Twitter – “we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home” | Hacker News Reader

Twitter – “we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home”

blog.twitter.com

210 pointsreimertz76 comments

That isn't the full sentence though, the sentence continues "if they’re able."

It further states

> Working from home will be mandatory for employees based in our Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea offices due in part to government restrictions.

Twitter should look into on how working from home affects productivity.

I'm sure it'll decrease in the short term. Although, if this goes on long enough, it would be neat to see if people re-establish strong lines of communication and if there are any productivity gains from certain teams.

Obviously, I'm not hoping that the virus affects peoples lives longer, but they might as well get some data while there are government restrictions.

The lost productivity from WFH will probably be less than the potential lost productivity from infected and dead employees...

Eh, you should meet some of my coworkers.

I believe that’s not the point of the comment. The point is that working from home is something employees desire in general, and this is a good opportunity to see if large scale work from home can still function well for a large organization like Twitter. It would be encouraging if they can make it work.

It requires different management styles and tools. I doubt anyone is going to try particularly hard to make it work well.

I don't really see any reason why the US shouldn't already be on lockdown the way most of Asia is.

We like to wait until it is too late before taking steps.

it's infuriating to me! i cant even get my parents to take it seriously they keep diminishing my concern and dont even bother to read what I send them. I had to mail them supplies!

If this does turn out to be a nothingburger (seems most here think that it wont) what's the cost of a hedge/being prepared? a few hundred bucks in non-perishable food you can eat later and changed behaviors should probably be doing anyways?!

there's got to be a sensible in between panic bum rushing the store with black friday insanity and doing nothing but repeating the stupid Trump presser TPs

There isn't, not with this kind of stuff. Some things in life are all-or-nothings, comfortably early and overprepared or not prepared at all. In fact I would say most major life events take that pattern. Older people increasingly resemble "survivors" but they may or may not recognize the correlations here.

> a sensible in between panic bum rushing the store with black friday insanity and doing nothing but repeating the stupid Trump presser TPs

Like following the story, figuring it’s an asymmetric risk event and getting prepared a couple of weeks ago?

haha yes that's what i tried to explain to my parents. the hedge costs very little money not getting prepared at least a bit is crazy to me

> If this does turn out to be a nothingburger (seems most here think that it wont) what's the cost of a hedge/being prepared?

Umm, the cost of locking down an entire country? The cost would be absolutely immense.

Dollars vs lives

Lives will be impacted either way. If the USA were to shut down, a lot of people would suffer because of it.

Some people will probably die because of the lockdown in China. There were some reports of HIV medications becoming hard to fill. Multiply that across a nation and there will be consequences.

That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it's not only dollars.

dollars are lives if you didn't start with enough.

The value of statistical life [1] provides a method to estimate the dollar value of a life.

   There is no standard concept for the value of a specific human life in economics. However, when looking at risk/reward trade-offs that people make with regard to their health, economists often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). Note that the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death.

Given that humans make choices to buy things that reduce their chance of death all the time, we have many sources of how people value their own lives. Humans are often bad at this calculation, yet surprisingly their willing to pay to reduce a certain risk divided by the reduction in risk is pretty consistent in its estimate of how much people value their lives. The number comes out to around $5-10M per life or $125K per year of life.

Thus, we can estimate how many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus the economic cost of trying to contain it and do a cost-benefit analysis.

I just did a quick and dirty Cost/Benefit for this purpose, which you can find here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rn9NFw-ldpUVMEM6JvGU...

High level summary: If we assume that around the same number of people as the flu would be infected annually if we did not stop it, anywhere from 10 - 45 million Americans would catch it yearly. Let's use 20M for this calculation.

Let's assume a COVID-19 mortality rate of 1% given that there are likely way more undetected cases than confirmed cases (given the current rate wrt confirmed cases is closer to 2%).

(20,000,000 cases * 0.01 mortality rate) => 200,000 deaths per year.

Most of those deaths are the elderly. Thus, they have fewer years left to live. Let's take the expected age of a person who dies to be 60. Thus their value of remaining life that is lost is $2.4M. Times the total expected deaths is $475B per year of costs simply due to loss of life.

This doesn't take into account loss of future GDP (which is less than the loss of life though) from those deaths nor the loss of GDP from people being sick but recovering.

