Is that surprising? There is little value in taking on the risk of infection (and resulting bad PR and work disruption) given that you can maintain your operations with remote workers ... especially given the fact that if you wait just a few more months, your staff will be vaccinated.
> Box Inc said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
That's probably the most reasonable timeline for tech workers. And even then, we'll probably see tepid support for that. Things aren't going to go back to normal in 2021.
Because humans are social animals, and many of us enjoy interacting with IRL coworkers. It also allows much creativity and has various other benefits, both with your work - and with your mental well being.
As someone who was suffering from serious cabin fever last April, I can now say that I would find it quite annoying to be asked to go to an office full time again.
The option to go as I please (which would probably average one or two days a week) would be excellent, though!
we, small enterprise software company, have opened the office under that model. What is happening is that some people have refused to return, myself included, some are doing the official 2 days a week, and others are going back full time. The office actually opened up last year, right after the first NYC fizzled out. There have been a few week long shutdowns of the entire office as some are found to have COVID-19.
My general thoughts are that there are a few people that got strong armed into returning, but most that are back in the office are happy to be there.
All the same can be said for wfh. I can socialize with people I want to socialize with, not those I have to socialize with. I have freedom, no commute, no open office, no manager dropping in on me...
I have extensive experience managing and working remote and non-remote and I've never seen any benefit to non-remote work. Productivity and creativity are higher with wfh and stress and burnout are way lower.
Thats what you want to believe. In reality after 6 months plus of full remote work most people dont want to step in the office again at least nowhere near full time. We see this in every 1:1 conversation.
I guess I've learned since the pandemic and finding a new job during pandemic that being at the office wasn't as fulfilling as I once thought it was and that those social interactions were rather fake/short lived and the bursts of creativity I did enjoy were destroyed by upper management deciding everything we did would be thrown out for something new.
What I want is not another day sitting in a god forsaken office after sitting in crappy traffic but rather the ability to go have a coffee, grab some lunch or just hang out and "Talk shop" with people regardless of being direct co-workers, friends, peers and whatnot. Those are the kinds of people who called me, messaged me and asked me how I was doing. THe only other former co-workers who keep up with me are ones who quit and found new jobs too - it's like since we're not still suffering we're no longer friends and all too often we see that as fulfilling social interactions without question.
I guess with hindsight I actually see the "office" as anti-social - it creates bad/poor behaviors, people find solace in common suffering and 9 times out of 10 all of my co-workers were actually dicks who only showed up to work to avoid their unhealthy home life and again, with hindsight, I see they tried making me ancillary to their unhealth work life too.
hard to explain it in a small text box, but I guess i just see the office environment as extremely fake, demoralizing and depressing - even though i've had some great memories through it - i'd rather not be captive to sitting in a cubicle chair and actually develop much more rewarding, enriching and valuable experiences that translate to more productivity and creativity in the end.
Often times i don't even get to choose my co-workers and if I did, those teams are often short lived and i think that corporate disruption to things that matter on a human to human level is something we're refusing to challenge/change because "it is the way it is". I get thrown on a new team, and its not new friends, it's now colleagues to suffer with and build empty relationships.
To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out with friends on weeknights and weekends.
You are absolutely right that the office is a pisspoor substitute for real comraderie, and I wish people would stop conflating the two.
I sympathize with the people who hate WFH but I think sometimes their sentiments towards WFF are slightly misplaced. They confuse "general quarantine", "kids doing school from home", "no good work/office area", and/or "unresolved issues with partner/husband/wife/etc" with WFH.
Personally I love working from home. It gives me a lot more flexibility, I have no commute, I have my dog with me, I can cook lunch or prep for dinner, I can do small chores on a break or to clear my head, I can take my dog on a walk, and the list goes on. That said I don't have kids and I have a home office. I was also fortunate to start WFH about 5 months before COVID hit so I was able to go out with friends and what not which totally satisfied my social needs, proving to me that any added stress while working from home now is caused by things other than WFH itself.
When I used to work in an office there were a number of people that were difficult to deal with and/or annoying to put up with. While I didn't go full WFH at that job I did get to the point where I was working 2 days a week from home and those days were glorious. Being able to pick who you are actual friends with (verses being forced in pretending to be nice to some truly toxic people) is so much nicer. I am friends with a handful of people at my new (WFH) company but that's because we both wanted to be friends and went out of our way to build the friendship not because we were forced to work together.
My hope is that people don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when this is all over and there is a choice of WFH or going back to the office. That said, it's not be for everyone/every job but one silver lining of this terrible last year has been a number of my staunchly anti-WFH friends talk about how much they have enjoyed it and how they want to continue it at least for part of the week if not fully.
About 11 months a year (~1 month for holidays). Around 160 hours a month. So 1760 hours a year. And about 88k hours over my entire lifetime.
That works out to <<10 full years>> of my lifetime.
If I'm not socializing at work, albeit a bit constrained by the professional environment, something is super wrong. Restricting socialization strictly to weeknights and weekends seems... super radical to me.
Working hours taking up so much of our life is an orthogonal, but not totally unrelated issue.
As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem, but they have mis-identified the root cause.
Admittedly, my views on this come from the limits of my own experience - as someone who writes (and sometimes rights) software, I highly prize uninterrupted time in flow. I suppose writing and other such similar pursuits would work very well on an work environment that was isolated.
But I do try to exercise my empathy and recognize for some endeavors it's is useful to collaborate. I just wish that people wouldn't attribute intrinsic necessity of physically close collaboration where it is not warranted.
My purpose or activity, even after I'm financially independent will be writing software, something I can do without having to be in close contact with people I am working with, and I in fact am much more productive when I'm not.
And honestly, even at 40 hours a week, I still have a lot of time in which I've formed my best social relationships. My coworkers are nice people, I just have shockingly little in common with them outside of work.
Oh, this isn't about sitting at home in isolation like we are doing during covid, this is about being out with people who actually care to have a healthy relationship. Working with people who inspire creativity, challenge your assumptions and actually get to know you as a person - things that are often difficult with direct peers because of corporate policies, competition for positions, hierarchy and career status nonsense...
I think your math actually suggests our way of life is actually extremely unhealthy with the assumption we should develop social systems at our places of employment that absolutely don't exist for any such activity.
We need those relationships - but the office way of work certainly isn't a healthy way to achieve them. People get fired, laid of, move to new orgs, get moved around, corporate policy is dictated from top down without regard to human experiences but rather bottom dollar value line.
Not saying it can't be done - but again - think back on all your working years - were many of your work relationships meaningful or just convenient? Do they know your family? kids? spouse? significant other? Do they wish you a happy birthday? did they call you during covid to see how your doing?
Maybe try part-time at a co-working space. You get some company a few days a week, but if it turns out you hate the group, moving is easier than at your employer's office.
I've worked in shared offices for 20+ years and have made a lot of long-term friends through them.
Offices make me spend 4+ extra hours a day on work with 0 benefit. That's 20 hours/week I could be spending with my wife & cats, caring for my home, developing skills and software that makes me money instead of some corporation.
That's an entire mini-lifetime I'd be giving my employer. And I don't think I ever will have to - I can force myself to be remote the rest of my working life. And that mini-lifetime is mine..and that's priceless.
I've had 1 or 2 coworkers out of hundreds I became any level of "friends" with, and the closest of whom I didn't even work directly with. Actually, one of the coworkers I'm friends with, I met in a remote team with us living across the country from each other.
I am glad that is your experience.There is no single answer for all people. I think you as an employee are making a wise choice. If you can get paid a full salary for 20 hours of work, it is in your best interest to keep that alive!
As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis. I would personally not hire someone that can only work for 20 hours a week, there is too much to do.
I've worked at many remote companies by now. None have asked how many hours they're getting out of me. And they all got more or less the amount of time mentioned. And they were all plenty happy with my output!
Why would they care if the output was the result of fewer hours? If they wanted to pay me by the hour, they could have negotiated that.
At-will salaried employment cuts both ways :) and in this case, everyone is happy. Anyone wanting more hours out of me is just trying to exploit my labor. I'm already getting paid fair value for what I'm producing.
>As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis
If you are hiring salaried individuals on the basis on how many hours they put in a week, then you might be focusing on the wrong metrics. There were plenty of people in tech doing 20 hours of work a week, and spending the remaining 20 hours on hacker news.
> As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis. I would personally not hire someone that can only work for 20 hours a week, there is too much to do.
When you're hiring make this known so people can do their own filtering on their end, as well.
Yup, we make it known. Plenty of companies in the world that you can coast at, it can’t be a company with <5 developers fighting well funded competitors.
This is only true if you assume 40 hours a week produces better software than 20 hours a week. I’ve not found that to be the case. Software productivity is in large part a function of developer happiness. Plenty of people are happier and more productive with less hours. That’s not even getting into burnout and cost of replacing people.
I get the feeling they were talking about the commute/lunch/break overhead not slagging off for an extra 20 hours per week because they weren’t supervised.
I know I get a lot of benefit from not commuting, from being able to make a healthy lunch out of my fridge & from doing laundry when I would have been walking to the coffee shop.
If anything I “work” more remote than I ever did in the office.
The issue is that almost no workplace in the US is going to work like this knowingly for salaried employees. I really doubt your current workplace is okay with you working 20hrs/week, you just likely don’t tell them that’s the case.
Maybe consider contracting instead?
Just because you haven’t made friends doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t. On top of this, work friendships can just be that. Work friendships. Ones that last as long as you’re at that job, not all of them have to go outside of it. And that’s okay.
I think people who "enjoy interacting with IRL coworkers" should absolutely be allowed to return to their offices, but don't force people who work better from home or have four hour commutes (like me) to come back too.
Some people have been really struggling with WFH and just can't make it work well for them, and they understandably want to get back to the office. That's great, and they should do it! But why not also let people who have been thriving under WFH continue to do it?
I'd probably prefer full-time WFH over full-time office 9-5, but I agree there is definitely a benefit to spending 1-2 days per week in the office. I'm hoping some more jobs with that sort of format will come out of this too.
Human beings didn’t evolve to spend 100% of their time staring into a webcam, only interacting over Zoom. Remote is great and should be part of the solution, but sometimes, you just can’t beat face-to-face.
I'm not sure what you mean. In people who sit for long periods of time the gluteus mucles (buttocks) become atrophied. Do you mean the ass fat is useful for sitting?
Maybe you're just making a joke and I'm not getting it.
Excellent questions and astute predictions of what's in store on the roadmap. :)
Very soon we will be adding viewer annotations (ability for remote viewers to add content/comments on your board). As you're facing your laptop during your remote presentation anyway, we've found that this works reasonably well. The augmented reality approach (via smart glasses or synchronized projectors) is also on the map but getting the timing right is much trickier. The UX of it is nothing short of magic but the market for people with glasses or synchronized projectors is fragmented.
As for your last note: you don't need a whiteboard! Flipcharts or electrostatic sheets are cost/space-effective alternatives. Also, you can simply point your camera at your notebook and scribble away. Indeed, many of us do this, it's very natural (though, admittedly, we're still getting some kinks out).
I asked this very question in my 1st year of fully remote working. By the 7th year the answer was very clear in my head, so I went back to the office. Two years later COVID happened and now I'm stuck at home again.
It took me a few years to realize the effects of loneliness and the lack of social interaction.
But I do have one extra point: if work is fully remote (i.e., every employee is remote) things work much much better than when only part of the team is remote. You need to at least make sure your manager is also fully remote.
Its nothing to do with the risk from covid because its minuscule, its more of does it actually make sense to work in the office? For many tech worker, there is little benefit of actual office space.
You don't believe the risk of spreading covid is small in an enclosed space? Especially when so many of us now work in open floor plans?
My first job in an open floor plan (really a trading floor setup), we would literally watch colds and other ailments work their way up and down the rows each winter.
Its not just about death with Covid- one of my coworkers- who on the brief times he came to the office since this started last March- wore a mask at all times, even at his desk- caught covid in early November. He is a long hauler and now has what appears to be chronic leg pains that he goes to doctors weekly for to get properly diagnosed. This is a guy in his 20s.
If a "really small risk" is 545k people dead in a year in the US, even with all the precautions we have taken, I think we fundamentally disagree on what a really small risk is. There are now more dead from Covid in a year than the entire durations of both World Wars combined and in about a month or so, we can lump in Vietnam in there as well.
And his case, although is very possible, also need further investigation, is it really because the covid?
The number of death is highly inflated, that number include every case remotely related to covid. Also the US population has increased considerably compared back to word war.
How does this disprove that masks are not effective? There was almost zero influenza this year as well: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm How do you have any idea what the numbers would have been without masks or the measures that were taken? I can tell you about a year ago to the day there were ambulances outside my house every 3 minutes or so, just outside Manhattan.
He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
you mentioned that your coworkers still caught covid despite wore mask at all times.
so mask only work with influenza ?
>He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
Could still be coincide with something else.
Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is. I know friends that got covid but recover fully.
>The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
In the place that don't implement lockdown, the death chart look similar, how do u know if lockdown work ?
And by the way, death is not the only metric to go by.
Lets say you can reduce death number but in order to do that you increase misery, that would be suck, I certainly don't want that.
>You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself.
The lockdown has certainly affect me. I too have friends that suffer from the lockdown.
> you mentioned that your coworkers still caught covid despite wore mask at all times.
No claim was ever made that they are 100% effective. Vaccines are not 100% effective either, this does not mean they are ineffective.
> Could still be coincide with something else. Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is.
Willfully ignorant.
> The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
Because lifting restrictions is directly related to increases in cases, which is then directly correlated to the number of deaths? Willfully ignorant.
> I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself
We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
As for your last statement, you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. You don't want to wear a mask, you won't stay home, you... just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may. All the while claiming that lockdowns are ineffective while in your other posts admitting you didn't follow them [1][2]. "The thing doesn't work even though I didn't do it and I am fully aware it requires everyone's compliance to be effective." Sounds like you are ready to run for office as a Republican.
>Because lifting restrictions is directly related to increases in cases, which is then directly correlated to the number of deaths? Willfully ignorant.
Correlation != Causation. Willfully ignorant.
>We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
South dakota, sweeden don't have lockdown and they pretty much normal all these times. Florida has short lockdown, but they realized their mistake and quickly lifted it. They are normal too.
>you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. '
No, lockdown affect a lot of people, not just me and its just not merely inconvenience.
> just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may
No, I never said that. I support reducing/preventing death as much as we possibly can, but trying to do so with causing so much damage that is bigger than the virus itself, I can't support.
Especially because they gave us long timeframes (my Silicon Valley company announced "no return to office requirement until September 2021" last summer sometime) in order to give us all the ability to make longer-term plans, rather than always wondering "Will it be this month?
I know of a couple SV startups that went from <100 employees to a couple hundred during the pandemic. Which means that these companies are now essentially distributed across the country and the employees have mostly never met each other in person. I can’t imagine these companies forcing their new workforce to move to SV so they are almost forced to be fully remote going forward.
As an aside, I kind of really like working in central time for a company operating in pacific time. Works well for my sleep schedule and gives me a couple hours of pure productivity in the morning before the rest of the company “wakes up.”
> I can’t imagine these companies forcing their new workforce to move to SV so they are almost forced to be fully remote going forward.
Yes, that's not going to happen.
Employees who were hired remotely during the pandemic, or even those who moved away during the pandemic, are not just going to move back once the pandemic is over.
It's especially clear for those who never lived in SV. These folks were happy to live and work locally in remote locations for their entire career so far. They chose to stay in their location for years, over moving to SV.
If you try to force them to move to SV, they'll just quit and continue working locally as they've done before.
Yeah, it's great to watch the sunrise, check overnight markets in Euro and Asia, and get ahead of the day. I like the East Coast time zone. And find colleagues on West Coast generally like to hack late into the night their time. "While the rest of the world sleeps". Many don't even saunter into work until past noon. There can be a bit of a disconnect when trying to synchronize. But EST also aligns with Brazil as its same latitude. And Tokyo is exactly 12 hours diff so 8am in Japan is 8pm in New York which makes late night chats fun as well ;)
I would never work in an office again. The one good thing about covid is that it definitely transitioned us away from and industrial revolution model to the Information Age.
The 20th century work model of offices and managers was very much an industrial revolution by-product. People were working together on farms, the battlefield... before that. I don't think there was any consideration to worker health or safety.
I'm saying now that we're in the info age, we can do away with that and for the first time work from home or the environment of our choosing.
Not really anything like in the metropolis we have where millions of people used to commute in and out. This was never a thing in History for pretty obvious reasons.
> A survey late last year of 9,000 knowledge workers commissioned by workplace chat software company Slack found 20% want to work remotely, 17% in the office and 63% a mix of the two.
That's pretty much where I'm at. I like the idea of hopping into the office maybe once or twice a week to interact with my co-workers, but otherwise I'm extremely productive at home especially without having to endure the 1-2 hours commute.
I joined a company last last year and they moved to this hybrid model once they found there was practically no efficiency loss with respect to moving everyone to remote. But some people still missed going into the office so they re-opened their physical offices albeit at limited capacity.
This is mostly how I feel as well. However, I wonder how well the hybrid office thing will work out in practice.
Specifically, if you’re in the 63% of people who want to “pop into the office sometimes,” and you come in on some random Tuesday.... is anyone else even there?
It seems like the probability of seeing the people you want to see by chance (when 83% are either always or usually remote) is very low.
So my guess is that for the hybrid thing to still have the social aspect of office work it probably needs to be paired with a policy like “we all come to work on Tuesdays.” But if you do that then the all-remote crowd isn’t getting what they want (they still need to live in travel range if they have to be in the office once a week).
So the alternative is to do something more like “we all come to the office for one week every quarter,” and in that case it’s more of a company retreat than normal work.
So as I said, I’m curious how things will unfold as life opens back up.
My best guess is we’ll end up converging on 2-4 different archetypical models which will become part of a company’s identity and recruiting pitch, and people will self select into the work style they prefer.
I think many (most) places will return to in-office by default with a permissive WFH system, so you can choose to WFH on any given day with no/minimal notice. Places that are remote first by default - a category which will continue growing - will have minimal to no in-office component.
Your personal desks go away replaced with work stations / long tables where anyone can dock. It become more like a school libruary where everyone is working on different things .
Then you have these community meetings every few months where everyone comes in for a meeting but there are not enough work stations so everyone just hangs around until people trickle home.
Honestly that sounds amazing. Just to be able to run around and get appointments or errands done during the day avoiding traffic and work a little longer at home has been a godsend.
