Charter prohibits working from home despite spread of coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Charter prohibits working from home despite spread of coronavirus

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125 pointscsnover57 comments

I think some people may just be shell-shocked and reacting too slowly.

My employer refused to allow working from home for the most part last week, up until Thursday.

After several days of union negotiations, they floated the idea on Friday of letting people request up to four days per two week pay period to be remote. That was at about 3 PM.

Just after 4 PM, an email went out saying that people were allowed to work remotely 5 days a week for the next month or two. So some of us got kind of upset that they were making it an individual decision. Somebody may have to come in, but most people shouldn't and some people can't. It needs to be collectively managed, in my opinion.

So then, today, around COB, there's another email saying everybody is required to work remotely for the next couple weeks unless there is some specific exception.

So it's just dramatically evolving day by day.

> they floated the idea on Friday of letting people request up to four days per two week pay period to be remote

I don't understand why do they think of it in terms of people requesting it like it's a perk? Even out of time of crisis it's not some luxury it's just a normal working arrangement.

edit: Ok, enough downvotes for taking his statement statement literally, without observing its context.

If you can’t work from home (factory worker, nurse, spy, whatever) then clearly none of these messages or discussions are relevant to you so why bring it up?

My mistake, I took your "normal working arrangement" literally.

edit: No need to downvote an apology. I took it literally, without the appropriate context. Sorry.

We are able to work from home, but a higher-level person I work with made multiple statements last week to the effect that working from home was "like a vacation".

Normally, it's allowed one day a week, but not at all for new employees, and not without advance approval.

One answer to why it's this way would be that's what the union contract was negotiated to be.

My inference is that government employees are considered to be lazy and/or like children, that you can't trust them in general to work on their own.

But I really wished people to understand it's neither a perk nor an entitlement now. It can't be an individual decision, because whether one person goes in depends on what other people do. Telling people they can stay home if they want makes it into a prisoner's dilemma situation. People (leadership and rank and file) are trapped by their individualistic thought patterns when the only solution is to both do what you are told and be told to do what is in the collective interest.

People sometimes talk about how other cultures don't prioritize the individual as much but they never sound like it actually makes sense, it's just kind of patronizing. Right now, it's making sense to me, but a lot of people (e.g. on my Facebook feed) seem to just be writhing in misery over trying to choose the best thing for themselves and guilt over other people not necessarily being able to do the same thing.

> government employees

Where did anyone mention government employees?

The person who you are responding to is one.

He did. He's op, he works for a government.

Ah, I saw his follow-up post.

The leaders who resist change probably know what they'd do at home..

> My inference is that government employees are considered to be lazy and/or like children, that you can't trust them in general to work on their own.

From my observation, this is just what a certain school of manager things of all employees/subordinates.

It's horribly toxic, especially when said manager is seeking to polish their own credentials with their higher-ups by taking on more work in their department. Any time their subordinates tell them, "We're already at full capacity. We can't take on anything more," that's seen as meaningless whining.

So the workload doubles, with no increase in overtime or staffing. You can guess what that does to the people having to do the work.

As a monopoly provider of substandard internet to most of its customers, I would not give Charter the benefit of the doubt.

In my case, I work for the (a) government that was just telling everyone else in the private sector to work from home several days earlier...

Maybe they are hesitant to allow remote work because they know how bad the internet provide is?

My partner’s work has been talking contradictory circles around how they’re (all of a sudden) doing work from home. People need to come in for “critical business functions” (undefined), but must be “staggered” (no explanation of how or to what extent), and of course “only if they feel safe.”

I get that everyone is just trying to get a handle on the situation, but trying to project authority or control through these vagaries mostly has the opposite effect.

I think there is a fundamental missing piece of what people consider leadership that is being stressed now.

People are used to thinking of their job in a stressful situation as comforting people and part of that is giving them choices. Or commanding people to do what they don't want to do, or a combination.

When there is a situation that affects people differently and collectively, the important thing IMO is to release them from the conflict of individual vs group decisions by giving direction that is fair and aimed toward the collective interest.

It's hard to change gears and do the opposite of what normally seems right.

I got frustrated because it seemed like leadership didn't understand that they don't have to force us to do anything, but they can't just let us all decide for ourselves - the task that is necessary is to tell us to do what we generally know needs to be done. It seems redundant, but it's vital, it's not magical, it just has to be done. Kind of like pulling the rip cord on a parachute - it's not rocket science but you have to do it and do it now.

I got a few e-mails from various companies (not my employer but companies I am/was a customer of) that went from "here are some small changes we're making" to "here are some big changes" to "we're closed". One company in particular sent 2 of these e-mails in the same day!