Then if we assume that to stop the virus, we will need a quarantine as severe as China's and thus suffer extreme economic impacts, then many sectors of the economy will contract dramatically. For example, China has seen a >90% reduction in car sales year over year due to Coronavirus.[2] Hopefully a lot of that will simply be transferred to a future quarter once they have recovered, but that is TBD. For travel, restaurants, etc, it certainly isn't.

I estimated the total cost for the US GDP of containing COVID-19 as $6,605B per year if the goal it to make it extinct like what happened to SARS.

Thus, it is absolutely worth paying the one time fee of losing 1/3 of one's GDP to not pay the perpetual tax of 2.3% of GDP annually due to it sticking around.

My biggest fear though is that we will pay the one time fee with hopes of making it go extinct and it will persist nonetheless in countries with weak public health infrastructure or lax quarantine enforcement. Thus, we will end up with it perpetually anyway. That is especially likely if countries start to believe it is as it becomes a race to the bottom / self fulfilling prophecy where no one wants to take the extreme cost to fight it when other countries are not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51583348

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/business/economy/china-co...

What if we find a vaccine? Then all the lock-downs become a waste of money.

No they won't,they'll slow down the spread therefore fewer people die before the vaccine becomes available, also any vaccine that comes out will be months away from now, if not a year or more. They have to do animal and human trials before they can start mass production.

please don't use code blocks as quotes, it makes them very difficult to read

You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve exhausted every other possible course of action.

- Churchill

the current federal administration does not operate with the well-being of the general public in mind.

This is not a comment in good faith. You are accusing parties of something you cannot prove: intent of action. Regardless of how the actions are perceived you may assume malice or something else, but you can't prove it. Even in court of law (I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I have learned) intent is incredibly difficult to prove.

It is better to make claims with data (ie, administration does X, Y, and Z) and the provide reasonable interpretation (these have such and such an outcome on these segments of the population).

This is a gentle reminder that casting aspersions does not benefit anyone and may divide communities on issues that should be talked about in concrete terms. Bumper sticker politics might the status quo on most social media sites, but they have no place here.

Absolutely is a comment in good faith as people are entitled to their opinions and interpretation. I take your comment as condescending; you are not a moderator and shouldn't try to bully people out of expressing their opinions on a message board.

because a lockdown doesn't necessarily slow down the spread by much (some epidemiologists suggested the Chinese lockdown only slowed the virus by 20% or so) while it has drastic effects on supply chains and the economy in the country. The trade-off is probably not worth it.

I can also be plain counterproductive by making people suspicious of authorities, with the result of sick people avoiding registering their infections or seeking help.

Source for that 20%? WHO seems pretty convinced that the world should look to China as an example.

WHO has also taken a lot of criticism in recent days as being extremely solicitous towards China and avoiding anything that looks like criticising them.

That doesn't mean they're wrong, mind you. Just that, if they wanted to keep on the good side of Xi, perhaps they'd exaggerate how good his policies have been.

A 20% slowdown would be pretty major when taken to its conclusion. The graphs of 'China vs the world' tell that story in a way that not much else can:

https://ncov.r6.no/

Assuming the Chinese figures are accurate, according to the WHO delegation that just visited China and toured 5 cities in Hubei province they are.

well there's not a very high rate of confirmed cases in the US yet. of course that's mostly because of our complete lack of testing anyone...

> Working from home will be mandatory... due in part to government restrictions.

What government restrictions? Not sure about South Korea, but to my knowledge, there aren't any government-mandated measures in Hong Kong or Japan that require non-government employees (except school teachers) to work from home. It's up to businesses to decide what they should do.

In my company a staff member in a different office has tested positive. The ceo seems to be very careful to follow government advice. It's like they don't want to be seen to under-react or over-react. This seems misguided when there are positive things you can do like encouraging people to work from home. If the cost is minimal then why not? It's like telling people to wash their hands or use a tissue.

Because that's how this society unfolded. Overreactions are seen as poor leadership and leaders are held by the public instead of the public wellbeing.

The public health people know what they are talking about. For most people, frequently washing your hands is the only action required.

Your CEO probably isn't a health care professional and doesn't want to promote or advise specific behavior that isn't in line with official recommendations.

It is also worth pointing out that not everyone can work from home. I know someone who would love to, but two autistic children under school age at home makes that essentially impossible.

Work from home doesn't have to literally mean home. You can set up a laptop in the library and work there. Fairly often they have tables and decent chairs with a power point available and you aren't expected to spend any money or get out of the way like in a cafe.