My employer is talking about having a core set of days where everyone is onsite and then a few days where you can wfh. I like that, it avoids losing my desk and wondering if someone is in on a certain day.
> (they still need to live in travel range if they have to be in the office once a week).
True, but I think that range expands significantly if one comes in only once a week. Living 2 or more hours away might become reasonable, and even getting a hotel room once a week can easily pay for itself when taking into account housing costs.
I wish more companies were talking about the "we all work from the same place for a week or two" per quarter. It gives almost all of the flexibility of working remote along with much of the benefit of being in person. Plus as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
A few days per week in the office is the worst of both systems. Some remote workers and some office workers isn't a ton better.
Is the question phrased in a way that distinguishes between "working remotely as you have during COVID times" vs. "working remotely post-COVID"
I think it's important to distinguish that in the mind of the responder. At the very least, get people thinking in terms of "What would WFH be like if the kids were at school much of the day?" or "What would WFH be like if we could meet with friends at 17:30?" or whatever.
What we've experienced over the last year is far less social, and far more stressful than what WFH could be.
Personally, I'd like to WFH most of the time, with sprint & release planning sessions in person.
For me, it probably depends on if I have the option to go to a cafe and how nice my home office is. Right now, I'm stuck in my bedroom basically 24 hours a day because I have roommates (1 of which also works from home) and don't have room to move outside of my bedroom. This is extremely depressing. I absolutely hate it and I'd say I'm probably operating at 60% productivity or less and have been for most of the last year. But, I'm moving in May and will at least have my desk not in my bedroom. Even then, I'd rather be in person for most meetings. I think it's extremely important to have face-to-face communication the majority of the time both for social reasons, but also because it's just more efficient. Understanding on what the team is doing over the last year has dropped significantly as well, and the (remote) barriers to communication are real and have a larger than I think people realize impact.
> So you want other people to go to the office to deliver your preference for face to face meetings?
Yes, I think that's an entirely reasonable expectation to be the norm. It's what was the norm/expectation when I started and I do not see a reason that should change. My boss has said that it will most likely be the expectation once it's safe to return to the office, so I am not alone.
> Your company has to pay for desk space and for meeting space?
Yes, actually. They aren't paying for my home office and it wasn't an expectation in the original employment contract. Further, we work with specialized scientific hardware. We need the space anyway.
I've been WFH for a few years and liked it. I did not like it because of the COVID baggage:
* At home schooling
* More people needing help at odd hours (nights/weekends)
* Lots of normally well adjusted folks stressed/angry about minor things
That and there was a lot of corporate "make sure to take time for yourself" and "be realistic about schedules", however there were clearly roles/orgs where that was not an option.
I'm afraid of "partial" WFH meaning that I have a schedule opposite others, and there are many people I simply never see.
I tend to be a fairly black-and-white thinker, so it's easier to envision 100% office or 100% WFH, and harder to get my head around a mixed arrangement. Particularly if that mixed arrangement means I don't have my 'own' desk and equipment in the office.
That said, even though I've done WFH in bits and pieces here and there, I've enjoyed WFH this past year a lot more than I thought I would. I'm thinking of my post-Covid schedule being in the office tues-thurs, so that I still have a consistent block of time where I'm going in "every day" for a few days, rather than every other day.
As much as I love remote work, part of me wonders how much of this is a temporary effect. Yes, we can take a functional in-person organization and transition it to remote. But now as time marches on and that organization needs to change and grow and learn, will that be as effective remote as it is in-person?
Doesn’t that happen naturally as circumstances change and therefore needs too? I’ve never had an issue with this. In fact I’ve helped transform my company from my home. It’s barely recognisable to the company I joined (in a good way). People are happy and employee churn is way down, we’re still shipping new features, sometimes even with new technologies, sales are up, revenues are up even breaking records during the pandemic, stock price is up etc etc
If creating new knowledge and processes is important to you you just have to invest time and money into it. I’m not sure what worker proximity has to do with this? To clarify (a simplified version of) my management approach is to find the current organisational bottleneck and remove it ad nauseam. This can drive immense amounts of new knowledge and processes creation.
That sounds like you've had an awesome experience and if you're into blogging I think it's a topic many people would be interested to hear about.
I do think you write off the value of worker proximity too quickly though. Particularly many other comments in this thread are talking about the real struggles junior devs and interns are facing getting up to speed without in-person mentorship. Those are the long-term impacts I'm worried about. By moving to full WFH has an organization just broken their hiring pipeline and thus is now doomed to fail as people retire and they can't grow?
I don’t discount your perspective at all and it’s true that it could become the most pressing organisational bottleneck at which point I would focus all my efforts on solving it. Cloud IDEs and pair programming come to mind as a potential solution.
Judging from how academics across the world, and even across decades if not centuries create new knowledge all the time, I'd say it's not a barrier to work remotely, whether that's in time or space.
I worry that MBAs of other companies will take the lessons learned from Silicon Valley WFH and misapply them.
Silicon Valley has high salaries and very long commute times. But how does this apply to medium sized cities with low commute times and lower salaries?
How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
How productive is it for workers who have to work from home in their bedroom?
I’ve noticed this split in opinion from higher ups who have higher pay and thus have large, finished home offices versus others lower on the totem pole who don’t.
Also, I think WFH tends to isolate and stovepipe employees even more than they already were, which is a problem especially in larger organizations.
And the odds of fortuitous interactions drops dramatically while the latency for some red tape processes increases as well, since you have to fight an email chain with people with more and more disparate work schedules (and less tacit knowledge transfer and trust-building).
I think the narrative of WFH success is in many ways driven by the people for which WFH is a godsend due to really long commute times or having poor office workplaces (like open plan) and who either function well with very little guidance or who don’t but dislike the guidance.
But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
(Still a huge fan of having the option of WFH, but there have been massive productivity losses in my workplace from strict WFH requirements... in part because we do a mix of fundamentally physical lab work, not just sitting in front of a computer.)
While I mostly agree with you, one of the health institutions in Germany that I know of(and probably plenty others), only had laptops and VPN's available for middle and upper management. So while upper and middle management got to WFH, older folks and plenty of people with preexisting heart and lung conditions got to work in cramped 3-5 people offices.
I agree that a lot of people can't afford a full size home office. Nonetheless most of them will probably also only have a small cubicle or less at work.
My statement doesn't negate what you said, but do keep this perspective in mind also.
Absolutely this. If a company wants people to come into the office but does not have enough space for them they should be forced to allow those employees to work remotely or pay for adequate space. They can't have both.
"who either function well with very little guidance"
That's the definition of a senior developer and senior employees.
For junior developers I've worked in pre-covid with juniors in wfh environments and success rates are lower. For everyone 1 developer who finds there way you have another who can't setup there environment. If someone held your hand in school or if you relied on working together I could see things falling apart quickly online. I feel like the new grads will have wfh school experience from this year will adapt well.
Yeah, I definitely think it’s a senior vs junior thing. Experienced folk already know the ropes and keep their head down without interruptions from underlings or junior developers. Junior developers have a harder time with acquiring tacit knowledge and need more handholding, which they don’t get because the experienced folk have their head down.
I’ve had a couple interns lately, and the WFH experience with them has been much less successful than past in-person internships have been. They’re able to basically moonlight on a remote project, and there has been actually MORE handholding required as it’s much harder to judge when they’re struggling or if they have things under control. There are a lot more non-work distractions for them and they have developed less camaraderie between each other as lunch times, social activities, and fortuitous interactions have been rarer. The lack of established trust also has significant overhead.
So I agree that this is in many ways a senior vs junior and a maturity divide, however these are digital-native students and they’re still struggling, so I’m not sure I agree it’s going to get much better. I think some of the WFH productivity gains are coasting on pre-pandemic trust and implicit knowledge transfer that aren’t happening as much any more. You can see how hard it is for young people in particular by seeing the drops in performance due to school-at-home.
(However, WFH is indeed forcing some familiarity with remote work for many institutions that resisted technology and teleworking arrangements, so there definitely has been some improvement in some areas. It has been a godsend for some people, and that will be a lasting benefit of 2020’s forced WFH experiment.)
I interned remotely last summer and it was a disaster. I had very little direction, couldn't stay focused on work, didn't meet anyone, and really learned very little. Not looking forward to doing it again this summer.
Yeah, I used "handholding," but that's really an unnecessarily pejorative term for providing direction and knowledge transfer to less-senior employees. I.e. senior employees and managers actually doing their frakking jobs.
What advice would you give to an intern's mentor to improve the remote internship experience?
let interns meet or communicate and share onboarding experience with each ither.
so kne senior dev can "hold hand" of a single intern, so to speak, and that intern will hold hands of other interns
I was a 2x WFH intern. Micromanage the intern a bit more. Ask to see code that’s being worked on and don’t let them go too long without interaction. It’s way too easy to get distracted when the only interaction we have is a 15 minute stand up in the morning, a few slack messages, and 8 hours of time to manage ourselves. There were a lot of days where I could get done more work in the hour before a 1:1 meeting than the rest of the day. When I’m not learning much and the feedback is still positive even when I slack off then it’s really hard to stay motivated.
Also remember that interns don’t have a home office and most are in their bedroom at the same desk they relax and play games at. It doesn’t feel like I’m actually at work unless there’s frequent interaction
One nice way to "micromanage" and also just learn how senior devs work is to pair program. I feel like it's been a boon for me, as a junior dev myself.
I second what DC1350 said. I didn't get enough opportunities to face criticism, have my code reviewed, or to get steered in the right direction, and that led to the same exact situation where I would piss away weekdays and scramble to put something together before my weekly 1:1.
Of course, if I were a better intern, I would have taken care of a lot of those things myself, but I think it's better practice as a mentor to start with the metaphorical bowling bumpers up and then relax the oversight as the intern proves themselves capable over the 3 months.
Doing it again this summer, I plan to ask for at least 3x weekly 1:1s (e.g. MWF) and to make sure I have code reviewed in the first week or two of the internship. More interaction with other interns would also help, especially technical interaction and not just high-level discussions of our projects. I also think it would be cool to do some sort of pair programming / spectating where I watch the mentor work through a problem to get a sense of what the professional workflow actually looks like.
MOST technology knowledge involves a good deal of tacit knowledge which an only be transmitted person-to-person in an intern/mentor/supervisor mode.
So simpler tasks that have zero barriers-to-entry for automation can be done without this. But for more complex stuff, not so much. This is the same for B2B sales - that will ALWAYS be person-to-person - it simply can't work via e-commerce like selling books or CDs on Amazon.
I think some of it is a "senior vs junior and a maturity divide" as you said, but some of WFH effectiveness has to do with experience in the current role/project. I've got something like 18 years of software experience, have often been the senior guy who doesn't require handholding, etc. But I got a new job during the pandemic, and joining a team with a complex system and various environments and deployment methods, etc, takes some time to come up to speed on. I definitely felt that I picked that stuff up more slowly from Confluence pages and Slack conversations than from previous transitions where you can sit next to a co-worker and effortlessly watch what they're doing, talk about what they're doing, shout over to the person in the next cube with a question, etc. Not saying WFH doesn't or can't work, but I do think that people who are already up to speed do well WFH and people who are still coming up to speed are at a bit of a disadvantage.
>Yeah, I definitely think it’s a senior vs junior thing.
Also, an existing vs new employee thing (which is not the same). I'm doing fine with WFH because of the relationships I have built here over the last 5 years and my knowledge of the company culture/organization/processes. If I were a new employee (even coming in as a senior level experienced hire) I would not have any of that and it would be far harder to get established. Usually by the 5 year mark I'm looking to hop, but I've been holding off for exactly that reason.
I’m CTO in a software company but I don’t have a proper home office. I was using a small coworking space a 2 minute walk around the corner instead. During the pandemic i’m working in the kitchen for 4 hours before the kids get up and then in the afternoon when my wife takes the kids out. We were always partially wfh as a company anyways and tbh I get zero work done in the office when I go. I only go for morale and relationships (though I do need to take a 20 hour flight to get there). I couldn’t imagine this working in lab based companies but for a company like ours offices are bad or neutral for productivity but useful for mental health.
> I was using a small coworking space a 2 minute walk around the corner instead
This was something I wanted to do as well - only to find out that the local coworking doesn't let you do calls in the space - you have to walk out into halls or limited number of "booths". And I found this common in coworking spaces around here. Which is a stark contrast with how open layout offices I worked in worked (you were expected to keep noise down to tolerable levels but if you didn't want to be disturbed by noise you had headphones).
The idea sounds excellent - I live 5 walking from a nearby coworking space that's really well equipped - but in practice it's not ideal. + having to leave my equipment around strangers isn't the best either and I don't want to meet randoms in a coworking space before I can feel comfortable leaving a wallet on the desk when going to the toilet.
I might end up renting a private office there - but the smallest office they have is 2 people and that's a lot more expensive than a coworking desk.
I agree with everything else you said - I love walking out with my wife and son around lunch time and flexible work hours are much better - I tend to be most productive later in the day anyway - which usually meant I spent mornings in the office socialising and procrastinating and then having to work late - I get to spend that time with my family now.
I use afternoons for focused work, no calls, so it works for me. In the morning I usually work from the kitchen taking calls etc as I can make coffee etc and everyone is still asleep anyways. Calls are definitely an issue for coworking. I even considered designing and developing modular call booths for coworking space at one time (when I ran a space).
Closed headphones do a better job, because a thick hunk of plastic doesn’t need to predict the incoming noise. I found HD-280 to be pretty comfortable.
There often just isn't a choice. When I was shopping for co-working spaces I'd see tons of open plan space, with maybe 1 or 2 tiny phone closets for 50 - 100 people. They were always in constant use. I don't know why open offices don't set aside more space for private conversations when they need to happen.
> Which is a stark contrast with how open layout offices I worked in worked (you were expected to keep noise down to tolerable levels but if you didn't want to be disturbed by noise you had headphones).
People who thought they could talk as loud as they want / hold an impromptu meeting by your desk and thought it was your problem to sort out if you didn’t like it are a lot of the reason why I hated open plan offices so much.
> I only go for morale and relationships (though I do need to take a 20 hour flight to get there). I couldn’t imagine this working in lab based companies but for a company like ours offices are bad or neutral for productivity but useful for mental health.
It is like that when people go there to socialize. It is different if company culture treats offices as places to work in.
I really don't get this are you in some super poor country? No offense intended. I'm an IT manager of a mediocre real estate company and I have a decked out home office with all the new toys and with a mini data center that could power a medium size office. In all probably totaling in the mid 5 figures. All company paid and I doubt they remember I exist most days. Where are these tech first companies that barely allow a CTO to scrape by with no resources?
Not to say it applies to the OP, but there are "CTOs" (poorly compensated, ramen startup engineer with a fancy title) then there are CTOs (well compensated--cash and equity, and C-Suite or C-Suite adjacent individuals at a well-capitalized real business)
If you're in a high COL area, then the constraint is usually an extra room away from your family, not the equipment. Not always an option to buy or rent a place with another room once you start working from home. My company sure isn't paying an extra $500-1,000 per month to cover rent/mortgage.
High pay does not imply that you live in a large house with ample space for an office even if you can afford it. Someone living in a $1M+ condo in an urban high-rise for the lifestyle is unlikely to have space for an office if they did not plan on needing one when they bought it. Most people aren't in the habit of spending lots of money on things they don't plan on using. Even if you wanted to move to a larger house since COVID means you now need an office, in many regions there is no housing available to buy.
I don't have a home office either and no one would confuse me with being poor. Until COVID, I had no use for one.
Well said. I like how you laid out both sides. For employees, this is a preference. I'm tired of the "best" narrative. Everything has trade-offs that are not calculated in.
Sorry just want to nitpick - this really has not a whole lot to do with MBAs or any degree specifically. I think it would be a little bit more beneficial to swap MBA with management. Many of the things you're discussing are true of engineering managers, researchers with PHDs, and accountants and not specifically one group of people with one degree - they don't run the whole world and have exclusive ownership of "all the bad decisions".
Blaming MBAs for how companies behave is like blaming people with software engineering degree for writing buggy code. Not having people with MBA degree won’t magically make your company better, same as employing developers without a diploma won’t magically make your product more stable.
People without business degrees tend to consider more variables than simply optimizing the business for profit extraction at any cost. No guarantee, but that's what an MBA trains people to do. For some reason, doing that causes all kinds of social problems that were completely unanticipated by philosophers in the 1800s.
That might be what some MBA programs do for some graduates but I can at least give you a data point that the MBA program I attended spends a lot of time focusing on how that type of extraction is bad for long-term business.
There are some cases where it actually is perfectly ok to extract value from a business before winding it down. But that doesn't mean that all of a sudden anybody with an MBA degree is some sort of ruthless capitalist.
I got an MBA because I wanted to learn more about business, network, and hopefully adjust my own personal career path.
I can say for Fisher (Ohio State) we spent a lot of time focusing on not just great ways to make money or improve a business, but on people too. At least that was my experience. I'd guess if you spend a lot of time around "ruthless MBAs" you should take a look at what universities they're coming from and see if they have anything in common.
My software engineering classes taught me really well how to implement red black trees. They shouldn’t, so I don’t use them when they aren’t right tool for the job and I should use linked list instead?
That’s the main problem I have with MBA sentiment here. Somehow knowing about something is bad. That’s a very naive viewpoint.
It indeed is. Just the other day, when the news came out that Backblaze is sending private info to Facebook, the top comments on HN were along the lines of "I guess some MBA decided it was going to make more money, so they did it."
It really takes a special level of blind hatered to blame an MBA (where there is no evidence one was involved) for sending one's information to a company founded and lead by a Harvard computer science major. But yes, let's blame all ills in this world on MBAs.
EDIT: Another example I remember was that commenters here started the usual MBA-bashing on an article about how GE's financial engineering became their downfall, until other pointed out the person behind it was GE's former CEO, whose BSc, MSc, and PhD are all in chemical engineering.
The fundamental critique of an MBA is that presumes "management" or “business” is a thing you can be an expert in, independent of the domain you are managing. If you're a domain expert in something and also an MBA then sure, whatever.
That's exactly it. There are too many MBA's who have never had a proper job, but will authoritatively tell others how to run a business they know nothing about. An MBA, to the the extent the degree should exist at all, should be something one attains later in life after getting some real world expertise and a hefty amount of domain knowledge.
