Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.
So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope.
It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.
It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolating/WFH. When in fact we have a lot more cases now, high levels of new cases and more than half the states have R0 > 1.0. https://rt.live/
It's definitely concerning how people are acting but that being said I think the initial research is showing that outdoor spread during the day is very unlikely. UV light seems to be devastating to Covid and Vitamin D seems to be protective. So a crowded beach is probably not all that bad. Packed bars and restaurants? That's a near worst case scenario
I have been pro-lockdowns and have not indulged in any conspiratorial nonsense. But at a certain point, if states and localities don't accept the mounting evidence that outdoor transmission is not a significant threat, it will start to feel a little tyrannical.
It's probably a question of awareness. How many of these people are reading e.g arxiv preprints to see this kind of research in the first place? There's also a rebound/face saving effect: if the CDC, State Health Officials, etc. got it wrong at first why should we believe them about anything? I just really doubt there are secret totalitarian Mayors and Governors out there intentionally locking people in their homes despite all evidence. Given politicians obsession with reelection and the unpopularity of these lockdowns it doesn't make sense they would do it for no reason and basically guarantee they lose their next election.
I think the outside is less dangerous not because of UV, but because a far smaller percentage of the air you breath in was breathed out by someone else in the last 15 minutes.
This whole thing is like a giant self-destructive part of the population coming together. There's ideological based reasoning (masks are for libs, somehow), it reduces my freedom (cause I have the right to die if I want). But you are making a choice for other people by exposing yourself.
It's hard not to see this as the decadent end of a powerful empire (sound like the most famous case), where the people just want to party and they don't care that it will be killing them and greatly reducing their future prospects and their descendants also. They have lost trust in the institutions around them. Let's just go ahead and break up and let the west coast join Canada already.
I am in south-ish (north palm beach) Florida and went to the beach the past few weekends. Fortunately it was nowhere near has busy as that picture. We haven't had much issue finding a spot with enough space to feel socially distanced.
We also went to Longhorn for dinner yesterday and they had everyone pretty spaced out (every other booth, no seating at center tables). All the restaurant employees were wearing masks. I'm not sure we were at more risk than getting takeout.
It has been really great mentally to go to the beach and have dinner outside the house.
I am trying to keep our distance and not expose ourselves or others to anything unnecessary... we would have definitely left the beach and/or the restaurant if it was anything like the pictures you posted.
I guess my point is I feel like it's possible to go out and not be too risky. I don't think every area reopening is getting crazy.
Regardless of your perception of safety, being indoor without a mask for a long period of time is probably the highest risk factor you got yourself into. By a big margin.
I don't like to pick on other people, and I'd dearly love to go out and do something other than stay in my house. But that poster two up who went to a restaurant - you are putting yourself at risk if it is indoor. And you put at risk the other people around you if they aren't wearing masks. The choices of the politicians is contraindicated, it's against what the scientists tell us is safe. Yes, people want to go out, but you are engaging in risky behavior for everyone around you, not just yourself.
I remain stunned by the people who think they will not endanger themselves and others. I wish the OP diner in the restaurant would explain why they think this is safe? Let's assume he is a programmer or some kind of educated person who thinks basic science, math, etc works. Why would they think it's safe to go to a restaurant where it is an enclosed space.
I can't bring myself to dine out because while I'm not as concerned for myself, I feel like the risk has to be pretty high to the waiters/bussers (prolonged interactions with dozens of people each day, and handling used dishes/silverware). I feel better about takeout currently since it cuts down on that.
I agree that going outside, especially when wearing a mask and staying socially distanced, does not seem especially risky. Public officials in Southern California have generally been accepting of outdoor activity, so long as it hasn't involved large groups gathering. I have avoided it myself because I have family members in elevated risk groups. (Although, in truth, I think we are all to some degree.)
The thing that would worry me most about the Huntington Beach photo (being familiar with that spot) is not being on the beach. It would be getting too and from the beach. You're going to be shoulder to shoulder with others once your ascend from the sand and get back on PCH.
The other part of the risk equation is the consequences of catching COVID-19. It reminds me of Taleb's Black Swan characterization: small risks predominate but potentially catastrophic consequences in the event. And an accumulation of lots of small risks as people ellide long-tail risks and treat them as no risk at all.
I get the impression from online chatter (mainly Reddit) that most people around here are catching it working in hospitals or restaurants. I recognize it's an unreliable sampling. I wonder if it would help keep people safe if local health officials categorized sources of infection. I suspect they couldn't do so in most the US right now even if they wanted to.
Vox, by the way, put out a nice simple guide on the topic:
You are endangering yourself and others. Political advocations should be carefully considered with the actual science behind it. You might be young and think there's little risk. All the other people around you might not be the same. By the way, your vox link says going to an indoor area with others is the highest risk. It's not low risk.
Yes, but if you actually look at the death count, it has dropped in the past month and a half, despite re-openings: https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ Georgia being one of the earliest states to re-open, continue to see their deaths plummet even as their case count increases. What's the reason for this? I don't know. Better testing, maybe. Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. Not sure.
The Georgia death rate graph that you link to is sort of an odd case; there's apparently a variable lag between the occurrence and reporting of a death, sometimes up to a month - When a death is reported, they place it on its occurrence date on the graph, not on the reported date.
As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not - the more recent deaths have not yet been reported, so they're not anywhere on the graph. They do the same thing with their daily cases map, but they're a little more transparent there about noting that numbers for the past few weeks are basically meaningless.
Reported deaths in GA have been fairly flat, but hospitalizations are rising slowly:
Another thing to keep in mind about hospitalizations is that many people have avoided going to hospitals during the pandemic for non-covid related visits for fear of contracting covid at the hospital and/or adding to hospitals caseload. It could also be the case that people are re-evaluating their risk profiles and no longer taking the same precautions with respect to hospital visits. I'm not sure what is really happening but wanted to emphasize how tricky it can be to interpret covid related metrics.
>As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not
Most deaths are reported relatively quickly. If there were, as an example, a 2x increase in deaths it would show on the graph within a few days. It would show as something like a 1.8x increase before trickling up to the full 2x over the following weeks.
Yeah, but the problem is the combination of these points:
* A certain percentage of infections lead to death
* Death usually only occurs one or two weeks in
* Pandemics follow a logistic curve in their spread (and this curve has an exponential part)
* Most infectious transmissions happen before one gets symptoms (otherwise staying at home once you cough would solve everything)
This is why a sudden rise in deaths would indicate that a few weeks ago something went terribly wrong. This also means that a decline in deaths does not mean you are doing just fine right now — if anything, it means you did fine 1-2 weeks ago.
Death lags new case by as much as a month (due to time from infection to death). So we won't really know if there is an increase an death due to the new cases for a number of weeks after we see a rise in cases.
The death rate absolutely does respond more quickly than a month, and in a time series with this distribution the tail of the data is not the most important factor.
We should be seeing increased deaths from this in places that have reopened weeks ago.
The problem is, we accelerated deaths drastically due to insane public policies like housing the sick in close quarters with the elderly. In engineering, overengineering like this wastes time. In public health, it kills people.
My expectation is that we'll see an increase in infection rate, a decrease in new deaths per day, and we'll have spikes associated with pockets of the elderly who were previously not impacted being exposed.
Been saying this for a while now ... since the Georgia Reopening, I've been monitoring a lot of state data daily, lots of places that started seeing spikes 3-4 weeks ago haven't even had as much as a slight trend upwards in deaths (Here's South Carolina for example https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-carolina-c...)
It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus ... to feel they can't point out that simple observation for fear of undoing their reporting about the virus, which is a shame. I mean deaths are down nationally ... by a lot, even as the cases have ticked back up.
My hunch is that the folks who are most at risk are taking drastic precautions, which is what is keeping the death rates down. I guess we'll just have to see for sure in 2-3 more weeks.
It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus
It feels odd that you blame the "media narrative" and then post two links to the New York Times.
Death rate is down because the average age of people getting COVID is younger, it’s already been documented and talked about quite a bit. Doesn’t mean they won’t get lifetime lung damage and that they won’t eventually re-infect the older folks at risk.
The lifetime of lung damage myth is absolutely one of the most ridiculous pieces of modern folklore about covid.
Please point to the incidence of these cripplingly disabled healthy young people?
We have no reason to assume reinfection is possible prior to functional mutation. Functional mutation is likely, but at a much slower rate than the flu. However, what we know from other novel viruses is that mortality rate will usually trend down over time in successive, functionally different mutations.
2. Some reports indicate younger people are starting to get it more frequently. Data and common sense suggests they will have a higher survival rate. But this does not mean they will not suffer serious ongoing health and economic consequences as result. They also risk infecting others close to them.
median age of infection is plummeting. Covid19 doesn't kill younger people at the same rate as the elderly.
