, so it feels understandable.
> I don’t think they even try to get work visas. A lot of countries have tourist visas up to 90 days. And if you go to a country to work there, but are not paid by a local company, you are basically a tourist.
this has been discussed to death on DN forums. Basically yes you're breaking the law but if you don't get caught no one will know. Some people don't like taking this risk while some don't mind.
Well traveling within the EU should be simple enough. Haven't done it outside but I have a few questions.
If I'm on paid leave, I'm still earning money, and I go to Asia - am I breaking the law? I'm still "doing" the activity that's earning me money.
If I'm on my paid leave, and fiddle with my blog, which gets ad revenue - am I earning money and thus doing illegal economic activity?
Not a lawyer so would love a more rigorous definition of "doing work" that is applied in Asia so I know if I'm overstepping. Maybe you can point me to some of those discussions?
to test your theory, i invite you to present this exact scenario to border officials anywhere in the world. This is not meant as a snarky comment but a very literal statement. If you are turned around and refused entry, what you plan to do is illegal.
As already mentioned, “Asia” is not a legal or political entity.
> If you are turned around and refused entry, what you plan to do is illegal
That's... an overstatement. Asking weird questions that indicate a risk of tourist visa overstays which nobody else bothers to ask (even if it is perfectly legal) will put you at risk of rejection, whether or not the law allows what you're trying to do.
I actually did - a bunch of times back when UK was part of EU, and I didn’t have a EU passport myself.
Traveling to UK, permanent resident of Bulgaria (EU), Russian passport.
Border guard - “What are you doing in UK?”. Me - “Working on the clients premises and in their offices.” - “Sure come on in.”
All on tourist visas. Now I have BG citizenship there are no questions, but I wouldn’t think the sentiment is much different. As long as I’m not _employed_ by a company from the country I’m visiting, and stay a month or two, its fine, at least in the Europe. (I’m a contractor employed by BG company with clients in UK)
by “Asia” I meant no disrespect but I know little about the legal state of things there so seemed prudent to generalize
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
I work at a remote first company and HR have given a nod and a wink to this, but with the requirement that you maintain a permanent address and pay taxes in a country where they have an office.
>> Most folks will end up working on tourist visas which is explicitly not allowed around most of the world.
Are you sure this is the case? You’re not allowed to get hired locally but I believe you can work online for a company based in your country of residence provided you don’t stay long enough to become a resident of the new country (which you can’t on a tourist visa). I visited Canada for 6 months on a tourist visa. I had a full immigration interview at the airport when I arrived and they were perfectly happy with me working freelance/online for those 6 months. They were just clear I couldn’t become an employee of a Canadian company.
Yeah; I'm pretty sure that isn't the case. They don't care if you do work online while visiting, just that you're not looking to stay or to take a local job (that they'd prefer to go to a resident). The legal language may be a little fuzzy since I bet it was written before remote work (telecommuting if it even existed at the time :P) was as much a thing, but I'd challenge anyone to find a case of someone penalized for working for doing their job remotely from another country.
That said, if you're working for a multinational company, you may want to be careful. Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
> Being hired in country A, for a company that has presence in both A and B, and then flying and working for a few months in B, could conceivably raise all sorts of flags if noticed.
My employer adopted a similar policy (just not as publicly announced as Airbnb's), and the way they work around this problem is by, assuming you reside in A, allowing you to travel and work in B but explicitly disallowing you from entering an office location in B.
Nope, unless your country has a special arrangement with the country you are visiting, you cannot work with a tourist visa, at all. Does not matter if the company is local or not. No work visa = no work.
Haha yes, exactly. However, AirBnB figured out how to change culture (and law?) to rent our homes out to strangers, maybe they'll lead the way here as well.
I think a couple dozen countries offer digital nomad visas now, the ones I've looked into in detail just require you to be employed remotely by a company outside the country and earn at least a couple thousand USD per month.
I do wonder which country would in effet cause troubles to travellers on a tourist visa, contributing to the local economy by renting a temporary home and other living expenses but happen to be working on their laptop every day of their 90 days trip.
I find it hard to imagine any country actually cares, and even if they do, I find it hard to imagine they could reasonably check whether anyone is there for tourism, or just to work.
They do. Actually the amount of taxes in some countries if you end up messing up and staying over 180 days is significant. And then there is health care. Maybe not an issue in those third world countries with private one, but with public systems real question for them.
Is health care really an issue? They'd really only need to cover emergency issues? Everything longer term I would assume you'd have to go back to your home country to get covered.
Self-imposed limits on imagination do not restrict the possibilities and imagination of government agencies, nor restrict what other people think is "fair and reasonable"
Like you, I also wish the world worked in the way I like to imagine it should.
Is there any country that gives out 90+ day tourist visa? Obviously you still have to follow the rest of immigration law (so no overstaying your welcome).
I know some people are very excited about that, and some think that is going to be a new norm. I have not worked for the corps for at least 4-5 years, but before that I always assumed there are only small amount of people who can really work for company remotely.
I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
I have very little believe that a majority of people can work from home, especially when travel. You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours. So I do understand why airbnb is telling their employees to do so, but curious how long it is going to last, and curious how real it is going to be (considering that it could be up to management approval as well). But I doubt that other companies will follow that.
> I definitely saw people calling that they are going to work from home, but saw very little work to be done that day. Which probably means that people used that as excuse, as they had some business to do outside work, and they did not want to take PTO.
Remote manager here. This is definitely a huge problem with people new to remote work.
I actually don't care at all if people are doing something else during the day and getting their work done at night or whatever they want to do. However, a significant number of people really struggle to get work done at all when they first go remote and lack a repeatable schedule and the feeling of social pressure to be working like their peers. It takes a lot of coaching and mentoring to get these people back on track with their remote-ready peers.
Many other people have no problems working remote, though. IMO, the key to success of a remote team is to coach and mentor all new remote workers very intensely in the first months or year, but then also to be willing to remove people from the team if they just can't get work done remotely. You absolutely don't want a few bad apples to ruin remote work for everyone else.
I think even that is probably an over-estimation. I suspect most folks can work productively (as in, being intensely focused on an activity) only for 2-4 hours a day, and the rest of the time is just "fluff" (which may or may not be necessary for staying productive). From that perspective, regular 9-5 in an office really "steals" our time, because we can't use it on more productive things.
I've done some work-cation. Like instead of 1week off I'll take 2 and work the second. If I'm in a different time zone, I've felt even more productive. Work with out distraction for a few hours show up for a meeting or answer slack when people start working. My mood might even be better because I'm doing something cool on vacation before or after work.
The only people doing 8 hours of "work" are the people scheduling back to back meetings all day
If anything I’ve been seeing lots of articles lately saying that because there are fewer boundaries between life and work when you’re remote lots of people are working far more than they did when they were in person. Idk the numbers but that’s definitely what happened to me.
Just to clarify the hours of productivity. I meant the person will allocate only 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours, and most of the time will be on FB, reading news, and spending time in chats. And whatever is left going to use for some work :)
I used to take my PowerBook into the bathroom stall at work when I needed some alone time to concentrate, but it was embarrassing to get busted when it crashed and made that reboot sound so everybody else in the bathroom knew what I was up to.