I'm commenting on this small thread a lot because it's interesting so I do apologize for that - but where are these MBAs who have never had a proper job getting hired at?
I read this and think damn I've had a proper job that I worked at for years before doing my MBA (which I did while working) + 4 years on active duty in the military - and I've really struggled in the job market as it pertains to working at some top companies or startups and it scares me to think maybe I'm getting outcompeted by other MBA program graduates that haven't even held a job before. Not that they can't be capable, but still....
I can't even get a job or interview as a product analyst at this point. No "1-3 years of formal product experience" on my resume... guess I could never do that job! (sorry /rant I've been going through a rough patch with this lately)
It seems in general one needs a degree, a passing GMAT, 2-3 years experience and a recommendation letter.
But then again, maybe successfully gaming the entrance to business school is how one demonstrates they're ready for a leadership position in the business world... Just kidding. Kinda ;)
Management consulting, where they also do not develop deep experience in any field, and then somehow they're qualified in some general 'business' field and can be hired to senior positions.
It varies by school, but here's the list for Wharton [1]. In general, it's a lot of consulting and finance followed by various types of roles at Fortune 500 companies. Plenty go to FAANG as well, though.
My understanding is it's very difficult to get into Wharton MBA without having worked a bit first. Even the "out of undergrad" admits usually get in via a 2+2 program where they spend their first 2 years working at a partner company. I believe most top MBA programs are like this, and everyone I've encountered from a mid tier MBA was doing it part time while working because their company paid.
Not saying MBAs have a ton of practical experience going in, and I wouldn't be surprised if the professors are pretty far removed from any practical experience. But I also don't think it's accurate to say most MBAs haven't worked a real job before. [At least not most MBAs that the average SWE on HN would encounter. People that got an MBA from Random U because they didn't know what else to do are probably not being hired at major tech companies.]
There's a very big difference between having worked 2-3 years in industry and actually being an experienced expert in that industry. The latter usually takes a minimum of 5 years in my opinion. Also note the industry most MBA students come from is itself consulting or finance, although again that varies by school and degree type (part time programs, for example, tend to skew older and more toward general Fortune 1000 employee students).
That was the original point of an MBA it was for a small number of highflying midcareer executives in large companies who had several years of real world experience.
Now a lot of the time its gamed for points on immigration systems.
MBA myself, and I can happily contrast the hate here with how much ridicule of engineers there was from business professors when I was in college. I just knock off a few points of my perception of the speaker's competence either way.
Mostly along the lines of engineering-centric companies that went out of business (or stayed small/struggled) because they didn’t think about marketing.
My undergraduate was in engineering and it’s fun to look back because we used to do that with business and sales. For a student org we once sold shirts that said “friends don’t let friends become business majors”... which was fun and in jest of course.
I didn’t experience a lot of what you described in my MBA program as an engineer, though. Usually it was the opposite, but I think that comes with the maturity of the program I was in where you knew that not only was engineering important and valuable, but so were sales, accounting, nursing, and all sorts of other disciplines.
> MBA hate here is ridiculous.
>
> Blaming MBAs for how companies behave is like blaming people with software engineering degree for writing buggy code. Not having people with MBA degree won’t magically make your company better, same as employing developers without a diploma won’t magically make your product more stable.
I think there's a current trend -- perhaps not entirely unjustified -- of skepticism towards academic elitism and a bit of a divide, in the U.S. at least, between those in ivory towers who issue edicts, and boots on the ground. Not taking a side, here, especially being that I'm in management.
I do have to say, when I hear of "ethicists" and I recently spoke to someone who taught "medical ethics" while at Google they fired a controversial "AI Ethicist" I have to raise an eyebrow. Ethics are morals. Somehow someone studied them and can tell us the correct ones. Maybe I've mischaracterized this in my head, but it sounds awfully similar to a priesthood.
The idea though is that having an MBA is meant to make you better at the BA bit.
It doesn't feel that way though because having an MBA doesn't guarantee a minimum floor of capability. There is no such thing as losing your MBA for making a dumb decision.
I noticed that in my organization the senior folks stayed in the office but sent all the workers home to create the safety buffer. They continued to show up and network with each other.
I believe MBAs are going to love this new world order. The privilege to show your face in the office will become a sign that you've "arrived" and all your time before that will be working towards that privilege.
Related to that I’m interested how office cliques will work. It’s pretty damn easy to exclude someone if everyone is working from home. Unless they are scouring calendars they may not even know they were left out of an important meeting. Seems like a nightmare for a office with more passive-aggressive types.
Any mixed remote/office work company suffers from this, even with the best intentions.
Face-to-face conversations have such a huge latency/throughput advantage over online discussions that the remote employees are typically left out of the loop.
(At least, that's been my observation at dedicated remote vs hybrid companies. Maybe things will change post-pandemic, but I'm not optimistic.)
Trust me, this already happened and it's an easy way to get rid of your workers after you "relocate" without paying unemployment.
Offer remote work and then offer no advancement opportunities until they quit, so you don't take the unemployment hit. Voila, you have shifted the costs unto them to go find a new job.
>Also, I think WFH tends to isolate and stovepipe employees even more than they already were, which is a problem especially in larger organizations.
The large organization I am consulting at right now had a larger than average number of employees (also higher level employees) quit over the lockdown which has given management the idea that WFH frays the social ties and makes it easier for people to consider leaving.
We had a rather average amount of turnover which might be high considering the concerns about the economy. I think one possible contributor is that more remote roles are available.
> has given management the idea that WFH frays the social ties
It does fray social ties. We're social beings, made for face to face interactions. That's how we operate. There's a reason almost every language has a proverb along the lines of "out of sight, out of mind".
Many would argue that it’s unhealthy to rely on your work for social bonds. I much prefer keeping my social circle and my work circles completely separate. Wfh means I can spend more time socializing with those I care about.
Not having social bonds out of work is definitely a problem with our society. It's fixable though, there are lots of groups outside of work you can connect with and start meeting people. The internet made this a lot easier.
> For others they prefer their co-workers over forced social socialization due to family relations.
Honestly, these are the co-workers I hate being around the most as they treat you like an outlet for not just social contact but often therapy or venting about their family. I literally never want to hear about a co-worker's terrible marriage (for an example I've had to deal with quite a bit).
Having no social bonds with people you're spending 8+ hours/day with seems a lot more unhealthy to me (and so does spending all that time hermit-like - and doing your job in the company of family or friends from outside the job seems awkward too).
Sure, but if you don't have any bonds with your coworkers you're either having zero social contact for 8 hours/day, or trying to work while socialising with non-coworkers. There are definitely days where I keep my head down and don't talk to anyone, but I wouldn't want every day to be like that.
If you're socializing with co-workers you're also not working. One of the problems is the 8 hour work day. I don't want to be forced to spend 40+ hours a week with co-workers. That is why people aren't having healthy social lives. Work is draining their time and energy. Yes, people make due by creating social bonds with their co-workers, but I'd hardly call that ideal.
> If you're socializing with co-workers you're also not working.
Only in a narrow sense. If anything employers in our industry tend to deliberately encourage employees to socialise (within reason): casual contact is important to help different parts of the org chart break out of their silos, liminal spaces are an important route for information that might be suppressed over normal channels, and almost everyone knows at some level that you can't do 40 hours of productive programming per week. The way I see it, a certain amount of socialising on the clock is win-win.
> One of the problems is the 8 hour work day. I don't want to be forced to spend 40+ hours a week with co-workers. That is why people aren't having healthy social lives. Work is draining their time and energy.
I don't disagree, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Given that I do have to work 8 hours/day, I'd rather humanise that time as much as possible than refuse out of some sense of accelerationism.
I wouldn't call optimizing for information flow through an organization in a way prescribed by management "socializing" or even "good".
Wfh definitely isn't accelerationism (or perfect). It's just a chance to live somewhere less oppressively expensive and have less surveillance from your employer all day. It's up to the individual to take advantage of that. If socializing is important to them, there are more opportunities to do it, it just takes a bit more work but I would argue the results are much healthier and more natural than relying on work and centering relationships around working.
Micromanaged "socialising" is indeed bad for everyone. But organic socialisation at work can be win-win. Refusing to socialise at work is what I'm saying is accelerationism.
> Many would argue that it’s unhealthy to rely on your work for social bonds.
Many would argue that eating right and exercising is healthy, yet 30%+ of people in developed countries are overweight and the percentage is increasing.
At some point we have to accept reality. People are flawed (yet they somehow manage to live their lives :-) ).
Does it, though? Socializing at home during work hours is not the same thing as socializing outside of work hours.
Plus, people still work 8+ hours a day, so you can't really interact much with friends.
The main thing you win is geographically, I guess. No more time lost in commute plus maybe less time lost meeting with friends because you don't have to go from the office to the meeting place (though that will obviously depend on how far your friends are from your home).
You're not really socializing with people in the office either, you're working with them. Without a boss around looking over your shoulder, you have a lot more time to socialize if you want. Go get a coffee with a friend, your partner, your kid...
I'd also describe the office as anti-social as I would not voluntarily spend my time with the majority of my co-workers and having to be around them day in and day out is extremely draining and demoralizing. I find surrounding myself with people I actually care about and have real bonds with to be far more positive.
“Ignoring State Guidance” was pretty much one of the main themes of 2020 and likely will be for 2021. Which is one reason we can’t seem to claw our way out of this mess without throwing people under the bus to die.
The move to remote work has made me both less productive and personally unhappy. I've mostly just been grateful that I still have a job and trying not to complain considering so many people have been laid off or have had to risk their health when going to work. But the idea of permanent long-term WFH is very unappealing.
It seems like the majority of people prefer working from home, and I understand why, but I still prefer having a dedicated place away from home to work. It seems to put me in a different frame of mind that is much harder to get to when I'm at home. I've found it much harder to actually work on hobby projects for some reason; since it's all done from the same place, it just feels a bit like work and motivation has certainly waned.
That's definitely my perspective. I certainly like not having to commute (25 minute drive one way) but I would still like to get out of the house for the day 1-2 days per week. I'm introverted though and my commute is relatively easy. WFH is much more daunting for other personality types and situations.
I think my ideal would be work-from-anywhere, plus travel to the office for maybe 5 days every month or two. It would be the perfect balance of in-person collaboration, AND allow me to live somewhere affordable.
They're not the majority. Maybe they're close to it, among developers. But outside of developers, it's not the case, by far. For a lot of people work is an important part of their social life.
I think an underrepresented problem with WFH is that even among senior engineers collaborating on a project, overall communication goes down and it results in less cohesion among the team. It results in a small, but quite noticeable amount of siloing within a project. I've also found I don't really know my coworkers as people much anymore because we don't have much of any off-topic discussions which leads to strained social dynamics.
It sounds like a lot of the issues you are describing could be screened for. Making having an office at home a requirement to become a remote worker. Remote work only for certain levels of employees.
Is that a perfect fix? No. But many remote friendly companies are already doing something like that. In 2020 people didnt really have a choice and many had kids at home. That is not a normal WFH situation for many.
> In 2020 people didnt really have a choice and many had kids at home. That is not a normal WFH situation for many.
Similarly, people who homeschool their kids often remind others that having your kids at home learning remotely because the school is closed, is not the same as the usual homeschooling. (And similarly, many of them hope that current experience will make more people consider homeschooling as an option.)
One parent works from home and one home schools. It’s easier to do with wfh because you can live in a low cost of living area where one tech salary supports a family and buys a large house with dedicated rooms for work and school.
My point is that it's not possible to support a family with one parent homeschooling without wfh because it's the only way you can have only one parent work and also have the room you need to effectively homeschool due to the ability to move to a low cost of living area.
Who is actually calling for permanent, "close the office" WFH for everyone? Nobody I know. It seems like a strawman. I would argue it's just as unreasonable as forcing everyone to work in the office or quit, whether they like it or not. Different people work better in different environments, and ideally WFH would stay optional.
Are you being serious? A very vocal portion of HN has advocated this for years. At least for their own positions, if not "forced" onto all employees.
For YEARS now, the #1 most reliable way to see your username on the front page of HN is to post a link about David Heinemeier Hansson promoting remote work, or a story skewering Marissa Mayer for squashing it at Yahoo.
It's only after 12 months of sitting at home in our sweatpants going crazy, that I'm starting to see more people discuss offices a bit wistfully.
> At least for their own positions, if not "forced" onto all employees.
There is a huge difference between advocating for the option to WFH for yourself and arguing to force everyone to WFH. Few if any are advocates for the latter.
> There is a huge difference between advocating for the option to WFH for yourself and arguing to force everyone to WFH. Few if any are advocates for the latter.
The thing is, 100% WFH means that you probably kneecap your career if the others don't do the same.
I've worked for remote-only, local-only, and mixed environments.
Mixed environments are significantly more difficult to sustain. FTF discussions are such big wins when it comes to volume of information shared and ability to quickly redirect to other topics as needed, that the employees who are remote will often find themselves cut out of the loop entirely.
So, given the choice, I'd much rather work for a remote-only company than be left out of the important conversations. It's not a deliberate decision to exclude the remote workers, it just happens naturally.
(As I said elsewhere, it's possible that will change post-pandemic, but I think that it's mostly an inevitable outcome of the typical office dynamics.)
You cannot have a mixed environment unless the company is a "remote-first" company. A remote-first company means that all policy is designed for remote work, but still has open office space for anyone who wants to come in.
Remote-first companies have specific policies about meetings and unscheduled conversations. For example, all meetings must be announced, available over video, recorded, with a write up at the end. All spontaneous chats happen over email, slack, or a wiki to make sure they are documented.
This levels the playing field for anyone working remote, so that they aren't completely isolated or left out of important decisions by those in the office.
That's an excellent point; I'm skeptical, however, that many companies will successfully make a transition to remote-first, if they even seriously attempt it.
> All spontaneous chats happen over email, slack, or a wiki to make sure they are documented.
That's just anti-human. I'm all for working from home but people in the office are going to chat just as the people working from home are going too. The bitch sessions about the boss just happen in the 1 on 1 video calls.
>> Who is actually calling for permanent, "close the office" WFH for everyone?
REI sold their corporate campus in a move to 100% WFH:
We have made the decision to pursue a sale of our buildings and land in Bellevue’s Spring District—and, with that sale, to step toward a new model for our headquarters that will better serve the way we live, work and act as a force for positive change.
Remote working will move from a temporary solve to a more engrained, supported, and normalized model for many of our headquarters employees.
Target recently sold its downtown offices as well:
Minnesota-based Target says that flexibility is behind the decision to shut down the company's City Center operation in downtown Minneapolis, and relocate 3,500 employees to other locations in the city and elsewhere.
"None of us knew what the future would hold or how long we’d be working from home, but in just one year we’ve proven that we can drive incredible results, together, from our kitchens and basements and living rooms," Kremer wrote in her email.
With the end of the pandemic hopefully in site, Kremer says Target is moving toward a hybrid system called "Flex for Your Day" that will incorporate both virtual and on-site work and collaboration when employees "gradually return to headquarters later this year."
Capitol One is doing the same thing:
Capital One Financial Corp. said the majority of employees at its U.S. call centers for cards will work from home even after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
For the rest of its staff, the card giant extended remote operations until the end of March, according to an internal memo. Capital One had previously said employees would work remotely until at least the end of this year.
I think this is an oversimplification. There isn't one uniform market for labor, even within an industry. What is a mistake for one company might not be for another, but social and other non-economic pressures may cause less weight to be given to such distinctions and work against both.
> I worry that MBAs of other companies will take the lessons learned from Silicon Valley WFH and misapply them.
Don't worry: It won't be the last time it happens. How many shops have I heard say they are "Just like Google" only to find out that what they mean by that is that they have beanbag chairs?
> But it's potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it's a bad idea.
They'll learn that they need a higher caliber of employees to make it work. Incidentally, these employees are also now hirable by competing SV firms that can and will outbid them.
> How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
Yea, i'm very pro-WFH, but i've built my life around it. I own a house with an office. I can't imagine trying to WFH on a couch or some desk in my living room while my wife cooks/watches TV/etc.
With that said i still hope people see more chances to WFH, and can start buying/renting homes with this in mind. I have a three bedroom house, turned into 2 offices 1 bedroom, and it worked wonderfully for my wife and I during these WFH times. My wife fwiw was not a WFH person before Covid, but she is currently, and she has adapted quite easily with a dedicated office. One of her coworkers however lived in a tiny apartment with two children and no office. Her QOL was miserable.
we inadvertantly made exactly the situation you couldn't imagine happen, as our house is very new but purposefully small, and the TV and noise with no office is distracting. Honestly wouldn't wish it on others, because it's frustrating when one is accustomed to being able to totally focus.
> I think the narrative of WFH success is in many ways driven by the people for which WFH is a godsend due to really long commute times or having poor office workplaces (like open plan)
Who doesn't have open plan offices? There are about three people left in the tech industry these days who still have a private office.
> But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
Working in an open plan space is simply inferior to working remotely, except in rare cases where your team is in a bullpen and working full time on a specific project together. It's inferior for engineers because of distractions, and it's inferior for the company because of real estate costs.
I actually feel and work much better in an open-plan office. The energy of other people being present keeps me very focused and I really like that it’s so easy to collaborate. I think it helps prevent me from being burned out.
However this is all predicated on open office being a layout where your desk is made of wood, hardwood flooring instead of carpet, your coworkers Aeron is 5’ or less from yours, massive windows close by, and there aren’t any forms of walls other than computer monitors. Cubicles require me to attend therapy.
I absolutely despise open office plans. I can't work in them.
My productivity shot an incredible amount as soon as I had no choice than to work from home in March, and everybody else in the office. Saved 2 hours a day. And I can use my own bathroom... that alone is worth it.
>The energy of other people being present keeps me very focused
This is the opposite of my personal experience. The energy of other people distracts and interrupts. Collaboration that interrupts focused solo work has rarely if ever been a net gain.
The real estate costs don't go away, they just are paid for by the worker instead of the employer. Now you need to either dedicate square footage to an office setup, or get a bad back working from the couch or the bed or other common home furniture ill suited for long work hours. Maybe you legitimately don't have room in your apartment for this, and now need to invest in another bedroom. Maybe you need to buy faster home internet, or move apartments entirely due to a lack of ISP choices at your address. I've never heard of a business offering a stipend or remote assistance subsidy of any sort to their workers to cover any of this, from whatever great savings are reaped from saving on real estate costs.