“The severity of what we are getting has declined,” said Gino Santorio, chief executive officer of Broward Health, the four-hospital system that serves most of Broward County. “The average length of stay is six days versus 10. Initially, Broward Health had the really sick COVID patients, those from nursing homes and cruise ships. Now, that has changed, as the demographics have shifted.”
Likely people who believe they are high risk, especially older populations that aren't under any pressure to go to work, are still not taking many chances.
What I really want to see is general case severity. There's a whole range from "testing positive with no symptoms" to "bad flu" to "severe effects but not hospitalized, may have long-term damage." That last group is the scary one that, as far as I know, isn't being counted.
As klenwell said, deaths are very lagging. It could take weeks for a person admitted to a hospital to die so it shouldn't at all be reassuring that those numbers are going down. They are bound to rebound.
How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.
If we proceed on the assumption that exposure to higher viral load correlates to more severe symptoms and fatality, I think the trend can be attributed to the drop in viral load averaged over those being infected.
1. At the start of the pandemic, the older and more vulnerable were affected disproportionately. These patients had a high viral load.
2. Patients with more severe symptoms are now isolating at home or at hospitals. Previously they may have been contributing to serious super-spreader like situations.
3. PPE/Mask usage is more common now and these are possibly protecting most people against high exposure
4. Antivirals could be reducing the length of stay at hospitals and protecting workers from higher exposure
In other words, the virus is spreading but in a less severe form. However, I don't think fundamentally different (less virulent) mutations are the contributing to the lower death rate.
When you can have an ICU bed your chances are much better. There's a very steep inflection point when the hospitals reach capacity. Right now we're highly provisioned so it makes sense that the numbers show as less deadly.
The main take away is the infection rate is not linearly correlated to the death rate.
> Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now.
High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others:
It takes a while for people to die after infection. Give states like Georgia time to catch up. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed and the numbers of deaths will get there.
There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.
What isn't registering in what data? Reopening takes time to result in new cases recorded, and new cases take time to result in new deaths recorded. Reasonable estimates for the latter are about a month, and maybe the first part also took a month.
Georgia now has about 1,200 new cases daily compared to ~700 in New York. Only a month ago, New York had more like 2,000 per day.
Is it controversial that it takes about a month for new cases to turn into new deaths? Do you believe that isn't happening or won't happen in Georgia?
Here's the Twitter thread from Trevor Bedford (head of the NextStrain project cited in your link) reviewing the work that discovered the spike protein mutation in the European strain that may affect transmissibility:
"Both Korber et al and our analysis show no measurable effect on patient outcome. Hence, the hypothesis at this point is entirely in terms of transmissibility rather than severity. 14/16"
The conclusion that mortality is higher comes from the higher death rates in European countries. However, there's a major confounder: when the epidemic exceeds testing capacity, only the most severe cases are tested and counted, and so the denominator in mortality rates (total cases) is inaccurately small. We know this is the case in much of Europe (and NYC): follow-up antibody tests put the number of total infections at ~10x the number of detected cases. That brings the mortality rate back in line with the ~0.5-1% that's been found in populations where everyone was tested.
So would your tendency at this point be to agree with Trevor that differences in tranmissibility are inconclusive? Or would you tend towards supporting the transmissibility hypotheses as long as there is some small amount of supporting evidence?
That site looks amazing. It only seems to be state-level though. Do you know if it (or any other site) has aggregated local (city- or county-level) data?
I've heard two C-level guys with two separate German SMEs say that the only part of their workforce that hadn't handled remote work well was middle management.
The people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done.
Senior management / C-level types were content seeing sales figures and general output from afar.
Middle management struggled because they had a hard time judging work estimates for tasks and whether people had their butts in seats etc.
One of the execs of the bank I work at made a public statement that they actually saw the productive output of the IT organization shoot up during the WFH weeks here in Denmark.
But of course middle management didn't agree so now we are back in the office.
> the productive output of the IT organization shoot up during the WFH weeks
Should be careful about projecting that to the long term. During WW2, to increase production, the workweek was increased to 50 hours. Production went up substantially. But after 2 or 3 months, productivity dropped back below the 40 hour week. With subsequent experimentation, they found they could get sustained production increases by alternating between 40 and 50 hour weeks.
It's premature to declare victory for WFH. There can be long term deleterious effects:
1. the excitement and newness of WFH wears off, and the boredom and loneliness of it sets in
2. one loses connection with one's colleagues
3. one loses the serendipity of chance encounters and lunches with colleagues
4. you don't know your boss and he doesn't know you
Yeah definitely. It's almost like an enforced maker schedule.
In workloads that are more collaborative it's less clear though.
>people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done.
I felt the same effect in my personal productivity too (real or not). Not convinced it worked on a team level. More duplication, more teams doing incompatible work etc. Sure getting stuff done...just the wrong stuff half the time (and very proud of their productivity!). Ironically resulted in me micromanaging them more (remotely) because the organic/grassroots collaboration & coordination is just gone.
No surprise here. This is because middle management is tasked with converting meeting room decisions to actionable work. Both ends of the chain - executives and ICs can operate independently. The intermediaries need twice the number of personal interactions to get work done.
Yeah. Eliminate middle management and just have the C-levels do all the hiring, work assignments, perfomance reviews, pay raises... you know, all that worthless stuff that middle managers do.
I'm in a similar situation, except with a worse reason for requiring everyone to come back to the office. We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company. I can assure you that NO ONE is going to say "well I was going to spend money with these people but they're not in the office, so I'll go elsewhere".
Further, we are being given less than 24 hours notice to come back into the office. It's just absurd, and it has eroded any trust that I once had in the company.
This is honestly why I love working at smaller companies in addition to feeling like you actually make a difference as an individual, but that's another comment..
I just said no, not comfortable with that. That was the end of it. The in-office was replaced with a call (that was later replaced with a chat on Slack as it turned out)
> We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company.
Wherein "optics" means the millions that the top shareholders and decision makers may or may not make in the future. That's what's at stake, and that's why your families need to be put at risk.
Now, it probably isn't as correlated to butts-in-seats as mid-management would like to pretend it is, and maybe those people don't deserve bonuses for being bad mid-managers, but after the US just blew $2T+ on speculative bailouts, I do think that the goose is required to lay a few golden eggs.
Much like 8-hour workdays, weekends, or parental leave, I'm excited for us to discuss reforming parts of how the world works to make things better for everyone.
> They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.
But, this only increases the risk for those who actually do have to go in. Everyone should be vocally opposed to this policy, including (especially?) those to whom this policy is supposed to be "fair."
It seems insane. I work in digitalisation in Denmark, as a developer, so I can do everything from home. We’re running at 50% as our country is slowly coming back from a lockdown, but those 50% go to the people who actually need to be at the office, so I’m in no way a priority.
I wonder what management will do with the COVID data though. Our productivity is through the roof, but they’ve just spent several hundred millions building a new open office city hall because open offices were all the rage. Must be a tough pill to swallow that all those money were wasted because people work better from home where there are far less distractions.
My partner’s company just had their most profitable quarter in company history, when everyone but some bare bones staff was working at home, and they’re still debating whether or not to bring everyone back into the office.
At a certain point you have to recognize that it’s not about being safe or rational. It’s about bosses making sure they can hold power over employees.
Why do you think that? If anything, managers can help better connect a more distributed workforce. (And those connections are one of the definite downsides of everyone being remote.)
Because if you have competent people, managers don't need to do much, we just coordinate ourselves to achieve our goals and our boss asks us from time to time if everything is going OK.
The catch is, it takes a good manager to hire and keep good employees that can self coordinate effortlessly.
I think its less that "remote workers need fewer bosses" and more that "remote work is illustrating that the number of bosses we have is not necessary"
Many of them just don't have things to do when everyone is remote, and yet the work is still getting done.
Public transit can benefit everyone, including people who don’t take public transit. This is an analogous scenario except with severe health implications.
Costco did a similar thing at the start of the pandemic, where they forbid people working in offices from working remotely, to be "fair" to those who work in their stores.
Commuting would be easier with less people doing it too, so whilst going to the office is sucks, for many, due to transportation issues it would stick a little less with fewer people doing it. Even a single company can make parking easier if only half the company car-commutes continue.
Of course many businesses require employees to be present.
I think it will take extra factors like some manager who orders someone he knows has COVID into the office before we see a lawsuit that makes it very far.
I think it could be as simple as interpretation of state guidelines. My state is recommending workers work remote if possible. If your company allowed you to work remotely before, your employer has demonstrated that it's possible. So if you are forced to endanger yourself against state health and safety guidance, that should be enough.
Or, that management thinks the work they're having employees do sucks, and their employees are going to slack off as much as they can if left unsupervised. Also, that management doesn't have much in the way of supervisory powers apart from tracking hours at the office.
