As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.
Is that the best litmus test? My impression is that Valve is decentralized and self-organizing company[1] even though Gabe still has a "President" title.
In any case, it's quite an achievement to lie twice in a relatively short title. It's also ironic considering that Coinbase's business model is built on centralizing cryptocurrency services.
[1] "Welcome to Flatland [PDF]": http://dl.pcgamer.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
TLDR: "Welcome To Flatland" is Valve marketing and it doesn't hurt to take it with a grain of salt.
https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidde...
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
They say that nobody on the executive team lives in San Francisco anymore, so that much seems likely to stick.
What a loose use of the definition, which is oddly very much like Armstrong to attach his name and Coinbase to Bitcoin's virtues. And this is despite him actively helping push Bcash during USAF.
> As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.
Also recall that these guys are ex Goldman Sachs with deep ties to VC, which includes YC and is definitely not decentralized in anyway. Why this is on the front page is showing it's ties to YC because otherwise the focus should be on how they keep shutting down during ATH, and price dips.
The Bitcoin Core cooption of Bitcoin - which was the cause of Bitcoin Cash being created - has led to Bitcoin being transformed into a currency that in any kind of future success scenario, only power-users (banks and exchanges) will directly transact with on-chain, with their own private keys. Armstrong's vision is much more pro-decentralization.
A truly decentralized company, in the ideological sense, would have none of that.
We were all abruptly pushed into WFH due to the circumstances. It's perfectly logical to embrace this status quo, and then just gradually transition back to the office (in full or in part) as the dust settles.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...
The future is hybrid. Not all people would go back to office that often, making office less important, and company would spend less on office benefits. This is a self-enforcing feedback loop.
I suspect anything in between won't work very well. "Come in when you like" is obviously untenable; if there's no knowing when your colleagues will be in the office, then there's not much point in going in either. (Except maybe to near-to-home cafes and coworking spaces, which I expect to become more popular.) All of the N-days-a-week compromises end up seeming pretty arbitrary.
I honestly really enjoy close, collocated collaboration. But it seems so impractical to get all the right people close enough that the productivity bump is worth the commute. I expect I'll be working mostly remote from now on.
At an individual scale, you have to pay enough to convince the person to join your company over their other options. Their set of other options is still heavily influenced by geography, so geography is a always factor in the negotiation.
On a global scale, developer compensation in the US is an outlier, and not just in expensive cities like SF. If you truly want pay equality, you have two options: Either raise everyone’s pay to That of the most expensive market you want to hire in, or simply exclude the expensive markets from your hiring plans so you can bring the number down.
Ignoring geography in compensation discussions sounds great, until you realize that they end game is reversion to the global mean, which means most US salaries would have to come down. Way down.
2 devs with the same abilities will have different willingness to work in a situation because of their cost base.
Essentially, one gets more because they are demanding more and that demand is based on a kind of very hard negotiating legitimacy, and the company, on the other side of the table knows that and knows they have to concede if they want the table.
I don't think the cost of living shifts are quite that much however, they are generally not a true reflection of the change in cost of living, just a minor adjustment.
For the company: - Lower productivity (burnout, people not adequately connected, people not on same page, more difficult to manager remote workers, more distractions) - Less innovation - Less / No company culture - Less employee satisfaction; harder to recruit at all WFT firms - Difficulty onboarding new employees
For employees: - Competing with talent globally, lower wages - Fewer perks - Less community, more atomization
I can imagine it, because I've been doing it every day for the past year. It sucks. It sucks a lot.
I can't even count the number of people in my tech circle who went from (pre-covid) "ugh, so-and-so works from home at an all-remote company, that sounds fantastic" to (early-covid) "wow, working from home is fantastic, I can start a bit later, no boring commute, this is amazing" to (late-covid) "holy crap fuck working from home, i never want to do this again, I'm over it, get me back into an office".
COVID itself had something to do with this, in the sense that never leaving your home, for work or play, is exhausting, and makes work-from-home worse.