I think there is a happy medium, where maybe offices cut back to about 25% capacity or so. People would instead drop in and work like a university library. You could go there and print stuff out if you didn't have a printer at home. If your laptop blew up, you could go there and get a replacement from IT. If you preferred, you could rent out a substantial desk with several monitors and a good chair if you didn't have the space at home, or focused better in that environment. You could schedule in person meetings with your team in a well appointed conference room if you wanted. You could host social events. Maybe even a gym or childcare facility. I think that's my ideal for the office environment going forward: less a sweatshop and more a clubhouse.
> The real estate costs don't go away, they just are paid for by the worker instead of the employer.
I'm not sure how many tech workers didn't already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home but I have to imagine it's a miniscule number.
> I've never heard of a business offering a stipend or remote assistance subsidy of any sort to their workers to cover any of this, from whatever great savings are reaped from saving on real estate costs.
My company does, I'm sure it's become pretty standard lately.
Software engineer here who before the pandemic had a setup on the sofa or kitchen table. That’s fine for doing a few hours work in the evening. It starts to get ergonomically painful as a full time setup. It’s also annoying sharing a room with my partner who needs to be in meetings all day while I’m trying to write code.
IIRC it used to be that to claim a write off on dedicated work space at home you had to claim you had a 10'x10' dedicated work env... but I may be not recalling that correctly.
> I'm not sure how many tech workers didn't already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home but I have to imagine it's a miniscule number.
I thought the same as you, and then I saw a lot of people at work not have home setups, either because of space or other reasons. It was surprisingly common!
Concentration of jobs without adequate increase in housing leads to that extra room for an office being exorbitantly priced. Then again, if you can rely on wfh, why concentrate to that degree?
> I'm not sure how many tech workers didn't already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home but I have to imagine it's a miniscule number.
Once again, in SV/NYC/etc very few due to real estate costs. Most of my peers who aren't married have room mates.
This is the definition if a win-win then, because I would take a pay cut to keep working from home (not planning to mention this in salary negotiations). I definitely don't feel like I'm being exploited by saving my company a few bucks and saving irreplaceable moments of my life that I'd waste commuting. The lack of commute is the real kicker, driving to work costs me money, and it's a life-endangering activity.
This is it. I actually took a small pay cut this year to work for a company that is guaranteed remote friendly.
The peace of mind knowing that these guys already had remote engineers before the pandemic and a good workflow, and having a job that is officially and permanently remote is absolutely worth a few thousand bucks to me.
I was dreading going back to the office, even if only a day or two a week.
Counting the commute I would have otherwise been going back to with my previous company that was super excited to get asses back in seats, I'm probably actually getting paid more per hour of my time dedicated to work activities.
> saving my company a few bucks and saving irreplaceable moments of my life that I'd waste commuting.
I bet if you actually considered the commute as part of your paid time to calculate an hourly rate, a lot of people probably come ahead when switching to wfh despite "renting their space" or whatever.
No, but presumably they got some living utility out of that space previously that is now devoted to work. Maybe you can finally take up mountain biking now that you don't have to make space for a desk you don't use after 5pm on friday and can fit the equipment.
The person I replied to was explicitly talking about people who already have a desktop computer setup at home. I guess for a few of them that desktop might be used by a partner or children during the day, but in the vast majority of cases it would sit idle.
I always looked at the commute cost as a balance out, TBH. The distractions on the bus made study on the bus difficult and I wouldn't work on there because I was loathe to be one of the people edging out another with a laptop on a full bus. granted, other places may have better transport than the Seattle area (ours is pretty notorious), but most is pretty crowded and not suited for work or leisure. I count those commute hours as personal cost hours, to me and the environment. It was an hour in and an hour out (on a really good day), and I'm like 20 miles from the city center.
> I've never heard of a business offering a stipend or remote assistance subsidy of any sort to their workers to cover any of this
I switched jobs during the pandemic. My previous job offered $25/mo extra to help cover utilities, $250 to cover any wfh purchases and let me borrow any office supplies, including monitors, chairs, etc... Although this company instituted a 20% pay cut for 3 months which made that all seem very silly.
My new company is doing practically the same thing, but without the pay cut and is much less strict about the type of WFH purchases.
My commute was only ever a 10-15min bike ride, but Ive personally benefited greatly from the WFH switch and my productivity has been through the roof. I definitely agree with you that maintaining some space to meet and work would be nice.
Oracle is one company in the Valley with private locking offices with permanent full soundproof doors and outside windows with mountain views. I had one as an intern!
This reminds me of a story about early open plan offices in the 80s, where an up-and-coming Microsoft poached talent left and right by offering perks like offices with doors. I wonder if we'll swing the pendulum back in that direction again.
> Working in an open plan space is simply inferior to working remotely
"Simply inferior" is a bit of a bold statement. Lots of people want to go back to their office for various reasons. For me it's wanting to see my co-workers (which are my friends at this point) in person every day. It's certainly not rare.
I agree that the office is great for socializing, but that isn't what offices are for. I'm talking about trying to do head-down work requiring concentration.
Same here, but I find that a Google Meet session is more productive than in-person. We can share screens and talk (with the bonus of being able to record the session), and it's honestly easier to follow than when I'm trying to crane my neck to see over someone's shoulder.
In the office, a team or group meeting is a great break from sitting at the desk and an opportunity to be social. At home, it’s yet more staring at the screen at a fixed focus distance and speaking in fits and starts due to network latency. I don’t agree at all that an open office is simply inferior to remote work.
>> Who doesn't have open plan offices? There are about three people left in the tech industry these days who still have a private office.
There's a big range from true open-plan space (long tables with employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder next to each other) to private offices with doors.
Somewhere in between are traditional "cube farms" which provide some amount of semi-privacy, less distracting nightlines, noise reduction, and feeling of personal space. Most of the companies I've seen are still more like this.
SV isn't as unique as you think it is. A lot of the problems that plague the SF area plague LA, NYC, medium-sized cities and the metro areas surrounding them. I've even lived in small cities with less than 80k people that have similar problems.
People at my company work longer hours, have completely multiple very difficult high profile deadlines due to WFH. That your office is unproductive because you need a physical lab shouldn’t inform those who don’t, IMO!
fortuitous interactions - This is the big problem for me. Developing relationships and getting a pulse on the company and all the opportunities / challenges / "there be dragons" is nearly impossible working from home. The water cooler and grapevine have pretty much disappeared and any chance of getting ahead of arising issues / storms is now gone.
>I’ve noticed this split in opinion from higher ups who have higher pay and thus have large, finished home offices versus others lower on the totem pole who don’t.
I know lots of 'lower totem pole' employees with a nicer WFH setup than many managers.
From what I've seen, there is a more significant reason higher ups like WFH. PG wrote an essay about the creators schedule versus the managers schedule. A managers schedule (the higher ups) spend their day flip flopping between meetings during each hour increment. Imagine having to walk/transport to a different building on/off campus for a new meeting a many times a day. It can take a lot of valuable time & potentially be exhausting. In WFH, you just click a new link to join a zoom meeting. Much more convenient.
The people doing the low level work such as coding tend to be younger. They are looking to make office connections and define their career path. Working out of an office allows for progression in both.
Tech workers seem to agree: permanent work from office isn't what most of us want. Fair enough.
But here's a fun question: If you aren't permanently in the office, do you need a personal, permanent desk in the office? Because that is going to be the first cut that comes when we all "go back, some of the time". And half the people I pose this question to get upset about it.
My own prediction is that teams are going to book sets of desks together the same way we book meeting rooms. They're shared and you'd better have a reservation.
But "your" desk with your photo of the spouse and kids, your knick-knacks, your notebooks and "your" monitor? I doubt you'll ever have that again.
When your team is elsewhere the networking opportunities are more with whoever else came in from other departments. Which can be informative but rarely does it directly relate.
Why wouldn't you have notebooks? It worked be easy for the Facilities team to have your box of stuff (or rolling set of drawers) waiting at your assigned desk when you arrive.
Have you ever worked on a facilities team? When a company removes a provision like an personal office and moves to open office layouts they also rationalize their facilities spending. Theoretically, it's easier to clean and maintain the space. More often it's an excuse to find a way to pay less.
I'm not convinced that employees or facility operators are motivated enough to deliver your vision of your stuff being at your desk in any sort of reasonable way. I can't imagine folks being comfortable with packing and unpacking their stuff regularly. For a lot of people, although not me, having people touch their stuff is the root problem. Having different people pack and unpack this regularly would be a nightmare for them.
That's not what I'm proposing. At the end of the day, desk workers would put their favorite mouse and notebooks in a drawer or box, and at the start of the next day in the office they would pull them out at the new desk. Nobody else would be touching their stuff.
In fact, the mouse and main notebook would probably go in their backpack.
Why would a company hire someone to carry your shoebox of personal possessions to and from storage when it would cost less to just give you a locker or tell you to take that stuff home every day?
Back in the 2016 era, my megacorp started building out the tech facilities this way. No assigned seats. There were reservable bullpens for NOC style teams that were persistent. Rest of the floor was divided into quiet and social areas with various seating and work stations.
They already had a heavy work from home presence, but it was typically 2-3 days a week with some scheduled collab time for teams in the office.
Not valid for everyone, but for me, in the office, I'm almost never at my desk anyway. I'm usually booked solid in meetings back to back all day, so I'm simply carrying a laptop from meeting room to meeting room until I sign off for the day. I don't care about having my own desk or even my own workstation.
I'm still for the full-time office model with maybe an optional day a week to WFH and with dedicated office space and necessary equipment for each employee. The hybrid models aren't going to work. Especially if by hybrid model we mean - here are some tables, carry your laptop with you all the time and plug in wherever you want on the days when you come in.
I personally am more than happy to give up a personal, permanent desk, to be able to WFH most days. Carting around photos, notebooks or knick knacks is an extremely small price to pay.
They'll have managed to totally wipe away any personal attachment people have to the space and even further treat people as commodity labor units. Just keep moving, don't stop working, and no space is stable or at all personal.
What is the quote again?
"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. " -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
If you work at Google, this is already pretty much your life. You will get moved up to a dozen times in your five year career there. Companies that feel they can work like this are already doing it, and companies that cannot handle the morale hit aren't. Google can do this kind of thing because they offer really good amenities in virtually any office that you work from that somewhat make up for the ephemeral nature of your desk.
This was my experience at a large corp as well. You just had your desk packed up and moved whenever there was a re-org or someone decided that your team needed to move elsewhere.
Thankfully they took your knick-knacks and set them up for you, so it wasn't a really big deal, but the idea of a permanent seat seems crazy to me.
Not having a permanent desk means that you need to find somewhere to sit when you arrive, and you need to leave the desk completely clear when you’ve finished for the day. This was how the last company I worked at functioned, and it was a nightmare (also pretty common in expensive cities like London).
Companies will not want to spend money on office space to seat 100% of employees when the hybrid model means that on any given day there’s only ~50% in the office.
As a senior software engineer in the embedded space, I haven't had to work full-time from an office since... 2003?
AFAICT, most engineers have the option to put in 1-2 days a week remotely, and in-office days can be significantly shifted(i.e. I know a guy who works 6am-3pm).
FWIW, I might personalize an office, but if I have a cubicle I keep it pretty sterile. I'd be happy to share a cube with another engineer provided there was a way to switch the configuration(monitor positioning, keyboard, mouse) fairly quickly.
Not applicable to me since I've been 100% remote for 3+ years, but prior to that I stopped personalizing my desk when I moved from a regular private office around 2008 to a gig with an open office.
If someone was to have said that giving up personalization was the price to pay for being mostly remote, I wouldn't have blinked and just asked where the garbage can was to dump my desk trinkets.
Would the mixed/hybrid model include hoteling? If not, what's the advantage to the company if they still have to provide a reserved office/cubicle/workstation space for each employee? One of the big arguments in favor of allowing remote work is that is saves the employer on facilities. While there are other benefits, mostly in terms of morale, the bean counters who have a lot of control over this aren't going to be happy if they have to both provide office facilities and support for remote work to the same person.
I'd be happy to work in a hub-coworking-office close to home. A joint kitchen area so I can socialize with people, and a small sound-proofed room for everyone to work on their own stuff. No point in everyone travelling to the same large building to work.
I like this idea. I miss being in a separate environment from home, and prefer being around other people. I don't want to give up the options remote work gives you, living in a smaller town, so I could see co-working spaces and hub offices and the like being popular in the future.
Yea, I'm pretty outspoken here about keeping a WFH option but thinking more about it, I don't actually care as much about specifically working from home as I care about "moving out of the Bay Area". If my company let me work from some co-working space or a remote office in SmallTown, USA, I'd jump at that, too.
Comments here seem to be missing the point. "Reopening" just means allowing people to come back to the office if they want to, but the cat is out of the bag and there is never going to be a practical way to force everyone to come back to the office. The biggest upshot of the pandemic for me personally is I was able to go work for a Silicon Valley company, except I live in Texas. And I'm not moving. I made it clear to anyone who ever tried to hire me that relocation is not an option. These companies took advantage to open up their nets to the entire country if not the world. They can't make their actual remote workers move, so there is no fair way to force the people who live nearby to come back. If some people get to work from home, you have to give everyone the option or they're going to revolt.
If they want to put an office near me, I'm glad to show up every now and again. But I'm sure as shit not moving to San Francisco.
Companies have to weigh the tradeoffs between whatever benefit you get from people being physically together when they're working versus the benefit you get from being able to hire anyone and not just people who either live within X miles or who are under 25 with no house and no family and will gladly move across the country for you without you needing to pay them seven figures for it.
I hope you're right, but all it takes is one economic downturn and we're all back to begging for whatever job we can get, willing to jump through nearly any hoop. Things can change a lot over the years. I hope you're right though. 20 years ago I had to wear a tie and slacks to work(embedded s/w engineer for Casio).
> These companies took advantage to open up their nets to the entire country if not the world. They can't make their actual remote workers move
Weirdly, when I interviewed somewhere pretty cool last fall they made it clear that this was an in person NYC role and I have to be OK with working in NYC (where I live, so it's not a real problem). It was a little odd to hear that from a tech company, tbqh. I ended up taking a different offer before we got to the end of that process, so I have no idea how that continues to shake out there.
Almost everyone I know has been working 20-30% more than usual in the last year, are available basically at any/all times (and weekends), and getting the same salary. Plus, we're paying for the electricity of our work laptops now, and fridge, microwave oven, etc. Plus, no more paying for expensive company trips and meetings in expensive hotels. The fact that you can hire basically anyone, anywhere, means more competition and more pressure on the employee to work more and expect less from the employer.
This is one of the only comments I've seen that so perfectly captures the raw deal WFH will actually end up being for most people. Also, salaries will go down, not up, as employers pressure employees to move to lower cost of areas or emphasize hiring in those areas.
In a lot of ways I dream of a job I could well and truly leave at the office.
My company’s campus very large, and the RTW plan involves a slow, phased rollout.
My assumption is that one important driver has been the company’s legal team. Imagine the potential workers comp claims if there are covid flareups directly traceable to your jobsite.
Huh, the companies in one of the highest cost-of-living (and thus highest cost-of-labor) places in the country, want to keep with the remote-only thing a while longer? Interesting. I'm sure this is nothing to do with "maybe we could take advantage of this to relocate a lot of our jobs to cheaper places". It's probably just "being safe". Because that's what motivates top executive thinking at large corporations.
Are they still "Silicon Valley firms" when the employees are spread out around the country, and world, or can we finally retire this tedious, self-perpetuating myth of the elite workers of the golden coasts of California and New York, doing incredible and smart things the rest of the world can scarcely understand?
Good riddance to the Valley. Maybe having everyone go home will create an actual diversity of opinions, not the myopic progressive echo chambers that give rise to one Facebook after another - keep up the stock value, society be damned, but make sure no one gets offended in the process.
Wait, I thought that California was good because it keeps all those progressive near each other and away from the other states. Do you want all that California money flooding into your cities property market? Are you ready for legal marijuana? Gasp! They might pass strong environmental regulations! Oh no!
One of the benefits of wfh is that we now do not work on the corporate network anymore. Since we have discovered code together features pairing is so amazing. You get to work together on the same problem. Not needing to sync over git, one person can work on the large line and instead of calling out small things to fix the other can just in place fix them. It is amazing.
Been doing a few interviews recently and the narrative I’m hearing is different. Most companies want to go back to the office because of “company culture”, and are very happy I’m still in the Bay Area. Personally I miss going to the office and seeing my coworkers and friends in person. If WFH works for you that’s fine, but it’s not for everyone.
> businesses do not try to cut the pay of remote workers
This sounds great in theory, but in practice I feel like it actually encourages and even rewards those that choose not to come in to the office. Which might not be inherently bad, but I don't think companies should be expected to do that if those aren't the things they want to reward.
Pay will be cut. It’s definitely the norm for any companies that are allowing WFH for new hires.
I have yet to interview with a company that offers a truly competitive SV TC while allowing the employee to be remote forever. Most every says, “you need to choose where you will be based as your pay is dictated on that, remote pays less than in-person in our SV office”. If you think you’re gonna get $400k+ tc in BFE, you’re mistaken. There are much cheaper people in Romania available to do that.
Honestly, I’d prefer full remote and full in person teams. I hate dealing with remote workers when the majority is in office and I hate being remote when the majority are in office. I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
> If you think you’re gonna get $400k+ tc in BFE, you’re mistaken
I'd like to solve the use case where a dev in Oklahoma makes $80k or a dev in Texas makes just above six figures while doing the same work. Maybe that helps clarify the problem. I can't accept that the delta is just for COLA and commute to work.
> I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
It works okay, as long as you don't have any grossly strong personalities on your team.
That sounds like a fantastic argument until you realize that this thinking allows Silicon Valley developers to move widely while a dev that retires in Oklahoma can go very few places, if anywhere, due to the delta.
> I'd like to solve the use case where a dev in Oklahoma makes $80k or a dev in Texas makes just above six figures while doing the same work. Maybe that helps clarify the problem. I can't accept that the delta is just for COLA and commute to work.
The delta is because $80k is the best option an OK resident has (or the best option the person selling money thinks the OK resident has, and same for TX resident at $100k. If the OK resident accepts $80k, then this shows the person selling money was correct.
Employers are selling money, employees are selling labor, if they agree to a price then both parties have agreed to what they think their best option is at that time.
> businesses do not try to cut the pay of remote workers
This is what I don't understand - company essentially gets a worker + office in one package and they think this is of lesser value than a worker in their office?