>You are at new place, you going to work like 4-6 hours instead of 8-9 hours.
Literally nobody is productive for 9 hours straight. You end up doing low-value make-work projects because in a culture that values "time in seat" the work expands to fill the available time.
That’s an incentive problem not a “be in the office” problem. Or you’ve hired lazy bums. Or the work isn’t interesting enough.
If the people are screwing around then fire them. More than likely the job is dull or not challenging or not rewarding enough. That’s a call for the company to step up their game and bring in A level talent.
Or don’t and keep on getting the C team that’s only doing busy work as a boss is looking over their shoulder.
I don’t think this necessarily true. I can work just fine remote for weeks on end, but after a month of that I need a day in the office to recalibrate my focus.
> If the people are screwing around then fire them
You try firing someone in markets like NZ, Aus, lots of parts of Europe etc. Some people have for sure identified remote work as a meal ticket for life, it's frustrating.
I'm kinda of curious how this works if you are remote:
"Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time. Some roles, especially senior roles, will be expected to gather more often. We’ll do our best to define windows when most large team off-sites will occur and give you plenty of notice so you can make it work with personal and family plans."
Is this like just plan to be in the SF office during normal 9-5 work hours for a week every 13 weeks or is this like plan on a week long 24-7 corporate retreat away from your family every 13 weeks.
If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
> If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
If you can't make the time to spend a few days a quarter with your workmates in exchange for the most generous and fair remote working package then perhaps you're not a good fit for Airbnb. Which is totally fair. But they're not exactly taking the piss here. For many (many) people a week long retreat is a perk not a burden.
Haha - I hear you - its a treat if you are single or a DINK (dual income no kids) and need some solo social time. Especially if Monday and Friday are travel days.
But if you have a family you actually like/love - then a full week away really is a non-starter. Especially if its Sunday night and Saturday morning travel. School plays and parent teacher conferences don't get planned based on the AirBNB week long retreat schedule.
And if you are in a dual income family with the stereotypical two kids - if both of you guys are in similar work situations - then on your "on" week - you're gonna be the one doing 2 school pickups and all after school driving.
I worked with plenty of family people (and been the family person) who could find two weeks per year in exchange of complete WFH flexibility the rest of 50 weeks of the year. Especially since steps were taken to accomodate them and not schedule things in the middle of "parent-teacher conferences" and "school plays".
I also did notice that there are plenty of parents who will blame their children for things they themselves don't want to do and not be honest about it. It's not the children that are at fault there though.
In the end, there are plenty of WFH jobs that don't need on-site time at all so you can pick and choose. It's a great market for an engineer to be in now.
Surely the trade off of spending 50 weeks a year with your kids (when they're home sick, school holidays, etc) you wouldn't be able to with a normal job is worth 2 weeks of not being at home a year?
Although there are sometimes reasons for it (e.g. community-related conferences that tend to span a weekday and a weekend day), for the most part I sorta resent conferences that force weekend travel. Sometimes I want to take the weekend for myself, but I want it to be my choice.
I work at Automattic (no proper offices, fully remote), which (pre-pandemic) does meetups once or twice per year per team, plus one for the whole company. Meetups are typically a week long. I’ve had the chance to visit Lisbon, Hawaii, and soon Cancun on the company’s dime, so I can’t see a world where I am upset about “having” to attend these trips :)
I recognize that kids makes it difficult. And there are also folks who find it hard to travel much at all. But I’ve found I have the opposite problem: remote work can be extremely challenging from a energy and social point of view without meetups. I’ve never met most people on my current team, and don’t have strong social relationships with them. Those are really only possible to build in person. I come away from meetups with a sense of camaraderie, energy, and vision that’s difficult or impossible to replicate over Zoom.
So for me, I have found remote work more difficult during covid without meetups. I burn out more frequently, and struggle to find as much energy as I’ve had in the past.
True remote work — not 4/5 days, or in close proximity to an office where most work — would be less viable for me without meetups. Just as remote work is less viable for some with meetups. And working in the office has huge drawbacks as well for plenty of people. So it’s all a balancing game, and I wouldn’t say that meetups should be ditched because of this.
I do want to note that when I think of a meetup, a lot of it is social and having a good time. While “real work” obviously happens too, it’s not like these trips are consumed by it. Getting paid to go to a pleasant location of your choice with nice lodging and a decent food/drink budget is super nice. If it was just going to a soulless office at a minimal budget with no expectation of having a good time, I probably wouldn’t be so much in favor of them :) But with a nice mix of meaningful conversations, socialization, brainstorming, and fun, they have a positive impact on my work/life balance. And I’m more productive as well. So it’s a huge win all around for me, and I hope most.
I think the sweet spot would be quarterly weekly meet-ups for culture building which occurs during normal hours from 9am-5pm and occur at the local office versus some "get away" all inclusive conference center where there is a packed schedule of 24/7 culture building (aka drinking, etc.) from 8am-11pm.
If its during normal work hours - employees with kids can live within 1-2 hours can suffer the commute for a week every quarter and socialize but still be home in time for dinner with the kids/wife.
Conversely - the single folks/DINKs can go out and paint the town from 5pm-11pm and experience the actual local nightlife.
The problem with this is that as companies go further and further remote, there’s no such thing as “the local office.” My team is in multiple countries, let alone multiple cities or towns in the same country. Forcing people to still live within commute distance of the office just for four events a year seems pretty restrictive. Currently, I could move anywhere in the world (assuming I could get a visa), and it’d work out. Or more reasonably, I can follow my wife for her career in health care to a different city. Or I could move back to the east coast US to be closer to family. All without changing jobs, teams, and especially pay. I think that freedom is pretty huge, and definitely understated if moving is a serious possibly in one’s life.
Are you suggesting it would be better if jobs requiring travel were illegal because they represent a loophole to discriminate against people with families?
A week of travel a quarter is not at all unusual for a lot of professional jobs including people with families. In fact, for a fair number of jobs, that would be considered not a lot of travel.
I used to travel every 6 weeks in my 20s for work and it was fine. I won’t travel at all now and it’s also fine. People will figure out what works for them, there will continue to be high paying jobs that are flexible.
Absolutely. There are consultants who pretty much live on the road and there are people who basically don't travel at all. Personally, I hit being away about 50% of the year at peak (including vacation). I doubt if I'll ever hit that again.
If they can, people should find something that works for them because they'll probably hate it otherwise.
It is also not clear who will pay for travelling, if you can work from anywhere but must be in a very specific place and time then travel cost can be significant. Assume I want to work from a small town in North Sweden where housing is really affordable while internet is still fast how will I get to SF?
>If its the former, then that seems sort of like hybrid work just 1 week per 13 week versus 2-3 day per 5 day where you should probably stick to within 1-2 hour commute of your local AirBNB office.
>If its the latter then that seems like it might be a non-starter for people with families.