I quit my job and found a new one because my company was forcing us to come into the office to "collaborate" -- even though for the most part only the team leads are in the US and the rest of the dev team is India. My team was in another state.
I was already halfway thinking about another job because of the open office that was a mix of developers, QA, customer service managers, and implementation folks that were always on the phone and it was loud. Now with Covid and me working from home for three months, I dreaded going back into the office.
2nd part. My wife works for the school system as a bus driver. My new job was always designed to be remote and it pays enough more for me to "retire my wife". We decided that it wasn't worth the risk or the headache for her to go back to work. She's already started a new business/hobby as a virtual fitness instructor when school let out early and the gyms closed.
What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.
It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.
The best way to protect the health of the employees who cannot work remotely is for those who can to stay home. It's appalling that your employer doesn't seem to understand this.
companies who ask their employees to take risks with their health, without a compelling reason, are destroying any sense of goodwill or morale. In the short term, that change might be invisible, but over the long-term it destroys businesses
I know one startup learning this. They're ~80 people, and I thought they had a decent chance of making it until this.
They lost their 'backbone' over the return-to-work plan. She was the one who kept everything nontechnical running. She felt the risk of bringing it home was too great, and $CEO pressured when he should have compromised. Now they're losing other key staff and it looks likely to become a stampede.
I'm sure there are many possible takeaways from this, and one would be to beware of soft-power/moral-authority rivals. I think a far smarter one might be about empathy.
I feel like American society is obsessed with safety and the value of individual lives, which has never made sense to me but I go along with it out of respect.
However, when your actions have a x% chance of killing someone, and you can mitigate it with reasonable precautions... ad what value of X do you go along with?
There's a disconnect there. Either people are really bad at math and science, or they do not care about other people's lives nearly as much as they think.
Here they are asking for volunteers first, but there is a clear push from management to get people back in the office ( and that is despite the fact that by all official metrics of our unit, we are basically killing it ). Doesn't matter. They want control.
Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.
So I’m voting with my feet and actively looking for a fully remote job, it’s fucking insane to pretend an extra 2ft and alcohol gel will work when no one is following the rules properly.
I’d have been moving on at some point anyway since I don’t particularly like my job but it pays well so I have time to look for something that is a better fit.
So they’ll drain the good staff, I’m not the only one planning to bugger off.
If that's their mindset with remote work, they probably have the "anti-adapt" mindset in other aspects of their business as well...which means they'll probably become dinosaurs and be out of business within the next 10 years.
Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable. They think employees need an eye behind its back in order to produce.
And if it is that way, it is their fault, they have chosen bad when hiring.
> Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable.
I'd wager most people understand it. Like you pointed out, it's an issue with the perception of lost control, and people are willing to trade productivity for power.
Here's what I do not understand -- if the company had an open office floor plan , which is probably the case a very large if not the majority number of offices, bringing the workforce back into the office would require a massive expense as the state governments are requiring the social distancing / partitions. How are the companies going to accommodate that set of regulations with the current layouts? From a simply logistical standpoint there's simply no way there enough time between now and say end of August to have offices redone to accommodate the new regulations.
The thing is, having worked remotely for a year... the people working remote are the ones that become at a disadvantage. Because people in office may forget to include them in calls or conversations.
or...they may "forget" to include them in calls or conversations
As much as I think WFH will be a huge win for workers, and the whole country (to some extent, ex SF/SV), I am skeptical it would work unless orgs are completely remote. In hybrid setups, I could see WFH workers end up getting edged out -- it has never worked any other way from what i've seen in the past.
Some problems happen when you have more than one office. It is almost always us VS them. Management needs to deal with this problem. Now I'll grant that it is a little better if it is a remote office as one person being remembered can remind you of the rest of the office. However it requires effort from management.
Which is why I have approval to travel to other countries several times a year if I want to. If teleportation existed I'd probably work in a different office every day of the week, as a tech lead it would help the team.
I've seen, so many times in my career, a system being built with blood, sweat, and tears over the course of 6 to 12 painstaking months -- and then the system being "given away" to someone over the course of a couple of beers at a happy hour. (that is, management re-org / re-assignment)
When I was co-founder/CTO I never acted this way, because frankly it didnt make sense. But it happens so often in real life, I wonder if this is more about human nature.
this has happened to me. In leadership positions it should be either everyone is remote or no-one is remote. In a hybrid setup too many conversations and decisions get made face-to-face and leave out the remote people until way too late in the process. I would get on calls that went like "yesterday, after work we were at dinner and all decided to do X and so made some calls, just fyi".
There's nothing worse than joining a meeting and hearing about "the plan" for the first time. "The plan" having been decided on over a lunch meeting between person-in-charge and the-guy who thought "the plan" is the best thing ever. Doesn't matter how bad "the plan" is - it's 10 times harder to walk back something like that.
Yeah, I already WFH in a team where half were in-office, and despite having great rapport and them clearly trying to include us fully, I still felt a clear improvement when everyone went WFH.
>As an institution of higher education, I believe that we should be evaluating all of our options and enacting what is equitable for our employees. Please note that 'equitable' does not mean everyone is treated the same. Some individuals have life circumstances out of their control during COVID. We are already working remotely, we know that it does work. Further, it gives those of us that need it the most the flexibility to protect our families, our students, and our programs without having to choose one over the other. It helps us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively simply because we do not have to choose between work or family. This should not have to be a choice at a place like [institution name]. In our leadership covenants, we sign onto a work-life balance, not work over life. Have we decided to simply eliminate this agreement in our covenants go to increase our (enrollment) profits for the college by having everyone back to work arbitrarily? I would desperately hope not. Was that necessarily the intention? Probably not, but it feels that way to me and probably to others.
This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.
My company also rushed to reopen our home office today. I and most my team are not located there so we continue to work remotely. But many of my co-workers were puzzled by the rush to get people back in the office after 3 months of working remotely quite effectively. There was also some confusion over who was required to return to the office when.
After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work.
I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe.
My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.
Building on this. If you have the risk tolerance. Just stating that you have to work remotely (if its legitimate) at-risk health, child care, family care I'm sure there can't be a ton of pushback on an individual level. Otherwise it might be a GREAT signal to leave a company who in the midst of a pandemic is irrational.
Companies being willing to throw their employees into meat grinders has generally been rewarded by the market (which also tends towards the irrational).
This is absolutely true, and normally those companies will receive reduced profit/revenue if the move is truly detrimental, and the company will slowly die and accumulate debt and drop in share price.
Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.
Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.
Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.
I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
> I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state.
Which direction are you picturing this going?
I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net.
So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.
I was specifically concerned that people would take unproductive risks. Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more often, etc. But your point is a good one; my concern could be unfounded and maybe people would be more productive? I genuinely don't know. One question I would have about your model is how it stacks up against countries with strong social safety nets? Do they tend to be more entrepreneurial as your model predicts? If not, why not?
Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.
As I see it, the welfare state model has the benefit of moving towards maximizing the potential of each individual. If you have free education and a strong safety net, you can take a lot of risks in terms of career choice without even realizing it, and never be worse off for it.
The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.
It’s not a scheme to make anyone do anything. Notably most Americans take out their own trash and tend their own lawns. It’s more to do with individualism and independence (quite the opposite of a scheme to force people to do manual labor)—the belief that the government has no right to take your money and redistribute it to others. That’s the philosophy, anyway.
In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services.
Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.
Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment.
As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken.
Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.
[^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
I liked Obama and everything, but I don't think the federal government was meaningfully more capable of administering a significant welfare program then than it is now. As much as we like to pretend that Obamacare was a great success, I don't get the feeling that it dramatically improved circumstances on balance (premiums went up across the board but coverage for preexisting conditions is guaranteed so that's something I guess).
I'm sure we'll all talk about how this is all the Republicans' fault, and that may well be true; however, it doesn't excuse us from perpetuating the cycle of divisiveness at every opportunity; however, cathartic that may be. We need to work to understand and build bridges if we're to be more than Pyrrhic victors. Of course partisanship and tribalism will always be more popular until we've reached whatever low we're willing to accept.
Obamacare was huge for pre-existing conditions and the marketplace, you actually had options now, instead of zero. Also Obamacare was watered down to appease Republican interests at the time. There was no interest in building bridges during it's building, Republicans were laying out the dynamite, and spent a hell of a lot of wasted effort after Trump took office trying to trigger that dynamite.
It is hard to meet in they middle when both sides are extremely far apart, and each side has factions that are even further apart than ever before.
Really we need more than two parties dictating the agenda. It is getting harder for the far left to even want deal with Democrats, much less Republicans. The same is happening with the far/alt right.
Why? Naivety. He wanted it to be bipartisan. This is about as in the middle as you can get, and it wasn't good enough. It wasn't just watered down for the blue dogs or Lieberman.