> businesses do not try to cut the pay of remote workers
Until businesses provide free transport to work and pay employees for their commute time I'd say it's reasonable to offer lower pay for remote work than on-premise work. This doesn't have to involve cutting pay but could rather take the form of a commuting subsidy or an on-premise bonus. The lack of a commute is a real tangible benefit and should be included in any compensation package.
Employees might get a benefit by not having to commute, but that isn't a cost the company has to pay. Just because people may find a pay cut worth it, doesn't justify companies cutting wages without a need just because they can, in my opinion.
On the other side of the coin, a fully-remote employee incurs the cost of maintaining a workspace. That's more square footage they have to buy or rent, then cool etc. That's a recurring monthly cost that company doesn't have to pay.
Companies that require employees to work from home, should pay them extra compensation for use of their property as their office. Probably they should be paying a comparable market rate to what would be the cost of renting an office space for that employee on the market.
I get that many employees find it very cool that they can WFH and just that fact makes them happy, but they forgetting that this way companies exploit them.
You are essentially sacrificing part of your home for the company you work for and you don't ask to be compensated for that?
If I could offload a portion of my utility bills, property taxes and so on onto my employer, proportionate to how much time I spend WFH I would be a very happy camper.
If you have equity as part of your comp for the company you work for you may disagree with this.
There's also a reasonableness part to any business relationship. The extreme entitlement of demanding work pay for your home because you're able to WFH during a pandemic just comes across as obnoxious.
It's like the employee that complains, "sushi again?!" in the free lunch cafeteria. Not everything is a zero sum game, your relationship with your employer doesn't need to be adversarial.
no, it doesn't need to be adversarial and that's not how I see it.
companies are merely a tool for extracting wealth. it's not a family. it has no emotions. it doesn't care about you, because it's a tool. so leverage it accordingly.
this doesn't mean you have to be nasty with people or unpleasant in any way.
Wealth can be created - the best companies create wealth and everyone gets a share. In that environment being petty over things like demanding a company pay for your WFH office just comes across poorly (imo).
I wouldn't want to work with someone going on about that. I personally find it tedious to work with colleagues that complain about things like that.
Good companies do care about their employees, because doing so enables the company to retain good people.
Companies are like functions, and the input is labor. Some are hyper-optimized functions that multiply the labor a million-fold. Others are bloated functions with hideous time complexity, barely producing enough value to justify their existence.
But what they all share is an absolute reliance on labor. No labor in, no value out.
People care about their employees and co-workers; companies cannot.
It's hard enough to WFH as it is (pandemic aside). I was surprised how rare and competitive fully-remote work was when I was looking for a job two years ago, especially once you try to be even a little selective in the work you'll be doing.
Making it more unpalatable to companies just removes the option entirely and we're stuck with the status quo.
I value my time so much that I've taken decreased pay to work fully remotely without Zoom meetings. Freedom is part of my compensation and not something you can buy retroactively.
Trying to squeeze some bonus fees from employers for a little justice boner does nothing for me.
There's a huge difference between petty hourly charges and WFH accommodations.
If I'm WFH forever, I need a larger living space with an office. It's been horrible the past year posting up in my kitchen, with the family running around the entire time. And since many companies are doing the 1-2 day in office hybrid model, it's not like I can just up and move to a cheaper area.
If my company forces me to WFH part-time while still coming to the office a couple of days a week, sure. If they let me go full time WFH I'll just move to a cheaper market and pocket the difference. Yes, they might adjust my salary, but that's a different issue.
> but they forgetting that this way companies exploit them
You forgetting one of the ways people are exploited is the commute time and associated costs that are not compensated for now, a few square feet of office space in the home is nothing compared to the lost time.
I agree that the workers should be compensated for commute time as well. I tried best I could to make use of that time - finding routes with a little changes as possible, getting some good tech books, a small laptop to practice things but after a while this is not sustainable. Even meditation is quite difficult in a full carriage.
The easing of bans without a vaccine is dumb. Once you have the vaccine, then you're free to go back to normal.
Without it, nothing has really changed.
Government policy around restrictions has been stupid since the beginning. It makes sense for companies to protect employees and wait for the vaccine - especially now that it's so close.
In California the vaccine is still restricted, but hopefully we'll get wide availability by the end of April. I've see lots of people on Twitter get it with nebulous pre-existing conditions. I wonder how many people are just lying.
This is still uncertain, but accumulating evidence suggests that vaccinated people are unlikely to spread the virus.
That said, masks will still likely be common for a while due to unknowns around variants and just the logistical hurdle of not knowing who has had the vaccine and who is lying about having it so they don't have to wear a mask.
If vaccinated people can still spread the virus why would a "critical mass" of vaccinations change anything?
Herd immunity relies on the fact that either having been vaccinated or recovered from the disease prevents you from spreading the disease to those that have not yet been vaccinated or can't get vaccinated.
A virus spreading to a pandemic level is a stochastic process. If you have enough people vaccinated, then there aren't enough carriers to push r over 1 even if unvaccinated people are catching and actively transmitting the disease. Doesn't matter at an individual level, but the restrictions are a societal issue due to lack of capacity for care and treatment.
Right so if you are vaccinated you are no longer a carrier and cannot infect those who are not vaccinated. If enough people get vaccinated they act as a barrier between the carriers and the unvaccinated, hence herd immunity.
Ah, I misunderstood your original question a bit. If the vaccinated were still acting as carriers, the critical mass would still be important (though I'd imagine the math would be different) because the window of transmissibility would be much shorter and drive R way down. Vaccine would mean less viral load, less viral load means less transmission overall. This seems less likely to me than what is actually happening (vaccine inhibits transmission), but I could picture mechanisms by which that would happen.
It’s not black and white “vaccinated = no longer a carrier”, but rather a gradient where vaccinated people have antibodies which reduce the amount of viral shedding to such low levels (some will be zero) that transmission is potentially an order of magnitude less.
Vaccines tend not to be 100% effective. The Covid-19 vaccines appear to be very good in real world use, but the less effective a given vaccine is, the larger percentage of the population you need vaccinated to stop the virus spreading.
That can get misscommunicated/misunderstood, and in addition lots of public health folks have been very conservative about saying anything that wasn't demonstrated in the trials, which didn't measure overall infection rates (they tracked symptomatic infections).
Data is finally coming out about overall infection rates in vaccinated people and they appear to be very low.
It's wild to me that in the trials they didn't test all participants (including asymptomatic people) when asymptomatic transmission is the reason we're in a pandemic.
I don't know - I'm also not the person that was arguing that.
I have pretty high confidence that if you have the vaccine you won't transmit the disease - I suspect the scientists are just being overly cautious because they don't have the data yet (though it is now starting to prove this out).
They don't have the data in part, because the trials did not test asymptomatic people. This means it's possible that some of the vaccinated people in the trial caught the virus, but at a reduced severity that was asymptomatic (but still transmissible).
Pretend that the vaccine reduced severity, but most people still caught it and were just asymptomatic. In that world, the vaccine wouldn't be enough (and the trials would not have revealed this). Since we know that some people who get the vaccine do catch the virus, but just have a mild case - it seems like a plausible outcome that others catch it without symptoms, but can still transmit it.
That said, it's looking like that's not the world we're in - and the vaccines do just stop you from contracting the disease in addition to reducing severity in the rare case you catch it anyway.
mRNA vaccines are new and given the asymptomatic transmission of the virus is why we have a pandemic, it's a reasonable thing to be cautious about (which is why I was surprised the trials only tested symptomatic patients).
According to this, most vaccines are as you describe:
"There are two main types of immunity you can achieve with vaccines. One is so-called 'effective' immunity, which can prevent a pathogen from causing serious disease, but can't stop it from entering the body or making more copies of itself. The other is 'sterilising immunity', which can thwart infections entirely, and even prevent asymptomatic cases. The latter is the aspiration of all vaccine research, but *surprisingly rarely achieved*." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210203-why-vaccinated-people-may-still-be-able-to-spread-covid-19
Side note—I wonder if these scientists were inspired by Spider-Man (1962):
"Nearly 40 years ago it was observed that sterilizing immunity against [Malaria] could be achieved by exposing human volunteers to the bites of irradiated mosquitoes carrying sporozoites in their salivary glands." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/sterilizing-immunity
The injectable vaccine prevents nervous system damage. The oral vaccine prevents transmission too.
The problem is that the oral vaccine is old technology and can revert to being dangerous. It’s rare but happens. So countries with resources gave everyone the IPV to protect them and then the OPV to eradicate the disease.
Tetanus is a partial example, too. The tetanus vaccine protects against the tetanus toxin but has no particular effect on whether you can have the bacteria replicate in your body. But tetanus isn’t transmissible, so this doesn’t matter much.
It'd be a logistical nightmare to setup validated testing and so on for tens of thousands of participants.
The studies coming out that did regular testing focused on easily reached populations (medical workers) that may not have been representative of the wider population (so not suitable for the trials).
Just collect data on the rate of infections of the members of the households of those in the study. Run an IV regression on the results. Since a significant fraction of transmission comes from those sharing a household, protection against asymptomatic transmission will show up in lower household infection rate among the vaccinated group.
Preventing severe infection is a fine endpoint though. A vaccine or treatment that does that is a minimum viable tool for moving forward.
Reduces deaths, reduces utilization of medical resources, etc, and then when it's a vaccine, it's pretty likely that it also reduces transmission. But it doesn't need to reduce transmission to be worth an awful lot.
AFAIK the impact of asymptomatic transmission is still under debate. The bigger danger seems to be presymptomatic transmission. But my info may be a few months out of date, would be interested if anyone has any sources saying otherwise?
Still though I agree it would have been useful to regularly test all trial participants - the US really could have done a lot better job with testing more generally.
Agreed. My Silicon Valley tech company had me start working from home on March 6. The valley was VERY early on shutdowns. It seems silly and insane to go back to in-office in a very hurried manner when, for most people, this is working fine. Daily infections are many orders of magnitude higher today than they were in early March of last year when there were only, what, a couple hundred cases in the entire STATE?
I won't discount how hard remote work has been for many people, but the fact of the matter is, continuing to do it for a little while longer is far less risky from the company's perspective than pulling the trigger in the first place, 1 year ago. It's largely been a successful move.
As for lying to get the vaccine, yeah. I'd say that once the 65+ population had been eligible for awhile, and the state opened it up to a lot more people, whatever moral hesitancy towards lying that there might have been, has largely evaporated. I've heard plenty about strategies, what vendors don't check.
I'm no in a huge hurry, so I'll wait. But that's just me.
Which part? I think the rollout has been quite good. Particularly compared to, well, most countries.
Every state and locality can have different rules, which I get is frustrating from a consistency and public messaging standpoint, but people get equally frustrated with a top-down approach where the rules don't make sense everywhere. Each locality has generally started with healthcare workers, old-age homes, and 65+.. beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted. shrug
It doesn't seem to be affecting the speed of vaccinations, which seems quite good, so I'm okay with waiting. I'm also somewhat okay with people jumping the line because at this point I think it's mostly important to get the numbers up, not gatekeeping.
I find it irritating that I'm waiting while others are lying to get it when I think it's time to open it up to general access.
I agree it's important to get the numbers up at this point, so just make it GA.
> "beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted."
Fair. Now that I'm having surgery in 3 weeks, and spending a lot of time in doctor's offices, I'm kinda wishing I had already gotten it. I guess there's still time for J&J, but not a multi-dose, not when avoiding 1 week before or after surgery timeframes.
> Government policy around restrictions has been stupid since the beginning.
I have friends that work retail floors who are required to work in person, but aren't considered essential, so no early vaccination. WTF?! Just because a job is deemed less useful, that doesn't make the people less susceptible...
<rant>
Corporate America has grown so greedy, so disconnected from reality, it hurts a lot of people without notice nor reprecussions.
</rant>
Don't get me started. My state (Oregon) has announced that the next wave of vaccinations will go to agriculture and food processing workers. I get why those industries are super important to protect from a supply chain standpoint, but it also seems insane to me that people in those specific positions get special treatment while workers in retail, restaurants, etc--who interact closely with potentially hundreds of human beings daily--won't get the vaccine until it's generally available to everyone. And if you're, say, a single food service worker in the city, it's not like you can afford to just choose not to go back to work.
From my mind, agriculture gets priority because food is important and harvesting is time sensitive.
Food processing gets priority because closures of large facilities due to outbreaks caused significant disruption last year. Kind of meh to reward an industry for having low spare capacity, but it is what it is.
Retail, restaurants, etc workers have higher risks, but disruption is limited. Maybe a restaurant has to close (and several did over the past year), but there are other restaurants. Same for retail, even supermarkets.
I think there's a limit to how many people you can prioritize over general population before people start really gaming the rules even though I know some people have been gaming the rules since the beginning. It's not reasonable to expect vaccination facilities to check patients' employment to determine priority, so it's going to be on people to follow them.
Also, many agricultural workers work in tight quarters with each other, often with no meaningful PPE (and are usually poor with little health coverage or ability to even take a day off during peak season). A relative almost died because his wife (who worked in food packaging) got it at work and infected the whole family. This was in Spain in the summer.
Actual agricultural work is rarely the ‘farmer driving his tractor in a big empty field’ - contract labor has pretty harsh working conditions in many cases.
What you're leaving out, and most states are, is the fact that these retail, restaurant, etc. workers may live with the vulnerable population (as is my case). My SO can't leave work (we need the money), but has to go on without a vaccine. We are each in our 30s, so no early vaccination (at least in Oregon), for young with underlying conditions.
My SO is protecting herself as best she can, but every time she comes home from work, she has to hope everything went perfectly and she's not bringing it home to me.
It's a bit like, "Shit, shit, shit! I was coughed on, talked to without their mask, etc. I hope all my protective gear holds up and my shower cleans me up before I see my SO," or more simply, "Shit, I hope today isn't the day I kill my SO." That's a LOT of pressure.
Oh and so you understand how dire our situation is: we live in/share a studio apartment.
Edit to add: The other industries have workers in the same situation too, I don't mean to disregaurd them. Those living with the (young && vulnerable) have to hope/pray/whatever they do everything right. And practically no state cares about that situation.
I live in Utah and remote work for a team predominantly in Pittsburgh.
Last week, the Governor threw open the sluice gates and announced general availability starting today, so I grabbed a vaccine appointment faster than you can say "RTX 3060 at MSRP". I just got my shot today... so I naturally wondered if I should start obsessively refreshing the Pennsylvania vaccine page like I had been the Utah one. I'm already bugging friends and family in Utah whenever appointments are open, so I figured I'd Slack ping the entire company once Pennsylvania general availability is announced. I go and check... and that state's still in Phase 1A.
Both states have similar per-capita vaccination rates - it's not like Pennsylvania is actually behind on shots, since the vaccine distribution in the US is based on state population. In Utah, we got 75% of 65+ before we opened it up to 50+ and people with pre-existing conditions; and about half of 50+ before today when we went to general availability. I say that the priority system did it's job: cases are down and the most vulnerable (old people) are protected. Every state should be moving to either general availability if they're at the same benchmarks, or at the very least an "anyone who can't work remote" standard (which would exclude my entire team, but w/e).
(The ideal vaccination system would be to specifically target superspreaders. If we could do that, then we could achieve herd immunity at really low vaccination rates. However, that's still speculative since there is no diagnostic criterion for that and "just forcibly vaccinate anyone who violated a mask order" probably isn't a great proxy for superspreading.)
Yeah, the entire population of UT is about half the population of the Philadelphia metro, and only about twice the population of the Pittsburgh metro, and that's not counting all the Penntucky between.
As a nominally-healthy, young(ish), 100% remote worker, I'm focusing more on facilitating the more-vulnerable/eligible to get vaccinated ASAP, both to protect them, and to keep that curve growing toward herd immunity.
The state of vaccine distribution/availability in California is pathetic. I'm a former thyroid cancer patient and since going through treatment a year and a half ago, I've become more susceptible to infections. Yet I'm not eligible for a vaccine since I don't have cancer currently.
Right? This idea that just because we're at the levels we were over the summer means we can open everything up is just insane. We're so close to the end of this so why risk it. Why do schools need to open right before the end of the school year? Certainly don't think theme parks and movie theaters (which are serving food) should be open. Ah well, I got my first shot yesterday so soon I wont have to worry about everyone else.
New infections isn’t the metric people care about - if young people get sick then there’s little harm. The metric is deaths, and MA is trending with its lowest new deaths from covid since nearly the beginning of the pandemic
"little harm" is an anodyne way to talk about people dying and suffering. Maybe not as many, but I sure as hell don't want to take my chances and catch it.
"Only" 2X deaths per day when cases are 5X per day is an improvement, but I am not rushing to eat indoors or go to a concert or gym. In fact, I am nervous as hell that loosened restrictions are going to increase spread the way they did last fall, and a bunch of people are going to get sick, suffer, and maybe die who wouldn't if we just buckled down for another month or two and got vaccinated.
Because schools should never have been closed. People keep talking about “the science” yet refuse to follow it when it’s been shown many times that schools are safe to open.
It’s not “the science” it’s the arguments. Throughout this pandemic “science” as authority has argued masks don’t work, or that they only work for healthcare workers, or that second order effects make it worse, or that it’s not spread via the air, etc.
The school arguments are similarly dumb. In an enclosed poorly ventilated space the disease will spread and infect parents at home.
I don’t buy that schools are somehow magic places not affected by this. Just because kids don’t have severe cases often doesn’t mean they don’t transmit the disease.
Unless there’s a compelling mechanism that suggests otherwise I put “schools are safe to open” alongside “masks don’t work” in the group of dumb arguments that don’t make sense when you think about it for ten seconds.
Well, the evidence from Europe (which mostly re-opened schools in Sept/Oct) would suggest that schools weren't a major source of transmission.
And to be brutally honest, closing bars and restaurants so that schools can open seems like a fair trade to me (and our child is six months old, so this isn't a self-serving argument).
For San Francisco anyways (where this article is more focused), vaccine distribution is moving at a fast pace: an estimated 39% of the eligible population has received atleast one shot. (https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/COVID-19-Vaccinations/a49y-... )
Probably because their employees can afford to bring lawsuits against their employers should they catch preventable COVID infections at work, or spread it to loved ones.
I'm really curious to see how this plays out, especially for larger Bay Area companies.