And that's okay! If people don't like it or can't make it work with their lifestyle, they don't have to work there
Plenty of people with families are able to make arrangements like this work, so I don't think it narrows it nearly as much as you seem to imply. Plus, this setup allows new pools of people to work for Airbnb who were originally unable. If I had to bet, I'd say this move is a net increase in available hiring pool.
Sounds nice in some ways. The stickler here is the focus on working in PST still. You’re not gonna get to travel to the EU and work async it sounds like. Which - while making sense - isn’t going to make a good portion of people who want this particularly happy.
After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot.
In other news - sounds like comp is going down at Airbnb. Not a surprise.
I really liked working from Hawaii. I kept pt hours. I woke up at 6 with the roosters crowing. I felt a like code farmer. Then I'd be done by 2 and felt like I had a whole day to enjoy. It was awesome. I'm actually a night owl in my pacific tz non traveling life
I've been considering this. I like to get up early anyways, so being up and it immediately being core hours sounds good. Get to enjoy the afternoon at the beach etc.
"After all - remote but stuck in one time zone for working hours isn’t really a huge win. It’s dangling a carrot."
that's a pretty realistic approach in my opinion. My company has people in India and Europe and it sucks royally to set up meetings with them. Either they have to work at night or the US people have to. If I had to decide, I would mandate at least a 4 hour overlap in working times.
Working remotely and working asynchronously are two very different things. COVID didn't necessitate asynchronous work by any stretch, so I think it will take some time for even the tech industry to move toward that. If for no other reason because it required much better communication skills than probably 80% of people have. A lot of developers, regardless of skill level, would not do very well in a truly asynchronous environment.
I wonder if we could see areas of major cities cropping up that operate on a different timezone's schedule, similar to how "chinatowns" formed in many cities. For example, having a neighborhood in a major European city that operates on Pacific time (restaurants, streetlights, noise complaints, etc) could make it easier for anyone that's working remotely in the target timezone.
Some people don't care about the local timezone, even without a need to stay up odd hours.
And for western Europe, you don't even need to work ridiculous hours. If my current core hours (9am - 3pm) were in PST and I worked in Paris, I could finish my workday at 11pm in Paris.
I used to work for a company in the UK and live in the west coast. It’s mildly challenging but my experience was if you were competent to plan out your day’s work you’d be fine.
If you ran into a show-stopper, capture it and being it up in your morning standup. They were all still in the office for at least a couple of hours when we got in.
I hope they add a "remote working approved" tag and filter, just like the "superhost".
I have been working remotely since almost a year now in several European countries and to filter out AirBnBs, which offer a decent desk and have stable internet takes hours. The "workstation" filter can not be trusted and neither the "has Wifi", which doesn't say anything about the quality.
An internet speed test should be required to be done by the host. This way I can avoid having to ask about the internet every time before booking - which takes sometimes half a day for getting a response.
I don't think I'd ever book a place that didn't explicitly list Internet speed if I were to work there and I hate that AirBnB doesn't easily provide this information. The last time I booked a place like that they claimed to have "professional grade" Internet which ended up being a 15mbps down/ 4mbps up connection. Surprisingly (to me at least) that was enough for most video calls.
There are a few countries where broadband is unjustifiably bad (Germany and Belgium come to mind) but I wouldn't generalize to the entire Western Europe. For instance many rural departments of France have extensive FTTH coverage.
Also DSL isn't necessarily so bad, G.fast allows for speeds that are close to what you can do with modern Docsis deployments.
>If you move, your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity.
I wonder how that will look like in practice, countries differ enormously in required pay for a decent living, especially within the US. Wouldn't states/regions for a few countries work better?
This is the part of universal WFH I just don't get. If you can work from anywhere, then why does the value of your work change depending on what country you're in?
You don’t get 100% of the value you produce, unless you work alone with only your equipment. You get the cost of retaining you, which depends on how many other employers would make you a better offer.
People love to predict this, they seek it. Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment). It's trendy now, which affects people who follow trends, but trends change fast. Talented people want to be around other talented people; smart, intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc. I don't think that will change.
> Perhaps it feels like pushing against some establishment (when it's serving another establishment).
What establishment do you think it's serving? To me, a return to the smaller cities where many of us grew up, or better yet, never leaving in the first place, feels like decentralization, which many of us think is a good thing.
> intellectually curious people want to live where there are great restaurants, arts, beauty, sophisticated people, etc.
This strikes me as elitist, especially the mention of "sophisticated people". Now that I've returned to my home city, in what Americans often call flyover country, I appreciate hanging out with ordinary people. True, when I do karaoke, I hope the other singers will be good (speaking of arts and beauty), but there are good karaoke singers everywhere.
It’s gotten pretty ridiculous in some neighborhoods. I don’t feel like a trend follower by leaving, and I don’t think random internet chatter influenced my decision.
Amazon is absolutely not going back to office in a significant capacity. I thought Meta had a bifurcated work force where anyone could be remote?
And G employees won't tolerate the forcing to be in office even if a ton like it. It seems they're the ones always demanding more from the employer (someone has to!).
Add to this the fact that SF has deteriorated a great deal as a city since the start of the pandemic. The loss of downtown office worker revenue has decimated local shops and restaurants. It will take time for things to adjust to the new reality that workers just aren’t going back to how things were.
Coordinating in Pacific Standard Time is really weird. Right now, the Pacific Time zone is on Daylight time, so they'd need to calculate a one-hour offset for everything, even in the main office.
Coordinating on Pacific Time would be less weird.
But, as I learned working at a company that's truly international, coordinating on UTC is better. Each employee only has to know the offset between their own time and UTC. They know when any local Daylight Saving laws shift them relative to UTC, and it's extremely easy to look it up if they forget. It's also extremely easy to look up the UTC offset anywhere you may travel.
Picking Pacific Time, and specifically Pacific Standard Time, is a weird choice.
https://www.remote.com/ is a proxy company with subsidiaries in all countries allowing you to hire employees legally in any country.
I discover it the other day, it's a game changer for remote international teams.
I will check it out, but to be honest, I am extremely skeptical. I have been using companies providing similar services for over a decade. Not only they have consistently all been very expensive (35%-45% cut)†, but they all required MASSIVE amounts of paperwork, both from the contracting company and from the "employee". Employee enrolment took at least a month, and this was when the employee was already a resident, and when we already had other employees in the same country. Otherwise it took much longer because specific contracts in the local language had to be written and approved.
Employee resignation took months, and relocation also took months.
This all sounds too good to be true.
This is with US parent companies and EU employees.
† The least I've seen was 20%, and it was a horror show so bad that it was worth it to switch to a 40% competitor.
Have laws caught up for this new way to work yet? Last ai checked there are non-insignificant legal and tax issues for small businesses to have employees in other states.
The short answer is no, they haven't. Payroll for something like this is a huge pain in the ass if you're not at this kind of scale. You end up just hiring people as contractors, which has its own set of problems (namely the fact that you can't just do that because it's easier, they have to actually be contractors and not employees).
Not sure the pricing structure, but I remember office depot having an advertisement, it was probably like "As Low as $6" per pay period.
