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Comment by cheeze | Hacker News Reader

Amazon recently announced that all non essential work travel is cancelled. Friend who works there said they are taking it very seriously - any "essential" travel must be approved from the highest levels.

They also announced that interviews will be conducted via VC going forward during the outbreak.

I wonder if they 'shut down' campus and encourage everybody to work from home after this, self quarantine kind of thing.

IMO it's the right thing to do. Not all sectors can have all of their workers stay home, but Amazon employees (in Seattle, fulfillment centers are a totally different thing) can easily work from home in almost all cases.

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I wonder if this “temporary alteration” will impact the way business is conducted long-term. Instead of choosing between conference calls or flights, choose VC.

As someone who doesn't have to do business travel very often, I enjoy the trips to go meet with long-lost colleagues. But at the same time, it's pretty clear at least to me that most of these things are a waste of company money and don't really move the ball forward much compared to typical electronic collaboration. Selfishly, I'd be sad if business travel suffered a large permanent reduction. But it would be better for the business and the environment if it did, even ignoring the risk of propagating diseases.

I just got done planning a 20 person meeting in Germany for July. It will cost almost $5k USD per participant for travel, lodging, and food.

We were only half joking when we said the company could FedEx us each a top of the line video conference setup, and then throw it in the trash afterwards, and it would still be cheaper.

$5k per person? Are these business class seats? this can certainly be done for cheaper.

Nope. Just premium economy seats. Summer flights from US to Germany with no weekend stay are really expensive.

An interesting side effect if it does lead to long-term change is the airlines. Currently ticket prices are kept low by expensive business class tickets and late purchased business travelers. If either of those sees a >10% drop, some major disruptions are going to hit the aviation companies and ticket prices.

I have to ask—since you admit to causing environmental harm with your admittedly unessisary travels—how do you morally accept the damage your selfish actions are causing? I’m genially asking, and not trying to be judgmental.

The company I work for uses high quality carbon offsets to reach carbon neutrality for all business activities, including business travel by employees. Of course, this isn't scalable, so it doesn't really absolve me. But the travel I do is also not really optional. I just personally don't think it's necessary or helpful. Doesn't mean I don't have to do it when I'm called upon to do so.

The other thing I do is live a fairly carbon efficient lifestyle. I travel much less than other folks in my income bracket, and I live in the most carbon efficient city in the U.S. I take mass transit to work and don't own a car. There is of course more that I could do, but if I zero out my usage it will make precisely no difference to the outcome. So I also vote with my dollars and my actual votes for political candidates who will push in the right direction on this issue.

But more than anything, I think if I'm honest, I don't justify it. I just do it. These scales cannot be balanced -- the human mind cannot encompass actions whose harms are so incrementally minor and diffuse, but corporately so major and severe. Our social heuristic engine is not equipped to process it, and mine isn't an exception.

Thank you for an honest and good answer

Generally speaking, people almost always find some way to justify their actions to themselves, if they even think about what they do in ethical terms at all.

They justify it by convincing themselves their actions are necessary to feed their families, or they think what they do isn't as bad as what someone else does, or everyone else is doing it, or they'll compromise for now but do better later, or they just don't care about most others and are looking out for themselves, their friends and family.

Given the impact airline travel has on global warming I hope it results in fewer companies using air travel in place of video conferencing.

These comments are being voted down. But I think it warrants some justification. These actions are just and rational, however in the wake of the climate emergency they are just as just and rational. I do believe governments and companies should answer for why they haven’t taken them before, and if they revert after this outbreak is over, they should have to answer for why.

Whether they want to or not, they are now being forced into running a large scale experiment of only conducting interviews over VC. Should at least yield some interesting data.

I personally hate doing VC interviewing. It's already hard enough to make a decision from an hour long in person meeting, but VC complicates that more.

Having ubiquitous, reliable access to good VC doesn't eliminate the need to travel. Humans communicate so much better face to face.

Source: I work in Google, spending up to half of my working time in VC. Still need to hop in a plane when something is important enough.

Exactly. We’ve had long-distance telephone for a long time, and it actually works much better than the audio of most internet teleconferencing I’ve experienced. It’s not a complete substitute for face to face communication.

> Humans communicate so much better face to face.

No, they don't. They communicate more, but not better.

It depends.

I find that the lack of massive volume of communication that is face-to-face can be beneficial, but often it needs to be more structured. Without this structure, non-FtF communication is just FtF without the nuances.

how many GVCs do you have where people are connecting from their desk or rooms on different floors of the same building? It happens a lot. Can’t be that bad.

It's not that it's impossible to communicate through GVC, but most people interact very differently with those they only know through a screen vs. those they've met in person.

Hopefully it encourages innovation in the space. 17 years after Skype came out we'd still all rather prefer to be in the same physical room than a laggy, compressed, low quality virtual call.

To be fair, video quality is usually great in developed regions where ISP's do not intentionally slow down internet speed via bandwidth throttling.

Maybe I just haven't been exposed to it, but in my opinion I have pretty good speeds (100 down / 50 up) and still experience stuttering on both ends. I've tried enterprise solutions (like WebEx) at a Fortune 50 with a >1Tbps fiber connection and still encountered problems. I think the problem is just that...video conferencing is a hard problem, and there is more innovation that needs to be done until we can feel comfortable replacing physical interactions with it.

One exciting prospect is the advent of AR/VR, where instead of streaming 30 1080x720 frames a second, we can stream 60 virtual character positions a second (a la multiplayer FPSs like CS:GO) that operate as stand ins for real bodies / faces. I think games such as VRChat will have a real impact on the enterprise teleconferencing space once the proper market is targeted: replace the childish characters with more "indifferent" avatars, add in some "business casual" background environments, etc.

This pandemic will likely play out over a months to years timescale, so it very well might alter patterns like this.

I heard this, too, and I wonder if any companies will extend this travel ban to local transit. I work in Seattle, and I ride a ferry and a bus to get to the office. The Seattle ferry, especially at rush hour is a crowded and not-incredibly-santiary experience, as are the city busses. How long before MSFT/GOOG/AMZN/etc. are asking people not to ride the ferries? Or busses?

> Amazon recently announced that all non essential work travel is cancelled. Friend who works there said they are taking it very seriously - any "essential" travel must be approved from the highest levels.

Same at Toyota. At least for international travel.

The company I work for has canceled travel to "affected regions" period -- no exceptions for "essential" travel. But it hasn't cancelled business travel elsewhere (e.g. the US, Canada, South America) . . . yet. I can only imagine in a week or two that will be the next step.

Same at the Megacorp I work at and a lot of other places. I’m in the South and my closing is doing it globally with a 14 day self-quarantine if you went to China, South Korea, and Italy.

Same here. All travel must be approved by the CEO

As we are several decades into an equally serious—or perhaps a far greater—catastrophe with globally rising temperatures—in part to blame by human activities that are now hindered because of this new immediate emergency.

I love that it took a global virus outbreak for these companies to take these actions that they should have taken long since in an effort against the climate disaster.

I don't know where to begin with this opinion and commentary so I'll just say how I feel.

Finding solace of potential human loss of life through a lens of reduced carbon footprint is tonedeaf to those who have lost loved ones to this disaster, and furthermore alienates an enriching dialogue between climate deniers by providing a scapegoat to keep heads in sand.

"Look at those climate cry babies, celebrating loss of life"

The numbers don’t really add up though since the climate disaster is causing few orders of magnitude more deaths then the corona virus outbreak.

I find it great that companies and governments are taking actions to reduce harm (like I said, I love it), but these actions should have been taken long ago to prevent a far greater harm being caused by another disaster.

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