Look, I love remote working and I almost always find myself on the side of workers in any management v workers debate. But I find it very difficult to get worked up about the plight of folks who are likely making 60k+/yr. And much more if they are in a tech-focused role.
Reddit loses money. Does everyone just expect them to continue on with no changes forever? And where's the HN outrage when a factory closes down?
Mayer may have already played her hip-internet-company-with-no-revenues-acquisition card.
There's a lot of places asking people to move from would be difficult, but from my familiarity with both, those might be two of the harder sells.
SLC offers certain outdoor rec opportunities the Bay can't match, and unless the requirement to move to SF comes with a big pay bump, they're effectively asking employees to uproot their lives and take a big pay cut.
Cost of living in New York is probably roughly on par, but I'm trying to imagine someone who likes the breadth/depth of cultural/rec opportunities in NYC being happy with SF and guessing it's not going to play well.
Also, seems like critics and talking mouths like this one are almost always more upset than the workers themselves.
If you want the power to work at home, start your own business or work exclusively on contract with specific remote provisions. Its unfortunate when something gets taken away from you, but who can you really blame unless its written and legally binding?
Anyways, here's a detailed response about the issue from the CEO:
http://www.quora.com/Is-Reddit-closing-their-NYC-and-Salt-La...
> "I can't find sympathy for people making $x/yr."
Why not? Where do you draw the line of people deserving sympathy vs. those deserving none? If they made $59,999/yr would you "get worked up about their plight"? Can you point out an article on HN (ostensibly a site related to the Tech Industry, hence the posts about Tech Workers) about a factory closing down where there was explicitly no sympathy?
Don't forget that when any hot story hits the tech press, every outlet puts out one or more articles about it. That makes for dozens of posts. Throw in blogs and there are dozens more. If we didn't prune duplicates, copies, and me-toos, that's all the front page would consist of.
Maybe you don't enforce it as hardly as you used to, or maybe this thing I saw was a one off, or maybe that guy at the time had crossed a starker line; regardless, saying that it isn't true is misleading.
Second, I know from experience how distorted people's interpretations of these situations can be. You seem sure that you judged one example correctly; I think it's more likely that you jumped to a conclusion.
The first thing PG said when teaching me how to moderate HN two years ago was: whatever you do, don't censor stories because they're anti-YC. I think about this every day and try to stick to it. But that doesn't mean that posts like the OP get a free pass just because they say bad things about a YC-funded startup. If we applied the rule that mechanically, we would fail our primary responsibility, which is to keep the quality of HN high. So we do what we can to balance the concerns.
From everything that's being shown here, the people being fired will likely be getting nothing. Considering that these people most likely have denied themselves much more lucrative positions for a chance at being in a cool company where there's growth opportunity, it is practically a betrayal of the principles being choosing this sort of place to work.
If this were to happen to me you'd be damn sure I'd be lawyering up.
For example, the average income per person in Germany is at 41k Euro. For the US it is $51,939 per household, already adjusted for inflation.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Oops: That's not even middle class anymore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class ?
60k a year is making less than the average worker
Beginning of the end for Reddit.
Remote workers being removed simply mean it has gone from an engineering/innovative company to a metrics/bean counted/make sure you are in your chair typing in an IDE all day type of place (they might not even allow reddit workers to be on reddit with that type of ultimatum).
Even if that is not the intention that is the end result.
It is so strange though that business has really concentrated technology so much in the Bay Area, it goes against what networked systems mean. Is it smart that everything has to be in SF? Is that the only way to get the best people?