Ths site says $70 a month but that's probably the minimum for the whole company. Then per check fees.
If you have an employee in another state, you are usually required to incorporate or register with the state and then do the filings for that state. I don’t think this office depot thing handles that part for you. In fact, not even Gusto did this and that’s one of the reasons we had to switch to a PEO instead.
In the US, the tricky/potentially expensive part is understanding what labor laws you need to adhere to and what taxation issues you might be creating when you hire someone in a new jurisdiction.
A good example is working remotely in another country. The US does not allow foreigners on a visitor visa to work remotely. It's a bit of a gray zone, since if you fly into the US for a business meeting, that's not regarded as "working in the US". But flying in for 1 month and working remote the entire time is.
Same with California income. Working in Nevada and then decide to work remote from California? That's CA income and taxable by CA. But of course people rarely even mention they're working in another state and rarely pay taxes owed.
There are companies like TriNet that hire your workers directly on W2 and administer all the payroll and benefits for you. You then just pay TriNet directly instead of doing payroll yourself.
Insperity is one such company--my clients typically have employees in multiple states and we just handle all the details for them. https://www.insperity.com/bpa/zac.mutrux
I'm surprised no one has mentioned corporate tax yet. A worker in a foreign country (potentially) exposes the home company to corporate tax by the foreign company. Ianatl and there are probably a million caveats, but I've had multiple companies and tax people warn me about this.
Imagine Apple USA being taxed by New Zealand, for example. That's the main reason Apple employees are employed by Apple NZ
Yep all of those sweet, sweet nexus events cramping would be remote employers' and e-commerce tycoons' style will keep tax professionals highly paid for years and years.
Judging by my employer, small businesses are able to have their payroll companies take care of all that hassle without much cost, so it’s not really a problem.
It depends on scale. I moved during my last job, post-COVID, and the HR department has to make sure the state I was moving to was approved. If not, I was going to have to switch to contracting (fewer hours, fewer employer/employee type rules, more rigidly defined tasks, etc.) because the cost of setting up payroll and taxation in another state was too onerous for just one person, even at the higher levels of the development staff.
I am the employer, and it is a problem even after using a PEO. Plus, having an employee somewhere creates a nexus which is another whole set of problems.
Recently booked a 3 month stay in an airbnb in Denver. 5000$ a month which was a big sacrifice but I wanted to stay somewhere where I would be comfortable . I get to the place and it's nothing like the pictures. I tried really hard to evaluate this possibility but still couldn't catch it, they had done some really creative photography. The appliances are disgusting, the place smells like cigarettes and some kind of industrial cleaner that was used to try to cover up the cigarettes.
So I ask the owner If i can leave, with the offer that I won't leave any type of review just so he won't be scared of that outcome. He rejects my offer and basically laughs at me for falling for his listing.
After all this airbnb then takes down my review because "I had tried to manipulate the owner by offering not to leave a review if he let me leave"
Now I understand why places like this have good reviews. It's unbelievably easy to get negative reviews taken down.
Pretty sure the unspoken rule for years was to book the minimum then make contact for the rest at a good discount. Airbnb knows this which is why they charge such a high fee and don't give rats butt about most clients.
Everybody seems to be praising Airbnb but a couple of things need to be stated about doing remote work. Just because some rules are difficult to enforce or monitor, the spread of these practices will invite increased scrutiny by local authorities.
1) None of the usual 90 days Visas allow you to perform working activities. Neither when issued in the US or in European countries. Even when you are still a resident and employed in your country of residence. See for example the allowed activities for a B-1 or a B-2 Visa.
3) Some professions like Airline crews, Military personal, Athletes and Musicians have specific provisions on the law that allow for their remote work.
5) Each case will be different, subject to a long and complex process. The company announcement mentions:
"Starting in September, you can live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location."
On a first analysis, seems Airbnb applying again the grow patterns they used before: Flout the rules, push ambiguous legal scenarios, then pay fines or ask for forgiveness before asking for permission.
> None of the usual 90 days Visas allow you to perform working activities.
They don't allow you to perform work within the jurisdiction. But no one cares if you're working remotely, and I'm not aware of any tourism visas that preclude it.
Digital nomad visas are not about legalizing an otherwise-illegal arrangement, they are intended to expand and promote it with longer visa terms that traditional tourism visas allow. It's about increasing the length of the visa, not legalizing it. But neither a tourism visa, or a digital nomad visa allow you to work in the jurisdiction.
> They don't allow you to perform work within the jurisdiction. But no one cares if you're working remotely, and I'm not aware of any tourism visas that preclude it.
Working in the jurisdiction is working in the jurisdiction no matter where the person paying you or your usual place of work (if such thing even exists) is.
If you are in the jurisdiction, doing labor for pay (regardless of where the pay comes from), you are working in the jurisdiction.
Just because no one cares does not mean it's allowed.
Try going through the US border on a B1 (tourist) VISA (or visa-exempt) and mentioning that you're staying 90 days to work for your <other country> company. I doubt that will work.
They don't care as long as this does not become the norm. If you look at some of the references I provided, they explicit state the type of activities you are allowed to do.
Work from anywhere is truly advantageous for people without families, or people who have much older children (maybe). Also, if collaboration is centered around Pacific Time, then it effectively rules out many of the 170 countries. Add in 4 1-week onsites per year, and the logistical challenges become mind-boggling, never mind the other more subtle aspects. How will this work in practice?
I guess they had to let their employees live anywhere since people have bought up all the single family housing in large cities to be de-facto landlords through airbnb.
Good that the compensation is not changing in the country, but why not bring compensation parity with other countries as well. If they are going towards compensation determined by role not market location, they should do this.
I work at a fully remote company. To be honest, I don't like it very much. I like that I don't have to commute, but I pay for it in lost productivity waiting to hear back from my coworkers when I have questions. What would normally be a 5 mins conversation turns into pinging on chat, setting up a meeting, and then chatting at a further time. Collaboration is much harder and the rate of doing work is much slower.
If companies are okay with this, then it's the "new normal" I suppose, but I can understand why Apple and Google want people face to face. If I knew I could go into work twice a week and meet with my team, I would enjoy that, but my team is global so it will never happen. It's definitely a weird experience.
Exactly. Just today in the office there was a coworker who was unfamiliar with a particular internal tool. He asked me, I walked to his desk, and pointed out the couple of buttons he needed to click in that internal tool. The whole exchange finished in one minute. After that minute I went back to coding. I stayed in my flow.
But if this request for help arrived via group chat, I wouldn't have bothered to help. It was simply too much effort to either do screen sharing, or open the internal tool on my computer, replicate the state of that UI, and then describe the buttons the coworker needed. The one-minute interruption would be a ten-minute interruption. I wouldn't stay in my flow.
What software do you all use for screen sharing? That seems like something that could be done in a fairly trivial manner in teams. Teammate calls you (1 click), shares screen (1 click), and then you tell him where the couple of buttons he needs to click are.
