DeÄMPed: https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/arbeitgeber-muessen-einen-teil-de...

In French: https://www.tdg.ch/teletravail-les-employeurs-doivent-dedomm...

Disclaimer: FB employee.

The company claimed that they don't see this necessarily as a cost-saving measure because they plan on providing for home office equipment for permanent remote workers, kind of like how employees going to the office have monitors and keyboards provided for them.

That’s pretty funny. I have an amazing home office setup, and even all that high-end kit cost a very small fraction of an FB engineer yearly salary. Are they planning on burning the delta by throwing in high-end telepresence hardware, or something?

I don't know if it's high end, but every FTE I know got a Portal.

The top end afaik is the Cisco telepresence gear used in eg the White House. There’s a spectrum in between, but $280 is definitely near the lower end. Maybe portal is really good, though?

But honestly, it could be the best teleconferencing gear, I’d never put a camera from FB in my home.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a Portal?

A video-call device they make: https://portal.facebook.com/

I was about to ask the same question. I didn't even know this product existed!

The average dev at Facebook is paid like $150k. If they implement this then some engineers will lose $50k per year.

$179. Lol

If Facebook gave each dev a $15,000 computer setup then most will still be royally fucked by this policy.

At $179 that's a cheap product.

Isn't office rent far more expensive than equipment?

Home office equipment is only a fraction of the company's potential savings from office rent or other operational costs. Some of those costs get passed on to the employee, like electricity or heating costs.

Seems like the Uberization of white-collar workers, shifting costs to employees.

And if not shifting those costs, then seems like a windfall for accountants to deal with all the tax implications.

Or, an opportunity for a new wave of politicians to figure out how to implement tax and labor laws in such an environment.

WFH might be simpler for tax purposes since you don't have imputed income from free lunches and such.

Oh, interesting. Didn't think about that.

To be honest: all of the office equipment is a mere fraction of a month's of an engineer salary, providing the basic tools for your workers that is less than a month's salary is nowhere a "cost-saving measure", even less when you are saving on real estate...

That is fair. If I'm using my personal car for work, I'm reimbursed. Same thing should be done for business use at home.

My increase in electricity and internet usage should be covered.

In practice this can't really be enforced. Say you were making $200k but then a law was passed that companies have to reimburse you for 20k of "home office expenses" per year. Guess what, now your salary is 180k + the reimbursement!

Oh, you're saying you could pass a law against that too? OK, then what happens to new hires. They're gonna get 180k. You can't really stop that.

At the end of the day, salaries will be set by the market. Companies are price takers just like employees.

Not "just ruled", the decision is from April 2019!