I mean, ok. But, if Lieberman (the 60th vote) was willing to vote for something farther left (hypothetically), why not remove that stuff once you realize it won't get republican votes?
I'll agree that Lieberman played a large role in the death of the public option. That said it was eleventh hour and further changes to the bill would require more time to rectify, and Republicans were still involved down to the wire, even if they didn't vote for it.
> There was no interest in building bridges during it's building, Republicans were laying out the dynamite, and spent a hell of a lot of wasted effort after Trump took office trying to trigger that dynamite.
So what's the point? One could argue that Republicans were responding in kind. You would disagree (as would I, but that doesn't matter). This kind of endless litigation only polarizes us--we each permit our own extremists because we believe they are slightly less bad than the other side's extremists. I think a multi-party system would be helpful, but I think the problems run deeper (especially since we're seeing the same trends toward polarization in countries with multi-party systems).
I think at its core the problem is that our epistemological institutions are corrupted by extremists. We aren't having an actual debate because the "hosts" or "moderators" of the debate are only presenting one perspective and only the facts that support it. The other side isn't going to have their opinions changed because their questions aren't being addressed, only shouted down and maligned. I think this lack of real national discussion drives each side to be more entrenched and more extreme, and I think this is somewhat by design--the media in particular seems to be optimizing for it deliberately.
I think we need to build a collective awareness of the manipulation we're subject to. We need to understand that the folks on the other side of the party line aren't evil, but that we're being presented with a distorted perspective (although certainly many on each side really are bad). We need to start moderating ourselves as individuals and developing empathy for people on the other side of the party line while demanding better of our institutions. We won't start agreeing with each other on everything or indeed many things (and certainly not overnight), but we should be able to have productive debate and work gradually through issues. We need to start humanizing each other and finding common ground.
Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly.
It is very hard to empathize with conservative capitalists, libertarians or the alt right, when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy.
It's also kind of sad that rioting, protests and raw anger over recent social issues has been more effective at moving the needle than decades of political handwringing. I don't think this is going to help with any "see it from both sides and meet in the middle" arguments.
> Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly.
Right. He had the right idea. Of course things wouldn’t change over night. One man making positive gestures is important but insufficient to turn the ship on a dime. A lot of mistrust had been built up by that time and others were continuing to build that mistrust. I think he did a lot to stem the tide of divisiveness, especially given how quickly things fell apart in that regard after he left office.
Again, I don't buy the "meet in the middle" approach or the "both sides are at fault" theory. Only one side has a populist leader who's platform was to foment racism and pledged to destroy Obamacare, and basically no one is reigning him in. If anything, people are volunteering for their chance to be thrown under the bus. It's very hard to meet in the middle with the current situation. There is serious moral concern if meeting in the middle means "a moderate amount of racism is acceptable", and when reaching an olive branch on policies results in no cooperation and instead pledges of destruction down the road.
However even with Democrats, there are a lot of people who think Bernie was unfairly treated, and that Biden is in bed with corporations, while establishment democrats think you should vote "blue no matter who", and that Bernie supporters were loons. Again, hard to come to a middle ground even within each party.
I don’t know man. I don’t see how we’re going to go anywhere if we’re determined to only see the worst qualities in our opposition. Notably contrary to your point, lots of conservatives are Never Trumpers and are very unhappy about the populist turn things have taken. Anyway, if you’re interested in minimizing racism, “the middle” is where we should be. The poles are obsessed with their racial hierarchies. Moderates are committed to a post-racial egalitarian future, even if they don’t have all of the information or political power to push things over the line. But anyway, good luck; it feels like doubling down on polarization, division, intolerance, etc is a recipe for disaster, but I guess I hope I’m wrong since it seems like the direction we’re committing ourselves to as a country.
I have a hard time finding a middle ground that would have it be acceptable for people of color to be considered lesser, but this has been the status quo for decades after the civil rights act. There is no moderate position to take on the matter of racism, no meeting in the middle with those who want to uphold racist institutions or systems. Moderate behavior comes off as weak tea inaction in order to restore an unsatisfactory status quo. Both sides should have polarized views pointed towards anti-racism, it should not even be something on the table that needs to be bargained for, but that's not the case.
MLK Jr was not a moderate, and had problems with their ineffectiveness.
The article is 2 years old, what was done in those two years to help prevent the outcome we're seeing now? More black men got shot by police with little to no action done about it.
I think you’re mistaken. The moderate position minimizes for racism; moderate doesn’t mean “status quo” or “50% racism” or whatever you seem to think it means. Like everyone, moderates don’t know how to fix the cycles of poverty and violence in inner city communities that lead to disparate outcomes, but that doesn’t mean they are unwilling (note that there is broad support across the spectrum for police reform). And progressives haven’t articulated any policies apart from “abolish the police” (which is flatly rejected by 70% of black Americans)—otherwise they just kind of shout about “dismantling whiteness/white supremacy/systemic racism/systems of oppression/capitalism” but they can’t seem to define any of those terms concretely or coherently much less articulate policies. So it’s not like progressives are actually going to do anything about racism that moderates wouldn’t; the difference in my mind is that in their effort to eliminate racism they would succeed only in creating a hyper-racial society that doesn’t value free speech, due process, equality, or other human rights (not to mention widespread economic damage from “dismantling capitalism”).
Police are being charged with murder for things that would likely have been covered up and swept under the rug previously. Confederate monuments and those paying tribute to slavery and/or colonialism have been torn down from public display. Racist mascots are being retired. Conversations around hostile work environments and pay gap for POC are happening and being aired in the open. Why hasn't moderate action been effective enough to even get that done? It seems a few weeks of unrest has done more than decades of tepidness.
Treat people as equals doesn't exactly need a list of demands, but the discrimination has become so ingrained that some need it spelled out for them.
> when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy
This is a misunderstanding. The difference is not in the presence or absence of empathy, but rather in how that empathy is expressed: private interaction or government programs. The libertarians are not lacking in empathy; they just don't see it as a suitable justification for political action.
Of course, if you only discuss the problem from a political angle, and consider only political solutions, then it would indeed seem like they aren't interested in solving it at all, when in fact they are very interested in finding a solution—just one that doesn't involve force.
> Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight
IIRC we did have a massive stockpile of masks, but it was only discovered at the start of the pandemic that they weren't being rotated out and most/all of them had degraded too far to be safe.
> You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.
I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.
> Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
> I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.
I agree with this assessment to the extent that we keep electing poor officials, but I don't think it's a "one party is amazing and the other is terrible". In particular, the CDC's issues were around a long time before the prior administration (again, SARS was in 2003 and we scarcely made preparations in the intervening years). To the extent that the problem is the officials we elect, I think that's partially true--I think the government is an emergent property of the health of our body politic, but our body politic is highly partisan (as evidenced by your comment). This is partly due to a divisive media but also probably to our two party system. We will keep electing worse officials because those officials can make a plausible argument that they are at least marginally better than the officials in the other party. The bar keeps getting lower; it's a race to the bottom.
> We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
The pandemic response team wasn't part of the CDC, but yes, disposing of that team was a bad idea in hindsight. It doesn't absolve the CDC; however, and it misses the point in the same way that the "but the government didn't properly fund the CDC!" argument misses the point.
Um, I'm not sure it's easy at all for people to live as precariously as they do in the US now with a decent safety net. Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? You'd have to be pretty clever to emulate that.
> Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way?
It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.
A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly.
And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan).
In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't.
You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive.
The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores.
This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.
It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims.
Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
What a disturbing notion of “fairness” - apparently forcing people to be subjected to daily exposure to a deadly virus (via commute & office spaces) is “more fair”?
The reality of post-coved is that such employers will start losing people as never before. Most businesses are now transitioning to remote work as default.
This is the explanation I hear most often, but when you examine it, it makes no sense. Otherwise you would need everyone to make the same money, which makes no sense either. People are different, their duties are different, some jobs are better suited for remote work than others - putting everyone in the same basket is plain stupid.
The trouble is from an IR (industrial relations) perspective that actually can be problem if one group perceives that some other group has something they don't have. (Brigit's Jones Smaug Marrieds )
Also how would you audit this "oh her she's friends with manger x so she gets o work from home etc"
It depends. For example I have my set of duties written in a table (a fairy long one). I added a column with the "Can be done remotely?" heading and marked the respective entries (most of them - the exceptions were things like meetings and business trips). The same can be done with all employees: the ones who have tasks that don't absolutely require their presence should be able to work remotely during a pandemic.
Besides, by now it should be clear who is efficiently working remotely and who isn't. If there are problems, this should be a signal to reexamine the situation of a given employee. Everything should be based on clear metrics known to everybody. Riskng other people's (or, more likely, their relatives') lives for a wrong purpose is plain silly.
