Should probably qualify this as "geographically decentralized".
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.
Indeed, I would say the article is mistitled. Or at least, it was titled in a way that tries to capitalize on the buzzwordiness of the term "decentralized" without really using the word in the sense in which it is usually used by the cryptocurrency community. A better title would have been "Coinbase now permanently Remote-first".
> 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.
take a minute to look up the various "I was inside Valve and it had a hidden structure" war stories. that led to a lot of people reading "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" back in the day.
TLDR: "Welcome To Flatland" is Valve marketing and it doesn't hurt to take it with a grain of salt.
Important to note that Gabe gave the product rights that the fired team were developing. Said team went on to have a successful Kickstarter (250% successful!), and then failed in actually delivering results.
In hindsight, seems smart to pull the plug so far in advance.
I'm sure the complaints about informal power groups, careful politicking being required and gaurded groups are true... if only because that's true in every office I've worked in.
> In hindsight, seems smart to pull the plug so far in advance.
Not knowing the product, this looks like it may be a valid interpretation; could another be that the project would be more likely to succeed with the commercial backing of a company like Valve?
Absolutely, let me walk back my language so that its clear I'm extrapolating from very limited data.
Edit: I can't edit it anymore. Was going to change it to "Based on this limited insight, it may have been the best option for both parties to part ways given the project teams complaints and valves lack of interest in the product"
Surely that proves that it is decentralized; like so many decentralized services before it (IRC, email) the lack of the lack of formal structure meant that its structure was emergent instead (freenode, gmail).
Sure. I think this is more a matter of Conway's law, or the old observation that when a company moves its headquarters, it usually makes the CEO's commute shorter.
They say that nobody on the executive team lives in San Francisco anymore, so that much seems likely to stick.
And even then, only barely, since all of the open jobs are US/Canada only. There's a bunch of countries even on the same timezones being skipped, so I'd say it's pretty geographically centralized too.
The word "distributed" is typically used to describe a system that consists of separated units. Decentralization is a more complex idea, but basically means that the authority of the system is distributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization
> Should probably qualify this as "geographically decentralized".
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.
Bitcoin Cash stays true to Bitcoin's original vision of allowing every one on Earth to control their bitcoin with their own private keys, and transfer it without trusted third party intermediaries.
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.
Bitcoin Cash foolishly believes they can wave a magic wand or “jazz hands” away the unavoidable technical constraints that inevitably led to Core’s roadmap.
Core accepts the technical realities and limitations of Bitcoin’s design and works within them. Bitcoin Cash simply wishes them away and ignores them, and that will eventually cause the whole system to fail.
They’ll learn the hard way what the wiser small block contingent have understood from the early days. Bitcoin Core’s layered architecture is the only realistically viable architecture given Bitcoin’s inherent design constraints.
>>Bitcoin Cash foolishly believes they can wave a magic wand or “jazz hands” away the unavoidable technical constraints that inevitably led to Core’s roadmap.
Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff.
There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth.
The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
>Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff.
That wasn’t the tradeoff. The tradeoff was that increasing transaction throughput would also increase the risk to loss of decentralization and thus effectively the systemic catastrophic failure of Bitcoin. Without decentralization it’s just technological trash.
The most vocal big blockers were business guys prone to the same kind of risk-blind short-term thinking that led to the Global Financial Crisis less than a decade before - improve some easily measured metric now at the expense of introducing greater medium to long term total failure risk into the system.
Part of the problem is, systemic risk is difficult to measure and quantify, whereas other metrics like ROI or TPS are easy to measure and quantify. And thus we get more of what we measure, and less of what we don’t (systemic resilience, safety factor, redundancy, etc.). Everyone has a very strong bias for optimizing measurable metrics while being blind to the unmeasurable but important, and that’s what was happening here.
Thankfully the Bitcoin engineering community understood this and resisted making this tradeoff.
>There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints,
This is a fundamental and irreconcilable philosophical difference. You think third parties can be trusted indefinitely and safely integrated into a core role in a decentralized system. That kind of mindset is why Ethereum is being run almost entirely on Consensys’s centralized Infura database. But that mindset doesn’t fly in the Bitcoin community. Core and most others that prioritize decentralization and censorship resistance will, rightly, never agree.