Personally I've worked remotely and in person, and I'm much more productive at home than in the office. There's a plethora of tools that enable us to get as much done if not even more without all of the distractions that exist in the office. This has been true in my former career working in sales and marketing, and is true now in my career as a software developer.
I joined a company remotely for the first time in March.
I've been able to avoid stalling by anticipating questions I could have and ask them ahead of time. That might be a (partial) solution to this problem.
> 2. You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change
> ... Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.
I wonder if an Airbnb employee's pay was set using a higher location-based pay tier, would that be down adjusted, conversely? A single pay tier in U.S. means there are wide pay gaps between San Francisco, California vs. Billings, Montana for the same skill set/job role to be reconciled, correct? It only makes sense to me that they aren't adjusting everyone to the Silicon Valley pay rate in June.
Can someone share lights on how that single pay tier for a country would work?
> Before you move, make sure to talk to your manager about performance and time zone expectations, as well as your availability for team gatherings.
Work from anywhere but ask your manager from where you can work. Also I want you here each three months for a one-week gathering, and if you're senior I want you to gather even more often. "The most flexible policy in the world" people are calling it LOL It's great a company like Airbnb does this, but come on!
> The best people live everywhere, not concentrated in one area.
Meaning that the best people are nomadic because its such a common choice amongst the best people, and would be a common choice among people with a choice. This is the experience they have with recruiting, and the CEO then pretends its because of a diverse pool of people that happen to live in a variety of towns where they stay all the time.
Okay, sure. Since we're sharing takes, here is how I read that statement:
Smart people exist outside of the SFBA. (Or Seattle. Or NYC. Or London. Or ...)
As someone who is intimately familiar with geographic discrimination, this was nice to read. I grew up and went to school in the US bible belt. When sending out resumes, the only companies I ever heard back from (even a 'no thanks'!) were local, or cosmic luck (hired an adjacent person and reached out to me.)
My point is that its supposed to feel good but that verbatim reading isn't really whats happening.
Over the past two years lots of people left the SFBA, Seattle, NYC etc. They didn't move to the US Bible Belt they went to islands, Miami, Austin, Southern California....
so to keep talent and get some of the other talent back, they released this statement. about nomads.
It's not about people with feeble parents and health issues that get them stuck in the midwest, or those really there by even easier choice. Maybe it will never be about them.
Its not charity, its a reaction to their own workforce.
Of course it is in the company's interest. That's why they are doing it.
I used my life in the bible belt as an anecdotal example, but it can apply to many places.
Disparaging a company's move just because - acktualllly it benefits them - will have you hating every business on the planet.
My point here is they didn't _have_ to do this. Places like Google and Apple are all but telling remote workers to kick rocks. Others like Facebook say 'be remote but we are doing CoLA.' ABNB's policy here is the most fair (and generous) out of the ones I've seen. If that attracts workers, good for them.
Somewhere in between a pay grade based on scarcity, and S.F. norms, and a pay grade based on Ross Perot's IBM model of "feed 'em peanuts and sack at will" is a happy medium.
I don't personally think that US pay for work done in Bali as a non-dom is sustainable, but paying Indonesian rate for work towards US profit is just as unviable.
Because there typically is a cost/price function in this. If the cost of living isn't as high, then the company can sell more by reducing the price. To reduce the price they have to reduce the cost inputs. The risk for them, is somebody else working out the same brain awesome can be found cheaper, and removing the market under their feet.
I work in IT, and I know it would suck to be told "you're worth less because you pay less rent" but this actually is normal: The majors are already telling SF residents "take $10,000 to move to Austin but we pay you less" And the majors are already saying "stay in India and we'll hire you and pay you less" -So it is not like there isn't already real world downward pressure on pay.
(the context here is that I am paid way above local average for Australia and way below FAANG in the US, working in a not for profit)
I strongly believe in unions. Even with a union, pay isn't going to be uniform across a nation, or between nations to do the same role.
Musk is making Tesla in the US, Germany and China. I ask, non-rhetorically, which country do you think will wind up in the long term making more of the cars, and why? And, also non-rhetorically, why do you think "knowledge work" (which is what software is) is any different?
It's all fun and games until you start to be serious about the climate change.
I mean maybe there is a contradiction between being green and the work in 170 countries up to 90 days per year + gather in person every quarter policy.
"""
If we limited our talent pool to a commuting radius around our offices, we would be at a significant disadvantage. The best people live everywhere, not concentrated in one area. And by recruiting from a diverse set of communities, we will become a more diverse company.
"""
Very good decision and hopefully more companies will follow the new way of working. It’s not a “one size fits all” situation, for some WFH (or from anywhere) is great and they’re more productive, for others being in the office with their colleagues works best. Companies should allow people to choose and see what works best (with proper management, training, support…).
One other important aspect is the ability to work from any country/city which will greatly help certain locations to attract WFH people or tech-nomads. Speaking for my country, Greece, there are already some islands and municipalities advertising their offerings to attract new people. This is going to be a win-win for all and help with counterurbanization. Sure there are many technicalities still to be sorted out but this is the way to go, this is the way of the future.
>Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution so other companies can offer this flexibility as well.
I had a little chortle at this. This is going to be like building an application that handles timezones for you, but instead of getting timezones wrong, you're committing tax evasion.
Let's say you move to the UK to work for 50 days. Whether you're resident in the UK and therefore have to pay tax will involve myriad complexities including whether your partner is resident in the UK. It's just going to be such a faff, and it depends far more on the individuals circumstances than the company.
Digital nomads aren't new. Someone must have figured out
what is the most lucrative place to have official residency - assuming you're not from the US - US citizens have to pay taxes in the US (and sometimes twice) as far as i know.
The gist here should be that there needs to be worldwide coordination for taxation base of workers. Remote work visas are a start but there needs to be a clear global standard. Maybe airbnb could push for this
> Everyone will still need a permanent address for tax and payroll purposes
I spent a lot of time outside US while waiting for my wife's visa to process and quickly wrote some advice on maintaining US domicile & "permanent address" while abroad:
Sorry about the misspellings and slightly ugly personal site but I hope that this helps somebody who may be considering working or staying from abroad for a bit!
Like full time RV'ers you could pick a domicile state and a mail forwarding service in that state. Texas, Nevada, Florida, and South Dakota are popular for tax, insurance, and legal reasons.
This makes me happy to read. It's not perfect (location-based pay), but it seems like a really great setup overall. Over the pandemic I have learned that I _love_ remote work and now work remotely full time. It's been a game changer in terms of my overall life satisfaction, happiness, and productivity. It doesn't work for everyone, but it does for me. I'm very glad there are more opportunities to work like this now.
I've been working like this for the past year and a half. I'll never go back to a "normal" office environment.
Winners in this new paradigm: Owners of real estate in lifestyle towns like Boise, Boulder, etc. I also think borders between the US and Latin America (same/similar time zones) will become a lot more fluid. Why not work in Mexico City or Buenos Aires during the winters, for a fraction of the cost of living in the US?
Friends, family, kids, not having all your stuff, cultural and language barriers, etc…
It’s pretty obvious why this doesn’t work for a large portion of people. I am glad for the child free and those who have little need for stuff - but it’s just not… realistic for the rest of us (who are the overwhelming majority of the population). It’s good for that niche 22-28 crowd.
