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Microsoft recommends WA and CA employees work from home

124 points| ahghtgfhg | 6 years ago |news.microsoft.com | reply

Just got notice from Microsoft HR that we're to work from home when possible due to COVID-19, through 3/25.

Edit: official announcement https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/04/kurt-delbenes-march-4-guidance-to-king-county-employees/

65 comments

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[+] femto113|6 years ago|reply
Overhead in SLU today “at least I can finally find an empty conference room”.

For non Seattle folk SLU is South Lake Union, home to many Amazon buildings as well as Google and Facebook

[+] 01100011|6 years ago|reply
I don't work at MS, just a valley tech company. We finally got the email encouraging us to work with our managers and WFH when possible. I don't think many people are actually doing it, from what I can tell from my home office. I don't know why more large tech shops aren't doing this.
[+] anonsivalley652|6 years ago|reply
People can't see who's contagious in the early stages, so they're gambling with their lives by not taking proactive precautions before it's a widespread problem.

COVID-19/SARS-cov-2 is something to take seriously for several reasons:

- To reiterate an important point: "Healthy" infected people go around unwittingly spreading it for several days to a week, so you have no idea who's really sick. And you have no idea how many people in public actually have it at any one time. It's another reason this pathogen is so successful.

- It's a terrible flu for most.

- It can quickly turn life-threatening. A number of bodies were discovered in Wuhan of people trying to walk or drive themselves to the hospital, but they died before reaching it.

- FIXED: If hospitalization is needed, the average CFR is 16% (Russian roulette odds) and 49% for critical condition.

- There is no treatment.

It's going to be a full pandemic in 7-21 days (depending on the area), and last from 19-35 days. For example, someone already died from it within 40 mi / 64 km of where my mom lives in a rural/suburban area. You have to assume the number of infected is 10-30x the number of identified cases because the CDC has strict PUI criteria that are turning away patients. (Oh, and it costs $2000±1000 if you take the test and test negative.)

[+] stygiansonic|6 years ago|reply
Where does it say CA employees? Does Bay Area in the context of Puget Sound mean SF Bay Area?
[+] samcheng|6 years ago|reply
Yes; when you say "Bay Area" in Washington and Oregon, you generally mean SF Bay Area.

Maybe an exception for those living in Coos Bay?

[+] warmfuzzykitten|6 years ago|reply
Hard to see how any part of the SF Bay Area could be in King County.
[+] starpilot|6 years ago|reply
Also in Seattle (well, Bellevue), my company has told us to WFH through the end of the month. Went out to lunch downtown and the usual place I go to was empty, normally it's packed.
[+] mc3|6 years ago|reply
This will be an interesting challenge to suddenly be thrust as a team into WFH.
[+] foogazi|6 years ago|reply
Remote first!

Beats joining a team and getting getting covid-19

[+] wyclif|6 years ago|reply
Somebody should fix the link so it's pointing to the MSFT press release.
[+] mohamedmansour|6 years ago|reply
I might bring my work computer home then!
[+] mips_avatar|6 years ago|reply
Most of the IT-admins in Microsoft told people they can bring their monitors and computers home if they need them.
[+] thrownawaynw|6 years ago|reply
I'm working for a tech firm in one of these two related areas. The idea of bringing the work computer home sounded good until IT added a number of high-bandwidth sites to the IT-mandated DNS blacklist software to keep traffic down for remote workers.

I could see things like Hulu and Pandora being less mission critical than other sites but then they blocked YouTube and, probably because google mixes domains a lot, gMail got caught in the net. People were not happy about that.

[+] pts_|6 years ago|reply
Why not bring just your soft creds (vpn cert)?
[+] pkraft|6 years ago|reply
I first thought WFH stood for Wash Fking Hands.
[+] jimthrow|6 years ago|reply
I don’t know why this is being downvoted so much. It’s a legitimate abbreviation considering that washing hands is the most well known deterrent for the virus
[+] fractal618|6 years ago|reply
Throwaway username suggests that MS also directed employees not to publicize this.
[+] loeg|6 years ago|reply
They likely just don't want to identify their regular account as a Microsoft employee.
[+] earthtourist|6 years ago|reply
It seems like the only way out of this without a huge infection rate is a government mandated stay-at-home period. It probably requires implementing martial law.

Tech workers going WFH seems like it will be totally ineffectual by itself.

1. Most other workers can't afford to take time off, aren't permitted to, or can't do their jobs remotely.

2. Schools aren't implementing study-at-home yet.

3. There isn't mass testing in place yet.

For #1 it seems like we need some kind of massive billion gov disaster insurance bailout to compensate people. And someone still needs to do essential services, so a skeleton crew needs to be paid overtime and tested regularly by health officials.

For #2 this could be done tomorrow if it was ordered by health departments. The main downside would be people being forced to stay home from work, but at least this problem can be mitigated by families/friends.

For #3 to be implemented at the scale of millions of people, would probably require deploying the US military going up and down streets requesting samples.

Anything short of a stay-at-home period seems like it's guaranteed to get us the majority infection rate that will kill millions, mostly our parents and grandparents but a large number of young people too.

The damage to the economy of this could be huge. It seems better to overreact now, pay a huge bill ($1+ trillion, if need be), and prevent a massive loss of loss and/or economic depression.

[+] blaser-waffle|6 years ago|reply
The US FedGov + state and local authorities have the ability to issue quarantines using local police or other forces. No different than the police enforcing a curfew or other regulations. These have been used several times; my grandmother told me stories about being quarantined in Philadelphia during the 1930s.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

There are links at the bottom to specific legislation.

[+] dvtrn|6 years ago|reply
It probably requires implementing marshal law.

Are you serious? Martial law (let’s at least start by spelling it properly) is not something you just throw out there and change a setting to disable once you’re done with.