> The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
No, UASF proved that wasn’t true at all. The majority of people actually running Bitcoin nodes preferred Segwit and no block increase. The “loud minority” was the cartel of highly visible large businesses that wanted to increase the blocksize, not the “vast majority of Bitcoin”.
> It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
No, it was wise, responsible, foresightful, and technologically savvy leadership that understood the potential butterfly effect here, small changes compounding the systemic catastrophic failure risk over time.
Even if that systemic risk to decentralization couldn’t be easily quantified, Core and small block advocates nevertheless acknowledged it, and integrated it into their analysis of the decision, and came to a very different conclusion from others who did not and who only focused on measurable metrics and short-term considerations.
It was the latter loud minority who proved to be irresponsible and almost forced Bitcoin into making the same category of error that Wall Street made in creating the GFC.
No, other protocols may have solved those design problems, like Mina (formerly Coda). This is just inherent to Bitcoin’s gen 1 design. https://minaprotocol.com/
Also, Coinbase isn't legally decentralized. If someone wanted to subpony them or serve them a court summons they still have a listed agent for service of process.
A truly decentralized company, in the ideological sense, would have none of that.
Keep in mind: The average tenure for big-tech employees is less than 3 years -- and usually more like 2 years [1].
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.
not all, no. many people were pushed into this. but many people have been doing this for a very long time, and we do it very differently from the people who just got pushed into it.
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.
Yup. For work that can be done remotely, I think there are only two stable points. One is where you and your colleagues are in the same space almost all your working time. The other is full remote probably with occasional get-togethers for bonding and close collaboration. (Monthly to quarterly are the common frequencies I see.)
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.
We've only been doing mass WFH for a year. Many companies have been saying things very similar to Coinbase, but I'm not sure if long-term mass WFH will prove to that great (for the company, I'd argue it certainly won't be great for the average worker).
One thing the average worker should watch out for is companies who perform geographically adjustment pay scales. Some WFH companies now even list that as a benefit that they do not do these type of adjustments. I'm not sure what the best answer is to that but feel many are using it as an excuse to pay workers less.
The reality is that geographic pay modifiers are part of the negotiation process whether it’s explicit or not. They only time it’s not is if a company goes out of their way to pay everyone the same, which is currently rare and only limited to small companies that haven’t tried to hire at scale yet.
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.
Why wouldn't companies use WFH for their own benefit? They are businesses. I find it weird that western workers somehow imagine that WFH means that they can happily work remote but not compete with other remote workers. The fact is that their big value-add has been the physical contact with the employer, as employers want to interact with their employees f2f for god knows what reason.
I agree with the sentiment that companies should compete on WFH wages, the same as they would compete on anything else. It's really weird to me that HN thinks it shouldn't make a difference. Why not? You get to pick the job, pick it if it pays enough, don't if it doesn't. If it suppresses wages.. good, they were too high anyay.
But I disagree with "f2f for god knows what reason.". Face-to-face is really important to lots of people. That group of people is relatively less well-represented in HN comment sections, where lots of hacker types who are motivated by the work and would prefer to avoid socialization hang out, but it's a huge factor for lots of people.
I, for one, am considering changing jobs to find one with an office as soon as possible if my workplace doesn't go back to having a physical office, which it looks like it won't.
I think the big value add is time proximity and lack of language barrier. Moreover, the large majority of high-level technical talent remains in the West (and the west coast of the west-most country of the West, at that), although that gap is closing.
The west coast is heavy with tech talent because the tech companies are there. And tech companies are there because the tech talent is there. It's been a self-perpetuating feedback loop until now. With remote work normalized and proven to work to whatever extent it has, that feedback loop will start to break down.
Paying extra for in-person employment and geographically determined pay-scales are only similar issues, not the same one. As long as you are doing your job with no issues the only two locations your employers should care about are Here and Not Here.
(Obviously things can get trickier across national borders, but that falls under the "with no issues" clause.)