But, I don't think most people will disentangle that from the reality of how they feel. I think many, many people want to get back to the normalcy of a commute and office life. And, a few years from now, we'll all be tired of it again. And that's fine.
This whole "remote-first" wave we're seeing is almost entirely isolated to tech jobs in tier-1 tech cities (SF, Seattle, NY). That's definitely a situation where, many many people wanted to get out of the city pre-COVID, due to rising costs, and COVID-fueled remote work became the excuse they needed. Then, companies corroborated by going all-remote because corporate real estate is expensive, and if its what employees (and especially c-suite) want, lets do it.
I fundamentally believe that its not the wide-spread movement that's so easy to conclude it to be. First, because many people want to go back to an office, especially outside of tier-1 metro areas. Second, because going remote is fucking hard on your business, and executives generally aren't dumb, they know its hard. Collaborating asynchronously? No one can do it. Human beings don't have the patience. Scheduling a 60 minute meeting because a topic isn't resolved in ten minutes of Slack chat? So fun, much asynchronous. Documenting everything? Ha. Nope. We can hire anyone! I mean, in our timezone, maybe +/-1, because timezones and latency are a fundamental, physical, law of nature bitch and a half. Sorry, my microphone was muted, and my dog is barking (and if you think we're going to "solve" online video chat in our lifetimes, go buy a printer and realize we haven't even solved that).
Also, to some degree I hold the controversial opinion that many of these "pioneering" remote-first companies (Gitlab, Coinbase, Spotify (to a lesser degree), etc) are generally involved in product domains which require, lets say, less creativity. I love their products; they're absolutely fantastic, and I don't mean that disparagingly in the slightest. I simply mean that their biggest problems are generally operational in nature, or have relatively well-defined edges. If you're at a company where you can't even imagine what your product/project will look like in 12 months, where you need zero latency high creative output from your team, remote is even harder.
I have a friend who works on Azure, and she said they were seriously considering full remote. Its like, duh, that'll work great for Azure, because they're highly operational and a ton of their product development is just "what did AWS do last year". It works for some companies, and it definitely won't work for others, but maybe they need to go through the pain to realize it.
Like lots of employees working in lots of different states/countries, no “home base”.
Is there an easy way to do it?
In a nutshell, having an employee in a tax jurisdiction creates a taxable nexus for the company, meaning that they can be subject to income taxes, commercial taxes, sales taxes/VAT, etc., in that jurisdiction. (And note: this has been part of domestic and international tax law for decades.)
For example: Company C in CA has an employee, E, who moves to NY to work remotely. Company C is now subject to NY income taxes, and must now collect NY sales tax if they have any sales to NY customers (though note: in the US many states now require sales tax collection even in the absence of physical presence, so C may already have been obligated to collect NY sales tax). If E is a programmer, the NY income tax exposure is probably very low, but if E is in sales, they could be looking at significant NY tax liabilities based on how they may be required to apportion (aka allocate) their income between CA and NY.
If E is a salesperson is it complicated because they’re bringing contracts to C in NY or because they might work on Commission?
People don't want to sit at home all day in zoom calls. You can try to prevent people from being able to see each other in person, but those attempts will always eventually fail.
The issue in LDRs is mostly lack of intimacy these days, since you can easily be connected all the time.
I'm not sure you would need this from someone in sales from company X.
As you say the problem would be _building_ relationships, which is different from _maintaining_ them.
People have been leaving their parents' place for a very long time, but this rarely means become estranged, because the relationship is already there, and it's not that hard to maintain.
Hardly a fair comparison. You don't have to love, or even have any real feelings towards business colleagues, customers etc.
The opposite to a long distance relationship.
It's hard to predict the post lockdown world is what I'm saying.
- company pays to fly me out (biz class) - puts me in a decent hotel for a week - I need to get from hotel to wherever we go (rideshare) hopefully it’s walking distance but not always.
This happens once every quarter or so given covid has stopped.
We might have real offices again some day but till then it’s all ephemeral stays and juicing the industry you say is fucked.
