18
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Evolving Reddit's workforce - Going forward, Reddit employees will mostly be able to work remotely from wherever they want, and all US employees will be paid the same, regardless of location
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- Title
- Evolving Reddit's Workforce
- Authors
- Staff
- Published
- Oct 27 2020
- Word count
- 707 words
I came across this blog post today and found it interesting considering the background reddit has with working from home. A few years ago a lot of employees actually already did work from home and then reddit decided to eliminate that asking all employees to move to SF (I am not sure if the New York office was already a thing back then).
Now under pressure of covid related times they are effectively reverting this decision as if it the most logical thing in the world.
While I wrote the above in a bit of a cynical manner but personally speaking I can only applaud the fact that working from home is becoming more accepted even if companies had be forced to try it out due to a pandemic. While a lot can be said in favor of having people working together on the work floor it isn't always ideal in my opinion. Certainly not with the unchallenged popularity of open offices reducing productivity, increasing travel times, etc .
Personally speaking I do hope that we end up in a hybrid situation where the office is still a central hub for the company but in less of a beehive sort of way. People work from home most of the time where possible and only coming to the office a few times per month to catch up with colleagues and for those meetings where it simply works a bit better to be together.
Honestly, I think making any sort of comparisons to "how Reddit used to be" from more than a few years ago is totally pointless. It's effectively a completely different company and site at this point, and not really one that smoothly "evolved" from the old one. They've switched CEOs twice, hired a completely new executive team, taken $550M in venture capital, hired over 600 people and made the company about 20x the size it used to be, massively changed the priorities and direction of the site, etc.
Looking back and comparing to the 2014-era remote-work policy isn't really any more meaningful than looking back at the "every man is responsible for his own soul" mindset that Yishan had about running the site at the time. All of that is long gone, and doesn't really have any bearing on what they're doing now.
I suppose that is fair, I still find it interesting how a much smaller reddit felt like it had less an handle on remote workers that it moved to a non remote strategy while a much bigger reddit is now finding out that is a perfectly feasible solution and is now embracing it as a long term thing allowing employees to once again move to anywhere else in the country.
As a side note, I wonder if more tech companies doing this will have any impact on strained housing markets like the one in SF.
A big factor in how good of a handle they'd have is how spread out their employees were mixed with how big the HR department is. My partner is in HR for a tech company. It takes a non-trivial amount of work to register your company in every state that you have a remote employee in and make sure you meet all Federal and State employment, tax, and insurance laws. Not saying it is impossible, but especially now that WFH is a common conversation topic, its becoming a very regular conversation for me to explain how much harder it is to let people work from home than just "fuck it, work from your house" (not saying you're saying that, that phrasing is much more common on reddit)
Speaking of we are already seeing some interesting numbers come out of SF
Number of Homes for Sale in S.F. Hits a Two-Decade High
Man, I absolutely do not want to go back to the office after this.
My company was about a month or two out from moving us to a new open landscape office (that nobody I know was looking forward to) right before we all went home in March.
I'm already keeping my eye out for full-time remote opportunities, but I'll have to become more proactive in my hunt once they start making noises about us going back in.
From what I am hearing a lot of places are going to end up being 1-3 days at the office, the rest home once/if there is a vaccine that allows us back to the office. So you wont have a dedicated desk which will be weird.
Basically it sounds like some types of meetings don't really work over zoom calls. And they need people their for them. Also people that are struggling in some area needs face to face time.
Why wouldn't you still have a dedicated desk? The only way 1 day per week in the office makes sense is if everyone is in the office on the same day. If 80% of the workforce is remote on any given day, you're going to have to run everything as remote-first anyway so why bother requiring anyone to come in at all?
Honest question, why would you have a dedicated desk again? (By dedicated I mean one that no one else uses). If I was a corp I would only bring in one department at a time, give everyone facetime, meeting time, workshop with struggling workers. Then do the same thing w/ a different department the next day. All the time re-using the same desks.
Ah, I guess that could work for some workplaces. My work involves a lot of purpose-built lab spaces, so giving everyone their own desk doesn't actually add that much to the square footage of a building. I'm also a lucky member of the near-extinct species that is the Bay Area tech worker who still has their own office, so I don't have the best insight into how life works for the majority (I think?) who don't even get a cubicle anymore. On the other hand, I also started a 12 month lease in another state at the beginning of this month. It is entirely unclear to me whether I'll ever spend any significant time in said office ever again, but if I do return to on site work again there are all kinds of things in there that I would rather not have to carry back to my car every time I leave and set up every time I return to a new desk.
IIRC it was, but it was pretty small at that time, and they closed it when they forced everyone to relocate to SF. Also IIRC, that is one of the reasons Victoria was fired, since after the reshuffling she was the last employee who remained in NYC.
Expect to see more announcements like this. I work for a place that expressly did not allow WFH pre-COVID. Last year we were testing a WFH pilot that would maybe let some people have a 2/3 WFH schedule. By the end of March, everyone who could WFH was out of the office, and a lot of people who couldn't found a way. I'm not expecting to go back into the office any time soon. My leadership has learned that WFH is just as effective as in the office for an awful lot of jobs. Others are learning too. "Everyone at their desks" is a luxury.
I wonder if they will start hiring interns from places outside the USA. I'm not sure if they would still need to sponsor or not.
Not sure either, might also depend on what part of the world someone applies from. They already have an office in Dublin so in theory remote working from EU countries sounds like a possibility.