A lot of people seem to operate under the assumption that there's a huge pool of talented engineers outside the tech major metros, eager to work for cheap salaries.
I just don't see it all. The reality is almost all talented engineers are currently being paid tech industry salaries. Yes, there's a lot of IT workers making $85k at regional banks in suburban Ohio. But the vast majority of these workers are not anywhere near skilled enough to step into a typical SV role. (I've seen the codebases of Ohio regional banks... they certainly wouldn't pass review at Google.) There's a huge shortage of software engineers-- everywhere, not just in the Bay Area.
Imagining that FAANG giants are just gonna hire a bunch of cheap IT workers from middle America, is like imagining that Goldman Sachs is going to replace their investment bankers with loan officers Missouri.
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.
Why not? Yes, to the sibling comment, there's the potential issue of pay adjustments that may (or may not) leave employees better off. But, in general, some percentage of employees do seem to want full remote and the majority want to work from home at least half the time. I agree that it's a negative for people who want to go back to an in-person office most days before time. But I assume that there will be many companies that lean in that direction.
These all potentially could or could not happen, but I think they're possible given multi-year mass WFT. I'm not guaranteeing these, but I've seen them discussed.
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 was mostly responding to "I'd argue it certainly won't be great for the average worker"
Many of us were working remotely before the current situation. I guess that makes me not average. But many people are saying they're looking forward to not going back to a commute every day even if they stay in the same general area and maybe go in a day or two a week for collaboration/meetings. The big negative for me has been working remotely during a pandemic with my usual 100 or so days of travel curtailed.
Though I often feel my work/life relationship has shifted more towards work since moving full WFH, I am still saving time each day without a commute and also saving money on gas and car maintenance.
Yeah. Work from home is not suitable for all personality types, for example. I believe one needs to at least be partially introverted to thrive in it. And I worry about long-term cohesion, onboarding and mentorship for rookie hires, culture erosion, serendipity effects, etc. that tend to get lost in remote work.
Well, I guess I won’t be working for Coinbase then. I am probably of the rare breed, who actually likes to go to office (not everyday). I can’t imagine staying home all day everyday basically hopping zoom calls. I hope other companies use office presence as a competitive advantage at this point
I have worked in a mostly remote company. Eventually everyone just stops going to the office as they are not sure if anyone will be there. Eventually the real estate sits empty and the employer exits it
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.
I agree that a lot of people will want to go back to 60% or 80% in the office, once again they can. But I feel you're doing a lot of looking into other people's business and being dismissive of their complexities. Or, at least, it sounds like you're using "highly operational" as a proxy for that. Yes, we're not all in the top tier of, whatever is there, maybe rocket science. But there is a very large middle tier of still very complex businesses, which may look simple from the outside, but often only deceivingly so.
I would say that building and running a cloud — multi-tenant outsourced digital infrastructure — seems to be the very definition of “highly operational.” Especially when you’re working at Microsoft, which continues its unregulated tradition of cloning and/or embracing-and-extending its competitors.
I don't think there's any way to build something like CosmosDB - or even heck, s3 - at scale, without an extremely high degree of creativity on the team.
A useful proxy for organizational creativity oftentimes comes down to "how well-defined are the edges".
Every human who interacts with (externally) and works on (internally) S3 has an intrinsic understanding of what S3 is. It has well-defined edges.
Higher definition of edges within a product domain naturally correlates with a decrease in necessary creativity and an increase in operational expertise. Its more important that someone who works With and On S3 understand what S3 is, rather than what it could be. That's just the nature of the beast.
That isn't to say that it requires zero creativity; that isn't remotely what I'm saying. There is creativity involved in operational expertise, and beyond even that, S3 gets awesome new features all the time which requires creativity in thinking about how to solve customers' problems in a generic, customer-agnostic way, how to implement those solutions at scale, etc.
Though, even developing out these features are more operational, because you have the defined edges to anchor yourself against. You have customers who are reporting their problems to you. You have a profitable operational model which guides investment in the product.
It wasn't possible before because companies couldn't figure out how to effectively manage a workforce remotely. Now that they've been forced to learn, this will be explored with renewed vigor. There are a lot of highly talented foreign workers who will work for a fraction of US salaries.