Although I now realize this suggestion is entirely useless for avoiding sickness. Still useful if you want to work away from the office in normal conditions.

> It is also worth pointing out that not everyone can work from home

A WFH-if-able policy would benefit them as well, because fewer people would be at the office, reducing their risk of coming in contact with the disease.

Telling people to work from home isn't necessarily of benefit if they're still out and about in the evenings, and most people don't have a few weeks of food stocked at home. If the cost is minimal but so is the benefit, there's not much point - your CEO may as well tell everyone to eat oranges and get enough vitamin C on "why not" grounds.

Saying "Prepare to not leave your house at all for two weeks, and we'll give you a couple days off to prepare but get on the VPN once you've quarantined yourself" would be of much more benefit, but it's much more disruptive.

Yeah but it decreases the odds of a whole office getting sick at once, which seems like worst case

The employer has no legal way to mandate that. That said, if it were consistent with generally accepted recommendations from the government, and my employer was not just allowing but encouraging that recommendation, I probably would comply voluntarily.

I urge everyone to listen to what this frontline ER doctor in NYC said this morning:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/02/coronavirus-testing-em...

Testing is being stonewalled, false assurances are being made, and he anticipates serious disruption once the full extent of community transmission becomes clear and rears its head.

I don't understand the need or upside to mass testing? We know the spread is inevitable. It doesn't change the course of treatment right now, or the recommended precautionary measures.

Mass testing is the only way to gauge the appropriate response for things like level of quarantine and directing additional resources where case clusters will overwhelm healthcare infrastructure.

It's still beneficial to slow the spread. It will be easier for a health care system to handle X cases over the course of six months than X cases over the course of three months. Mass testing has the potential to get infected individuals out of the population more quickly, and thus create a slower spread.

How sensitive is the test? You might end up flooding ERs with false positives, or people from not-at-risk populations.

In the Korean and Chinese tests, there was no evidence of false positives, only false negatives, and they still ratcheted up testing because it’s still better to catch all the cases one can.

You wouldn't go to ER, even as a positive test, unless you needed intensive care. Most cases could be isolated at home.

This is the big reason why you don't need to test everyone - the results of the test change nothing.

If you have a mild case of Coronavirus and are able to self-isolate, then just do it. Testing and confirming you have it doesn't change things, you'd still be asked to self-isolate.

I can see the value in people who are very sick - confirming they have the virus can inform the need for isolation in the hospital.

But how does anyone know they have a mild case of Coronavirus? It looks just like the cold or flu. Now that there's community spread, you can't assume that you only have Coronavirus if you've recently traveled or had contact with someone with confirmed Coronavirus. People who think they just have the cold or flu are going to maybe stay home a day or two, not self-quarantine for 2 weeks.

A positive test result would indicate to a person that they should remain in isolation for a week or so (or whatever the current recommendation is) after they get better, and not return to work immediately.

It might also be useful to have a diagnosis to present to an impatient boss who wants you back at work.

I think the point is, if it becomes endemic, people should self-quarantine even in the absence of a positive test.

That's what my employer is doing now. If you're sick, work from home for 2 weeks. Don't come in.

the results of the test indicate whether quarantine and contact tracing are useful.

Deciding whether to visit elderly relatives?

There aren't enough tests to do that. All that would happen is you'd run out testing, largely on unlikely cases as people flock to their doctors for tests, and when someone with clearer symptoms presents themselves you won't be able to test them.

You really don't think tens of thousands of medical doctors and experts haven't already thought this one through? They're not limiting tests because they're utter morons, they're limiting them because they are limited and they are trying to do the best with what they have.

The only reason the tests are limited is because the US rejected the WHO standard test, tried to make their own, screwed it up, and now are stonewalling frontline doctors (who are absolutely demanding more testing).

We could import foreign tests from Korea, where some facilities are capable of producing 10K per day. The absence of testing is absolutely an unnecessary, dangerous scandal, and everyone credible on this is saying as much.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-testin...

If true, this should be a huge scandal. People, myself included, criticized China early on for being slow to recognize the crisis. It would be tragic and embarrassing if we’ve made the same mistake here in the States.

It’s true. Read the article and watch the clip linked at the top of this thread. It’s Li Wenliang all over again:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/03/02/coronavirus-testing-em...

The CDC even deleted the testing counts from the data off their site to try and cover up the absence of testing.

