>Does it encourage physical get togethers?<p>I generally agree with all the points (minus the obvious caveats), but I'd prefer if we'd push back against the whole "happy work family" mantra. Some of us don't mind being seen as "just that guy doing the job from a distance", but do mind other people trying to make us more than that. For me, part of remote work is to <i>get away</i> from continuous pushing towards more socialization. Whenever someone says 'encourage', it often seems to loop around to a negative if you don't want to participate.
> Offering equal pay for equal work [...] Pay people for their contribution and treat all humans with equal respect.<p>Does any company actually do this? I don’t feel like this is economically feasible. What rate do you pay? The California rate or the Romania rate? If pay the Romania rate then no one from California will work for you. If you pay the California rate then you will be putting way more money into salaries then needed, which could drown your company in hard times. Splitting the difference doesn’t actually solve anything.<p>I can see in the long run equal pay becoming a reality, especially within a country (same pay for California or Nebraska) because movement is so easy. But it will be long time before cost of living between the poorest matches that of the richest.
> Offering equal pay for equal work [...] Pay people for their contribution and treat all humans with equal respect.<p>That demand reads like a double-standard to me: people from the western world are happy to buy clothes, hardware, or food from foreign countries with low labour cost. They do that to cut down their own expenses, because the same goods would be much more expensive when produced domestically. This is the exact same mechanism at play, just with reversed roles. In one case it’s considered okay, in the other unfair. It only depends on which side of the table you sit at.
The benefits/vacation point is a poor one. So much of that aspect of compensation is driven by local laws so as to be pointless. In fact, it’s a major reason why even remote friendly companies won’t hire internationally.<p>Heck imagine a company founded in the UK committing to this. How would they deal with providing health insurance to their first employee in the US? Not offer it to US based employees?
> Let’s say you can both afford to save 30% of your salary and you go on to invest it in, say, the S&P500. Then after your career you’ll go and retire in Spain. Guess who’ll afford a better lifestyle? That’s right, the US citizen. Location based pay simply exploits employees of weaker economic regions. It’s common in our world but that doesn’t make it right.<p>I’m working at Google and moving back to Spain where I’m from where I will see my salary reduced by 50%. I love my team and my work but this is precisely the reason that will make me quit in favor of an American company that doesn’t adjust salary to region.<p>Plenty of non-FAANG American companies that would pay what I was being paid while based in Germany.<p>I strongly suspect I am not the only one.
I'm an Engineering Manager at Stacker (YC S20) and heavily involved in hiring (which, yes, we are by the way :-). We're fully remote and I think we do pretty well on this test as written, which is nice to see.<p>I was just discussing with someone the other day how exciting it is to be involved in this (historically) brand new model of organising around work, discovering and navigating all the advantages and challenges it presents.<p>Like perhaps the actual Joel test I think this list is broadly directionally right, if I would say a <i>little</i> naive (or more generously, low in nuance) in the extremes where the interesting details and subtleties always are - but I love that the author has had a good run at making this, a decent list, and the first person I've seen attempt to do so. I look forward to us as an industry iterating forwards from here on what the best practices are and seeing how the fully remote model evolves over the next decade or so. Exciting times!
Reasonable list but I do take issue with #5. Synchronous communication is incredibly important in any working environment. Else you end up waiting an inordinate amount of time getting simple answers to simple questions. Not to mention the social aspect of simply having a conversation with a co worker.<p>we have tools that easily enable this in a remote work environment. I’d suggest that this be re-tooled to be something more like “does the company optimize for focus time/flow time during the workday”
Isn’t it kinda weird to attribute Joel’s name to this even though he has nothing to do with it?<p>I mean sure, they are both lists of ten questions for assessing a job’s suitability, but is “Joel test” common enough (first I’ve heard of it but :shrug:) that’s it’s more a noun for the list than being seen as having to do with Joel?
For point #1, perhaps <i>neither</i> scenario is "equitable". "Equal pay" may <i>sound</i> equitable given the horribly biased example given, but look at the converse case:<p>> You have two people doing the same job but if you live in Romania and your colleague lives in the US at<p>a company that pays both equally<p>> Then after your career you’ll go and retire in Spain. Guess who’ll afford a better lifestyle?<p>That's right - You, the Romanian citizen.<p>Since your cost of living is 42.4% cheaper than your US colleague, you'll have much more disposable income to invest over the course of your career.<p>Let's say you both make an after-tax income of $60,000 USD. If your colleague pays $40,000 a year for rent/food/transportation/clothing/staples and another $5,000 for (optional) non-essentials, then they'll have $15,000 to invest.<p>You will spend roughly $23,000 on the same essentials and another $3,000 on non-essentials, leaving you $34,000 to invest annually.<p>If you both invest in the S&P500, and it continues to return around 10% annually, then you both move to Spain to retire after 30 number of years, you'll have just over $5.5 million USD compared to your US colleague's ~ $2.5million.<p><a href="https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states/romania" rel="nofollow">https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states...</a> - Although the basic principle holds as long as there's any cost of living difference. Also doesn't include tax or healthcare.