Depressingly, the easiest tactic is to keep piling on work, especially on remote workers.
The manager won't be able to tell if you're genuinely stuck or slacking off, and the benefit of doubt is likely to go against you if offices have reopened.
So unless you truly can't make it to work, you'll likely go back once the majority have, regardless of your apprehensions.
If someone’s job can be performed from home and they’re at higher risk due to a co-morbidity it would very likely be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA to have them work from home.
If you can, get another job. Don’t work for that kind of company. If you can’t leave or demand better working conditions then you’re virtually a slave.
More fair would be to allow people to choose to remain remote, but at a salary deduction, and give that salary to the people who are required to be on-site.
The issue is, I know I would be fired, and cannot afford to lose this job. There is no one hiring in the area, and we're geographically locked due to factors around my child that I don't care to get into here.
So, the answer is yes, but there is no way to do that without losing my health insurance, and probably home. So that's neat.
> The issue is, I know I would be fired, and cannot afford to lose this job. There is no one hiring in the area, and we're geographically locked due to factors around my child that I don't care to get into here.
Yes. It's all about PR, and if a company looks bad because it's forcing its employees to return to the office, amid a global pandemic and health concerns, that won't bode well, and they are likely to buckle under the pressure.
Eh any company who engages in marketing imo has entered the thunder dome of public opinion. They can’t have their brand be a one way communication channel
>But it should be a last resort not the go to response.
Private companies have been slinging political / social issues messaging all over social media in the past few weeks. COVID and the decisions made around it are political / social issues, right?
So in the name of not having things be one sided i.e. they get political when it suits their brand, I really feel like the right counterbalance is employee activism via organizing & leaking online.
A company that is proclaiming about lives mattering one week and then pressuring their staff to return to close-quartered open-offices the next week deserves to have their dirty laundry hung high for all to see.
Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new normal, citing long reopening timelines, their own preferences, increased productivity, Twitter's policy change, etc.
But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).
I wonder if what we've seen since March isn't really "working from home", it's "working from home during a pandemic", and there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care).
The current situation has actually been good/neutral for my personal productivity, since I'm more able to easily chat with my colleagues across the country... but why exactly is that easier now? Are they more available because they're working from home, or because they're stuck at home?
I am unsure this is the answer you were looking for but I do make a distinction. I've been working remotely for 10+ years, and the 3 months of lockdown were the worst I've had, for the simple reason that _my family was locked in with me_.
I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it.
Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc.
We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.
This seems to be the primary issue I see at work right now. People without kids are loving wfh and people with kids are struggling with distraction causing some of them to come back to the office just to work remotely with the rest of us.
I do not have kids and do not love WFH during lockdown.
Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings.
Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x.
If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs.
In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO).
If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence.
I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.
>I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction
I think its more that other workplaces do not have this kind of interaction. I have found that a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.
For me time has stayed the same. I start and finish at the same time and I go for lunch for the same time as I did before. I don't have work email or IM on my phone so once I close my laptop work is done.
> a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.
It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens.
In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't.
It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.
I'm glad we are not co workers then. I would hate it if you decided that my time is not important and that whenever you walk over to my desk I should drop everything I'm doing to serve you.
It's an office, not an isolation chamber. You have to work together.
That may be a frustrating concept for some -- from your comment it appears you only care about your work, you don't care if others' work is completed or the larger corporate objectives are met -- but that's why teamwork is so important.
Yes, it would be great if everyone could just singlestream on their own tasks but that's not how companies work. I'm sorry you find helping your coworkers to be such a frustration and distraction from your own personal achievements.
> But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies
I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020.
> why exactly is that easier now?
I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates.
I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.
> IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused
While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.
> there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)
There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.
> policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).
And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.
Couldn't agree more. The point at which you start trying to tell people how to do their work and "oh well you logged on 5 minutes late here" and "oh well it shows here you always log off for an extra 10 minutes here" is the point you begin holding your workforce back rather than allowing them to perform at their best.
I can't wait for it to back to normal because my employer has done an absolutely terrible job of making our infrastructure work well for remote development.
No source code allowed on laptops, but my work is on hardware devices I have to sit next to. So I have to shell to my workstation to produce binaries, port forwarding to my hardware devices to push them over, slow slow awkwad...
Part of the code base I work on is open source, so for my own sanity I'm mostly just doing that portion of work... but on my own personal (underpowered) computer. But not allowed to expense a new machine... Doing work for the corporation using my own assets...
And forced to use a chromebook as my laptop, with its awful ssh support...
Sorry, this can't end soon enough. But it won't for us until January or so. They need to fix this, or I need to find an employer who is competent at WFH.
I guess it depends on your WFH situation. If you live in a big enough house to have a dedicated office room, probably it is better to WFH. If you live in a studio, where you do everything in a single room, then it is better to go to the office to change the scene a bit.
idk. I basically have my office in my bedroom right now and I find it to be fine. I guess what helps is I already had 2 large monitors and a second hand high end office chair so I find this setup just as good as my one in the office just without the standing desk. I guess what helps is I live with 5 other adults so I don't feel like I am missing any kind of social element that I would have got at work.
We can't be the only ones -- the library at my school was full of people studying independently despite absolutely zero external pressure to do so. I found myself much more productive in that environment than in my home and the (admittedly short) commute created a nice, clear separation of work vs. rest.
Same here. I live in a 950 square foot apartment. I can't stand being in the same space all day long. I need a change of space, and I actually enjoy working in the company building. It's a very modern work space.
Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.
Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).
I work my full complement.. actually even more so.
But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.
For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.
I absolutely consider working from home different from this, which is almost house arrest. WFH I am able to spend time working in coffee shops, am able to use the outside world to sync my clock with everyone else. Being stuck on my own in a London flat is driving me nuts, and I'm introverted. I've been going to bed at 5:30am for no reason other than my clock has drifted.
I feel the change that has happened is that managers _had to_ figure out managing remote workers.
Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.
Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN."
Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.
Although regular WFH and pandemic WFH are functionally the same, being forced to work remote has a different effect on me than elective remote work. As someone who prefers working in the office, mandatory indefinite WFH is much more...mentally taxing(?) than when I choose to do it.
> agree on the bigger desks bit, but what difference does a 12" tall barrier make?
It keeps your neighbor's shit from spilling over onto your desk, necessitating an awkward conversation (at the minimum). It also gives you a surface to attach taller, jury-rigged barriers, if you're so inclined.
COVID? Not a lot. But normal office work? Just a little bit of privacy. Enough so that casually glancing at what someone else is doing is discouraged. But also, not enough so that communication is too discouraged.
Most modern tech companies have a single height-adjustable desk per person, so most of the time your desk will be slightly higher or lower than your neighbour's.
All the tech offices I have worked in or visited for Meetup groups are long shared benches. How much linear space you get depends on how fast the team is hiring, whether there are interns right now, etc.
I thought the same thing initially; it looks terribly cramped.
But the longer I look at the picture, the more I realise that they have more personal space, sound isolation and visual privacy than I have in my office.
People are on the phone much of the day in lots of jobs. And the newsroom in that picture isn't some modern open office fad. Go look at any film that's concerned with the newspaper business. It's more or less how newsrooms have looked for many decades.
Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months.
Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work in an office, I would be saving every penny and working on a career change ASAP.
Time zones are still a thing. No matter how remote someone is, if they're more than a few times zones away it becomes problematic. More than nine timezones across the company is nearly impossible to do well.
So if we're talking about a US company, if you want anyone on the west coast, hiring continental Europeans will be tough, unless one of those groups is willing to work outside normal hours.
Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.
The most likely outcome of remote work is a lowering of salaries in the big cities and a raising of salaries in more rural areas, as salaries tend towards the national median.
Also: Culture barriers, language barriers. Even if the cheaper market speaks decent English, there will be a greater communications overhead.
Also, skill compatibility. Maybe your labor pool is bigger, but so is the employer pool of everyone with world-class skills in whatever domain you're operating in.
I wish things like this mattered. I've worked for more than one company where the bulk of development happens in India.
Even though we would have a 2-3 hour window in the morning US time where meetings happen, there is lack of business context, and language/skillset barriers, the cost savings is just too much to overcome.
Had a similar discussion with a tech company that was outsourcing to fairly competent developers that I figured were sandbagging because the defect rate was so high that it didnt make sense.
I talked to the director who was in charge of this and brought to light the impact on the customer base.
The response? We were paying devs on the order of 10% of what we would pay in the united states, and if they padded it to 3x it still would save us an insane amount of money.
There's nothing wrong with outsourcing per-se, but its lovely when the actual "we dont care about the customer's result" comes out of someone's mouth.
Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.
Inside the US is a solved problem. I haven't worked for a company in 20 years that did its own payroll. ADP, Insperity among others solve this for you. You can even set this up with a small business account through Bank Of America.