It's actually pretty economical to have a second home in Latin America, with copies of all your creature comforts there. Kids get multicultural friends, new language, and much wider perspective on the world.
Are you speaking from experience or just making shit up? I can’t imagine this going well for some of the kids I know personally. (And kids that I do know who have done this have been “problematic” during these things)
I've studied abroad in SEA and I've met plenty of families with kids. A good friend is an American who grew up in Shenzhen. International schools have awesome communities of expat families or private schools to also interact with locals.
When the kids are younger, they don't really need to stick with a specific curriculum throughout the year. As they get older, I imagine the need to dictate your schedule around school increases. And if they're at a boarding school, that really frees up your planning.
That's a different conversation entirely about what you think of boarding schools and your reasons for having children.
Hopefully your reasons for having a child are compatible with the child spending time away from you cos that's going to happen eventually. Your comment suggests you're making a lot it assumptions about what it means for someone to be in a boarding school...
No, I don't think so. The parent offered boarding school as an option if a couple were planning to spend time in different households in different countries.
The implication is that the kids will be sent to boarding school because they are inconvenient for these plans.
Sorry if it came off that way, but what was intended is that if boarding school is an option you want for your children then the parents are not tied to any one place geographically.
Sounds ideal. Have you checked the laws in your country of (legal) residence about taking your kids out of school?
Also, I'm not sure how the children would integrate with their classmates if they are only in the class 1/2 the year. Even worse if you are in the other country for the winter, i.e you child gets 2 months in the US school, is gone for 4, then back for 2.
In the short term, with tons of well-funded or high-revenue companies struggling to hire, remote is a way to make your existing comp more attractive by opening it up to a new set of people and out-bidding their local employers.
In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and yet the FANG companies have been in an increasing comp arms race for several years.
It'll take a long time (likely never, for small companies) for more companies to be international-friendly, for communications reasons for non-English-native-languages nearby countries, for HR/tax/legal compliance overhead reasons even for Canada, and for those plus time zone headaches for others.
If you really want to do it with less paperwork as a US company, you can get around the tax headaches even today, hiring through some outsourcing staffing firms. Lots of those in Latin America now. Quite a bit cheaper. Still a bit of a communication hassle. But that hard barrier of not being employed directly keeps things at arms length in terms of affecting the overall salary market.
No one with experience who currently makes top dollar would take jobs that pay them significantly less, especially as cost of living all over the country is skyrocketing. Companies will need to compete for those developers, and they'll have to compete on wages, as well.
I used to work with developers in Eastern Europe who made the same amount of money as their peers in SF made, despite living in countries with median salaries of ~$8,000 USD a year.
People with skills can and do command high compensation packages that are independent of where they do their work from. Market rates for talent already factor in domestic and global markets.
None of it really matters tbh. Without proper taxation and building policy - it’s all moot. Small town with a bunch of millionaires is just as bad as a big city with them.
Policy is what will dictate whether or not this is good and that’s not within the hands of any company. That’s up to the federal, state, and local governments. (Of which are all fucked - of course)
So will housing costs. The problems facing SF, Seattle, LA will spread to smaller towns. SF, Seattle, LA, will continue to be expensive because people spend $$$$$$ to live there for reasons other than tech jobs. Be careful what you wish for. I live in the Seattle metro, and would live nowhere else in the country, for what its worth.
You already see this happening in rural communities outside of big cities. "Tech-bro" approved towns such as Asheville, Knoxville, Ann Arbor, Twin Cities, etc, etc are getting so expensive the locals can't move. Where I am from in Southwest Michigan has been facing a worsening housing crisis for years.
Luckily for most of the country, the weather isn't as nice as it is on the west coast, so homelessness will probably not explode as much as it has here. On the other hand, you have to deal with shitty weather ;)
I think the reality is that our housing costs and our fuel costs will catch up with Europe's. In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe. So now if you want to visit the rest of your country you're going to have to pony up for fuel.
Your logic doesn't really track. People move from HCOL to LCOL, so LCOL becomes more expensive. Yet the HCOL areas continue to go up too?
Also why does public transit matter in a WFH/remote world? Seems to obviate it to a large degree, e.g. subway in NYC, which while used for many things, was majority used for commuting. It was losing large amounts of money even before the pandemic hit
People in hcol cities still need to move around. People from outside of the country move to hcol cities because of their reputation. Rich people live in hcol places because they can.
My logic doesn’t really need to track with whatever you are talking about- look at the cost of housing in high cost of living places; has it gone down during the last two years of pandemic? Has literally -everyone- becoming a remote worker driven down the cost of housing? No; it has made it worse.
Is it cheaper to live anywhere on the planet now than it was 2,5,10 years ago?
Take for instance where I am from- Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is a great town I love with all of my heart but have no wish to live there. Houses are difficult and expensive to buy there! And compared to Seattle it is pennies. Wages aren’t rising in Kalamazoo to match the money coming in: but houses aren’t getting cheaper in Seattle either.
It just defies basic logic. The reason most central areas became so expensive was the need to cluster close to them for work. And in some areas, leisure, but that's the exception.
Residential real estate prices skyrocketing has more to do with government interventions. I fully expect ex tech hubs such as the Bay Area to trend down in prices in real terms over many years
Foreclosure moratorium, eviction moratorium, stimulus checks that allowed new households to form (kids moving out) as well as preventing the normal level of foreclosures, Fed buying trillions in MBS pushing rates artificially low, massive amounts of cash out refis to use in ad hoc projects that sucked up labor and resources for new builds.
Yes migration from HCOL to LCOL will drive pricing up too, but to say HCOL will go higher because remote work is here does not track logically at all. Sure, leisure areas will go up in value, work areas should logically decline. e.g. Manhattan, Chicago, SF, Seattle
What you don’t seem to understand is that people move to hcol areas for leisure. There is a fundamental reason they are expensive in the first place. Seattle for instance is surrounded by ocean, national parks, mountains. Same thing with the Bay Area. It’s not gonna get cheaper.
Nebraska is not going to magically spring up natural beauty and culture.
Yes, every city has a work component and a leisure component. The work component of a given city was largely irreplaceable, while leisure can be substituted by many cities.
If you worked in tech, SF was the pinnacle location to live for your career. If you were in Finance, it was NYC. There was no exception to this. You can live in any of dozens of cities and still get an enjoyable life/leisure. It's not equivalent at all.
So in this new world, an SF home will be worth $4m while an equivalent San Diego one $2m? No way. The disparity in amenities between the two is not big enough to justify that kind of spread, once you remove the work component. The entire reason SF became so expensive was relocations to work for big tech and the concentration of VC money. Not because it was unambiguously the most desirable city in the US or even CA.
So you take away the component that made it expensive to begin with and ??? it goes higher still ???
I have two points I think: there are more components than you are giving high COL areas credit for, and that even if high COL see some sort of exodus, this is not good for low cost of living areas.
