Remote work: Escape from Silicon Valley
Facebook last week became the latest tech firm making plans to ditch the office, said Kurt Wagner in Bloomberg.com. Companies in Silicon Valley have been among the most resistant to rushing a return to the workplace, but Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg took the remote-work trend one step further, promoting a vision of remote hiring. Zuckerberg said the company planned to “aggressively open up” hiring far beyond coastal hubs like San Francisco and New York. He predicted “remote workers could make up as much as 50 percent of Facebook’s workforce in the next five to 10 years.” He also said Facebook’s current employees can telework permanently if they wish after the lockdowns. “We were worried productivity was going to fall off a cliff,” Zuckerberg said. “It just hasn’t.” One downside: Employees would be paid based on the cost of living in their locations, so those who move away from the San Francisco Bay Area will likely take a pay cut.
This is “hard for me to take seriously,” said Mark Sullivan in FastCompany.com. I’ve been to Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, and it’s like “you’re inside some huge Las Vegas casino.” The company spent millions designing ways to keep employees from ever needing to go out, supplying “big cafeterias with gourmet food,” massages, sleep pods, even “a massive green space on the roof.” This idea that it’s now encouraging half the company to work from home “flies in the face of the open and transparent but present work culture the company’s been honing for years.” Google isn’t anticipating the same exodus, said Steven Levy in Wired .com. In an interview, CEO Sundar Pichai said he was pleased at how the company has handled remote work during the pandemic, “but it is based on a foundation of all of us knowing each other.” Google is letting employees take their time to get back to the office, but needs a lot more data to consider a permanent shift. “How productive will we be,” asks Pichai, “when different teams who don’t normally work together have to come together for brainstorming, the creative process?”
Zuckerberg’s vision is not new, said Alexandra Levine in Politico .com. In fact, Rep. Ro Khanna (D.-Calif.) who represents parts of Silicon Valley, has “long advocated extending the region’s opportunities to other parts of the country.” He should be careful what he wishes for, said Brian Fung in CNN.com. More-flexible jobs are enticing for “workers wondering what life could look like beyond the Bay Area’s exorbitant home prices, rents, and taxes.” If that talent disperses, venture capital, a engine of Silicon Valley’s growth, may follow—and eventually Silicon Valley’s “50-mile stretch of businesses and campuses” could lose its primacy to cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Denver.