Every worker has their own preference about where they work best. If you don't allow remote work, how do you weigh the risk of losing good employees who don't want to return to the office? If you go remote-first, what about employees who really value the office? If you try to do a mix, how do you do it well? And there are other effects to think about, like on costs, company culture, and productivity.
As time passes after COVID is no longer a large risk
(which isn't guaranteed), I think we'll see tolerance for remote work decay at large companies. As fewer other companies offer flexibility for remote, the office will return across the board as the default.
I think the lasting change will be an increase in flexibility, though, like allowing WFH N days/week and more frequent exemptions for some employees to work fully remote. A few companies will recommit 100% to the office and a few will allow greater remote work, but the majority of employees at medium/large companies will again spend the majority of their time at the office.
I started the current job during pandemic. I had never been to office of current. Zoom interview and WFH until now. Kids are also schooling from home. Hence, I now have three office set ups in home. One for me and two for kids in 3700 sqft home.
At least for me, I don't want to spend 2 hours commuting.
Since, the job pays well, I will go to office if asked for it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] thread> Box Inc said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
That's probably the most reasonable timeline for tech workers. And even then, we'll probably see tepid support for that. Things aren't going to go back to normal in 2021.
The option to go as I please (which would probably average one or two days a week) would be excellent, though!
My general thoughts are that there are a few people that got strong armed into returning, but most that are back in the office are happy to be there.
I have extensive experience managing and working remote and non-remote and I've never seen any benefit to non-remote work. Productivity and creativity are higher with wfh and stress and burnout are way lower.
What I want is not another day sitting in a god forsaken office after sitting in crappy traffic but rather the ability to go have a coffee, grab some lunch or just hang out and "Talk shop" with people regardless of being direct co-workers, friends, peers and whatnot. Those are the kinds of people who called me, messaged me and asked me how I was doing. THe only other former co-workers who keep up with me are ones who quit and found new jobs too - it's like since we're not still suffering we're no longer friends and all too often we see that as fulfilling social interactions without question.
I guess with hindsight I actually see the "office" as anti-social - it creates bad/poor behaviors, people find solace in common suffering and 9 times out of 10 all of my co-workers were actually dicks who only showed up to work to avoid their unhealthy home life and again, with hindsight, I see they tried making me ancillary to their unhealth work life too.
hard to explain it in a small text box, but I guess i just see the office environment as extremely fake, demoralizing and depressing - even though i've had some great memories through it - i'd rather not be captive to sitting in a cubicle chair and actually develop much more rewarding, enriching and valuable experiences that translate to more productivity and creativity in the end.
Often times i don't even get to choose my co-workers and if I did, those teams are often short lived and i think that corporate disruption to things that matter on a human to human level is something we're refusing to challenge/change because "it is the way it is". I get thrown on a new team, and its not new friends, it's now colleagues to suffer with and build empty relationships.
To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out with friends on weeknights and weekends.
You are absolutely right that the office is a pisspoor substitute for real comraderie, and I wish people would stop conflating the two.
Personally I love working from home. It gives me a lot more flexibility, I have no commute, I have my dog with me, I can cook lunch or prep for dinner, I can do small chores on a break or to clear my head, I can take my dog on a walk, and the list goes on. That said I don't have kids and I have a home office. I was also fortunate to start WFH about 5 months before COVID hit so I was able to go out with friends and what not which totally satisfied my social needs, proving to me that any added stress while working from home now is caused by things other than WFH itself.
When I used to work in an office there were a number of people that were difficult to deal with and/or annoying to put up with. While I didn't go full WFH at that job I did get to the point where I was working 2 days a week from home and those days were glorious. Being able to pick who you are actual friends with (verses being forced in pretending to be nice to some truly toxic people) is so much nicer. I am friends with a handful of people at my new (WFH) company but that's because we both wanted to be friends and went out of our way to build the friendship not because we were forced to work together.
My hope is that people don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when this is all over and there is a choice of WFH or going back to the office. That said, it's not be for everyone/every job but one silver lining of this terrible last year has been a number of my staunchly anti-WFH friends talk about how much they have enjoyed it and how they want to continue it at least for part of the week if not fully.
About 11 months a year (~1 month for holidays). Around 160 hours a month. So 1760 hours a year. And about 88k hours over my entire lifetime.
That works out to <<10 full years>> of my lifetime.
If I'm not socializing at work, albeit a bit constrained by the professional environment, something is super wrong. Restricting socialization strictly to weeknights and weekends seems... super radical to me.
As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem, but they have mis-identified the root cause.
Well, we can complain about it, but it's a fact of life. It's almost like complaining that gravity drags us down :-)
Plus, for a lot of people does give them... something to do. A purpose, an activity, a place where they can use their skills and use their intellect.
It's hard to do this alone if everyone else is working. I guess you could try mingling with the rich people and join charities?
But I do try to exercise my empathy and recognize for some endeavors it's is useful to collaborate. I just wish that people wouldn't attribute intrinsic necessity of physically close collaboration where it is not warranted.
My purpose or activity, even after I'm financially independent will be writing software, something I can do without having to be in close contact with people I am working with, and I in fact am much more productive when I'm not.
And honestly, even at 40 hours a week, I still have a lot of time in which I've formed my best social relationships. My coworkers are nice people, I just have shockingly little in common with them outside of work.
I think your math actually suggests our way of life is actually extremely unhealthy with the assumption we should develop social systems at our places of employment that absolutely don't exist for any such activity.
We need those relationships - but the office way of work certainly isn't a healthy way to achieve them. People get fired, laid of, move to new orgs, get moved around, corporate policy is dictated from top down without regard to human experiences but rather bottom dollar value line.
Not saying it can't be done - but again - think back on all your working years - were many of your work relationships meaningful or just convenient? Do they know your family? kids? spouse? significant other? Do they wish you a happy birthday? did they call you during covid to see how your doing?
I've worked in shared offices for 20+ years and have made a lot of long-term friends through them.
That's an entire mini-lifetime I'd be giving my employer. And I don't think I ever will have to - I can force myself to be remote the rest of my working life. And that mini-lifetime is mine..and that's priceless.
I've had 1 or 2 coworkers out of hundreds I became any level of "friends" with, and the closest of whom I didn't even work directly with. Actually, one of the coworkers I'm friends with, I met in a remote team with us living across the country from each other.
As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis. I would personally not hire someone that can only work for 20 hours a week, there is too much to do.
Why would they care if the output was the result of fewer hours? If they wanted to pay me by the hour, they could have negotiated that.
At-will salaried employment cuts both ways :) and in this case, everyone is happy. Anyone wanting more hours out of me is just trying to exploit my labor. I'm already getting paid fair value for what I'm producing.
If you are hiring salaried individuals on the basis on how many hours they put in a week, then you might be focusing on the wrong metrics. There were plenty of people in tech doing 20 hours of work a week, and spending the remaining 20 hours on hacker news.
I bemoan WFH, but not because of work output.
When you're hiring make this known so people can do their own filtering on their end, as well.
I know I get a lot of benefit from not commuting, from being able to make a healthy lunch out of my fridge & from doing laundry when I would have been walking to the coffee shop.
If anything I “work” more remote than I ever did in the office.
Maybe consider contracting instead?
Just because you haven’t made friends doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t. On top of this, work friendships can just be that. Work friendships. Ones that last as long as you’re at that job, not all of them have to go outside of it. And that’s okay.
Also - it's springtime which means it's review season - the results are in and the entity paying me for my output is very happy with my output!
Some people have been really struggling with WFH and just can't make it work well for them, and they understandably want to get back to the office. That's great, and they should do it! But why not also let people who have been thriving under WFH continue to do it?
Maybe you're just making a joke and I'm not getting it.
Forget the fact that I don't have the space for a whiteboard in my home to begin with...
Very soon we will be adding viewer annotations (ability for remote viewers to add content/comments on your board). As you're facing your laptop during your remote presentation anyway, we've found that this works reasonably well. The augmented reality approach (via smart glasses or synchronized projectors) is also on the map but getting the timing right is much trickier. The UX of it is nothing short of magic but the market for people with glasses or synchronized projectors is fragmented.
As for your last note: you don't need a whiteboard! Flipcharts or electrostatic sheets are cost/space-effective alternatives. Also, you can simply point your camera at your notebook and scribble away. Indeed, many of us do this, it's very natural (though, admittedly, we're still getting some kinks out).
It took me a few years to realize the effects of loneliness and the lack of social interaction.
But I do have one extra point: if work is fully remote (i.e., every employee is remote) things work much much better than when only part of the team is remote. You need to at least make sure your manager is also fully remote.
Huh? The reason why offices of big tech companies are closed is SOLELY due to covid.
My first job in an open floor plan (really a trading floor setup), we would literally watch colds and other ailments work their way up and down the rows each winter.
I would be fine in the office in closed space with other people if it make sense for my work, regardless of covid.
If a "really small risk" is 545k people dead in a year in the US, even with all the precautions we have taken, I think we fundamentally disagree on what a really small risk is. There are now more dead from Covid in a year than the entire durations of both World Wars combined and in about a month or so, we can lump in Vietnam in there as well.
And his case, although is very possible, also need further investigation, is it really because the covid?
The number of death is highly inflated, that number include every case remotely related to covid. Also the US population has increased considerably compared back to word war.
Also lockdown can cause death too.
He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
so mask only work with influenza ?
>He was 100% fine before covid, then all of a sudden has chronic leg pains directly after which seem very consistent with blood clotting and nerve issues that covid causes?
Could still be coincide with something else. Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is. I know friends that got covid but recover fully.
>The excess deaths from all causes was up sharply in 2020, and correlates exactly with the start of the pandemic in 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores (remove the default countries, and just add the US- you will see an exact overlay with covid cases and deaths). How do you justify your claim?
The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
In the place that don't implement lockdown, the death chart look similar, how do u know if lockdown work ?
And by the way, death is not the only metric to go by.
Lets say you can reduce death number but in order to do that you increase misery, that would be suck, I certainly don't want that.
>You are being willfully ignorant, though I am glad you clearly haven't had this affect you in any way. I have two close friends that have lost parents to Covid.
I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself.
The lockdown has certainly affect me. I too have friends that suffer from the lockdown.
No claim was ever made that they are 100% effective. Vaccines are not 100% effective either, this does not mean they are ineffective.
> Could still be coincide with something else. Even if it covid that caused that, still need to how how prevalent this is.
Willfully ignorant.
> The lockdown also corelates with the start of the pandemic, how do u know its not caused by the lockdown ?
Because lifting restrictions is directly related to increases in cases, which is then directly correlated to the number of deaths? Willfully ignorant.
> I'm not blindly against lockdown, I'm againts lockdown because it doesn't make sense. It caused problem greater than the virus itself
We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
As for your last statement, you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. You don't want to wear a mask, you won't stay home, you... just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may. All the while claiming that lockdowns are ineffective while in your other posts admitting you didn't follow them [1][2]. "The thing doesn't work even though I didn't do it and I am fully aware it requires everyone's compliance to be effective." Sounds like you are ready to run for office as a Republican.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23817123 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191298
Correlation != Causation. Willfully ignorant.
>We might agree that there may be more effective ways to keep people separated than a full blown lockdown, balancing health concerns with people's needs, but at the time, it was the best tool in the toolbox- and outside the US worked well- New Zealand, for example, which is pretty much back to normal these days after a duration much closer to the first time period.
South dakota, sweeden don't have lockdown and they pretty much normal all these times. Florida has short lockdown, but they realized their mistake and quickly lifted it. They are normal too.
>you are certainly implying that your own inconvenience is far more damaging than the lives of others. '
No, lockdown affect a lot of people, not just me and its just not merely inconvenience.
> just want to let the people die and let the chips fall where they may
No, I never said that. I support reducing/preventing death as much as we possibly can, but trying to do so with causing so much damage that is bigger than the virus itself, I can't support.
As an aside, I kind of really like working in central time for a company operating in pacific time. Works well for my sleep schedule and gives me a couple hours of pure productivity in the morning before the rest of the company “wakes up.”
Yes, that's not going to happen.
Employees who were hired remotely during the pandemic, or even those who moved away during the pandemic, are not just going to move back once the pandemic is over.
It's especially clear for those who never lived in SV. These folks were happy to live and work locally in remote locations for their entire career so far. They chose to stay in their location for years, over moving to SV.
If you try to force them to move to SV, they'll just quit and continue working locally as they've done before.
I'm saying now that we're in the info age, we can do away with that and for the first time work from home or the environment of our choosing.
That's pretty much where I'm at. I like the idea of hopping into the office maybe once or twice a week to interact with my co-workers, but otherwise I'm extremely productive at home especially without having to endure the 1-2 hours commute.
I joined a company last last year and they moved to this hybrid model once they found there was practically no efficiency loss with respect to moving everyone to remote. But some people still missed going into the office so they re-opened their physical offices albeit at limited capacity.
how did they measure this?
We hit all, so no measurable loss on productivity.
Folks are overall more productive, yes, but at a cost of more hours worked. The marginal productivity and its rate of improvement is not as high.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/research/the-...
Specifically, if you’re in the 63% of people who want to “pop into the office sometimes,” and you come in on some random Tuesday.... is anyone else even there?
It seems like the probability of seeing the people you want to see by chance (when 83% are either always or usually remote) is very low.
So my guess is that for the hybrid thing to still have the social aspect of office work it probably needs to be paired with a policy like “we all come to work on Tuesdays.” But if you do that then the all-remote crowd isn’t getting what they want (they still need to live in travel range if they have to be in the office once a week).
So the alternative is to do something more like “we all come to the office for one week every quarter,” and in that case it’s more of a company retreat than normal work.
So as I said, I’m curious how things will unfold as life opens back up.
My best guess is we’ll end up converging on 2-4 different archetypical models which will become part of a company’s identity and recruiting pitch, and people will self select into the work style they prefer.
Your personal desks go away replaced with work stations / long tables where anyone can dock. It become more like a school libruary where everyone is working on different things .
Then you have these community meetings every few months where everyone comes in for a meeting but there are not enough work stations so everyone just hangs around until people trickle home.
My work are now looking at getting rid of a load of desks because they are expensive and unproductive.
Far better to spend the money on free beer for collaboration days.
True, but I think that range expands significantly if one comes in only once a week. Living 2 or more hours away might become reasonable, and even getting a hotel room once a week can easily pay for itself when taking into account housing costs.
I wish more companies were talking about the "we all work from the same place for a week or two" per quarter. It gives almost all of the flexibility of working remote along with much of the benefit of being in person. Plus as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
A few days per week in the office is the worst of both systems. Some remote workers and some office workers isn't a ton better.
Is the question phrased in a way that distinguishes between "working remotely as you have during COVID times" vs. "working remotely post-COVID"
I think it's important to distinguish that in the mind of the responder. At the very least, get people thinking in terms of "What would WFH be like if the kids were at school much of the day?" or "What would WFH be like if we could meet with friends at 17:30?" or whatever.
What we've experienced over the last year is far less social, and far more stressful than what WFH could be.
Personally, I'd like to WFH most of the time, with sprint & release planning sessions in person.
Your company has to pay for desk space and for meeting space?
Yes, I think that's an entirely reasonable expectation to be the norm. It's what was the norm/expectation when I started and I do not see a reason that should change. My boss has said that it will most likely be the expectation once it's safe to return to the office, so I am not alone.
> Your company has to pay for desk space and for meeting space?
Yes, actually. They aren't paying for my home office and it wasn't an expectation in the original employment contract. Further, we work with specialized scientific hardware. We need the space anyway.
* At home schooling * More people needing help at odd hours (nights/weekends) * Lots of normally well adjusted folks stressed/angry about minor things
That and there was a lot of corporate "make sure to take time for yourself" and "be realistic about schedules", however there were clearly roles/orgs where that was not an option.
I tend to be a fairly black-and-white thinker, so it's easier to envision 100% office or 100% WFH, and harder to get my head around a mixed arrangement. Particularly if that mixed arrangement means I don't have my 'own' desk and equipment in the office.
That said, even though I've done WFH in bits and pieces here and there, I've enjoyed WFH this past year a lot more than I thought I would. I'm thinking of my post-Covid schedule being in the office tues-thurs, so that I still have a consistent block of time where I'm going in "every day" for a few days, rather than every other day.
If creating new knowledge and processes is important to you you just have to invest time and money into it. I’m not sure what worker proximity has to do with this? To clarify (a simplified version of) my management approach is to find the current organisational bottleneck and remove it ad nauseam. This can drive immense amounts of new knowledge and processes creation.
I do think you write off the value of worker proximity too quickly though. Particularly many other comments in this thread are talking about the real struggles junior devs and interns are facing getting up to speed without in-person mentorship. Those are the long-term impacts I'm worried about. By moving to full WFH has an organization just broken their hiring pipeline and thus is now doomed to fail as people retire and they can't grow?
Judging from how academics across the world, and even across decades if not centuries create new knowledge all the time, I'd say it's not a barrier to work remotely, whether that's in time or space.
Silicon Valley has high salaries and very long commute times. But how does this apply to medium sized cities with low commute times and lower salaries?
How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
How productive is it for workers who have to work from home in their bedroom?
I’ve noticed this split in opinion from higher ups who have higher pay and thus have large, finished home offices versus others lower on the totem pole who don’t.
Also, I think WFH tends to isolate and stovepipe employees even more than they already were, which is a problem especially in larger organizations.
And the odds of fortuitous interactions drops dramatically while the latency for some red tape processes increases as well, since you have to fight an email chain with people with more and more disparate work schedules (and less tacit knowledge transfer and trust-building).
I think the narrative of WFH success is in many ways driven by the people for which WFH is a godsend due to really long commute times or having poor office workplaces (like open plan) and who either function well with very little guidance or who don’t but dislike the guidance.
But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
(Still a huge fan of having the option of WFH, but there have been massive productivity losses in my workplace from strict WFH requirements... in part because we do a mix of fundamentally physical lab work, not just sitting in front of a computer.)
I agree that a lot of people can't afford a full size home office. Nonetheless most of them will probably also only have a small cubicle or less at work.
My statement doesn't negate what you said, but do keep this perspective in mind also.
That's the definition of a senior developer and senior employees.
For junior developers I've worked in pre-covid with juniors in wfh environments and success rates are lower. For everyone 1 developer who finds there way you have another who can't setup there environment. If someone held your hand in school or if you relied on working together I could see things falling apart quickly online. I feel like the new grads will have wfh school experience from this year will adapt well.
