The Coronavirus Is Forcing Techies to Work from Home. Some May Never Go Back
buzzfeednews.com
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Secondly, large corporations seem to function via rules that are completely immune to reality. Every 10 years or so Intel will not only insist everyone is in the office, but will look at relocating teams into their head offices for any given project - literally giving the people the option "Hey! I hear Gdansk is lovely this time of year". This sort of organisational bullshit from large companies isn't going to go away. However, you can look at the opposite side, I know people (not engineers) who work at companies where they hot-desk every day and the office is only provisioned for 70% of staff to turn up on any given day because they're too cheap to actually provide everyone a desk.
I guess what I'm saying with that second point is that for most large businesses these choices are going to be more about corporate bullshit than some sudden epiphany that working from home is great.
But you are right about the corporate BS.
OTOH, of course, someone will come along to point out that you can afford 20 spare bedrooms if you work remote and can move from SV to a farm in upstate NY.
Isn't this pretty standard in the U.S?
I've seen employers even offer reimbursement for standing desks, antifatigue-mats, co-working space memberships and home internet.
A top of the line Laptop, Docking Station, Monitors and Keyboard would amount to a few hundred dollars a month even if all of it lasted a year (and most hardware nowdays are pretty reliable for 3 years atleast) - there's no point even discussing this from the POV of an employer that's not a ramen startup off a garage.
The savings from renting a place in any city, the insurance, maintenance and security costs are significant.
Also use MS' RDP and brew + SSH + port forwarding + SwitchyOmega (Chrome extension).
It's like I'm at my desk at work.
Actually, Gdansk is lovely all year round. If Silicon Valley could move to Gdansk, it would be a great step up (but not for Gdansk).
I was wrong on all counts. The problem is that you can’t suddenly transition people to WFH and expect them to figure it out right away. This doesn’t resonate with 20-something developers who spend much of their home time glued to a computer in a quiet room, but it will resonate with the parents who have kids at home.
In our case, productivity fell immensely in certain teams and departments. People scrambled to find quiet space at home where they could hide from young children. Others struggled to work efficiently with purely digital communication. A surprising number of people couldn’t handle being productive without the watchful eye of their manager. Some people tried to take vacations and respond with one-liner emails from their phones. Some of us were more productive, but it wasn’t anywhere near as uniform as I expected.
I’m concerned that this sudden, forced WFH environment will hurt perceptions of remote work more than it helps.
Small house sizes wouldn't be an issue if I was living basically anywhere else.
If this situation continues maybe I'll try to transition to full time remote and go live somewhere quieter?
Countless articles on the topic have graced the front page of HN over the years. I wonder if any of it will work.
A few of my colleagues hated it and returned to their FAANG(probably for financial reasons, as well), unlike myself.
It's more different than people think.
IMO the entire way your team operates needs to be centered around them being remote. The worst is hybrid teams where they are half remote and half in office. I don't think they work well anyway you do it.
Also some people just aren't very suited for remote work, they need to be physically around their co-workers.
If you are curious about more details, the REMOTE book is a good primer on the different ways of working remotely compared to in an office. https://basecamp.com/books/remote
Your mileage may vary, but it took me half a year to be 100% while remote.
You have to reach out and communicate when you're struggling or blocked because nobody will know by your body language.
You have to step away when you need to because it's easy to get sucked into non-stop work which isn't always productive work. This is even better if you're allowed to have a truly flexible schedule (e.g. you could work a few hours in the morning, take the midday to yourself, and work the rest of your day in the late afternoon/evening or switch it up and take the morning to yourself and work the afternoon/evening).
As with most predictions, there's a difference between predicting something existing at all, vs. predicting normalization/ubiquity; so there's a sense in which he was accurate, and a sense in which he missed the mark.
There are a million little reasons why physical proximity still makes a difference to company culture and human behavior, so some amount of that will always be with us. But I think it's fair to say that while we'll partially regress to the mean after Coronavirus blows over, the rate of WFH-friendliness will end up being significantly higher. (Depending on how long the scare lasts, the necessity of distributed-first culture changes might even grease the wheels for hiring remote workers, leading to secondary effects on the labor market.)
If you're making the transition, I put together a few of the most helpful things I've learned over the past decade. Hopefully it's helpful - http://woven.com/blog/remote-work-guide
Basically, rather than ending up with a utopic remote work coup d'etat into some sort of of distributed co-op, I imagine programming becoming yet another gig work job. And if tons of people do move to lower cost of living areas, well, wages will go down. (You need the majority/expectation of non-remote work to prevent that.)
If power is what you lack, household cost cutting in the form of remote work won't get you there. Put solidarity before your individualist paradise.
