Spiritually, there is a dichotomy, but it is (as most things) perhaps more nuanced than you've laid out here. This dichotomy is also commonly referred to as "top-down vs bottom-up" or "strategic vs tactical" or "big picture vs in the weeds."
On places where I agree with you: there are some people who naturally think about the big narrative, what could be done, the vision, and the way the hero will progress through their journey. There are also people who think through the day-to-day, less about the hero's journey and more about how the hero will get from Town A to Town B in two days. Great pairings come from having both; this is one of the reasons that co-founder teams are often so much more successful than individuals. They complement each other.
On the places where I disagree with you: some of your statements refer to reactions when the scenario requires thinking that is different than natural strengths. A successful "narrative" person understands and respects that someone needs to be thinking through the day-to-day, and a successful "facts" person understands that someone needs to be setting the big goals. They recognize weaknesses in themselves as strengths in another.
For example, a fully-aware "narrative" person won't think it's wrong to pierce a valuable story with contrary facts. They will respect that their story should be updated. And a fully-aware "facts" person won't put their foot in their mouth by saying things at the wrong time. They'll respectfully listen to others and chime in when it's appropriate to build up the group. None of us are perfect, so we will all make mistakes here, especially under stress.
The first two examples are founders who moved from Europe to San Francisco. Given the entrepreneurial ecosystem in most mid-to-large U.S. cities and more favorable ways of working, I would imagine that you could get a win by moving to any U.S. geography with >1M people versus being a software entrepreneur in a EU regulatory environment. San Francisco is one of the examples... but Chicago probably is, too.
And if you're a founder, there are all sorts of things you need for your business beyond software engineers. You need access to capital, and most VCs are based in the Bay Area and would prefer you be there too. You need access to talented advisors, and later on, experienced hires. Those are also often in SF. It's not impossible to do elsewhere, just more challenging.
Neither of those examples make the case that it's better to hire your engineering team in SF, or that your rank-and-file employees should be there. Yet the article jumps to imply that's the case.
This has happened before. From 2000-2004, this was the world. Companies were going out of business or cutting headcount to the bone, and the folks with 7+ years of experience were getting picked up (often at a discount). If you started your first job coding in 1999 and then got laid off half a year later, sucks for you.
2004 both Salesforce, Google, and Blackboard (they were big then!) IPO, and Facebook comes screaming onto the scene. Greenspan monetary policy had already made capital nearly free, and the 2008 financial crisis kicked us into 0% interest rate territory. It costs us nothing to invest in talent, so why not? If we invest in 100 startups, each with 100 employees at $150K salaries, and just two of those unicorn exit, we've made our money back, and it costs financiers nothing to wait.
2004 kicked off the simultaneous rise of "software as a service" and "social media," both of which were highly lucrative. But not only that - SaaS allowed traditional (think General Mills or Procter and Gamble) to have high-quality, cutting-edge software products without needing to employ a lot of engineers to run them. They could just pay a line item to Salesforce and let them concentrate the devs.
Just like in 2004, I think we will have a major industry shift that unlocks jobs for lots of these junior folks. I don't think it will be AI - just feels too obvious. I suspect it'll be something to do with climate change.
For early stage growth companies (say <100 employees), I think in-person will come back unless you're planning to take a massive pay cut.
Middle stage (anywhere from 100 to 1000 employees), I think there's a lot of space for remote. You're competing for talent with everyone at that point, and you're not cash-rich... the amount you spend on office space could also be spent on another engineer or couple of salespeople.
Large stage, I feel like Stripe's hybrid approach will be the model. There will be in-office roles in key geographies where pay is better, and there's an expectation of being in the office at least a few days each week. There will also be a "remote" option, and entire teams will be remote. Salaries will probably be a bit lower and promotions beyond a certain level will be tougher.
What's influencing my perspective: I'm at a mostly remote company with ~500 employees, and while ICs are generally remote all the time, there's some expectation on managers and above to occasionally travel into the office. And I've got some friends working at Salesforce in Denver who see it's tough to get beyond manager level in any non-hub office, and the few Directors are regularly traveling to SF. No VPs based in the non-hub offices.
COVID of course influenced this a bunch, but I've been at a company a few years and saw it grow from 30->130 employees - originally we were fully in office, then remote for covid, now it's settling back in to a hybrid approach where teams decide for themselves what works best (sales is generally in every day, dev is a few days a month if they're local), and then we have some requests to all come in to the office if the board/clients are coming in.
My hope for the future is that we basically pay for commuting time, so then employers can decide if it's worth asking someone to come in when they live farther away. Also seems like management does go in more for political reasons but I think that's specific to the org. I'm a huge fan of the way Automattic sets up their culture where it's remote-first so you don't end up with that two-tiered system - you can go in to an office if you want but everything has to be done online so there's a record to look back on later
At best, the primary reasons companies do unlimited PTO is that it's just not worth it to invest in official rules and some sort of tracking system. Just say "take what you need" and move on.