Companies that are good about integrating foreign workers into their existing teams are already reaping the benefits of this. Fortunately for Western tech workers, the majority of companies are terrible at integrating their offshore workers and have very outdated concepts of "outsourcing" where trusted local workers send robotic tasks to offshore teams being paid ridiculously low salaries. This model will continue to fail and should slow the enthusiasm for offshoring for a lot of companies.
If a tech company is sourcing engineers in an office work environment, they need to pay salaries competitive for the location of said office. (You can find great engineers in Jakarta, but you have to relocate them to SV and pay SV rates)
If everything is remote work, you hire the same worker, and pay them Jakarta rates (you can sub Jakarta for any very-low COL city).
Well that’s offset by the fact you no longer have to get a small one bedroom near a large city downtown.
Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.
I can't help but feel that this is going backwards. Cities are effective engines for value generation. Being in a city is valuable due to network effects, density, and overall efficiency that suburbs lack. Increased urbanization has gone hand-in-hand with increased prosperity for centuries. People don't pay $4.5k for a one bedroom in SOMA (just) to be close to the office.
It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.
SV isn't a city; it's mostly suburban sprawl. In most metro areas, you can get to reasonable property prices while still being in the gravitational well of a city even if you wouldn't want to commute into the downtown every day day.
What if I live somewhere for other reasons? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter how expensive or big my home is, switching to work-from-home means I have less of that home available to me.
If you have seas of empty skyscrapers and closed storefronts/restaurants, that's not going to be a city most people are going to have any interest living in.
Employees don't realize that taxes are the reason companies generally don't allow for remote positions. It's not just payroll taxes at stake.
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.
As I understand it, no--assuming you are not in the office over some threshold (which I don't know). If you commute from NH to Massachusetts you do need to pay MA income tax. And, oh, if you live in MA and commute to NH, you also have to pay MA income tax. I've definitely seen people who live in NH and used to commute to MA switching to being fully remote in the current situation.
Funny you bring that up. There's on ongoing case[1] involving New Hampshire and Massachusetts about that exact scenario that's likely to end up debated by the Supreme Court. In essence, does a state have, absent special status like 503(c), the right to apply income tax on activities/services for rendered in different state? If so, that implies that any and every money-making activity done in any part of world may be taxable even if one person in Massachusetts pays for it. This would apply whether the activity is part of an individual sale[2], employment, or contract work as would it apply, mutatis mutantis, for every other state.
I'm not sure I understand how that even works with larger companies. I live in MA but if I lived in NH, I'd only be working for my company in MA in the sense that it's the closest office. Company HQ is in NC and I work a lot with people all over the world. I haven't read all the background but surely MA doesn't say someone owes MA income tax because they could theoretically commute 2 hours to an office there.
ADDED: So I guess (although it's not super-clear) that it's a matter of being officially assigned to an office and maybe going in semi-regularly. Presumably if someone is 100% officially remote at a company with many offices, it wouldn't apply. https://andersen.com/pressroom/telecommuters-beware-of-state...
>>surely MA doesn't say someone owes MA income tax because they could theoretically come 2 hours to an office there.
The you'd be surprised what certain states would say, do, and compose in their legal briefs to justify extracting as much money as possible.
Also IANAL, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
Presumably, there could be some kind of test. If someone lives in NH but is 100% WFH, he may be subject to MA income tax under the following standard:
1) If the company is headquartered or incorporated in MA
2) If the work done is provided (a) to directly benefit operations of aforementioned company that are affiliated with a location in MA or (b) to be sold/provided to third party legal person(s) for which business operations /purchasing/selling would be done in MA. (i.e a business/service nexus)
there are payroll companies like https://justworks.com/ that have entities in each state to deal with the wage tax issue. that's the "easy" way as far as i know.
My understanding is that it's not "just" handling payroll taxes, unemployment, etc. There can also be paperwork around establishing legal entities which, of course, gets even more challenging as other countries are involved. It's mostly not that big a deal for large employers but it can be a fair bit of overhead for a small company--with the result that they don't want employees just working anywhere. Mitchell Hashimoto has written about this some with respect to HashiCorp.