We're getting ahead of additional Coronavirus impacts now, though, by establishing team chat channel and expectations for virtual presence and having discussions about how to maintain software engineering productivity on a remote laptop. Next thing on my list is to establish team culture of it being okay to quickly jump on a VC for high bandwidth information exchange and leaning-over-the-shoulder type stuff.
I see a lot more written communication in the future, too.
Almost all jobs require coordination with other people, and you need to be available to address clients’ needs when they expect you to (i.e. during business hours). You can’t have meetings or other coordination if everyone is on their own schedule.
The only jobs that might not need this are developer jobs where you just need to commit your code at the end of the day. So if your vision of WFH comes from this perspective, you’re in the vast minority of the overall workforce who can operate this way.
Too many people think that WFH means you can set your own hours, watch your kids, have the TV on, go to the gym, run errands, etc. If you have a well established track record, then maybe you can do one of those things in a day, once in a while, but people without the right work ethic will fall off the wagon pretty quickly and ruin it for everyone else.
Especially in a case like COVID-19, people working from home may be stuck with their kids and other family who are also forced to stay home, making it more difficult to establish good habits.
Quite true. I can be at the office and not get shit done all day and it looks like work. I can be at home, kill it, and even save the company, and it still doesn't really look like work.
Wally would never work from home...
They all have strict security, but we can remote just fine. My phone has a locked-down VPN set up so I can communicate by phone, slack, and email, and I can remotely log in to my computer through Citrix. My previous companies have had similar set ups. I was involved in the portfolio management and research side of things, and this was true for all of my colleagues.
Remote access to Bloomberg terminals works fine through these solutions.
There was a lot of talk when Kickstarter unionized about how tech employees don’t need similar protection relative to the dangers workers faced during the first mass waves of unionization. I think that calculus might change in cases where workers are forced to expose themselves and their families to a pandemic because their bosses value butt-in-seats over employee safety.
This is happening right now with the nurses’ union in California, who are exposing the CDC’s stonewalling and failure in testing for COVID-19 and the danger this is posing to everyone:
https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/N...
While it certainly seems reasonable to prioritize those at the most risk, on the other hand, in my brief experience with a union, it almost seems like they tend to prioritize problems they can't solve and ignore what can actually be done.
Laptops are standard-issue in my agency, so it seems like if the person at the top ordered it, essentially everybody could work remotely for the next month or two.
s/Work/Study/g
Then another thing that's lame about remote work is you have to limit the location people can work remotely due to employment regulations, so if your company is in California you aren't allowed to hire someone from Ohio without doing a bunch of extra paperwork and expenses. I got a job offer for a company in San Francisco but wasn't sure about it 100% or if it'd last so I thought trying remote would be interesting and then transition but the HR person told me no even though she was interested in me. But I guess they didn't want to register in other states, paying taxes in multiple states, payroll, some states require worker comp and probably applies if you work from home even, etc as it would create a bigger Nexus for a company with a handful of requirements for a state the HR person has never even visited or has an address in the state even (so they have to pay for a virtual office service, a agent for the company in the state and add extra costs and administration since some states won't accept a out of state address for some paperwork). So many companies unless it's already big with locations all over the US rather just deal with a single state for now... Then businesses large enough to meet the requirement have to file equal opportunity reports, what location do you put down? Someone's house (then fill out a separate form for every house - so 50 employees is 50 locations if no office in the area they could visit?), the virtual office address or what? Sounds like some say the office they report too, but if you worked remotely for a company in California from Ohio where they don't have a brick and mortar regional office seems to complicate things. Maybe in that case you report to their California office even if you never fly to or visit California? Seems like the laws were written never considered the possibility of working remotely and different answers depending on who you ask.
But the whole remote thing can get even more confusing, like apparently if you work for a company in New York remotely and a few other states they wants you to pay income taxes even if you never visited the state due to them considering it telecommuting even if you never psychically commute there, so double taxes even though your state will let you credit taxes paid to others, I expect NY would be much higher... Plus there's conflicting info and other things if you look up this type of stuff.
Someone lived in Tennessee and was found to owe Taxes to New York. https://www.biglawinvestor.com/new-york-telecommuting-tax-pe...
> If you work remotely for a company based in New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Nebraska or New Jersey, even if you physically never step foot in those states, you may be subject to state income tax in those states.
Which doesn't make sense according to what the HR person said, if they had to setup in your own state to hire you wouldn't it credited as payroll taxes in your state instead of New York? Then if you lived in Ohio full time and tried to claim New York taxes as a credit for working full time, I wonder if that's a huge red flag as they'd probably assume you psychically commuted instead of working remotely. Especially if you live in a lower tax state where due to the credit given to higher taxed New York so you ended up owning nothing to your state, paying all your income to state not close enough to commute to everyday by car.
Then I know Delaware is popular for incorporating too even if a company puts their HQ in California... Surprised everyone at the GooglePlex in California isn't considered to be working remotely in Delaware?