It's absolutely not solved. I run a company with employees in multiple states.
The payroll company takes care of some of the problems, but for example, every state has different rules about worker's comp. Most states require you to get your own, but you still have to let them know. Some states require you to buy into their state system, which requires signing up.
Then there is corporate registration. Many states require you to register as a foreign entity. Payroll doesn't take care of that.
Then you have to pay state taxes, or if you just have employees, you have to file a form that says "I don't owe your state any income taxes".
There are other things different states do differently that the payroll provider doesn't take care of.
For what its worth payroll companies like that do exist, but they generally only work as staffing/funding companies - you pay a markup and they manage workers comp pools/state legal issues/etc (though most only have regional not national support) - unfortunately that might be worth 1.3-6% of your payroll :|
Management doesn't care about this. They don't care about language barriers, cultural differences, time zones, etc. All they care about is reporting to their boss that they cut expenses by 50% and hired people who at a glance look just as suitable for the job.
Remote work has been a possibility for employers for a few decades now. Nothing has drastically changed since the new wave of WFH to change that, other than its more widely discussed.
> 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%)
is there a source for this?
I'm not convinced that the only reason "everything gets outsourced" hasn't happened yet is because employers are lazy.
I worked as what would now be considered a full stack developer during the dotcom bubble (and bust), and during that time thousands of engineering jobs were outsourced overseas. There were a couple main issues that I'd be curious to see if modern development teams would be able to overcome:
* The communication lag. When developers are working opposite hours from the rest of the team, small issues can take a day or longer to resolve. Even simple stuff like "can I cut the branch or is your feature not QA ready?"
* Rigidity. Specs are almost always incomplete (or inaccurate) in one way or another, and remote developers who aren't familiar with a company's product and goals have a difficult time distinguishing between what a product owners wants and what they ask for.
These aren't insurmountable issues, but they were the two things that really slowed things down for the teams I worked with.
I have an anecdata. I work for a fortune 500 financial company. I am personally acquainted with someone who transitioned from our offshore (India) team to the US. His salary went up 3x doing the same job with the same title, and all he changed was geography.
Eh, companies have had this option and many have engineering offices in lower cost of living countries long before the current situation. There are a lot of reasons for companies to hire in the US.
What wouldn't surprise me though if/when remote becomes a bigger chunk of certain types of jobs, is if salaries across US regions equalize more given that local labor market rates become less of a factor for setting salaries. In the extreme case (which won't be the norm), your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.
IMO FAANG is doing its best to try and hoover up all the tech talent that wants to work for them. Which is to say that while they won't necessarily have to pay people an arm and a leg to attract them to overcrowded high-COL areas, they do still want to hoover up people who happen to already live in high-COL areas.
COVID has shown us that remote work is feasible, but it still introduces frictions that employers/employees may not want to put up with, and the main thing attracting people to high-COL areas in the first place is the relative ease of networking and switching jobs. The death of the high-COL tech hub is greatly overexaggerated.
I don't really disagree. I'd also say that FAANGs specifically distort the overall salary picture a bit. My observation is that a fair number of non-FAANG companies, especially those who don't have a significant presence in the Bay Area, already don't try particularly hard to out-compete (on the basis of compensation) local Bay Area employers.
> your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.
That's certainly possible.
Of course, that would incentivize people to move out to cheaper areas, which would reduce the demand on expensive big cities, with the end result being that the price delta would become somewhat reduced.
Yeah, there are a lot of complex dynamics going on and things will play out over quite a while in a way that doesn't lend itself to absolute statements. That said, I tend to think that, even if a handful of large West Coast employers (and NYC fintech firms) tend to continue paying top-of-market rates, you're probably going to see some equalizing of salaries across the US overall (and perhaps some but less equalizing of CoL).
But many preexisting remote-focused US tech companies are not heavily outsourced. They've gone "through the initial pain of setting up remote work" and are subject to the same economic forces. If these companies haven't been tempted into heavy outsourcing, why should we imagine that new companies entering into their situation will?
This seems to be the norm for many companies. Everyone is throwing in the towel on 2020 so far as the office goes with the goal to take a fresh look for 2021 at the end of this year. Many will likely never go back to the setup they had before.
If you’re in the market for commercial office space you can probably get some killer deals moving forward.
I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments. My partner and I went to Austin for a month and a half and now are back in the Bay Area to hear the next decision on her office reopening. 2021 is 6 months away. That's not enough to move somewhere else that would make the pain of moving worth it.
>I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments.
Seconded. Employers are in a hard spot right now, because making an affirmative decision is going to cost them staff either way.
Those who've come to enjoy being at home and loving the flexibility of it, if told that it'll be back to the office in 2021 or ASAP, will start looking for a fully remote gig.
Those who dread the idea of being fully remote, if told that the company is going to remain fully or mainly remote, will start looking for a company that will offer more in-office hours.
They're probably looking down the barrel of a quick 20% turnover regardless of the decision they make, and so sitting here preserving the status quo is benefiting them the most.
I say this with all seriousness, and I understand some people don't have this luxury, but if you do, please quit.
These companies will continue to punish their employees if they are allowed to do so. The only way to create change is through leverage.
This goes for anyone facing this decision. If you have the ability to quit, you should absolutely do it. Take a year off, find another company that doesn't support archaic business practices, start your own business.
You owe it to the people that don't have that option. The people that are forced into commuting. The people that are forced into depression because they have to continue to pay their massive rents in absurdly expensive cities. The people that have incredibly poor mental health because they're pulled into gross office politics that pit employees against each other.
We must force these companies to change their bad behavior.
The things you describe are far from the charged language you're using, and also much of your description may not apply at all to the post you responded to.
How does someone quitting their job because their work is playing a global pandemic step by step help any of the things you listed? This approach is a very logical decision and honestly complaining this loudly about that step is incredibly privileged in a time where many are facing layoffs and pay cuts. Oh no! Your company has kept paying you, you're working remote for a job you were hired for in person, but you can't get a guarantee of when you'll be back in the office because of a pandemic? The horror!
That's not to take a "be happy with what you get and lick the boot" approach at all, but many companies have quite nice policies in regards to how COVID-19 is being handled.
Your issue appears to be with non-remote work in general, but you also make it seem like high COL cities are the only option. If someone is not able to be mentally stable working in the bay or Seattle or NYC etc, there are plenty of small cities with tech jobs that will pay good money with low COL and a short commute they can go work at. They absolutely should quit, for themselves. That was true before any pandemic.
> The people that have incredibly poor mental health because they're pulled into gross office politics that pit employees against each other.
Again, where was any of this mentioned? It sounds like you are projecting the issues of some companies. These companies should absolutely change their behavior, but again, this was true before the pandemic. I'm not sure how someone quitting will tech them a lesson either as those places probably already have high turnover and they won't have much issue hiring n the current market.
You say you create it through leverage, but I see no such leverage being developed in quitting even if all of this was true.
> This approach is a very logical decision and honestly complaining this loudly about that step is incredibly privileged in a time where many are facing layoffs and pay cuts.
I addressed the privilege in my post. It's in bad faith to bring it up as if I didn't, also gaslighting.
> How does someone quitting their job because their work is playing a global pandemic step by step help any of the things you listed?
Playing a global pandemic step by step is not the issue. The pandemic exists. As a business, you were forced to do away with your archaic work-location policies. To then go back on those is repugnant. Simply keep the change the pandemic forced.
> That's not to take a "be happy with what you get and lick the boot" approach at all, but many companies have quite nice policies in regards to how COVID-19 is being handled.
For jobs that can be done remote, anything less than the option to work 100% remote forever is corrupt.
> These companies should absolutely change their behavior, but again, this was true before the pandemic.
Every company that forces employees into an office has gross office politics. The power dynamic of the commute is a self-fulfilling prophecy for this very issue. Asses in seats are office politics.
> I addressed the privilege in my post. It's in bad faith to bring it up as if I didn't, also gaslighting.
You addressed it in respect to the ability to quit. I'm talking in terms of the standard you are setting and projecting onto all companies. I don't see how that's in bad faith or gaslighting. I don't think you know what that term means based on your use.
> For jobs that can be done remote
This might be the key issue - it sounds like you are massively undervaluing aspects of non-remote work that are beneficial to both workers and companies.
> Every company that forces employees into an office has gross office politics.
We're gonna have to agree to disagree. I'm all for more remote companies existing, but offices are not inherently corrupt.
> I don't think you know what that term means based on your use.
You made me second guess if I did in fact address the issue. I did.
> it sounds like you are massively undervaluing aspects of non-remote work that are beneficial to both workers and companies.
You're right. I am undervaluing it. Being in person has no inherent benefits over being remote. Maybe 20 years ago, but the internet has fixed those issues. Low-fidelity remote work is a cultural issue. Not a technology issue. Companies refuse to do remote work correctly so they can continue archaic co-located work.
