Why is Facebook for remote work?

One constant in Facebook’s corporate culture is the ruthless aggression when it comes to growth and competition. To take just one example: More than a decade ago, a young, upstart Facebook smashed a wage-fixing cartel that than had been imposed by older, more established tech companies and it tried to hire the best tech talent. With Facebook now among the most dominant employers in the San Francisco Bay Area labour market, the company is using its lessons from the past few months of work from home to hire remotely all across the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. In doing so, it’s telling both its own employees and tech employers across the country that competition is coming. What remains to be seen is what effect this will have on wages both in and beyond the San Francisco area, where terms are set when it comes to the compensation of tech employees.
The headlines in Facebook’s announcement about working from home were twofold: First, that during the next five to
10 years, as many as half
of Facebook’s employees could be remote; and second, that the pay of remote workers will be tied to where they work. In other words, if you’re moving from Palo Alto, California, to Boise, Idaho, expect a pay cut.
Although controlling employee compensation costs is surely part of the thinking, current and would-
be Facebook employees should recall that today’s high compensation for Silicon Valley software engineers is partly because of Facebook’s rule-breaking moves in the past. Until Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg left Google for Facebook, large technology companies such including Google, Apple, Intel and Intuit had what constituted a hiring cartel to prevent employee poaching, part of an effort to retain scare talent and hold down wages. Facebook, perhaps as an early indication of the disruptive nature of the next generation of technology companies, decided it would prioritise its own growth and talent acquisition. That undermined the cartel and led to growth in both employee pay and home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area during the past decade.
Facebook’s decision on remote work is an extension of that mindset, one that doesn’t abide by any niceties when it comes to attracting and retaining elite technology workers. Although the Facebook decision might be seen as little different from similar work-from-home announcements made by other Silicon Valley companies like Twitter and Square, it serves as a watershed moment in the same spirit as Amazon’s public search for a second headquarters.

—Bloomberg