Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.
So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope.
It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.
It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolating/WFH. When in fact we have a lot more cases now, high levels of new cases and more than half the states have R0 > 1.0. https://rt.live/
I've heard two C-level guys with two separate German SMEs say that the only part of their workforce that hadn't handled remote work well was middle management.
The people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done.
Senior management / C-level types were content seeing sales figures and general output from afar.
Middle management struggled because they had a hard time judging work estimates for tasks and whether people had their butts in seats etc.
I'm in a similar situation, except with a worse reason for requiring everyone to come back to the office. We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company. I can assure you that NO ONE is going to say "well I was going to spend money with these people but they're not in the office, so I'll go elsewhere".
Further, we are being given less than 24 hours notice to come back into the office. It's just absurd, and it has eroded any trust that I once had in the company.
> They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.
But, this only increases the risk for those who actually do have to go in. Everyone should be vocally opposed to this policy, including (especially?) those to whom this policy is supposed to be "fair."
Costco did a similar thing at the start of the pandemic, where they forbid people working in offices from working remotely, to be "fair" to those who work in their stores.
I quit my job and found a new one because my company was forcing us to come into the office to "collaborate" -- even though for the most part only the team leads are in the US and the rest of the dev team is India. My team was in another state.
I was already halfway thinking about another job because of the open office that was a mix of developers, QA, customer service managers, and implementation folks that were always on the phone and it was loud. Now with Covid and me working from home for three months, I dreaded going back into the office.
What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.
It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.
The best way to protect the health of the employees who cannot work remotely is for those who can to stay home. It's appalling that your employer doesn't seem to understand this.
companies who ask their employees to take risks with their health, without a compelling reason, are destroying any sense of goodwill or morale. In the short term, that change might be invisible, but over the long-term it destroys businesses
Here they are asking for volunteers first, but there is a clear push from management to get people back in the office ( and that is despite the fact that by all official metrics of our unit, we are basically killing it ). Doesn't matter. They want control.
Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.
So I’m voting with my feet and actively looking for a fully remote job, it’s fucking insane to pretend an extra 2ft and alcohol gel will work when no one is following the rules properly.
I’d have been moving on at some point anyway since I don’t particularly like my job but it pays well so I have time to look for something that is a better fit.
So they’ll drain the good staff, I’m not the only one planning to bugger off.
If that's their mindset with remote work, they probably have the "anti-adapt" mindset in other aspects of their business as well...which means they'll probably become dinosaurs and be out of business within the next 10 years.
Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable. They think employees need an eye behind its back in order to produce.
And if it is that way, it is their fault, they have chosen bad when hiring.
Here's what I do not understand -- if the company had an open office floor plan , which is probably the case a very large if not the majority number of offices, bringing the workforce back into the office would require a massive expense as the state governments are requiring the social distancing / partitions. How are the companies going to accommodate that set of regulations with the current layouts? From a simply logistical standpoint there's simply no way there enough time between now and say end of August to have offices redone to accommodate the new regulations.
The thing is, having worked remotely for a year... the people working remote are the ones that become at a disadvantage. Because people in office may forget to include them in calls or conversations.
Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new normal, citing long reopening timelines, their own preferences, increased productivity, Twitter's policy change, etc.
But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).
I wonder if what we've seen since March isn't really "working from home", it's "working from home during a pandemic", and there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care).
The current situation has actually been good/neutral for my personal productivity, since I'm more able to easily chat with my colleagues across the country... but why exactly is that easier now? Are they more available because they're working from home, or because they're stuck at home?
I am unsure this is the answer you were looking for but I do make a distinction. I've been working remotely for 10+ years, and the 3 months of lockdown were the worst I've had, for the simple reason that _my family was locked in with me_.
I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it.
Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc.
We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.
> But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies
I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020.
> why exactly is that easier now?
I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates.
I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.
> IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused
While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.
> there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)
There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.
> policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).
And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.
Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.
Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).
I work my full complement.. actually even more so.
But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.
For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.
I absolutely consider working from home different from this, which is almost house arrest. WFH I am able to spend time working in coffee shops, am able to use the outside world to sync my clock with everyone else. Being stuck on my own in a London flat is driving me nuts, and I'm introverted. I've been going to bed at 5:30am for no reason other than my clock has drifted.
I feel the change that has happened is that managers _had to_ figure out managing remote workers.
Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.
Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN."
Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.
Although regular WFH and pandemic WFH are functionally the same, being forced to work remote has a different effect on me than elective remote work. As someone who prefers working in the office, mandatory indefinite WFH is much more...mentally taxing(?) than when I choose to do it.
Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months.
Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work in an office, I would be saving every penny and working on a career change ASAP.
This seems to be the norm for many companies. Everyone is throwing in the towel on 2020 so far as the office goes with the goal to take a fresh look for 2021 at the end of this year. Many will likely never go back to the setup they had before.
If you’re in the market for commercial office space you can probably get some killer deals moving forward.
I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments. My partner and I went to Austin for a month and a half and now are back in the Bay Area to hear the next decision on her office reopening. 2021 is 6 months away. That's not enough to move somewhere else that would make the pain of moving worth it.
I'm in the worst of both worlds right now. Unable to commit to fully remote but still having to pay to live close enough to commute. I think a lot of people are stuck like this until their companies decide on a long-term solution.
I've heard now from a couple of people that they've enjoyed remote work and some have already sucessfully negotiated that in future they will work part time from home. So it really seems that some of the change will be permanent.