> You have two people doing the same job but if you live in Romania and your colleague lives in the US at Gitlab you could earn a lot less.<p>> But that’s treating you, a human being, like an asset.<p>Funny how that objectifies people if you approach it from the market side, but if you start from the human being side, it turns out equal payment doesn't always make sense.<p>How? Take a human being. One with abilities and needs - family, health, freedom, etc. They offer their abilities to you, the employer, because they need the ability to fulfill their needs. But the amount of resources to get there depend on their physical location: more expensive countries demand more money to fulfill the same needs. Therefore, paying the same would favor the needs of some over others.<p>If you consider that most humans have some need for fairness and justice, you can't pay equal rates for the same effort. Best you can do is equitable.<p>It's not the same as paying local market rates, but it precludes paying equally as a solution to objectification.
Hum... Fully, total remote, hiring included is a bit utopia IMO, it can be done practically of course but demand a society that's not there and is in contrast with "being together"...<p>IMVHO remote work, where possible (around 30% of jobs in the western world probably), should still be inside country borders in the same way multi-national company subdivide themselves by country because local laws can be too incompatible to manage a unique entity. Similarly for salary: in theory we must get paid for what we do so regardless of where we are in, but in practice cost of living must be taken into account because the same amount of money in math terms have not the same value everywhere and taking cost of living into account is simply too complex to be solved. The world is not a global world where anywhere we are things are equal, there are of course similarities, in the end humans are similar, but definitely not enough.<p>"local" remote work is perfectly doable with little travel and common profit, world-scale remote work is potentially doable but not in the present world, also fully remote work is hardly possible IMO/IME...<p>My honest opinion is that there is no "test" possible anyway, just negotiation not really different than any "non remote" job.
In regards to the first point, equal pay for equal work, last week I had a place drop the base salary from 260 to 135 because I'm in Arkansas. The whole state apparently has the same cost of living, and it's a fraction of the stated range for NY/CA. Ridiculous.
Seems like all major companies are offering location adjusted pay. Is there anyway to find companies who don't? Also I'm in Canada yet getting like 50% after currency conversion edit I should say Vancouver Canada so property prices are higher than most of the US
The original Joel Test is here:<p><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...</a>
These are good questions. But I would replace the 3 pillars with: Reciprocity/Fairness, Empathy and Communication, whereby the first two are known as the pillars of good moral. Effective communication enable and keep all the three coherent.
I would like to add more criteria for the effective communication, though. Most of the time you can do with asynchronous communication but sometimes synchronous communication is the only effective way to solve a problem. The composition of the teams and their time zones should take that into account.
I also don't mind an in-person interview if it's the final round for selected candidates.
> How do you balance the difference in national labour right laws and public holidays? The easiest is to simply give all employees enough vacation to decide themselves which holidays they want to celebrate and for how long. Everything else is an HR policy nightmare and an interference of the company in your personal life.<p>This is probably illegal in many countries. I assume in many places you can't just give extra vacation and use that instead of giving holidays.
Given that most businesses survive on the margin between business value vs employee pay, the notion of equal pay for equal work certainly sounds good, but will inevitably result either in more selectivity or a race to the bottom.
> Equal pay for equal work<p>This seems like Pandora's box of compensation (at least for U.S. based tech workers).<p>Is it not at least possible, that, if this were adopted by all tech cos, the average wage would pull wages downward?
This is what a union is for. People who think companies can't afford this are
1. Unaware of how much they skim at the top
2. Unaware of how many companies exist that don't deserve to.
>>> Are your direct colleagues all working remotely as well?<p>Yes, we do hardware work in our basements. </s><p>Ironically, I actually did hardware work in my basement during the lockdown.
> Is the company communication designed to be asynchronous?<p>No. There will always be some boomer who refuses to use Slack messages and needs handholding on Zoom video for the most minor discussions. Character traits include emotional manipulation, not invented here syndrome, poor time management.<p>They've been struggling to deploy a simple microservice for multiple financial quarters but will snap and call you slow when their code review process stalls.<p>It's not easy to teach the concept of decoupling as a problem solving strategy. They've suffered the yoke of enterprise programming for so long, that they feel naked without iron chafing at the neck.