> Being in person has no inherent benefits over being remote.
Socializing. Clearer communication with better nonverbal interpretations. The ability to more easily drop by someone's desk, to whiteboard in a room, etc. For some, productivity. Separation of home and work life. Even an excuse to get out and about.
Yes, there are ways to get some remote analogs for some of these, but they don't magically work the same for everyone.
> Low-fidelity remote work is a cultural issue.
That doesn't make it any less of an issue to implement. If anything, that's harder than a technology issue. Why would you trust these bad companies to implement any sort of sane work culture in a remote setting than they do in an office? If anything, remote only offers more abuse vectors.
> Companies refuse to do remote work correctly so they can continue archaic co-located work.
I think you're far too pessimistic here. Laziness and resistance to change is far more likely than malice in regards to not going remote.
what bad behavior? providing a 6mo heads up that you don't need to come back is pretty reasonable. while you are at criticizing these companies, do know that a lot of smaller companies are requiring their employees to come to work in lots of places.
If a job can be done remotely, then it should be done remotely. Forcing your employees into an office so you can play up office politics and look good in front of your board is bad behavior. It's archaic, gross, and in the case of a pandemic, negligent.
The assumption that being non-remote is for office politics is writing off many other benefits. Even if you can go remote, building a remote culture takes time. Also, not everyone works well remote. Shifting a company to full-time remote isn't fair to those people either.
How is not bringing people into the office negligent? That's again the comment you are responding to - a company that sounds like they are trying to get back ASAP but only when it can be done safely, hence the month to month updates.
I'm in the worst of both worlds right now. Unable to commit to fully remote but still having to pay to live close enough to commute. I think a lot of people are stuck like this until their companies decide on a long-term solution.
I've heard now from a couple of people that they've enjoyed remote work and some have already sucessfully negotiated that in future they will work part time from home. So it really seems that some of the change will be permanent.
Same here. I don’t think the majority of folks will start working remotely permanently, but I could very well see more and more people splitting time between WFH and working from the office. If some people on a team start to do it, others on that same team will start to ask if there’s still a reason for them to still be coming into the office every day. And I think this is especially true for densely-populated areas as people realize how much time and stress are saved not having to commute into the office _every single day_.
Before covid, being able to work from home once in a while was something of a perk. After a few months of fully remote it is now a hard requirement for me, a significant chunk of my work time has to be able to be home office, or I'm walking away.
As someone who works at a company that is normally pretty split between offices and remote/WFH, I've seen this first hand. I don't actually mind going into the office now and then (and it's only about a 30 minute commute). But (increasingly pre-Covid), I'd go in and not run into anyone I worked with or even knew. Eventually I just gave up my desk when I had to move anyway. And pretty much stopped going in at all unless I had a specific meeting.
As a (not quite so new) parent I really want a coworking space that's a five minute walk from my apartment. That way I can do school dropoffs and pickups so much more easily. In my dreams expanded remote work means lots more coworking spaces popping up. I know, I'm a dreamer...
I assume there will be plenty of co-working spaces at least in cities. But, at least so long as the company has an office you could go into, I wouldn't expect they'd reimburse you for it. Some companies will do this but, in my experience, it's only if there is no company office in a city.
You mean a dedicated office at home or you want to get out of the house? For me it's given me a much greater appreciation for working from home as I can be with the kid all day rather than outsource that for the majority of her waking hours.
You've already been voted down, so not sure how much I'd add to this, but...
Wanting to have an office outside the home doesn't mean you are trying to escape - it means you are trying to establish the conditions for maximizing your productivity. Where you can work uninterrupted for long stretches of time - and even when you are interrupted, it is likely less of a context switch than the various daily interactions, temptations, and chores that happen while at home.
On a tangential note - my major complaint about the currently popular "open office plan" setup is that it has flipped the productivity curve for me. I go into the office for all the team interactions. When I need to get work done, I work from home (and hope for a day of minimal interruptions).
Companies who were the butt-in-seat type most likely didn't have a sudden realization that WFH and telecommuting was productive, most likely they want you back in the office but they just don't want to do the required work to transform the office into a safe environment.
Yeah, but now the governments have to manage multiple platforms. Some are writing on Android tablets, others are using Windoze. There's probably some joker still running a TRS-80 Model 100, the former favorite of the sportswriters everywhere.
I've been trying recently to wrap my head around what life is going to be like from here on out. Where do we go? Things will never be the same again. Remote work will now be completely normal, that's for sure. But how do we get back to living our lives? Fundamental assumptions I've had about the things I've wanted to do in life are now basically no longer an option. Will Silicon Valley no longer really be a "thing" anymore with physical meetups, hackathons, conferences etc. being a thing of the past? Surely at some point we have to reckon with this, rather than just hunkering down in our caves.
This is not forever. We will likely have a vaccine at some point, may be within a year or two. We will also keep getting better at treating it over time - in identifying susceptible populations, developing cures, and hospitals being better equipped.
Near term availability of a vaccine seems like wishful thinking. The data is noisy, but some of it indicates antibodies to the virus are short lived. That would implicate the usefulness of a vaccine. And that's if one can be developed, a serious question given the lack of success in developing vaccines for other human coronaviruses.
Not a good time to own commercial office real estate. Office rental rates will likely race to the bottom as more and more businesses decide to stay remote.
A cycling pal of mine is an in-house lawyer at a big oil company here in Houston. They were told a couple weeks ago that there were no plans to go back to the office until at LEAST 2021. All the work is being done just fine.
Working for a unionized public sector employer, they are nevertheless doing the charade of "well, we'll go back next month, oops, maybe not" over and over. So I guess it's not just the heartless capitalists.
Most recently, a mid-July date was mooted for returning to the office, but a few days later it was announced that the union-negotiated work-from-home arrangements have been extended to October. It's ambiguous whether there will be a transition period, or if really nobody wants to go in.
But nobody seems to want to push things out as far as next year all at once. Some employees feel threatened and say they're not going back until there's a vaccine. I'm just kind of bemused for the moment, because I'm almost 100% sure that as things get worse, there is no chance of following through on the plans, yet the authorities keep making them, and then pushing the date out a little more.
I'm fine with going back to the office as soon as other people are and management can explain why we should. But I'm not sure that's happening in the forseeable future. Every day we get an email from our dear leader talking about going back as though we need to keep our hopes up, yet we are also told how well we are doing working remote. So...why return?
Big telco company is also telling their employees not to expect to return to offices until at least 2021, and to expect maybe even two years of working remotely before returning to work is reconsidered.
My workplace is pushing aggressively to eliminate remote work, with 50% off remote work in the next couple of weeks. I'm in one of the biggest hotspots, and as the last few months have shown, a significant amount of work has been perfectly viable from home. But before this shutdown, my workplace had a hard ban on WFH. It's the "the workers will be lazy if they're not in the office" mentality. As though you couldn't be lazy at work as well.
I have strong feelings against permanently remote. I feel like this hasn't been fully thought out. Face to face interaction is much more high bandwidth than remote video calls (in other words, it conveys more information). Not to mention that this transfers the costs of office space to the employee, maybe this is why all employers are quick to jump on this bandwagon. Curious to see where this new trend will fall in 2021.
There's a thing I see all the time online where people massively underestimate human variance. While people have many things in common, they are all over the place when it comes to many important emotional and mental characteristics. There is no one-size-fits all for anything behavioral, not even close.
If they say it's bad for their long term well-being, they very likely know exactly what they're talking about even if your own experience is very different from that.
I initially read the comment the same way, but I believe they were saying that when the pandemic is over you won't be isolated, not that isolation wouldn't be bad for wellbeing.
I'm like the parent commenter in feeling office work helps me:
For me, I don't do social very well, but I still need to interact with people, I get on well with people (AFAICT) but seldom does anyone ever really want to spend leisure time with me. Work forces me to have social interactions that help my "sanity" (by which I mean: a vague hand-wavey notion of mental health).
I'm "happy" day-to-day with hiding away at home; but I tend to spiral downwards as I don't get much social interaction outside of work. Banter is good medicine.
For me this is a midlife thing.
YMMV, and the parent is probably quite different, but that's my recent experience.
Many companies have been reimbursing home internet and electricity bills since March. Mine even paid for an chair, desk, monitor and lamp of my choosing for my home office.
I hope this becomes the norm if remote becomes mainstream
This is probably not the norm. I have a friend that works in a call center, and they've been working remotely during the pandemic. Her company won't pay for anything; she uses her personal laptop, personal consumer-grade Internet connection, etc. The consumer ISP doesn't provide their stated upload and download ever, and the ISP charged her $100 to come out and investigate the issue without fixing it. (You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?) The company won't pay for the debugging. When the Internet dies, she's told "welp, you're done for today" and doesn't get paid. (She also works 4 days x 10 hours, so one bad day costs more than the average 5 x 8 employee.)
