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Comment by vsareto | Hacker News Reader

2020: Let's just all work from home

My company is privately owned and the sole investor is anti-work-from-home, his firm is always sending us emails about how we're supposed to be a family and when you work from home you aren't part of the family. Every 1-2 weeks someone leaves and cites the policy as the sole reason (~130 people work here total). We just got a reminder that while we're supposed to be careful about the virus, sick time will count against PTO and working from home is still banned. I'm leaving in a few weeks and I'm very excited to watch this guy keep losing money.

Hopefully the WfH grass is greener for you! In my experience WfH companies have employees that are checked out, and collaboration is much more rare.

I think if WfH was really better, companies like Google and Apple would have different policies. Real estate in Cali ain’t cheap!

Why does it matter if collaboration is rare if the work still gets done?

Google does allow some level of remote work. Apple does not, largely for security reasons.

Many law and accounting firms have embraced work-from-home policies despite their work involving significantly more collaboration than programming does.

Is the job of a company of 100 developers for 100 developers to grind out features in a silo? Or for them to collaborate and create something greater than any one can?

I am not saying WFH cannot work. I did a year solo when starting my startup. But I have been a part of a lot of full remote teams, and I did not want to run my team like that.

Most developers claim WFH is better and companies win if they do it. Cool. So the market should prove out that the companies that do WFH would win over the companies that require butt in office.

So far I do not see this result. For the same reason outsourcing doesn't work great for innovation, WFH is real real hard to innovate.

Totally prove me wrong though. Start your own company, work remote, and kill it. I love the idea. It's great for the environment. It's just not how I choose to run my company, nor do I see many other highly successful companies doing it. (Allow WFH once in a while, sure. But apply to Google and ask if you can work 100% remote).

Our company experimented for 4 months and found productivity is much higher and the only people who were unhappy were the managers. Our CEO jokingly said while the devs have become more productive after about 3 weeks he had no idea what managers were doing. Except managers everyone was laughing pretty hard. In my experience working in about 4 companies managers are the gatekeepers for not allowing WFH.

In my experience the short term is a great boost as it improves morale, but over the long term the lack of team spirit and the innovation factors go down.

But if you guys started in person, that means you all live close. Do you meet up once a week or so? That might be enough to bend the curve to successful.

Honestly though, this will be an interesting test of the effectiveness of WFH on a large scale. We can look at past pandemics and compare the loss of economic activity.

Further, companies are essentially forced into updating their infrastructure for remote work.

I believe much of the dogma around the notion of “Gotta be present to be successful” at a company is some marketed adage that lasted past its time.

Companies save more money from having less physical office space in the most expensive areas of the world. The markedly small reduction in productivity (or increase) would be compensated by worker satisfaction, environmental tax credits, and savings on physical location space.

More like don't leave home at all. It's not just work where the virus spreads.

2020: The future of remote work is here.

I put some money into the Slack stock a few weeks ago based on that thinking, on a lark. Worked out well so far. Any ideas about other companies that will benefit from this inevitable giant wave of remote working that will be growing rapidly for the next 6-12 months?

I think we'll see entire new categories of people working from home on a large scale. Lawyers, marketing people, accountants, etc etc. Basically anyone who is dealing with information rather than physical goods.

Microsoft has a much more solid remote work product suite, IMHO; though most companies adopting more WFH policies are probably already Microsoft customers.

They're such a massive company with already gigantic solid revenue streams; this wouldn't move the needle much in the short term.

You're talking about Teams? Or Office365 / OneDrive? As a software developer how have you found it? We've had great luck with not Teams so far and are likely going to have to transition because [enterprise change] and I haven't found very many positive things being said about Teams at all. Interested in your thoughts.

Suppliers of baby products...

With ANA Avatar XPRIZE remote suit-controlled robots we'll soon have work-from-home for physical tasks too!

Zoom has been up big, but could continue as Twitter (announced today) and other big companies start rolling out WFH policies for the majority of their employees.

A lot of these companies have already run in anticipation (eg TDOC and ZM), and or were already obscenely expensive courtesy of the bubbly valuations in the market.

I'll add DocuSign (DOCU) to the list of companies that will benefit, however. A lot of people are about to be introduced to relying on their services in the coming months. Disclosure: I no longer own the stock, it's stupid expensive here, trading for ~19 times sales with no profit; future optimistic results are being pulled massively forward.

I think we’ll need more porters to connect America

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