There is paperwork, but you don't need to establish a new entity in every state/country where you have an office or employee. You can simply register your existing company as a "foreign" business in all of the jurisdictions where it is not legally incorporated (and this is what most businesses do).
Generally, you only have a location-specific business created if there are location-specific benefits acquired, or benefits avoided, by doing so. (Like say, access to tax credits, or avoidance of certain compliance responsibilities).
It would be infinitely easy to do this with Bitcoin, you could have and all anonymous all remote workforce. Wait, that's already how open source works for the most part.
This greatly oversimplifies how it actually works to be a foreign Corp in many states. You might be able to get away with this for a year or two but you will eventually be in a world of hurt. Once you have an employee in a state and you are making sales on that state, the tax and regulatory bodies will come after you. Your customers and partners will be reporting you, your payroll provider will make mistakes, and disgruntled employees will make claims in that state and it will be a significant drain on company resources.
??? This is literally how most multi-state businesses operate: 1 company, registered as a "foreign business" in other states, with a single multistate payroll provider like ADP handling the payroll function. (Yes, the company will be subject to tax and legal service in any state in which it has an employee, which is why generally when I was still at a firm I generally advised clients against remote employee arrangements.)
Note that a "foreign business" is a technical term in this context, simply meaning that a business operating in one state that is incorporated in another state. (See for example https://www.californiaregisteredagents.net/incorporation/for...) For example, almost every YC company is incorporated in Delaware, but is registered as a "foreign business" in CA where they are physically headquartered.
At the international level you usually form subsidiaries, due to the vast differences between laws at the national level, but some companies will simply register a "branch office" in other countries in which they have small operations. In fact, many countries, like the U.S., have tax forms specifically for these companies: the Form 1120F...
The main issue is that having a full time employees in a state creates a "nexus" in that state, which means you need to file a bunch of tax things and deal with regulatory issues you wouldn't otherwise need to. At the size of coinbase, its probably pretty simple to deal with and doesn't cost much relative to their bottom line, for a 15 person company, it is much easier to deal with 1-2 states than to deal with 15. You can avoid paying sales tax in some areas based on how this works out when you are small but not when you are large. Justworks doesn't help with the whole tax nexus issue, just providing benefits.
I am really looking forward to a future where we can all spread out to the locations we want and live the way we want. The trends of the past few decades towards big urban destinations means that people come to cities and encounter political strife trying to each make it how they want it, and no one is ever really happy. We already have a fix for that in our political system, which is to limit the amount of governance at higher-levels of the government (state, federal) and let local jurisdictions decide how they want to manage themselves. But taking full advantage of that requires more distributed economies. Hopefully this economic revolution (decentralization away from offices and expensive cities) also lets us decentralize politics next, so we can lower the temperature and be happy.
This is probably the final blow to unions. Without sharing a physical place and with many distinct jurisdictions, employees will not get a chance to unionize. Enjoy your serfdom!
I don't see how business travel goes away. You just can't effectively build relationships over zoom, phone calls, and email. It's just not possible. Ask anyone who's been in a long distance relationship.
Long-distance is not impossible, it's just known to be objectively inferior to in-person interaction. I think it is silly that mainstream tech is flirting with this idea of "remote 100% forever". The best people want to be in the same room as the best people. This is human nature. The only people promoting "remote 100% forever" are the people working in big tech that stand to gain from forced-remote.
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.
As someone who's been in working and failing long distance relationships, I'm not sure they are a good comparison.
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.
It's not a perfect comparison, but I think it will always be true that trust between two human beings is more strongly built in person than through an app.
And trust is the foundation of both romantic relationships and business relationships.
If WFH becomes more of a norm, I can imagine facilities / office budgets being re-purposed towards more travel for offsites, visits, and other activities to stay better connected. Work from home doesn't necessarily mean never seeing coworkers or clients in person.
Pre-pandemic, most fully remote companies like Basecamp had people get together a couple times a year. I expect that to be the norm. (Also at bigger companies. I'm on a team that's very distributed and we fly to get together for offsites.)