I have been working remote for startups since 2019 and for whatever reasons, you could attribute this to low interest rates I suppose in your favor, things have gotten INSANELY more expensive. NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, Miami I don't think they are getting any cheaper. These are Americas Elite Cities and thats going to command a demand that might seem to defy logic.
However I think people genuinely love living in these big HCOL cities. Otherwise it would defy all reason why they have been population centers for hundreds and hundreds of years. Take for instance Amsterdam; has Amsterdam gotten cheaper in the last 500 years?
To my second point, even if we are lucky and the money gets spread around a little bit what happens to the person working for 7$ an hour at the Hyvee in the Ozarks just because a small flurry of people from San Francisco and Seattle decided to settle there? What happens when he can't afford the property taxes on his paid off home anymore because a a random demand driven spike has increase the value of the properties around him to a point where he can't afford his property taxes anymore?
What happens when he can't afford his medical bills because of this? I've seen what happens and its a hunched over old dude outside of a tent on the streets of Seattle.
This isn't really the tech workers fault or the locals fault, but the fault of our government to account for inequality. Just something I've been thinking about. I just don't think that remote work is going to make life easier for anyone in the short term, except for the already spoiled white collar worker.
Certainly people will continue to enjoy living in specific cities and near to things. I don't dispute that. I dispute that real estate will rise in real terms nationally.
Now that the constraint of working in a specific location is gone, yes, people will migrate to areas for desirability of living, not because they're forced to for work. However, price is an aspect of desirability. It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote. People like SF, but not enough to pay such a spread over arguably equivalently nice places that are much cheaper.
So yes, HCOL -> LCOL drives LCOL to be more expensive.
Also the reason cities existed in the past was because people needed to gather together to work/exchange goods. With remote work/internet that goes away, aside from education/leisure.
You seem to be implying Amsterdam exists because people like it, and not because it was a job center. I can assure you there were very few people hundreds of years ago picking cities primarily for leisure. The need to densify/build vertically lessens when there's no concentration of a downtown for work.
> It's very hard to imagine how the Bay Area could maintain residential real estate pricing if all big tech went full remote.
Plenty of people want to live in the Bay Area beyond those working in big tech. This isn't Detroit; there are plenty of other industries that hire people here. Not to mention all of the working class people who are commuting in from Richmond, Vallejo, and other LCOL areas. People want to move there for the Mediterranean climate. For the political climate. Not to mention the children of locals who have been living at home for extended amounts of time. Long-time renters. Remote work will not bring down real estate prices as much as you believe. Especially since housing scarcity props up the prices.
The real estate market, like all markets of the modern era, can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.
> In this case it sucks because never built out the public transportation capabilities that could facilitate this being as "pleasant" as it is in Europe.
Or the publicly subsidized healthcare and higher education!
CoL will come down in California too. You won’t have the rich highly concentrated around the best job centers anymore and that will pull down the CoL in those places.
I don’t think this will happen as fast as you’d like. There are tons of things in cities tons of people just don’t want to give up, chief among them a stronger network. It’s like the difference between remote learning and being on campus, at an Ivy League school.
> Most of you should expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time.
No thanks. Couple this with the two or three trips I take per year with my girlfriend, I'm going to be getting on an airplane every other month at a minimum. That is way too much travel for me.
I was thinking this too. It would be one thing if the expectation were that you would come into the office you previously worked out of, because that would give you the option not to have to travel as long as you didn't move away, but suddenly adding a travel requirement for those people would suck.
It does make more sense to me if that stays an option, and it's only the people who do move away who would have to travel. That way people could choose the perk of living elsewhere, knowing they would have the downside of traveling quarterly.
But for people who were hired on to an office job with no travel requirement shouldn't suddenly have a travel requirement so that their coworkers who move away have it more convenient. It might even be enough of a change in working conditions for someone to quit and be eligible to draw unemployment benefits. (I used to adjudicate claims, and a significant change in working conditions is one of the ways you might be eligible for benefits even if you quit instead of being laid off.)
Will Apple finally make up their mind? Most of the big tech are getting more and more work remote friendly. If they want to retain talents ... they must align with them. Otherwise they will continue to bleed engineers to FB, Google, etc ...
This is the thing that stood out to me as well. It sounds like they are moving to a single pay tier and if you are currently below that, you will receive an increase. I think that implies the single tier is the same as the current max salary since they did not mention a decrease. I'm interested to see how this plays out since it could indirectly effect me as I live in a low COL location and my company currently adjusts salary depending on your location.
they recently banned the spouse (!) of some right-wing personality because they feared the banned guy might use his spouses name to book a room. Guilt by association. Of course no crazy leftist ever has been banned from airbnb. I am no longer using airbnb since I'm not woke.
For companies like this that profess to care about their employees (and I believe them), what’s the justification for paying less in e.g. London than USA given London is just as expensive? Will progressive companies start adjusting pay according to cost of living rather than the local labor market?
> what’s the justification for paying less in e.g. London than USA
You mention it in the next sentence - the local labor market. UK developers earn a fraction of what US developers do. We can debate the root causes but it seems irrelevant why it's true, only whether or not it is true.
I'm not sure why cost of living should factor into comp at all. I can have a much higher COL than you, but if you bring more value to the company, and you can get better offers than I can, you should make more than me.
Of course, I'm talking about comparing equally skilled and experienced employees. Can you rephrase your answer without conflating employee aptitude and CoL/local Labor market?
They're linked, intrinsically. If the someone's "market" (whether that's local, or global, or front-end, or full stack, or whatever) prices then at $80k/yr a business is going to try to pay them that much or less. Whether you want to admit it or not, locality plays a role in that.
I'm still not sure I'm understanding you. What I'm asking about is the question of compensation conditional on experience and skill being identical. So by definition, I'm taking experience/skill differences out of the picture. So we have
Alice: backend engineer in London, able to get $120K from UK companies
Alicia: backend engineer in NYC, able to get $250K from US companies
with identical skill/experience. And we say for the sake of argument that cost of living is identical in London and NYC.
Now suppose Alicia's company wants to hire Alice.
Certainly, I agree that it makes perfect sense in a free labor market for the US company to try to get Alice for $120K.
But the company I work for (a well-known US tech company) makes many claims about how "fair" its compensation program is. So what I'm inviting you to discuss is whether or not that company would have a hard time making an argument that adjusting according to the local labor market is actually "fair".
Essentially, Alice is being penalized for happening to be in a locality where her skills are valued less. But that is out of her control. Would it not be "fairer" for a company to adjust compensation as follows:
1. Firstly, according to skill / experience
And then, either
2a. That's it, end of story: skill / experience only.
or
2b. By local cost of living, within equivalent skill levels.
The article explicitly says they’re paying everyone the same pay across localities now.
But for the many company’s that don’t, the justification is simply that the cost of Human resources is not based around output but around market dynamics like other resources. Fresh fruit in Japan costs more than it does in California not because the Japanese fruit is better per se, but because the cost of production is higher.
I don't accept the premise, but student loans and healthcare are high costs that US folks bear that UK folks don't.