It is kind of a nightmare making every employee responsible for being the IT director for free. I imagine that most companies are not going to see good results here. (It's good when it's good, but what do you do when it gets bad? Nobody has a plan.)
All in all, consumer ISPs seem to be doing pretty good with the pandemic, but I worry that it's mostly a string of good luck rather than solid infrastructure investments.
> You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?
Easy, the CPE equipment is garbage or placed in a shitty location. I'm a nerd, but my ancient wifi setup started to struggle with the entire family working and schooling all day. I upgraded to a Ubiquiti solution with multiple antennas and life is good.
I worked on the CPE team for Google Fiber, and indeed, WiFi performance is something that we spent a lot of time on and never got perfect. The average ISP using off-the-shelf CPE doesn't stand a chance. I fear that the CPE is not the problem in my friend's case, and the ISP is just aggressively oversubscribing, and so nothing can be done. Switching to the business plan won't make a difference unless they drop all consumer traffic whenever the business subscriber needs to send and receive, and they are not charging enough money to lead me to believe they're doing that. I don't know anything about DOCSIS, though... I have worked at two ISPs and they both used GPON. The limitations of GPON, however, I understand well ;)
With COVID wfh, I've definitely heard alot of horror stories about local ISPs, especially with time of day based issues. (10 & 2) seem to be high-disruption periods. Where our folks have gotten engaged, 30/35 times it's wireless issues.
One thing that I would offer is for your friend to try to get input from neighbors in a rough proximity. I did have an issue a few years ago with Time Warner Cable where a contractor screwed up and hung the wrong grade coax on a pole.
Commercial internet does not cost a lot of money. I do a cable modem and while my speeds are a bit slower than the residential option (for the same money) I don't have bandwidth caps or 'talk to the hand' when an issue happens. Night and day between the two experiences. Worth looking into.
I agree. The problem is cost (higher, not being paid for by the company), and rewarding the ISP for their poor service by paying them more.
My philosophy is that you just have to accept that we messed up by letting one company monopolize the space, and pay them more for their better service... but not many people agree with me.
I work for one of the big US companies and I asked last week about this; the HR lady virtually showed me the finger, very polite, of course. Not a local policy in the local branch...
A fair number of people probably feel like you do. But I strongly suspect that, at least with many companies, a certain percentage of people never come back into the office except sporadically. So even for those who do return full-time, the atmosphere and work style will be changed for an indefinite period of time.
I know a number of people in the process of permanently moving out of cities--in several cases to rural locations many hours away.
For people with houses, the office space cost is likely less than the commuting cost. But it is indeed an issue for many in tiny city apartments.
I see this comment in every one of these discussions, but finding new venues for social contact is a fairly simple adjustment to make once you accept that it's necessary.
I’m happy to have the cost transferred (some parts are debateable, I need internet, a desk, and a monitor for home anyways) if it means no more commuting and no more open offices. My focus has significantly increased in the past few months.
I don't think you're wrong. There will certainly be some sort of correction of the bullish remote-work spirit.
But the 2020 lockdowns will fundamentally increase the amount of remote work permanently to at least some degree.
Like how before Bernie Sanders ran for president, no one in mainstream US politics was even talking about socialized healthcare. Or how before Andrew Yang, no one outside of silicon valley had ever heard of UBI.
The Times has actually been very progressive about WFH policies. Partially because they've been consolidating the number of floors they occupy at 620 8th Ave, so there's legitimately less room for everyone. But every team was designed to be remote friendly and there was very little expectation to be in the office. Some people lived in NYC and still refused to bother to come in for months at a time.
New Yorkers love to hate Time Square but it's really not so terrible, just crowded. It's in close proximity to everything, and it looks pretty at night. And as you said, it's really easy to get to.
Yes, the Port Authority: aka the world's worst bus station. But you go a few blocks and you're in Hell's Kitchen which I find a pretty interesting neighborhood with nice ethnic restaurants. Or walk south 10 blocks or so into Chelsea.
When I'm in NYC I often stay at about 42nd and 10th out of choice even if I'm not at a Javits event. It's near things but is out of the craziness of Times Square itself.
If you take a bus to Port Authority, it couldn't be more convenient. And I would guess that the Times Square subway stop may be the one spot where the most lines converge.
I don't understand how people could possibly do that; apart from the cost, my experience with Uber and Lyft was awfully stressful. Something new and unsettling would happen in 5/6 rides - I didn't particularly feel like it was worse on average than a regular cab, but I didn't feel secure either. Drivers taking their hands off the steering wheel, fumbling and accidentally hitting the SOS button, tailgating...I only used them when I absolutely had no alternative.
Remote work is such a fascinating leadership challenge given how dogmatic both sides have become. The tone of the debate is verging on a religious argument (on both sides), but it's all centered on work-related topics which typically don't engender such extreme responses.
A lot of individuals have very strong preferences. And those who want to go back to how things were also realize that, if many companies shift to a more patchwork employees can continue to WFH if they're able to and want to, many offices won't ever go back to the way they were.
In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand.
"In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand."
This is a great point, and that's exactly what makes this an interesting leadership challenge IMO.
Yup for sure. I (generally) see two camps on the remote work debate:
- WFH / unlimited remote work is the future, forcing people to come into the office is oppressive.
- Remote work harms culture and collaboration, we all need to get back into the office ASAP as we can't be effective remotely.
Overall I've just been surprised at the intensity of the remote work discussion, and surprised that we don't see deeper analyses on cost of rent, employee retention rates, productivity across jobs, environmental effects of less commuters, etc. My point was simply that as this topic elicits strong feelings, it presents an interesting leadership challenge.
Is it really forcing? If the work contract says "we pay you $X/month (or hour) to come to the office and do this work" is this oppressive?
I work from home since mid 2007, I know the benefits and I know the price. I do go to the office from time to time without anyone forcing me to do it. Without physical presence there is a significant negative impact for employees, I think the best of the 2 worlds is 1-2 days per week (organized in any way, even 3 days every 2 weeks) when each team is in the office, while teams will be in and out on rotations, so you do save on office space and rent, have a significant portion of WFH but still have the teams meeting regularly. Even with video conference, it's not the same as passing by on the hallway, at the water cooler and having a 30 seconds chat with random people in your department.
"Oppressive" is too strong in most cases. The more candid description of that side of the fence is probably more along the lines of "I prefer to work from home and not commute."
Assuming your team isn't geographically distributed anyway--which it often is at larger companies--the day a week thing makes some sense. I've done variants of that in the past.
On the other hand, you're now telling everyone that they still have to live in commuting distance, even if it can be a bit longer because it's infrequent just so they can come into the office now and then.
On still the other tentacle, I absolutely agree that some F2F is useful. But maybe that's better done with getting together every month or two for a few days and just fly people and put people up in hotel rooms if they're not local. Where I work, most of us (not engineering, but the same applies to engineering to greater or lesser degrees) are scattered around multiple offices and fully remote people.
Most of my team is global, just a handful of people are located in the same city as I am. We have a yearly F2F, it is very expensive and disturbing to get people from around the world (literally), get visas, fly them into a place. Because the cost, everyone wants "to make the most" out of it, resulting in stupid, meaningless meetings focused on "building the organization", making the cost/benefit even worse.
I had a colleague that worked alone in a remote place (~8 hours drive from nearest office) for 15 years. He did not went nuts, that's the best I can say about his situation.
I've always assumed most writers for these papers don't actually come into the office anyway. What's different? They're extending that to full time staff as well?
Yes. I worked for a major newspaper and would guess that all the people in editorial make up less than 50% of the staff. You have business, accounting, tech, delivery, support, sales, security etc...
That's good for their sysadmins and softwar engineers. They love to raise anxiety levels and create ambiguity interpeters (people who start believing there is meaning in people and objects around them) in NYC. Yes, this is a real thing... Don't ask for details, the short story is someone discovered they could exploit people with genes for paranoid schizophrenia to make them anxious and afraid to the point they look for meaning in things around them.
Everybody talks about online mobs and trolls but what happens when the entire workforce is online?
How vicious can one (mob) be against another co-worker when you can't phisically see him to calibrate what's really going on and the reaction to what you do?
I don't right now, but I certainly have people who dislike each other for some reason or another, and I'm worried about what that looks like when they all start going 3, 6, 9 months without seeing each other.
Hopefully, but I think there's a very plausible world where a lack of familiarity shifts people from "I kinda think he's wrong on these issues" to "I can't possibly work for a company that'd employ this jerk".
I have to admit I have a weakness for reading but not participating in these shit-hit-the-fan github threads. So many people arguing over something so trivial.
So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope.
It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.