In light of social distancing rules amid the coronavirus pandemic, many companies have asked their employees to work from home, among them being three tech giants Twitter, Google and Facebook. While Twitter has announced that it’s looking to allow employees to eventually work from home permanently, the latter two companies have also extended the remote working period until the end of this year. Despite this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now revealed in an interview with The Verge that the company is now planning for half of its entire workforce to work permanently from home in the near future.

In particular, Zuckerberg told The Verge that in an internal company survey, 40 percent of its 48,000-person staff expressed interest in working remotely permanently. In light of this, the company will start offering positions to existing employees to work from home indefinitely later this year, and hopes to have up to half its entire workforce working under that arrangement in the next five to 10 years. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” the CEO said.

The new direction taken by Facebook marks a strong departure from its previous policy, which offered up to $15,000 USD in bonuses to employees who voluntarily relocate closer to the company’s headquarters, hoping the added compensation can offset the increased cost of living. At the same time, a similar policy will exist but in the reverse direction: those who decide to work from home permanently will have their salaries reduced if they move to an area with a lower cost of living. “That means if you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places,” said Zuckerberg.

Elsewhere in tech, Apple’s iPhone 12 is rumored not to include earpods in the box.Source The Verge