I don’t know about that. Most people won’t enjoy being on the road. Even I who has done a lot of long form travel for fun got sick of it once I had to constantly travel for work.
Like most conversations with WFH, this wouldn't need to be an all-or-nothing proposition. I wouldn't want to live on the road forever. But I'd love to take three or four weeks a year and live somewhere entirely new and learn about a new culture. I'm sure there are some people that would want to travel more than that, and some that would want to travel less. The key is providing flexibility to allow people to live the life that they want for themselves.
After this it’s going to be more like the opposite.
- 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.
Also jumped the shark in 2007, 2000, 1989, and 1972.
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.
It's possible that this is the end of the Bay Area's tech ascendancy - there's no guarantee that whatever wave comes next will take off in the Bay first. But the region still has most of the ingredients that slant the odds in its favor: an educated and very hard-working population; a dense, diverse population to support chance encounters; lots of rich people to provide funding; and plenty of active research being conducted by the major corporations and universities in the region.
89 was both the onset of the AI winter and a significant slowdown in the PC market. The PC market had continued accelerating until about 1985, the year after the Mac was introduced and the year Windows came out. It coasted for about 4 years, but by 1989 the PC market was well-commoditized, the winners (Apple, Microsoft, and Intel) were flush with cash that they were deploying on prestige projects like Copland, Dylan, and OS/2, the cost of founding a PC software startup had risen such that a couple guys in a garage couldn't do it anymore, and we were just getting a string of incremental improvements like Windows 3.0, System 6, the Mac IIFX and SE/30, etc. Sound familiar?
1972 I'm dating from the replacement of the Polaris SLBM program with the Poseidon one, though my uphill neighbors say that the crash actually happened in 1968-1969 (they bought their house as a foreclosure in that recession, after the developer went bankrupt). 1972 is also connected with the age of most of the housing stock here, and the end of the Vietnam War. Much of the Bay Area economy of the 1960s was connected to defense: Lockheed Martin was the primary contractor for the Polaris missile program, the engines & nuclear reactor parts for the submarines were built by Hendy Iron Works (then Westinghouse, now Northrop Grumman), the nuclear warheads themselves were designed in Berkeley and Livermore, the chips for ballistic missile guidance were made by Fairchild, the military personnel connected to the project were based at Moffett Field. When Vietnam ended and you got the 1970s economic & defense slowdown, it hit the Bay Area hard. A lot of the 1970s microcomputer companies grew up against that backdrop: you had lots of electrical engineers looking for jobs, abundant new construction that was sitting vacant, and a welcome place for counterculture ideas.
I can't imagine what Karl Marx would think of all this. :-)
"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?"
Well, you own some means of production, but not all of them. The copyright, the data centers, etc.
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.
Do workers who are employees of a company but are working from home get to write off part of their home or apartment as a business expense, the way contractors and self-employed do?
The real bummer about this write-off is that it's binary based on the usage of the space - if you use it for _any_ non-business activities, you are unable to write it off. Compare to assets, where you write off the portion that you use for business. It makes it a fairly difficult writeoff to achieve for renters and people in small homes - who might be working out of their living room, kitchen, or bedroom most of the time.
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.
Depends where you are (Coinbase hires in Canada now as well!).
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.
In the US, I don't think you can write-off a space that's used for work, even if it's exclusive use, if you are a w2 employee. Please correct me if I'm wrong though, because I have a dedicated room for my office, and would be able to take advantage of this otherwise.
It depends, it was always a bit of a red flag in the US, but freelancers did and do so anyway. Based on the 2017? tax changes, employees basically can't period.
Depends on the country. In Germany you can. You need to have a separate room that is mainly used for that job. Eg Teachers, IT Professionals etc can benefit from it.
With the pandemic there is a flat amount everyone can deduct for 2020.
>In Q1 of 2020, only 28% of new employees lived outside of California. In Q1 of 2021 to date, 58% of our new hires are from outside of the state.
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.
> 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]…
What does a large GDP prove? It is the largest state after all. A smaller state, that doesn't happen to contain some of the country's best real estate and most productive industries (say, New Hampshire) could be better run, but of course with a smaller GDP to show for it.