You keep trying to pretend that the local labor market is irrelevant. Until you accept that it isn't, or at the very least accept that companies don't think it is, you're going to keep talking past everyone here.
> You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.
I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.
Eventually - and it might take a recession - the downside of “work from anywhere” will be that companies can “hire from anywhere”. That means the Bay Area salary you previously enjoyed may be knocked down through greater wage competition.
It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is flooded with candidates.
There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble.
The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up.
Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective.
The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.
Your second paragraph sounds like the same thing I meant, essentially "specialization and skill will continue to be required as software continues to be highly influential all over the place."
For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects.
(I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)
As an engineer I do hope that the global compensation level for good talent rises with all of this remote working. It seems to be already happening. Even in humble Vancouver, I hear of mobile developers being offered $320K. That was absolutely unheard of in 2019.
The engineers in less expensive locales are not used to the high pay. Even without remote, my team is pushed to hire in the offices outside the Bay Area because engineers demand less money and retention is higher.
Don’t take for granted the power of someone to undercut you at every turn. IT thought they weren’t replaceable. But oversea workers on visas and outsourcing to other countries began taking their jobs and pay
The reverse is also true. At the beginning Airbnb employees will be making SF level salaries. As Airbnb continues to hire and churn employees, average salaries will come down since they won't be paying SF salaries for new positions. They might pay better than other companies, but won't keep SF as baseline.
I've said as much on other threads. Employers are playing a longer game, and thinking about the salaries of the person who replaces you. So go ahead, move to Colombia but save up.
When there's zero friction and in fact a couple years successful track record involved in managing W2 staff in any country, the salary for new hires will reflect that.
No company will ignore this, because the potential savings are just monumental and there is no stigma attached.
This might be a plausible outcome, except for two factors:
- Big Tech has been expanding out of CA for over a decade (e.g. Amazon HQ2, Microsoft Atlanta HQ, etc.)
- Tech compensation is highly weighted toward equity (RSUs/etc.).
Taken together, these mean that more regions have at least one big tech player that's paying significantly in equity. This means that even if the salary portion of compensation is reduced for employees living outside SF, their overall compensation will likely still be very competitive.
At the same time, regional markets are heating up as non-tech companies increasingly are staffing up with the same React & Swift programmers needed in SF. Why leave family & move to SF for $180k base when you can make $150k base in Atlanta or Raleigh, where the cost of living is a fraction of SF?
(Given recent actions in the public markets, it's also worth nothing that equity-based compensation frequently is topped up to some extent when stock values remain depressed. It's been a number of years since this broadly happened, but we can generally expect the $100B+ club (at least) to issue meaningful retention grants if stocks stay down while the labor market remains tight.)
I am happy for you if you can play a FAANG salary against another offer, and many on HN can, but for the vast majority of tech employees _and_ employers, those numbers are nothing like a baseline.
AirBnB has to do this just to recruit employees since there are plenty of other companies with the same or better comp (and equity not on the downhill).
City after city is either severely restricting or eliminating AirBnB entirely. It's golden days are behind it. It's trying new approaches, but nothing unique there.
Why work for AirBnB? You could work for another big tech company that actually has room to grow and produce some solid equity returns.
Companies rely on memory of people to overcome the bad PR they had. It's been just 3 weeks this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30926834 made headlines in HN. Now we will see Airbnb as a company making meaningful change, invalidating the claims from ex-employee's post.
"wo decades ago, Silicon Valley startups popularized the idea of open floor plans and on-site perks, which were soon adopted by companies all around the world. Similarly, today’s startups have embraced remote work and flexibility"
You bosses adopted open floor plan to save money, no matter how miserable it made your employees. Now you're "embracing" remote work only because you can't hire anyone to work in your miserable offices.
When does the definition of talent extend beyond developers and system architects and product delivery? Airbnb’s support organization, particularly with respect to guest advocacy, is abhorrent.
I was just recently in a situation where a host rejected the rental price after booking, and convinced the support team that i agreed to the adjusted price, which was then charged against my card. (To be fair there was some messaging back-and-forth between myself and the host prior to the booking that gave credence to this, but nothing official.) When i rejected the new price the host agreed to cancel, then again convinced airbnb to execute a guest cancellation, forfeiting all but $613 of a now $4400 booking.
It took me roughly a week with those funds tied up before i found someone in their support team (O.G. Lou G, i love you man) to actually listen to me and reverse everything.
This on the heels of renting a condo with hammer drills running upstairs 8 hours a day for the last three days of my trip and zero consideration or recompense from the host or airbnb.
AirBNB is pretty awful to use as a customer. It's so shady and packed with hidden fees, at least speaking as someone who's only used it a few times.
Unfortunately, hotels have been massively deteriorating in quality these last few years.. the hotels I've stayed in over the last few months weren't cleaning rooms more than once a week (and doing a half-assed job then), the front desk, kitchen, and room service were all massively understaffed, and they were more expensive than ever while still having the same awful internet/TV setups.
If AirBNB eliminates the ruinously large cleaning fees, I'll probably just stop staying in hotels for good
I've had nothing but excellent experiences, going on 70+ distinct trips now. Many of them wouldn't even have been possible without Airbnb. Sorry it hasn't worked out so well for you
I keep going back, even with the bs that I’ve experienced, because the good outcones are so much better than what the traditional hospitality industry provides it’s worth the risk (to me). That said i bring my own linens and a thermal camera to look for electronic shenanigans.
I just think it’s important to recognize that the hosts are completely carrying the company’s brand.
Something similar happened to me this last February: I had a 5 week rental in Baja Sur (Mexico). Due to a serious medical emergency (covid booster vaccine gave me ischemic lacunar stroke) I was hospitalized 2 days before my trip and hence had to cancel it. You can imagine, in the middle of the hospital brain fog and all, I just cancelled through the standard process without thinking twice.
Days later after I was stable and out of the hospital, I found out that the cancellation gave me back I think $200 usd of the around $2000 I had paid....
At some level I kind of felt it as abusive. But I'm sure there are enough small prints somewhere to which I agreed to that explain why it's OK. And given my health issue I decided not to worry about that (puts things in perspective haha). I was more sad that I had to cancel the vacation/trip my wife and I planned, due to that emergency.
The company that scraped Craigslist and made “every” home in my favorite local places a speculative opportunity for out of state investors (and funds), moving the workforce into their inventory to create a competitive hiring advantage against other tech companies by letting me work at my (or any) kitchen table. Sounds like this won’t be sustainable. Should it become an acquisition target and the remote workforce is an impediment to their valuation, it will cost very little to send email demanding a return to the office.
The only way to pull off the whole, employee independence thing is to not concentrate resources in the hands of so few. You can work from your home, sure, but the CEO and board, for their risk receives outsized compensation and offers little control. It works because we a technologist breathing entrepreneurial air feel, one day I too will have millions in reserve so I won’t begrudge the few who are now.
I think a better response it to coordinate and not show up in the office or on zoom until…(I don’t know I am a contractor and have been working from home the past 12 years and really don’t have workplace complaints)
Airbnb employees can live and work anywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199833