Companies who were the butt-in-seat type most likely didn't have a sudden realization that WFH and telecommuting was productive, most likely they want you back in the office but they just don't want to do the required work to transform the office into a safe environment.
I've been trying recently to wrap my head around what life is going to be like from here on out. Where do we go? Things will never be the same again. Remote work will now be completely normal, that's for sure. But how do we get back to living our lives? Fundamental assumptions I've had about the things I've wanted to do in life are now basically no longer an option. Will Silicon Valley no longer really be a "thing" anymore with physical meetups, hackathons, conferences etc. being a thing of the past? Surely at some point we have to reckon with this, rather than just hunkering down in our caves.
Not a good time to own commercial office real estate. Office rental rates will likely race to the bottom as more and more businesses decide to stay remote.
A cycling pal of mine is an in-house lawyer at a big oil company here in Houston. They were told a couple weeks ago that there were no plans to go back to the office until at LEAST 2021. All the work is being done just fine.
My workplace is pushing aggressively to eliminate remote work, with 50% off remote work in the next couple of weeks. I'm in one of the biggest hotspots, and as the last few months have shown, a significant amount of work has been perfectly viable from home. But before this shutdown, my workplace had a hard ban on WFH. It's the "the workers will be lazy if they're not in the office" mentality. As though you couldn't be lazy at work as well.
Remote work is such a fascinating leadership challenge given how dogmatic both sides have become. The tone of the debate is verging on a religious argument (on both sides), but it's all centered on work-related topics which typically don't engender such extreme responses.
I've always assumed most writers for these papers don't actually come into the office anyway. What's different? They're extending that to full time staff as well?
[+] [-] Loughla|5 years ago|reply
So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope.
It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waltherg|5 years ago|reply
The people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done. Senior management / C-level types were content seeing sales figures and general output from afar.
Middle management struggled because they had a hard time judging work estimates for tasks and whether people had their butts in seats etc.
Just an anecdote but thought that was intriguing.
[+] [-] timewasted|5 years ago|reply
Further, we are being given less than 24 hours notice to come back into the office. It's just absurd, and it has eroded any trust that I once had in the company.
[+] [-] coldpie|5 years ago|reply
But, this only increases the risk for those who actually do have to go in. Everyone should be vocally opposed to this policy, including (especially?) those to whom this policy is supposed to be "fair."
[+] [-] neilparikh|5 years ago|reply
An employee who worked in their offices actually died from COVID-19: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-cor...
Now, it's not a given they got it from the office, but they probably did spread it more, so it was a very irresponsible policy IMO.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if they're aware of that subtext....
[+] [-] scarface74|5 years ago|reply
I was already halfway thinking about another job because of the open office that was a mix of developers, QA, customer service managers, and implementation folks that were always on the phone and it was loud. Now with Covid and me working from home for three months, I dreaded going back into the office.
[+] [-] downerending|5 years ago|reply
It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.
[+] [-] meej|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jes5199|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|5 years ago|reply
Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.
[+] [-] noir_lord|5 years ago|reply
So I’m voting with my feet and actively looking for a fully remote job, it’s fucking insane to pretend an extra 2ft and alcohol gel will work when no one is following the rules properly.
I’d have been moving on at some point anyway since I don’t particularly like my job but it pays well so I have time to look for something that is a better fit.
So they’ll drain the good staff, I’m not the only one planning to bugger off.
[+] [-] edw519|5 years ago|reply
Where I work, discussing salaries is strictly forbidden and grounds for dismissal.
I demanded an increase and was told, "No. It wouldn't be fair to the others."
I asked, "How would they know?"
(weWantToBeFair) = enterprise(iWontCumInYourMouth)
[+] [-] jb775|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g-garron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourday|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkaptur|5 years ago|reply
But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).
I wonder if what we've seen since March isn't really "working from home", it's "working from home during a pandemic", and there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care).
The current situation has actually been good/neutral for my personal productivity, since I'm more able to easily chat with my colleagues across the country... but why exactly is that easier now? Are they more available because they're working from home, or because they're stuck at home?
[+] [-] riffraff|5 years ago|reply
I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it.
Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc.
We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.
[+] [-] chipgap98|5 years ago|reply
I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020.
> why exactly is that easier now?
I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates.
I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.
[+] [-] shadowfox|5 years ago|reply
While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.
> there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)
There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.
[+] [-] triceratops|5 years ago|reply
And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.
[+] [-] edw519|5 years ago|reply
Either you're getting your work done or you're not.
Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.
[+] [-] kanox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|5 years ago|reply
Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.
Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).
I work my full complement.. actually even more so.
But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.
For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.
[+] [-] rezeroed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treespace89|5 years ago|reply
Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.
[+] [-] bragh|5 years ago|reply
This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.
[+] [-] nsilvestri|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elicash|5 years ago|reply
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/18/opinion/sunday/18...
[+] [-] momokoko|5 years ago|reply
Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work in an office, I would be saving every penny and working on a career change ASAP.
[+] [-] code4tee|5 years ago|reply
If you’re in the market for commercial office space you can probably get some killer deals moving forward.
[+] [-] TACIXAT|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deegles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niklasd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superfamicom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purple_ferret|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aphextron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb775|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldFatCactus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoolander2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staysaasy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
Now we just have to increase entrepreneurship by some orders of magnitude and things will scale like never before.
[+] [-] umwbk9gagy|5 years ago|reply