I’ve had a couple interns lately, and the WFH experience with them has been much less successful than past in-person internships have been. They’re able to basically moonlight on a remote project, and there has been actually MORE handholding required as it’s much harder to judge when they’re struggling or if they have things under control. There are a lot more non-work distractions for them and they have developed less camaraderie between each other as lunch times, social activities, and fortuitous interactions have been rarer. The lack of established trust also has significant overhead.
So I agree that this is in many ways a senior vs junior and a maturity divide, however these are digital-native students and they’re still struggling, so I’m not sure I agree it’s going to get much better. I think some of the WFH productivity gains are coasting on pre-pandemic trust and implicit knowledge transfer that aren’t happening as much any more. You can see how hard it is for young people in particular by seeing the drops in performance due to school-at-home.
(However, WFH is indeed forcing some familiarity with remote work for many institutions that resisted technology and teleworking arrangements, so there definitely has been some improvement in some areas. It has been a godsend for some people, and that will be a lasting benefit of 2020’s forced WFH experiment.)
What advice would you give to an intern's mentor to improve the remote internship experience?
Also remember that interns don’t have a home office and most are in their bedroom at the same desk they relax and play games at. It doesn’t feel like I’m actually at work unless there’s frequent interaction
Of course, if I were a better intern, I would have taken care of a lot of those things myself, but I think it's better practice as a mentor to start with the metaphorical bowling bumpers up and then relax the oversight as the intern proves themselves capable over the 3 months.
Doing it again this summer, I plan to ask for at least 3x weekly 1:1s (e.g. MWF) and to make sure I have code reviewed in the first week or two of the internship. More interaction with other interns would also help, especially technical interaction and not just high-level discussions of our projects. I also think it would be cool to do some sort of pair programming / spectating where I watch the mentor work through a problem to get a sense of what the professional workflow actually looks like.
MOST technology knowledge involves a good deal of tacit knowledge which an only be transmitted person-to-person in an intern/mentor/supervisor mode.
So simpler tasks that have zero barriers-to-entry for automation can be done without this. But for more complex stuff, not so much. This is the same for B2B sales - that will ALWAYS be person-to-person - it simply can't work via e-commerce like selling books or CDs on Amazon.
Often you don't even know what questions you need to ask, and the give-and-take of a 1:1 face to face meeting provokes all sorts of useful tangents.
Also, an existing vs new employee thing (which is not the same). I'm doing fine with WFH because of the relationships I have built here over the last 5 years and my knowledge of the company culture/organization/processes. If I were a new employee (even coming in as a senior level experienced hire) I would not have any of that and it would be far harder to get established. Usually by the 5 year mark I'm looking to hop, but I've been holding off for exactly that reason.
This was something I wanted to do as well - only to find out that the local coworking doesn't let you do calls in the space - you have to walk out into halls or limited number of "booths". And I found this common in coworking spaces around here. Which is a stark contrast with how open layout offices I worked in worked (you were expected to keep noise down to tolerable levels but if you didn't want to be disturbed by noise you had headphones).
The idea sounds excellent - I live 5 walking from a nearby coworking space that's really well equipped - but in practice it's not ideal. + having to leave my equipment around strangers isn't the best either and I don't want to meet randoms in a coworking space before I can feel comfortable leaving a wallet on the desk when going to the toilet.
I might end up renting a private office there - but the smallest office they have is 2 people and that's a lot more expensive than a coworking desk.
I agree with everything else you said - I love walking out with my wife and son around lunch time and flexible work hours are much better - I tend to be most productive later in the day anyway - which usually meant I spent mornings in the office socialising and procrastinating and then having to work late - I get to spend that time with my family now.
Wildly distracting and frustrating when people do this.
No noise canceling headphones do not block out voices.
This is why that old, stuffy, sclerotic behemoth named IBM used to have individual offices with doors.
Funny that.
People who thought they could talk as loud as they want / hold an impromptu meeting by your desk and thought it was your problem to sort out if you didn’t like it are a lot of the reason why I hated open plan offices so much.
It is like that when people go there to socialize. It is different if company culture treats offices as places to work in.
I don't have a home office either and no one would confuse me with being poor. Until COVID, I had no use for one.
As somebody who seems to be in a leadership position, you need to realize that building relationships and improving morale are part of your work.
Sorry just want to nitpick - this really has not a whole lot to do with MBAs or any degree specifically. I think it would be a little bit more beneficial to swap MBA with management. Many of the things you're discussing are true of engineering managers, researchers with PHDs, and accountants and not specifically one group of people with one degree - they don't run the whole world and have exclusive ownership of "all the bad decisions".
Blaming MBAs for how companies behave is like blaming people with software engineering degree for writing buggy code. Not having people with MBA degree won’t magically make your company better, same as employing developers without a diploma won’t magically make your product more stable.
There are some cases where it actually is perfectly ok to extract value from a business before winding it down. But that doesn't mean that all of a sudden anybody with an MBA degree is some sort of ruthless capitalist.
I got an MBA because I wanted to learn more about business, network, and hopefully adjust my own personal career path.
I can say for Fisher (Ohio State) we spent a lot of time focusing on not just great ways to make money or improve a business, but on people too. At least that was my experience. I'd guess if you spend a lot of time around "ruthless MBAs" you should take a look at what universities they're coming from and see if they have anything in common.
That’s the main problem I have with MBA sentiment here. Somehow knowing about something is bad. That’s a very naive viewpoint.
It indeed is. Just the other day, when the news came out that Backblaze is sending private info to Facebook, the top comments on HN were along the lines of "I guess some MBA decided it was going to make more money, so they did it."
It really takes a special level of blind hatered to blame an MBA (where there is no evidence one was involved) for sending one's information to a company founded and lead by a Harvard computer science major. But yes, let's blame all ills in this world on MBAs.
EDIT: Another example I remember was that commenters here started the usual MBA-bashing on an article about how GE's financial engineering became their downfall, until other pointed out the person behind it was GE's former CEO, whose BSc, MSc, and PhD are all in chemical engineering.
But you most of the time need also basic knowledge of fundamentals, and that can be enough to be just ok at your job.
I read this and think damn I've had a proper job that I worked at for years before doing my MBA (which I did while working) + 4 years on active duty in the military - and I've really struggled in the job market as it pertains to working at some top companies or startups and it scares me to think maybe I'm getting outcompeted by other MBA program graduates that haven't even held a job before. Not that they can't be capable, but still....
I can't even get a job or interview as a product analyst at this point. No "1-3 years of formal product experience" on my resume... guess I could never do that job! (sorry /rant I've been going through a rough patch with this lately)
I don't have an MBA myself but I've been asked to write a number of recommendation letters to business school over the years.
https://teach.com/resources/how-to-get-into-business-school/
It seems in general one needs a degree, a passing GMAT, 2-3 years experience and a recommendation letter.
But then again, maybe successfully gaming the entrance to business school is how one demonstrates they're ready for a leadership position in the business world... Just kidding. Kinda ;)
[1] https://poetsandquants.com/2019/10/25/these-companies-hired-...
Not saying MBAs have a ton of practical experience going in, and I wouldn't be surprised if the professors are pretty far removed from any practical experience. But I also don't think it's accurate to say most MBAs haven't worked a real job before. [At least not most MBAs that the average SWE on HN would encounter. People that got an MBA from Random U because they didn't know what else to do are probably not being hired at major tech companies.]
Now a lot of the time its gamed for points on immigration systems.
I didn’t experience a lot of what you described in my MBA program as an engineer, though. Usually it was the opposite, but I think that comes with the maturity of the program I was in where you knew that not only was engineering important and valuable, but so were sales, accounting, nursing, and all sorts of other disciplines.
I think there's a current trend -- perhaps not entirely unjustified -- of skepticism towards academic elitism and a bit of a divide, in the U.S. at least, between those in ivory towers who issue edicts, and boots on the ground. Not taking a side, here, especially being that I'm in management.
I do have to say, when I hear of "ethicists" and I recently spoke to someone who taught "medical ethics" while at Google they fired a controversial "AI Ethicist" I have to raise an eyebrow. Ethics are morals. Somehow someone studied them and can tell us the correct ones. Maybe I've mischaracterized this in my head, but it sounds awfully similar to a priesthood.
It doesn't feel that way though because having an MBA doesn't guarantee a minimum floor of capability. There is no such thing as losing your MBA for making a dumb decision.
I believe MBAs are going to love this new world order. The privilege to show your face in the office will become a sign that you've "arrived" and all your time before that will be working towards that privilege.
Any office will be the new corner office.
Related to that I’m interested how office cliques will work. It’s pretty damn easy to exclude someone if everyone is working from home. Unless they are scouring calendars they may not even know they were left out of an important meeting. Seems like a nightmare for a office with more passive-aggressive types.
Face-to-face conversations have such a huge latency/throughput advantage over online discussions that the remote employees are typically left out of the loop.
(At least, that's been my observation at dedicated remote vs hybrid companies. Maybe things will change post-pandemic, but I'm not optimistic.)
Offer remote work and then offer no advancement opportunities until they quit, so you don't take the unemployment hit. Voila, you have shifted the costs unto them to go find a new job.
The large organization I am consulting at right now had a larger than average number of employees (also higher level employees) quit over the lockdown which has given management the idea that WFH frays the social ties and makes it easier for people to consider leaving.
It does fray social ties. We're social beings, made for face to face interactions. That's how we operate. There's a reason almost every language has a proverb along the lines of "out of sight, out of mind".
For others they prefer their co-workers over forced social socializion due to family relations.
> For others they prefer their co-workers over forced social socialization due to family relations.
Honestly, these are the co-workers I hate being around the most as they treat you like an outlet for not just social contact but often therapy or venting about their family. I literally never want to hear about a co-worker's terrible marriage (for an example I've had to deal with quite a bit).
Only in a narrow sense. If anything employers in our industry tend to deliberately encourage employees to socialise (within reason): casual contact is important to help different parts of the org chart break out of their silos, liminal spaces are an important route for information that might be suppressed over normal channels, and almost everyone knows at some level that you can't do 40 hours of productive programming per week. The way I see it, a certain amount of socialising on the clock is win-win.
> One of the problems is the 8 hour work day. I don't want to be forced to spend 40+ hours a week with co-workers. That is why people aren't having healthy social lives. Work is draining their time and energy.
I don't disagree, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Given that I do have to work 8 hours/day, I'd rather humanise that time as much as possible than refuse out of some sense of accelerationism.
Wfh definitely isn't accelerationism (or perfect). It's just a chance to live somewhere less oppressively expensive and have less surveillance from your employer all day. It's up to the individual to take advantage of that. If socializing is important to them, there are more opportunities to do it, it just takes a bit more work but I would argue the results are much healthier and more natural than relying on work and centering relationships around working.
Many would argue that eating right and exercising is healthy, yet 30%+ of people in developed countries are overweight and the percentage is increasing.
At some point we have to accept reality. People are flawed (yet they somehow manage to live their lives :-) ).
Plus, people still work 8+ hours a day, so you can't really interact much with friends.
The main thing you win is geographically, I guess. No more time lost in commute plus maybe less time lost meeting with friends because you don't have to go from the office to the meeting place (though that will obviously depend on how far your friends are from your home).
I'd also describe the office as anti-social as I would not voluntarily spend my time with the majority of my co-workers and having to be around them day in and day out is extremely draining and demoralizing. I find surrounding myself with people I actually care about and have real bonds with to be far more positive.
Is that a perfect fix? No. But many remote friendly companies are already doing something like that. In 2020 people didnt really have a choice and many had kids at home. That is not a normal WFH situation for many.
Similarly, people who homeschool their kids often remind others that having your kids at home learning remotely because the school is closed, is not the same as the usual homeschooling. (And similarly, many of them hope that current experience will make more people consider homeschooling as an option.)
For YEARS now, the #1 most reliable way to see your username on the front page of HN is to post a link about David Heinemeier Hansson promoting remote work, or a story skewering Marissa Mayer for squashing it at Yahoo.
It's only after 12 months of sitting at home in our sweatpants going crazy, that I'm starting to see more people discuss offices a bit wistfully.
There is a huge difference between advocating for the option to WFH for yourself and arguing to force everyone to WFH. Few if any are advocates for the latter.
The thing is, 100% WFH means that you probably kneecap your career if the others don't do the same.
Mixed environments are significantly more difficult to sustain. FTF discussions are such big wins when it comes to volume of information shared and ability to quickly redirect to other topics as needed, that the employees who are remote will often find themselves cut out of the loop entirely.
So, given the choice, I'd much rather work for a remote-only company than be left out of the important conversations. It's not a deliberate decision to exclude the remote workers, it just happens naturally.
(As I said elsewhere, it's possible that will change post-pandemic, but I think that it's mostly an inevitable outcome of the typical office dynamics.)
Remote-first companies have specific policies about meetings and unscheduled conversations. For example, all meetings must be announced, available over video, recorded, with a write up at the end. All spontaneous chats happen over email, slack, or a wiki to make sure they are documented.
This levels the playing field for anyone working remote, so that they aren't completely isolated or left out of important decisions by those in the office.
That's just anti-human. I'm all for working from home but people in the office are going to chat just as the people working from home are going too. The bitch sessions about the boss just happen in the 1 on 1 video calls.
REI sold their corporate campus in a move to 100% WFH:
We have made the decision to pursue a sale of our buildings and land in Bellevue’s Spring District—and, with that sale, to step toward a new model for our headquarters that will better serve the way we live, work and act as a force for positive change.
Remote working will move from a temporary solve to a more engrained, supported, and normalized model for many of our headquarters employees.
Target recently sold its downtown offices as well:
Minnesota-based Target says that flexibility is behind the decision to shut down the company's City Center operation in downtown Minneapolis, and relocate 3,500 employees to other locations in the city and elsewhere.
"None of us knew what the future would hold or how long we’d be working from home, but in just one year we’ve proven that we can drive incredible results, together, from our kitchens and basements and living rooms," Kremer wrote in her email.
With the end of the pandemic hopefully in site, Kremer says Target is moving toward a hybrid system called "Flex for Your Day" that will incorporate both virtual and on-site work and collaboration when employees "gradually return to headquarters later this year."
Capitol One is doing the same thing:
Capital One Financial Corp. said the majority of employees at its U.S. call centers for cards will work from home even after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
For the rest of its staff, the card giant extended remote operations until the end of March, according to an internal memo. Capital One had previously said employees would work remotely until at least the end of this year.
At the end of the day markets are efficient. Some will make mistakes and loose, some will do the right thing and prosper.
Don't worry: It won't be the last time it happens. How many shops have I heard say they are "Just like Google" only to find out that what they mean by that is that they have beanbag chairs?
> But it's potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it's a bad idea.
They'll learn that they need a higher caliber of employees to make it work. Incidentally, these employees are also now hirable by competing SV firms that can and will outbid them.
That depends. As an ex-FAANG employee, I happily add a sizeable premium to my salary at the prospect of working at one of those again.
Yea, i'm very pro-WFH, but i've built my life around it. I own a house with an office. I can't imagine trying to WFH on a couch or some desk in my living room while my wife cooks/watches TV/etc.
With that said i still hope people see more chances to WFH, and can start buying/renting homes with this in mind. I have a three bedroom house, turned into 2 offices 1 bedroom, and it worked wonderfully for my wife and I during these WFH times. My wife fwiw was not a WFH person before Covid, but she is currently, and she has adapted quite easily with a dedicated office. One of her coworkers however lived in a tiny apartment with two children and no office. Her QOL was miserable.
Who doesn't have open plan offices? There are about three people left in the tech industry these days who still have a private office.
> But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
Working in an open plan space is simply inferior to working remotely, except in rare cases where your team is in a bullpen and working full time on a specific project together. It's inferior for engineers because of distractions, and it's inferior for the company because of real estate costs.
However this is all predicated on open office being a layout where your desk is made of wood, hardwood flooring instead of carpet, your coworkers Aeron is 5’ or less from yours, massive windows close by, and there aren’t any forms of walls other than computer monitors. Cubicles require me to attend therapy.
Unfortunately introverts are not well represented in management or the types of people who make decisions about seating.
Also unfortunately, many (most?) software developers are introverts.
I absolutely despise open office plans. I can't work in them.
My productivity shot an incredible amount as soon as I had no choice than to work from home in March, and everybody else in the office. Saved 2 hours a day. And I can use my own bathroom... that alone is worth it.
This is the opposite of my personal experience. The energy of other people distracts and interrupts. Collaboration that interrupts focused solo work has rarely if ever been a net gain.
I think there is a happy medium, where maybe offices cut back to about 25% capacity or so. People would instead drop in and work like a university library. You could go there and print stuff out if you didn't have a printer at home. If your laptop blew up, you could go there and get a replacement from IT. If you preferred, you could rent out a substantial desk with several monitors and a good chair if you didn't have the space at home, or focused better in that environment. You could schedule in person meetings with your team in a well appointed conference room if you wanted. You could host social events. Maybe even a gym or childcare facility. I think that's my ideal for the office environment going forward: less a sweatshop and more a clubhouse.
I'm not sure how many tech workers didn't already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home but I have to imagine it's a miniscule number.
> I've never heard of a business offering a stipend or remote assistance subsidy of any sort to their workers to cover any of this, from whatever great savings are reaped from saving on real estate costs.
My company does, I'm sure it's become pretty standard lately.
I thought the same as you, and then I saw a lot of people at work not have home setups, either because of space or other reasons. It was surprisingly common!
Once again, in SV/NYC/etc very few due to real estate costs. Most of my peers who aren't married have room mates.
Sure, but it's your personal desktop computing arrangement -- not the company's.
With WFH, the company is effectively renting that space from you so you can work in it, but you're charging them $0.
The peace of mind knowing that these guys already had remote engineers before the pandemic and a good workflow, and having a job that is officially and permanently remote is absolutely worth a few thousand bucks to me.
I was dreading going back to the office, even if only a day or two a week.
Counting the commute I would have otherwise been going back to with my previous company that was super excited to get asses back in seats, I'm probably actually getting paid more per hour of my time dedicated to work activities.
I bet if you actually considered the commute as part of your paid time to calculate an hourly rate, a lot of people probably come ahead when switching to wfh despite "renting their space" or whatever.
I recall Shopify was in the news early last year for offering employees $1000 stipend for WFH supplies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-shopify-gives-em...