Also, it would be better for COVID-19 patients to be showing up en mass when the flu season has abated in a couple months. Right now, hospitals don't have a lot of spare capacity.

That's my understanding, anyways. I'm not a health care expert.

if we knew the identities of all or most of the current cases, we could isolate them, trace their contacts, and thus slow the spread giving our systems more time to prepare by letting us allocate resources more effectively instead of reacting to critical cases only.

here is an analysis of the percentage of contacts we would have to trace (paramerized on R0), to stop the spread entirely. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

(We're probably past that point now, though)

is there value in at least testing a small sample randomly in all major population centers, to gauge where resources and potentially reduced movement rules should be put in place?

For random testing to find anything, you would need a large portion of the given population to be infected. By that point, you would already have detected the outbreak by targeted testing at hospitals (or even without any direct testing, based on the surge of patients with COVID-19 symptoms).

Once the dust settles, random testing for anti-bodies will probably be useful to work out exactly what happened to better inform planning on future epidemics.

It's going to be quite jarring to Americans when they realize how many people are already infected.

One thing that occurs to me is that even if my own job is hard to do from home, I would still benefit from a significant number of my colleagues staying home. One possible emergency measure that could be taken by a decisive government would be to mandate paid sick leave for everybody.

I remember someone quipping on HN about how the Coronavirus outbreak would effectively result in a global WFH experiment. I wonder what lessons, if any, will be learned and if this will have a lasting impact on how much software engineers (and people in similar positions) are expected to physically come to work 5 days a week.

If I had to guess, not as many as there should be. For WFH to work, you have to have an environment conducive to it. You can't just tell people to stay home and magically solve the problem without a huge productivity hit.

Unfortunately(in this context), I don't think it'll last long enough for those changes to happen.

It might have a negative effect when everyone tries to work from home without making any adjustments and finds it to be sub optimal.

I hope that doesn’t make a bunch of people think that WFH is a failure because it didn’t work when they threw people suddenly into it without the appropriate tools or norms.

A few years back we had an earthquake that forced many organizations to stay away from their offices (just days for some but years/permanently for others) because the buildings were declared unsafe (structural issues, disturbed asbestos, and such).

Long-term, one outcomes of that has been a matured approach to flexible working - The tech (if not already present) was rapidly deployed. The biggest change has been a cultural one. Everyone being forced to work remotely for a period of time killed off those little snarky comments about 'shirking from home' that previously were being made about any employee that dared work remotely. Some organisations used the situation as a springboard to push 'flexible working', made easier at the time by the prospect of moving into new offices and planning fit-outs to support it.

Working from home presents a similar trade-off for organizations as having open-plan offices. You save on office space, but you risk reducing productivity. A watershed event can take you over the cultural hump - Afterwards there's no longer a question of whether you can support flexible working, because you were forced to work through any barriers to it under urgency.

tl;dr strong external driver for something that would otherwise require an unlikely internal drive to accomplish

Square is doing the same.

The big (Fortune 500) company I work at already has an environment that is conducive to WFH - most people on my team do it ~1/week on average.

I'm very curious to see if/when we all get instructed to WFH though, because although WFH is allowed I doubt most people are as productive at home as at the office given how collaborative our work is. We regularly get updates on the virus from corporate so I expect it's only a matter of time.

I work for another Fortune 500 that's currently on the front page. Honestly, my team already WFH several days a month anyway, and we could start WFH tomorrow and be 100% as effective.

I'm in a F500 company that's a little late to the party but they're catching up. They just put some network restrictions in place to save bandwidth and people are getting antsy. From looking at Slack apparently losing Spotify was the biggest blow.

It wouldn't surprise me if that blacklist stays in place forever. I can't imagine how much bandwidth is lost to streaming audio and video during a work day.

What do network restrictions have to do with WFH/COVID-19? Am I missing something or was this comment meant for a different chain?

The company realized they don't have enough bandwidth at the VPN portals to support hundreds of simultaneous Skype and Teams video chats for the entire length of the work day when everyone starts working from home.

So the short-term fix (and probably long-term as well) is to restrict bandwidth-hogging apps from company computers.

This is the only responsible thing to do.

Everyone who can do it, should work from home. Also avoid big gatherings and pretty much reduce (but not completely avoid contact). The coronavirus is inevitable at this moment it will stay with us. But slowing it out makes a BIG difference so hospitals can keep up and we can develop and distribute a vaccine which may take 2 years.

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