Then some states say you owe taxes just for checking email while waiting in the Airport during a layover, so some companies track where employees are and pay taxes in multiple states, but some companies aren't capable enough to deal with this stuff since the big assumption is a employee is just staying at one location and seems like a grey area. So technically if you send your employees to a conference or trade show in another state, opening up another can of extra compliance, however I feel like a lot of companies probably just ignore this unless they make it a regular thing.
Then remember seeing if you are a contractor like a plumber, a business and employee is expected to file and pay taxes in every single city they visit a customer so that can add up too - but not every state allows cities to tax people and some have proposals to simplify this. Some contractors might visit a city one off if they aren't big enough but I guess some might just limit their service area but I know we had a roofer come from a hour away once, and tons of little small cities in between. So if a one off job, and then some cities expect you to keep filing even if zero and not all cities even put the forms online. I know one idea was to just let the state administer the city taxes as part of the regular state tax forms, then the state would forward the money to each city what they are owed and take a 1 or 2% cut for doing it, but cities wasn't happy with this idea and rather do it themselves. Then in some states like Michigan, was reading tax software won't even handle cities.
Confusing stuff... I guess this is something you'd have to probably hire a knowledge HR person to help you deal with this stuff, but who knows if the know all the little details when dealing with multiple states. I guess for a single person it's not worth it, so easier just to tell someone from Ohio no if they aren't willing to move to California right away. Seems like every states have stuff like this, be cool if some state encouraged fiber internet, remote work and relaxed regulations for remote companies - I guess instead people are forced to move even if they could work remotely technically but can't due to the bureaucracy and red tape burden getting in the way. So sounds like states will end up losing both residents and income instead of making some money they make zero. Same with how some affiliate programs banned people from Ohio participating, sending them a email with a short notice to stop sending traffic. However I guess the larger corporations like Google probably can hire people remotely nationwide since they are big enough to handle the extra burdens imposed by every state where they have people working remotely. Then cities and county has extra stuff too... Also wonder how OSHA works with remote, if you are on the clock and run to the bathroom in your house and ended up tripping and stubbing your toe... Is that a accident report just as if you worked from the office? Then what about the employment posters if working remotely - and even some cities have their own too... I guess make them available on the internal website maybe as I doubt someone would hang those on the wall in their bedroom. but another thing to monitor and keep up to date across all the locations people work remotely from. Also looks like some states even require you to reimburse them for internet access, but some make you track what's person or business? Sounds a bit annoying but might be a good perk... Free internet from your company if you work from home!
Maybe the tech and culture isn't holding back remote work, but the government putting all these artificial limitations. I wish we'd have some modern tax reforms and even take advantage of tech. My favorite idea I've had for a while would just cut all payments for a flat tax, sorta like how PayPal takes a transaction fee for every payment. Have the gov take a transaction fee and have some agency that's responsible for redistributing it to states and cities, so as a business it'd be super simple.
Stuff like this is a bit discouraging, you'd think 2020 remote work would be easier. As someone who dreams of a startup, I think making a MVP/prototype and seeking investors to relocate to a bigger city, renting office space would be the best path and just hire people locally would be simpler. Unfortunately I feel it's a disadvantaged though since talented people all across the country or even world that could be a good fit but can't just easily hire them remotely due to all the red tape. Just seems crazy if you hire someone remotely from across the country, you have a pile of regulations to follow like a brick and mortar business locally would. So I could see why a business in California would say no to wanting to deal with hiring people remotely, they have so much stuff in Ohio to deal with just for one person. Seems easier to just say no or require relocating to where the company is located. Just seems like the ways the regulations are or read doesn't really consider remote at all. Not sure if places would embrace it, seems like remote businesses would cut down on things like property taxes too... Why cater to Google across the country when you could try and force them to build a local regional office?
Still, I find it a great stress reduction and time saver to have the option. After years spent doing both 5 days/week, I find 3 days in office and 2 days from home strikes a pretty good balance.
I am a very social person so I liked hanging out with my friends/colleagues at the office but knowing that I only had to spend three days(a minority!) out of the entire week there was perfect.
In that case the company should not be obligated to pay you. There's a good chance your employment contract contains a clause allowing your place of work to change at any time (within a certain distance of where it is when you join).
Perhaps not, but in California the company is never obligated to pay you except for labor you've already done.
> There's a good chance your employment contract contains a clause allowing your place of work to change at any time (within a certain distance of where it is when you join).
In California, you don't have an employment contract period. Even if you did, I doubt the requirement to (for instance) maintain an Internet connection at your home so that you always have the ability to work from home would be an enforceable clause.
In this case WFH really is for your benefit, for multiple reasons: staying away from people (eg not get infected that easily) and keep your salary be keep working.