I switched jobs during the pandemic. My previous job offered $25/mo extra to help cover utilities, $250 to cover any wfh purchases and let me borrow any office supplies, including monitors, chairs, etc... Although this company instituted a 20% pay cut for 3 months which made that all seem very silly.
My new company is doing practically the same thing, but without the pay cut and is much less strict about the type of WFH purchases.
My commute was only ever a 10-15min bike ride, but Ive personally benefited greatly from the WFH switch and my productivity has been through the roof. I definitely agree with you that maintaining some space to meet and work would be nice.
Oracle is one company in the Valley with private locking offices with permanent full soundproof doors and outside windows with mountain views. I had one as an intern!
"Simply inferior" is a bit of a bold statement. Lots of people want to go back to their office for various reasons. For me it's wanting to see my co-workers (which are my friends at this point) in person every day. It's certainly not rare.
There's a big range from true open-plan space (long tables with employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder next to each other) to private offices with doors.
Somewhere in between are traditional "cube farms" which provide some amount of semi-privacy, less distracting nightlines, noise reduction, and feeling of personal space. Most of the companies I've seen are still more like this.
I know lots of 'lower totem pole' employees with a nicer WFH setup than many managers.
From what I've seen, there is a more significant reason higher ups like WFH. PG wrote an essay about the creators schedule versus the managers schedule. A managers schedule (the higher ups) spend their day flip flopping between meetings during each hour increment. Imagine having to walk/transport to a different building on/off campus for a new meeting a many times a day. It can take a lot of valuable time & potentially be exhausting. In WFH, you just click a new link to join a zoom meeting. Much more convenient.
The people doing the low level work such as coding tend to be younger. They are looking to make office connections and define their career path. Working out of an office allows for progression in both.
But here's a fun question: If you aren't permanently in the office, do you need a personal, permanent desk in the office? Because that is going to be the first cut that comes when we all "go back, some of the time". And half the people I pose this question to get upset about it.
My own prediction is that teams are going to book sets of desks together the same way we book meeting rooms. They're shared and you'd better have a reservation.
But "your" desk with your photo of the spouse and kids, your knick-knacks, your notebooks and "your" monitor? I doubt you'll ever have that again.
It's actually amazing how everyone in favor of offices only ever talks about how it's better for socializing!
Have you ever worked on a facilities team? When a company removes a provision like an personal office and moves to open office layouts they also rationalize their facilities spending. Theoretically, it's easier to clean and maintain the space. More often it's an excuse to find a way to pay less.
I'm not convinced that employees or facility operators are motivated enough to deliver your vision of your stuff being at your desk in any sort of reasonable way. I can't imagine folks being comfortable with packing and unpacking their stuff regularly. For a lot of people, although not me, having people touch their stuff is the root problem. Having different people pack and unpack this regularly would be a nightmare for them.
In fact, the mouse and main notebook would probably go in their backpack.
They already had a heavy work from home presence, but it was typically 2-3 days a week with some scheduled collab time for teams in the office.
What is the quote again?
"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. " -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Thankfully they took your knick-knacks and set them up for you, so it wasn't a really big deal, but the idea of a permanent seat seems crazy to me.
Companies will not want to spend money on office space to seat 100% of employees when the hybrid model means that on any given day there’s only ~50% in the office.
AFAICT, most engineers have the option to put in 1-2 days a week remotely, and in-office days can be significantly shifted(i.e. I know a guy who works 6am-3pm).
FWIW, I might personalize an office, but if I have a cubicle I keep it pretty sterile. I'd be happy to share a cube with another engineer provided there was a way to switch the configuration(monitor positioning, keyboard, mouse) fairly quickly.
If someone was to have said that giving up personalization was the price to pay for being mostly remote, I wouldn't have blinked and just asked where the garbage can was to dump my desk trinkets.
If they want to put an office near me, I'm glad to show up every now and again. But I'm sure as shit not moving to San Francisco.
Companies have to weigh the tradeoffs between whatever benefit you get from people being physically together when they're working versus the benefit you get from being able to hire anyone and not just people who either live within X miles or who are under 25 with no house and no family and will gladly move across the country for you without you needing to pay them seven figures for it.
Weirdly, when I interviewed somewhere pretty cool last fall they made it clear that this was an in person NYC role and I have to be OK with working in NYC (where I live, so it's not a real problem). It was a little odd to hear that from a tech company, tbqh. I ended up taking a different offer before we got to the end of that process, so I have no idea how that continues to shake out there.
Why the hell would they open up again?
In a lot of ways I dream of a job I could well and truly leave at the office.
I'm curious how it'll play out in the long run.
My assumption is that one important driver has been the company’s legal team. Imagine the potential workers comp claims if there are covid flareups directly traceable to your jobsite.
Yet imho that exists nowhere in the US. Companies might as well provide a car to commute in
Good riddance to the Valley. Maybe having everyone go home will create an actual diversity of opinions, not the myopic progressive echo chambers that give rise to one Facebook after another - keep up the stock value, society be damned, but make sure no one gets offended in the process.
- people get equal access to important projects
- businesses do not try to cut the pay of remote workers
- in office folks work to be inclusive of their remote counterparts
I now have a multi-office hybrid team and these are the things I'm focusing on.
This sounds great in theory, but in practice I feel like it actually encourages and even rewards those that choose not to come in to the office. Which might not be inherently bad, but I don't think companies should be expected to do that if those aren't the things they want to reward.
I have yet to interview with a company that offers a truly competitive SV TC while allowing the employee to be remote forever. Most every says, “you need to choose where you will be based as your pay is dictated on that, remote pays less than in-person in our SV office”. If you think you’re gonna get $400k+ tc in BFE, you’re mistaken. There are much cheaper people in Romania available to do that.
Honestly, I’d prefer full remote and full in person teams. I hate dealing with remote workers when the majority is in office and I hate being remote when the majority are in office. I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
I'd like to solve the use case where a dev in Oklahoma makes $80k or a dev in Texas makes just above six figures while doing the same work. Maybe that helps clarify the problem. I can't accept that the delta is just for COLA and commute to work.
> I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
It works okay, as long as you don't have any grossly strong personalities on your team.
The delta is because $80k is the best option an OK resident has (or the best option the person selling money thinks the OK resident has, and same for TX resident at $100k. If the OK resident accepts $80k, then this shows the person selling money was correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
Employers are selling money, employees are selling labor, if they agree to a price then both parties have agreed to what they think their best option is at that time.
This is what I don't understand - company essentially gets a worker + office in one package and they think this is of lesser value than a worker in their office?
Until businesses provide free transport to work and pay employees for their commute time I'd say it's reasonable to offer lower pay for remote work than on-premise work. This doesn't have to involve cutting pay but could rather take the form of a commuting subsidy or an on-premise bonus. The lack of a commute is a real tangible benefit and should be included in any compensation package.
Let’s not get overly greedy.
There's also a reasonableness part to any business relationship. The extreme entitlement of demanding work pay for your home because you're able to WFH during a pandemic just comes across as obnoxious.
It's like the employee that complains, "sushi again?!" in the free lunch cafeteria. Not everything is a zero sum game, your relationship with your employer doesn't need to be adversarial.
companies are merely a tool for extracting wealth. it's not a family. it has no emotions. it doesn't care about you, because it's a tool. so leverage it accordingly.
this doesn't mean you have to be nasty with people or unpleasant in any way.
I wouldn't want to work with someone going on about that. I personally find it tedious to work with colleagues that complain about things like that.
Good companies do care about their employees, because doing so enables the company to retain good people.
But what they all share is an absolute reliance on labor. No labor in, no value out.
People care about their employees and co-workers; companies cannot.
Making it more unpalatable to companies just removes the option entirely and we're stuck with the status quo.
I value my time so much that I've taken decreased pay to work fully remotely without Zoom meetings. Freedom is part of my compensation and not something you can buy retroactively.
Trying to squeeze some bonus fees from employers for a little justice boner does nothing for me.
cool, good for you. I'm happy to take the money while you sleep easier at night.
Or maybe have some dignity? How simply demanding a payment for use of your property is greedy? I don't understand this logic.
If I'm WFH forever, I need a larger living space with an office. It's been horrible the past year posting up in my kitchen, with the family running around the entire time. And since many companies are doing the 1-2 day in office hybrid model, it's not like I can just up and move to a cheaper area.
You forgetting one of the ways people are exploited is the commute time and associated costs that are not compensated for now, a few square feet of office space in the home is nothing compared to the lost time.
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/income-and-deductions/ded...
The easing of bans without a vaccine is dumb. Once you have the vaccine, then you're free to go back to normal.
Without it, nothing has really changed.
Government policy around restrictions has been stupid since the beginning. It makes sense for companies to protect employees and wait for the vaccine - especially now that it's so close.
In California the vaccine is still restricted, but hopefully we'll get wide availability by the end of April. I've see lots of people on Twitter get it with nebulous pre-existing conditions. I wonder how many people are just lying.
Only after a critical mass of people are vaccinated, otherwise vaccinated people can still spread the virus to those who are unvaccinated.
That said, masks will still likely be common for a while due to unknowns around variants and just the logistical hurdle of not knowing who has had the vaccine and who is lying about having it so they don't have to wear a mask.
Herd immunity relies on the fact that either having been vaccinated or recovered from the disease prevents you from spreading the disease to those that have not yet been vaccinated or can't get vaccinated.
That can get misscommunicated/misunderstood, and in addition lots of public health folks have been very conservative about saying anything that wasn't demonstrated in the trials, which didn't measure overall infection rates (they tracked symptomatic infections).
Data is finally coming out about overall infection rates in vaccinated people and they appear to be very low.
I have pretty high confidence that if you have the vaccine you won't transmit the disease - I suspect the scientists are just being overly cautious because they don't have the data yet (though it is now starting to prove this out).
They don't have the data in part, because the trials did not test asymptomatic people. This means it's possible that some of the vaccinated people in the trial caught the virus, but at a reduced severity that was asymptomatic (but still transmissible).
Pretend that the vaccine reduced severity, but most people still caught it and were just asymptomatic. In that world, the vaccine wouldn't be enough (and the trials would not have revealed this). Since we know that some people who get the vaccine do catch the virus, but just have a mild case - it seems like a plausible outcome that others catch it without symptoms, but can still transmit it.
That said, it's looking like that's not the world we're in - and the vaccines do just stop you from contracting the disease in addition to reducing severity in the rare case you catch it anyway.
mRNA vaccines are new and given the asymptomatic transmission of the virus is why we have a pandemic, it's a reasonable thing to be cautious about (which is why I was surprised the trials only tested symptomatic patients).
In chicken, Marek’s disease works like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
The injectable vaccine prevents nervous system damage. The oral vaccine prevents transmission too.
The problem is that the oral vaccine is old technology and can revert to being dangerous. It’s rare but happens. So countries with resources gave everyone the IPV to protect them and then the OPV to eradicate the disease.
Tetanus is a partial example, too. The tetanus vaccine protects against the tetanus toxin but has no particular effect on whether you can have the bacteria replicate in your body. But tetanus isn’t transmissible, so this doesn’t matter much.
The studies coming out that did regular testing focused on easily reached populations (medical workers) that may not have been representative of the wider population (so not suitable for the trials).
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102153
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2101927
Maybe I'm underestimating complexity (typical for an outsider), but just seemed surprising to me when I heard that.
Reduces deaths, reduces utilization of medical resources, etc, and then when it's a vaccine, it's pretty likely that it also reduces transmission. But it doesn't need to reduce transmission to be worth an awful lot.
Still though I agree it would have been useful to regularly test all trial participants - the US really could have done a lot better job with testing more generally.
I won't discount how hard remote work has been for many people, but the fact of the matter is, continuing to do it for a little while longer is far less risky from the company's perspective than pulling the trigger in the first place, 1 year ago. It's largely been a successful move.
As for lying to get the vaccine, yeah. I'd say that once the 65+ population had been eligible for awhile, and the state opened it up to a lot more people, whatever moral hesitancy towards lying that there might have been, has largely evaporated. I've heard plenty about strategies, what vendors don't check.
I'm no in a huge hurry, so I'll wait. But that's just me.
Every state and locality can have different rules, which I get is frustrating from a consistency and public messaging standpoint, but people get equally frustrated with a top-down approach where the rules don't make sense everywhere. Each locality has generally started with healthcare workers, old-age homes, and 65+.. beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted. shrug
It doesn't seem to be affecting the speed of vaccinations, which seems quite good, so I'm okay with waiting. I'm also somewhat okay with people jumping the line because at this point I think it's mostly important to get the numbers up, not gatekeeping.
I agree it's important to get the numbers up at this point, so just make it GA.
> "beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted."
I agree - which is why I'd like it to open up. 40% of people over 16 in SF now have had it - let me get it too. https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1375131053518508033
I have friends that work retail floors who are required to work in person, but aren't considered essential, so no early vaccination. WTF?! Just because a job is deemed less useful, that doesn't make the people less susceptible...
<rant> Corporate America has grown so greedy, so disconnected from reality, it hurts a lot of people without notice nor reprecussions. </rant>
Food processing gets priority because closures of large facilities due to outbreaks caused significant disruption last year. Kind of meh to reward an industry for having low spare capacity, but it is what it is.
Retail, restaurants, etc workers have higher risks, but disruption is limited. Maybe a restaurant has to close (and several did over the past year), but there are other restaurants. Same for retail, even supermarkets.
I think there's a limit to how many people you can prioritize over general population before people start really gaming the rules even though I know some people have been gaming the rules since the beginning. It's not reasonable to expect vaccination facilities to check patients' employment to determine priority, so it's going to be on people to follow them.
You could do age bands to get old people in, but once they stop coming just keep expanding the age or open it up to everyone.
I'm leaning towards favoring first come first serve. The early stories around people throwing out expired vaccine were awful.
Actual agricultural work is rarely the ‘farmer driving his tractor in a big empty field’ - contract labor has pretty harsh working conditions in many cases.
My SO is protecting herself as best she can, but every time she comes home from work, she has to hope everything went perfectly and she's not bringing it home to me.
It's a bit like, "Shit, shit, shit! I was coughed on, talked to without their mask, etc. I hope all my protective gear holds up and my shower cleans me up before I see my SO," or more simply, "Shit, I hope today isn't the day I kill my SO." That's a LOT of pressure.
Oh and so you understand how dire our situation is: we live in/share a studio apartment.
Edit to add: The other industries have workers in the same situation too, I don't mean to disregaurd them. Those living with the (young && vulnerable) have to hope/pray/whatever they do everything right. And practically no state cares about that situation.
Last week, the Governor threw open the sluice gates and announced general availability starting today, so I grabbed a vaccine appointment faster than you can say "RTX 3060 at MSRP". I just got my shot today... so I naturally wondered if I should start obsessively refreshing the Pennsylvania vaccine page like I had been the Utah one. I'm already bugging friends and family in Utah whenever appointments are open, so I figured I'd Slack ping the entire company once Pennsylvania general availability is announced. I go and check... and that state's still in Phase 1A.
Both states have similar per-capita vaccination rates - it's not like Pennsylvania is actually behind on shots, since the vaccine distribution in the US is based on state population. In Utah, we got 75% of 65+ before we opened it up to 50+ and people with pre-existing conditions; and about half of 50+ before today when we went to general availability. I say that the priority system did it's job: cases are down and the most vulnerable (old people) are protected. Every state should be moving to either general availability if they're at the same benchmarks, or at the very least an "anyone who can't work remote" standard (which would exclude my entire team, but w/e).
(The ideal vaccination system would be to specifically target superspreaders. If we could do that, then we could achieve herd immunity at really low vaccination rates. However, that's still speculative since there is no diagnostic criterion for that and "just forcibly vaccinate anyone who violated a mask order" probably isn't a great proxy for superspreading.)
As a nominally-healthy, young(ish), 100% remote worker, I'm focusing more on facilitating the more-vulnerable/eligible to get vaccinated ASAP, both to protect them, and to keep that curve growing toward herd immunity.
First link from a quick googling: https://www.bbc.com/news/53137613
"Food processing plants" (really, mostly slaughterhouses) had the largest workplace COVID outbreaks last year. This is how management responded: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/business/tyson-coronavirus-la...
In both cases, the important thing is the exponential growth (shrinkage?) in the other direction. Not the absolute numbers right now.
Also are you sure about that metric? This chart looks like deaths/day are 2X above summer levels (30 vs 15): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/10/nation/latest-coronav...
"Only" 2X deaths per day when cases are 5X per day is an improvement, but I am not rushing to eat indoors or go to a concert or gym. In fact, I am nervous as hell that loosened restrictions are going to increase spread the way they did last fall, and a bunch of people are going to get sick, suffer, and maybe die who wouldn't if we just buckled down for another month or two and got vaccinated.
It’s not “the science” it’s the arguments. Throughout this pandemic “science” as authority has argued masks don’t work, or that they only work for healthcare workers, or that second order effects make it worse, or that it’s not spread via the air, etc.
The school arguments are similarly dumb. In an enclosed poorly ventilated space the disease will spread and infect parents at home.
I don’t buy that schools are somehow magic places not affected by this. Just because kids don’t have severe cases often doesn’t mean they don’t transmit the disease.
Unless there’s a compelling mechanism that suggests otherwise I put “schools are safe to open” alongside “masks don’t work” in the group of dumb arguments that don’t make sense when you think about it for ten seconds.
And to be brutally honest, closing bars and restaurants so that schools can open seems like a fair trade to me (and our child is six months old, so this isn't a self-serving argument).
https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/covid-19-outbreak-data/reso...
There have been 119 outbreaks at California schools in the last 2 months. That's hardly what I'd call "safe".
To my knowledge they’re not saying that and that’s the important bit.
Every worker has their own preference about where they work best. If you don't allow remote work, how do you weigh the risk of losing good employees who don't want to return to the office? If you go remote-first, what about employees who really value the office? If you try to do a mix, how do you do it well? And there are other effects to think about, like on costs, company culture, and productivity.
As time passes after COVID is no longer a large risk (which isn't guaranteed), I think we'll see tolerance for remote work decay at large companies. As fewer other companies offer flexibility for remote, the office will return across the board as the default.
I think the lasting change will be an increase in flexibility, though, like allowing WFH N days/week and more frequent exemptions for some employees to work fully remote. A few companies will recommit 100% to the office and a few will allow greater remote work, but the majority of employees at medium/large companies will again spend the majority of their time at the office.
At least for me, I don't want to spend 2 hours commuting.
Since, the job pays well, I will go to office if asked for it.