But at worst, companies don't pay attention to the psychological impact.
If you're a manager or leader in this sort of environment, I suggest telling your teams something like "I consider 4-6 weeks of PTO to be a healthy amount. You should take somewhere around that. If you need to take more, I'd appreciate it if we talked about that. And if you still feel pressure to take less, let's talk about that too so I can help you feel more comfortable."
taking no PTO isn't mentally healthy. I've never felt like we got "more done" over the course of a year because no one took PTO. Eventually it was just burnt out employees grinding through the days.
> the primary reasons companies do unlimited PTO is that it's just not worth it to invest in official rules and some sort of tracking system.
One of the reasons that this can be so much of a problem is that a lot of states treat the PTO as essentially a liability to the company. It's something that needs to be paid out to an employee leaving (barring being fired for cause or other situations where it'd be forfeit). I've worked in a number of start-ups or early companies that ran with unlimited pto for this reason alone since it makes the balance sheets easier to deal with when reporting to investors because now there's not this extra lingering liability that can be difficult to deal with if things go awry.
The pressure to take less almost certainly is another benefit to those early companies but it's not the one that I've heard being primarily discussed for keeping the unlimited PTO like that.
I’ve worked at a company with unlimited PTO since 2012.
It was the founder’s preference, as was allowing us all to work from home, because he didn’t want to babysit adults who all agreed to work towards a goal.
It’s never felt like a trap. Employees absolutely take a week+ off work, multiple times a year, and I’ve never heard of anyone ever being reprimanded.
The same founder also continued to pay an employee who was struggling with life in general, encouraging them to take off for a couple weeks and when they were ready, chat about whether they’d continue to work here.
There certainly can be scammy, predatory “unlimited PTO” policies, and maybe my experience is the exception, but I definitely prefer it over having to submit paperwork any time I have to miss working hours to take my kid to doctor, or just to take half a day to with the family on a Friday afternoon.
Best case: unlimited/flexible PTO policy simply reflects a company taking the attitude of "you are a responsible adult and we trust you," and skipping the need for a cumbersome tracking system.
Worst case: constant pressure + an unclear PTO policy induces workers to take less vacation than the norm.
There is another sort of worst case (company's perspective): An employee thinks they need to rebuild their house and needs to do it all by hand, hence will be on leave for the next six months. Or, say, wants to explore Europe backpacking and hence needs break for the next two months.
With unlimited PTO the biggest challenge is to define (both ways) what qualifies for a good reason to go on a leave.
I have enjoyed unlimited PTO wherever I had. But I tried to have my own benchmark of about four weeks in a year. Of course, there have been times when I needed more, and it was fine. There have been times when I didn't need four weeks either, and I was okay with that too!
I am in the fantastic situation of working for a company that recently transitioned to no payouts on separation (state law allows) with a staunch no unlimited PTO because of our customer demands. PTO has now become something of a sham.
I had unlimited PTO (they called it DTO, for discretionary time off, to make it clear what it actually was). When I was interviewing I told my manager that I had 6 weeks at my old job and asked if he saw any issues with that. He said no, and sure enough I never had a issue taking time off. Definitely not always a scam, but also definitely a good idea to be explicit about what's reasonable.
Shortly after leaving that job for one that did have limited PTO, both my mother and sister had some health issues (they are both doing better now), and I found myself looking at my PTO balance when deciding if I take time off for this or that, and I really missed the cognitive freedom that came with "unlimited".
We have an alternative path that works for us: get a terrible, ugly, but functional version of the feature up as quickly as possible. Preferably, the uglier the better. Skip the tests for now. Put it behind a feature flag or some other way to "get it into production" without any real users able to see it.
This lets you try the feature out end-to-end. Click buttons that call APIs and see if the right actions occur. Fix all the stuff that breaks when you first try this out.
Then show it to a friendly. Product manager maybe, engineering manager, another developer... whatever. Someone who understands you're just looking for someone to try out this feature with you.
It works now? Great. Put unit and integration tests around it. Make sure that this happy thing you have running won't accidentally break. Now make it pretty. Give it the design product actually asked for. They'll have feedback, which you can now incorporate safely because you have tests.
As a suggestion for finding mentors, maybe just track down some senior software engineers at OpenAI and the like and drop them a cold email explaining that you're curious and would love some time to chat about how <some new tool they're working on> works?
If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.
That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.
> If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat.
I've been on the receiving end of those emails a small handful of times due to a previous job, and I've been thrilled to receive them every time. While none of them turned into a longer-term relationship, I would have been happy if they had. I think in general, (non-famous) people are less busy than people assume and would love to talk about things they're passionate about. Don't track down the project lead; instead go talk to the anonymous people a step or two down the ladder.
The word "soccer" started in England as a slang of "association," which became "assocc" and then "soccer." Americans learned the word from the English.
It may also surprise you to learn that water closets are called restrooms in other countries that speak English.
And if science-infused cooking is your jam, Kenji Lopez-Alt is another great read. https://www.kenjilopezalt.com