Bay Area has always had boom & bust cycles, and the busts can last for 5+ years. They also seem to precede the recession by about 2-ish years. I'd agree that 2016 was effectively the end of the last boom, 2016-2018 we were coasting, and the crisis was COVID in 2020. So we'll probably see the next boom start around mid-2022, and really get going through 2023.
"You mean to tell me the factory owner said the entire factory is now distributed? And you must now put the equipment on your own property in addition to using your own equipment, and you still don't get a share in the wealth? And on top of that, they will pay you less?"
I would take paying for my own home setup (which most companies will give you a stipend for) over commuting any day.
But most importantly you don't own the distribution channels. In the days of Marx if you made the goods you were guaranteed to sell them, but we live in the world of Keynes and making the goods is the easy part but selling them is the hard part.
Someone should upgrade Marx with some Keynes.
Just a pet peeve of mine - it seems like it's well intentioned, but for many people who really could use it (people in small spaces starting their own business), it's not applicable. On the other hand, it can cut a nice chunk off of a big house's mortgage.
I say this as someone who has never been able to take advantage of the writeoff despite working from a small home for years.
Here you can write off the entirety of the space if it's used for business purposes, or a pro-rated amount if it's used for any non-business purposes.
Unfortunately, as soon as you step into "pro-rated" the value drops immensely.
If you have a 1000sqft house with a 100sqft office for which you pay $2,000/mo in rent, for a dedicated space you can write off `100sqft/1000sqft * $2,000/mo` = $200/mo = $2,400/yr
If you use that office for one hour once a week to join the video calls of your secret club or something, you can now only claim a fraction of the hours you used for work (160hours/mo) versus _total hours_ it exists (720hours/mo), not total hours you use the room. So the equation changes to `100sqft/1000sqft * 160h/720h * $2000/mo` = $44/mo = $528/yr
Since the denominator is the total hours available for use, not the total hours you use it you're no longer claiming any value for the time you're not using the room.
It's a little disappointing because I do have a spare room I could dedicate to an office, but I also have a nice desk with a nice chair and five monitors, speakers and mic set up for comfortable video calls, etc, etc. The extra tax refund would basically pay for me to re-buy a second copy of all this stuff after a year and I'd be saving money from there on out, but it's just so wasteful.
This year they offered a "simplified" deduction of just a flat $2/day up to $400/yr and so I didn't even bother with the paperwork for the detailed claim... this actually pays me more even though my rent is several thousand dollars a month.
See e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/your-home-office-deductions-ch...
With the pandemic there is a flat amount everyone can deduct for 2020.
But that has always been the case. Anything you purchase that is used for work purposes can be deducted (at a pro-rata basis if need be).
This has huge implications for California. The state of California is horribly mismanaged, but the tremendous amounts of money that is bought in by tech, covers a multitude of sins. However, if that money starts drying up, California will be in a world of hurt.
Compared to what? Texas?
Edited to add: Wikipedia:
> The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, boasting a $3.2 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2019.[9] If California were a sovereign nation (2019), it would rank as the world's fifth largest economy, ahead of India and behind Germany.[10][11]…
California's large GDP could then be in spite of its management, not a product of it.
There are many kinds of decentralization, and in this blog post it refers to decentralization of location -- there is not one place that is "Coinbase headquarters".
No.
Conceptually a decentralized structure sounds great but it creates power and process vaccuums. And in those vaccuums centralization manifests itself based on office politics. I predict some high profile Coinbase employees are going to coalesce around some location and that will start turning into a de-facto headquarters.
> The executive team should lead by example... even after people can safely return to offices, the executive team has no plans to be “in-office” on a regular basis, and none of them currently live in San Francisco. This is one of the most powerful things we can do to keep Coinbase from inadvertently returning to an in-office culture.
If they're serious about this, how far do they have to go? Would an official or unofficial policy of not promoting employees who come in to the office too much be enough incentive?
Most exchanges also use a service like Chainalysis to help identify which addresses need to be blocked or are high risk and need additional due diligence.
