Susan Armstrong, Jobbio 
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Hear the one about the company that got all of its employees going back to the office full-time? It was no laughing matter. Employees now want flexibility more than ever, and unless an organization is willing to offer its employees a hybrid, mostly remote or fully remote environment, they may soon be without it. folks, that is.
Well before 2020, the question was being whispered in certain industries: “Do we really have to come into the office every day?” We got the answer during the pandemic lockdown, when entire workforces quickly realized after a few technical adjustments that we were quite good at being able to work from home. Sure, there’s the zoom fatigue and increased isolation, but for most there’s also better work-life balance, less commute stress, and location independence. As a result, now that we’re in mid-2022, we have a new question: Will work from home (WFH) or, even better, work from anywhere (WFA) persist?
If you ask Airbnb, the answer is “definitely”. Last month, the billion-euro company announced that after years of working from home, employees can now do this permanently. In addition, employees can relocate anywhere in the country where they work without changing their compensation and, starting in September, can live and work in more than 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in any location.
“Millions of people are now more flexible about where they live and work,” the company said in a statement on its website. “In response to this trend of newfound flexibility, Airbnb today announced our approach to enabling employees to live and work anywhere, and how we will partner with destinations to help them attract remote workers.”
The home sharing platform joins the ever-growing club of companies including Atlassian, Brex, Quora, Twitter, Slack, Zillow and Dropbox that enable employees to work from anywhere. It’s pretty clear that while a WFA policy might be a nice-to-have right now, it will soon become a must-have if organizations are to attract and, more importantly, retain top talent.
Never want to go back to the office? Here are three great companies with WFA policies offering roles that might be right down your street (whatever that street might be):
Shopify
Founded in 2004, Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company that has developed a cloud-based multichannel commerce platform for small and medium-sized businesses. It was also one of the first companies to fully walk away during the pandemic, and it’s not going back now. In fact, it takes it a step further with a series of innovations dubbed “digital by design”. Company President Harley Finkelstein recently said that office life no longer provides a competitive advantage and that “work should be built around mission, not headquarters.”
Shopify is currently hiring high caliber developers and is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer covering the disciplines of Site Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure Engineering. They build on one of the largest Kubernetes deployments on Google Cloud (running a fleet of 50+ clusters), collaborate with other developers, build languages, frameworks, and libraries, and help develop their caching infrastructure.
Not exactly what you’re looking for? Discover dozens of other interesting roles offered at Shopify.
coin base
According to Coinbase, it is the world’s most trusted way to join the crypto revolution, serving more than 89 million accounts in more than 100 countries. In May 2021, CEO Brian Armstrong told employees in a company-wide email that they would be able to choose to work from home or the office once the pandemic ended.
His vision, he said, is to have one floor of office space in 10 cities instead of 10 floors of office space in one city. “Part of Coinbase’s vision is to create a world with more economic freedom, and not being tied to one place is an integral part of that,” Armstrong wrote. “A mix of in-office and remote work allows us to reduce the risk of centralizing too much in one place.”
Sounds good? The company is looking for a Software Engineer – Market Data & Analytics. You will become part of the Coinbase investment organization and your mission is to organize the world’s crypto data and make it easily actionable for all users as they embrace the crypto economy.
As an engineer, you will help build institutional-level data and analytics products and interact with a range of teams and systems, including exchange data pipelines, real-time market data streaming, and external data delivery. If this sounds like you, you can learn more about jobs at Coinbase here.
Spotify
Launched in 2008, Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 422 million users, including 182 million subscribers, in 183 markets. In February 2021, the Swedish music streaming company announced its Work From Anywhere policy, which offers employees the choice to work entirely from home, from the office, or a combination of both.
Spotify also promised to give employees more flexibility in choosing where they work. If employees want to work from locations that aren’t close to an office, the company said it would offer them a coworking space membership if they want to work from an office.
The company is currently looking to join Spotify Live Android engineers to help build the foundation of the brand’s app and infrastructure. If you want to help build an application that millions of people use every day and you have a deep understanding of modern Android development, this is the perfect opportunity. To apply and see other open positions, visit the Spotify job board.
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