The CEO of Dropbox has a 90/10 rule for remote work::“If you trust people and treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told Fortune.
The CEO of Dropbox has a 90/10 rule for remote work::“If you trust people and treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told Fortune.
What does that mean? Five weeks of retreat a year? Who pays for that?
I wouldn’t take the 90/10 literally. It probably is closer to 1 week per quarter at an offsite event.
which is not that uncommon at a tech company.
That’s still a lot. Four weeks a year?
A quarter has 13 weeks, so if you do 2 week sprints and align them to start with a quarter, there is 1 week per quarter that is not accounted for. That week can be used for stuff outside of daily activities. It can be used for training, offsites, working on a pet project, etc. Its a good way to build time in the schedule for this type of thing. These types of breaks have tremendous long term value.
Eugh. Makes me so glad I’m working at a professional company and not one of those tech bro firms. We have an annual conference you can attend either in person or remotely, and it spans like two days. Doing some random corporate BS four weeks of the year just so your CEO can pretend to be some sort of popstar sounds abysmal to me.
Dropbox isn’t some tech bro startup anymore…
Y’all hiring?
I work in the public sector and my management is walking back on remote work now.
Wanna line something up and quit.
We are actually, if you’re in Sweden.
this is quite funny considering we’re discussing remote work… why should your location matters in this case?
Employees usually have to be a tax resident in the country they are working for in Europe. Depending on the country you can go as a contractor. That can also be tricky as some countries have rules against freelance contractors only working for one client - to get around companies having employees but not registering them as employees and giving them full employment rights and benefits.
Poorly worded by me, location doesn’t matter much, but language does. We work a lot with clients that operate in Swedish, and most of our internal communication is in Swedish as well.
Location matters a little in the sense that we still have working hours. These are somewhat flexible depending on which contract you’re working on though. But if you’re far enough away you might en up working nights or something like that.
That might also make you less likely to get the job due to extra compensation for work during nights etc.
I dunno, I’m just a developer.
i totally agree with the sentiment. my last job was a “tech bro firm”. that entire attitude and working environment is stacked in favor of extroverts. as an introvert, that shit is extremely difficult and frustrating.
I think there is value to meeting the people you work with face to face. It goes a long way to help build rapport, and it doesn’t require all that much time.
I would be OK with 1 event per quarter, which would be 4 weeks per year. Not exactly 90/10, but close enough and 90/10 sounds better than getting too technical. Give me a free flight, hotel, and food in an interesting place for a week 4 times per year. I’m good with that, provided they aren’t all so mandatory that if you have a conflict with life they don’t shit can me. Maybe there are 4 opportunities per year, and you show up for 2.
I was actually going to suggest this to my boss as a compromise when I went to work from home and moved about 6 hours from the office… but the pandemic happened 2 weeks after I left, so that pretty much eliminated any chance of that happening and the team I was on in that office was gutted.
If this allowed a company to eliminate their offices completely, I wonder how that would work out financially. I assume it would be cheaper than maintaining an office.
I have a designated-remote job, but I’m also in a role that’s periodically customer-facing. For accounting purposes, the time I spend working from home in my home office is considered ‘remote’ and my time on-site at customer premises is considered an off-site event. Not sure how they do it at Dropbox, but that gives you an idea of how the time categorization goes.
Not relevant to the discussion, and Readily admitting I have no idea how tax laws work.
Every time I hear “for accounting purposes…” what my brain replaces it with is “we commit fraud! Here’s how…” mostly as a joke, but sometimes I wonder how true it really is.
To be clear I’m not trying to imply anything about your job lol just think it’s funny
An offsite event doesn’t have to be expensive. Some are travel and hotel junkets but others are just meetings at some location that isn’t the office - it might even be the office of another company that lends you some space for a day or two. I’ve seen companies trade this favor back and forth. The only real requirement is that you get out of the ordinary space and routine of work so you can focus completely on the people you are with and what you’re talking about.