Welcome to the Tech Mem Right Home for Friday, May 22nd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Yeah, Mea Culpa on my whole Work From Home slash remote work skepticism. Also I was wrong about

Magic Leap being a goner. But that subscription aggregator we've all been

anticipating is showing up right on schedule and in the weekend long read suggestions let me

introduce you to the two men who are about to become nerd superstars. Here's what

you missed today in the world of tech. Facebook announced late yesterday that it will allow many of its 50,000 employees to work from home permanently,

while also aggressively opening up its remote hiring operations, first in the US and then everywhere.

Mark Zuckerberg made the interview rounds yesterday telling various outlets that he wanted Facebook

to be the most forward-leaning company

on remote work and that Facebook could get to about half of its staff

working remotely within five to ten years time. This follows news that Shopify is another tech company

that says it will allow all of its 5,000 employees to work from home indefinitely.

So never let it be said that I don't change my opinion on things when presented with new data.

As you've heard, especially recently, I've been pretty skeptical about how real this whole remote work thing will be.

But in the last few days I've been having conversations that have been changing my mind.

Just yesterday I recorded a panel discussion for the collision at home conference with Jessica Lesson of the information and she basically straight up told me my skepticism was unwarranted.

She said, far from your boss not wanting this to happen.

There are simple dollars and sense reasons why major Silicon Valley companies really will want remote work to happen. It comes down to this. Think about it. So far

when we've discussed working for Facebook but living, say in Oklahoma, we've been thinking

about how you as that person working remotely could live like a king in Tulsa on a

Facebook engineer salary. But remember we also said Facebook would know you were

living like a king and they might adjust your salary accordingly.

...