California's large GDP could then be in spite of its management, not a product of it.
CA's large GDP is the result of the diversification of its industries. CA has the largest agricultural industry in the U.S., the largest manufacturing industry (yes, people still make things in the U.S.), the largest entertainment industry, and the largest tourism industry.
And that doesn't even take into account the purely local-market GDP in the Bay Area, LA/OC metro area, or San Diego, each of which boasts a local GDP larger than the total GDPs of most of the Midwestern states, or, for that matter, industries where CA has a large market but isn't a national leader, such as finance, biotech, or resource extraction.
If you divide by per capita, CA is still the largest in these industries per capita, and even where it isn't, it is still close to being the largest.
Everyone thinks CA is just tech and entertainment, but CA is a very diversified state, which is why it has been able to weather COVID19 so well despite essentially no tourism in 2020.
No, it really doesn't refute that argument at all. Nobody is arguing that size is the only factor. India being ahead of California would refute _that_ argument, but no argument that anybody here has actually made.
Not sure how that refutes the size argument. The variation between California and New Hampshire is much smaller than the variation between California and India. It's not really apples to apples in the latter case.
They have a ton of people. They're 8th in GDP per capita, even though the have a huge natural geographic advantage. (Almost all US-Asia trade goes through California)
I know, they did not even put their employees on the blockchain! /s
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".
This reminds me of how Valve Inc. touts a flat-hierarchy where no one has a boss and you can work on whatever project you'd like. But in reality Valve employees complain about constant office politics and de-facto team structures.
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.
I agree, it's natural that new structures emerge in this kind of power vacuum, but it sounds like Coinbase are explicitly taking measures to fight against it.
> 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?
I'm not clear why you think all remote companies can't have processes in place that allow them to work the same as those working in a physical office space.
Yeah, the two things are pretty much orthogonal to each other. Though, if anything, I'd probably argue that absent clear communication channels and roles, remote work is much harder if you're dependent on self-organization.
this a remote-first company. they will have different physical locations but most of the company will be working remotely. regardless, given that SF was the original HQ, that will likely always be the de facto HQ... since the higher ups are already coalesced around there
Too bad coinabase\s approach to crypto is centralized. They operate a blocklists to prevent people from sending funds to certain addresses . Even paypal does not do this.
Dumb question: How is such a block even effective? What keeps you from creating a temporary wallet outside Coinbase, sending your funds there from Coinbase and then sending the funds from the wallet to the blocked address?
I mean, I can understand the basic reason if the goal is to avoid money laundering (if this goal runs counter to crypto's intended purpose of anonymity then I have frankly not much sympathy with crypto here).
But I find it interesting that they do this even though they technically can't know if the intermediate address was really under your control. Wouldn't this make any transaction out of Coinbase inherently risky? Like, if I were a troll that wanted to get as many Coinbase accounts banned as possible, could I simply set up a service that accepts payment at a specific bitcoin address, then immediately pass on all payments to a blocked address - and have everyone who uses my service auto-banned from Coinbase?
It makes sense though that tracing the transaction chains can be a reliable way to find repeat offenders. If your transaction history shows a consistent pattern of "your account -> some random intermediate addresses -> blocked address" then there is reason for suspicion. No one has that much bad luck.
I didn't say they did do this, only that they can.
The goal doesn't seem to be simply to avoid "money laundering." Of the small sample of people I know who've been banned from Coinbase, all of them have been simply for transacting with gambling sites.
What's worse is that when they ban you they refuse to talk to you. No explanation, no justification, no appeal. Just an automated reply to look at their ToS and you can never hold a coinbase account again.
Unfortunately this is essentially what anti-money laundering laws require businesses to do. It's illegal to "tip off" a customer of the reasons you flagged them for being under suspicion of money launder/evading sanctions/funding terrorism. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470685280.ch...
Yeah, because paypal doesn't allow sending and receiving bitcoins to begin with. For sure they block sanctioned individuals or customers from sanctioned countries like any financial institution. And if they implement crypto, for sure they will have as strict compliance as coinbase.
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.
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.