On my 15-inch MacBook, I have a full-screen terminal running tmux, split down the middle with Vim in the left pane and a shell in the right pane. At the smallest font size I can stand in decent lighting, I can get 88 columns in the left pane. Usually I want the font larger.

80 seems good to me.

A discussion of how Erlang processes help us build scalable and reliable systems in Elixir.

This may not be news to developers, but might be useful for broader company discussions.

This is really murky to me. As a professional, I keep notes as I learn things which may or may not relate to my current employment. The notes are my property and part of my knowledge base that I bring to any job. But I suppose I indirectly receive compensation for knowing things, so I need a commercial license?

Or what if I start taking notes on some random subject for fun, and eventually I write and sell a book based on them? All of a sudden I need to start paying a yearly fee?

It's not a prohibitive amount of money, but I'd be much happier with paying a one-time fee for the current version, then buying future versions if I choose to.

> I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged

Yes, and there is some correlation between age and seniority. If companies are so eager to hire senior developers, they might consider the preferences of candidates who have been working long enough to fit that description.

So you're considering Candidate A, who lives in SF, and B, who lives in a small town.

You decide that B has to compete with A on talent, but A doesn't have to compete with B on price.

Does that make strategic sense?

Yes. Stripe and Gitlab follow that model for their remote workforce.

If you want to hire A, you have to compete with local SF company that pay high wages.

If you want to hire B, you have to compete with local small town companies which pay low wages, plus a very small number of remote companies which are in the same position as you from a game-theoretical perspective.

I think it's obvious that in the long term, if remote work becomes widespread, wages (and thus cost of living) will level out, but in the short term if few enough companies do it they can beat the prisoner's dilemma and keep remote wages lower than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Candidate A probably wouldn't live in SF if he didn't have to

It cuts both ways, right?

Companies: "I don't have to pay you $big_city rates because you live in $small_town and nobody there will offer you $big_city rates."

Candidates: "I don't have to accept $small_town rates because I work remotely and can work for a company in $big_city."

> But if a company is fully remote, why should it adjust for costs of living at all? Candidate A lives in an expensive place and Candidate B has an expensive hobby. Neither is the company's concern, is it? The bottom line is that each is worth $X to the company and wants $Y in compensation.

Because if it wants to hire workers that live in SF, it has to pay SF wages. It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa.

Think about it flipped around a bit. Let's say that instead of hiring employees, you're buying candy bars. Someone running a bodega in NYC isn't gonna give you a discount just because you're going to have the candy bar mailed to Oklahoma.

The bottom line is not the $X value and the $Y compensation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just like the company's bargaining position is a complex mixture of the value that different employees provide and the opportunity cost of leaving a position unfilled, the employee's bargaining position is affected by the salary the company is willing to provide and the opportunity cost of accepting this job offer instead of another.

> It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa.

Not yet. When Tulsa engineers wake up to their value, they hold the cards.

I’ve been on the hiring side for good senior engineers. They’re hard to hire, period.

They take a ton of time to properly screen and by the end of the interview process, the company has wasted so many resources that could have been used for development if they don’t land that person.

I work for a company based in a major west coast city from a non-major city in the southeast. My employer has different buckets it puts cities in and then limits your base pay based on those buckets. Even with that limitation, my compensation is much higher than what I would make at a local company but not the rate I would get in a 'premium' market.

The most impactful benefit for me is I get to work on $big_city problems with $big_city talent. $Small_town problems and the $small_town talent are mind-numbing and deeply frustrating to work with

Strangely, you could be getting paid from the premium bucket. They have that budget. It’s there. You provide the same value as Adam from SF.

Why not you?

Short reason is because the market is driven not only by what value you provide, but how strong your negotiating position is.

As an analogy, imagine someone from NYC traveling to Mexico City to get tacos from a cart on the street at 9 pesos a pop (about 50¢ US). Those tacos are better than the tacos in New York, so why aren’t they paying $4 each?

The market is / will be self-balancing in this case. If companies can't hire people they'll have to come up with more than you're offering. If you're unemployed, you'll have to accept less than you're asking.

> Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office.

OTOH, your applicant pool is limited only to the time zones and legal jurisdictions you're willing to hire from. If you're office-based, it's limited to those who can reasonably commute there.

> There can be a fair amount of lag time over messenger and this occasionally blocks the completion of work.

Agreed. But the reverse is also true: it's harder for people to interrupt you.

It's impossible to have a company potluck.

Typically remote work companies still have occasional (say quarterly) in person, all-hands gatherings.

Yep. But I'm not lugging a crock pot on a plane. :)

> That's the same risk you have with any open source project.

Yes and no. The larger the number of dependencies you have, and the larger number of maintainers that are behind them, the more chances you have of one of them containing malicious code.

I think you're pretty safe from Phoenix or Rails or NodeJS getting owned because so many people work on them. But one of the thousand small packages you use may belong to someone careless or malicious.