Half of Facebook employees to work from home five to ten years from now

Mark Zuckerberg says he expects about half of Facebook Inc.’s employees to work from home five to ten years from now, but there’s a catch for those expecting to take their fat Silicon Valley salaries and lives like kings in a rural area.

The Facebook chief executive laid out the company’s future remote-working plans during a videoconference with the employee.

Zuckerberg said Facebook will “aggressively” ramp up the hiring of remote workers, though not all employees would be allowed to permanently work from home, at least at the start. And those who choose to work where the cost of living is less should expect to be paid less.

“That means if you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower or the cost of labour is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook already pays based on location, but Zuckerberg said employees working remotely must notify Facebook if they move to a new area before Jan. 1, 2021.

“We’ll adjust salary to your location at that point,” he said, noting it will be necessary to take taxes into account.

“There’ll be severe ramifications for people who are not honest about this.”

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That may put a crimp in the plans of some workers hoping to make their salaries go a lot farther in cheaper areas. A recent survey of San Francisco Bay Area tech workers found two-thirds would consider moving away from the pricey area if they could work remotely.

“It makes no sense paying Bay Area rent if we can earn our salary living elsewhere,” one startup employee told Bloomberg news. As of 2018, the median employee compensation at Facebook was more than $240, 000 a year. The median home price in Menlo Park, California, where the tech giant has its headquarters, is $2.4 million, according to Zillow, while the median home price in the wider Bay Area was $928,000 a year.

Zuckerberg said that in a company survey, of the people who said they would want to work remotely full time, about 45 per cent were “pretty confident” that they would move to another place if they had that opportunity, with an additional 30 per cent saying they “might” move.

About 60 per cenr of that total said they’d prefer to move to a smaller city or town. Ultimately, Zuckerberg said the changes will help Facebook become more diverse in its workforce.

“When you limit hiring to people who either live in a small number of big cities or are willing to move there, that cuts out a lot of people who live in different communities, different backgrounds or may have different perspectives,” he said.