My work went from "next Tuesday workers with last names A-L should work from home to test our remote access capability" to "starting tomorrow everyone who can work from home should and work with your managers before coming in, and to prepare to do so for up to a month" in the space of 1 hour between emails.

I've been finding myself really aggravated at people who continue to downplay it, especially when they're engineers who should know what exponential growth means. There also seems to be this weird narrative going around (or at least it was, I'm not sure if it still is now) that this is all being overplayed by the media. My manager told me over the phone yesterday that it was 'just a bad flu' and that the reaction everyone was having was out of proportion. She's an engineering type that I'd have expected to know better. I'm currently working from home unless it's absolutely necessary to go into the office.

At the same time, I'm having to grapple with the honest truth (found after some introspection) that my extreme need to make people understand this is just as much about my own fear as some people's need to pretend everything is okay and downplay it is to them.

While reading yesterday's thread about "I'm not sure there's an acceptable solution to this", something in me started raising some alarm bells. Reading that thread, it was like the world had already ended. I can totally understand this, but I know there's only a certain amount you can be drawn into that before it goes from being responsibly aware to being uselessly hopeless.

So I'm trying to practice empathy and remind myself not to jump down my friend's throats in chat everytime something coronavirus comes up. At the end of the day, we're all in this together and nobody has definitive answers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, remind yourself to be nice to people. Everyone needs this more than ever right now.

Edit: Not intended to be directed at anyone in particular here. Just a bit of my rambling thoughts. I'm also not saying we shouldn't spread good information. I've just been finding myself getting really angry at really close friends and trying to keep on top of why that is for me and how I can be a bit nicer to them.

Please don't use allcaps for emphasis on HN, regardless of how aggravated you feel. This is one of the site guidelines.

Sorry dang; my intent was to express how urgent it felt in my own internal dialogue, not to express aggravation to anyone else here. I'll edit.

Appreciated! Btw you can italicize text by surrounding it in asterisks. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

"There also seems to be this weird narrative going around (or at least it was, I'm not sure if it still is now) that this is all being overplayed by the media"

If there isn't already, there should be a thread about Elon Musk gaslighting his employees.

Almost exactly the same experience here (NASA center).

This will change now. Many ministers are quaranteed and working remotely as of this week.

There are at least two factors at play here: - some people really don't understand exponential growth - it's become a mark of political tribalism to pretend that the pandemic isn't real.

There are other factors, like the fact that most offices don't have the infrastructure for 100% of employees to work from home suddenly. But I think the above two factors dominate.

Wow, I really admire Nick Wheeler, the engineer in the article raising the issue, standing by his principles.

I work in the Denver area. Maybe I'll hit him up on LinkedIn to come work for my company.

Fuck this company, and others like it. I know nothing will happen in the end, but these executives should get imprisoned and barred from ever holding a leadership role ever again.

And 3 to 7 decades, it's going to happen again because anybody who remembered the crisis are either dead or had forgotten what should be proper response. Imprisonment isn't going to change anything.

If we had the will to imprison them, I figure we would also have the will to fix the system.

This is a little tone deaf honestly, and not for the reasons people might think.

Amazon factory workers can’t dial it in. Nor can restaurant workers, or grocery shelf stockers, or gas station attendants, or truck mechanics, or of course almost everyone in the medical/police/fire profession.

Sure, people who can work from home effectively should. But there are also 300 million people desperately depending on supply lines staying up, and shelves staying stocked, manufacturing of basic goods, and food supply continuing.

Despite any “shelter in place” orders, there’s probably a solid 30% of the employed population which one way or the other are doing mission critical work. Charter is providing mission critical services, and while a small percentage of their workforce probably could dial it in, I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of people there actually need to be on-site to do their job.

Maybe most of those people have to commute in to the Bay Area though...

They're too afraid that they'll have to upgrade the "middle mile" to accommodate teleworkers.

I used to work for Spectrum, in Business Class tech support. Several friends still work there, in NOC and Enterprise tech support. All of them have laptops, "in case [they] ever have to work from home". Meanwhile, they're not allowed to work from home.

This is comic book villain level evil.

Here's a whole thread from @dhh about a few dozen others:

Head of thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1239286206803742721

> Do you know of a tech company that’s asking people who could work from home to come to the office? Reply to this thread, so we can track these irresponsible organizations, and remember their names even after this is over.

Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239286206803742721.html

Does that mean Charter would potentially be liable for the deaths of anyone caused directly by this?

eg say a Charter employee catches COVID-19 at work, then one of their elderly relatives catches it from them + passes away

If there's a clear chain of transmission, and Charter refused to stop it... well...

Glad to know this happened in Colorado, one less TeleCom to worry about (as if I was ever worried...)

I know somebody at Charter. This is absolutely how they work. No WFH. No exceptions. None.

It's obvious. It requires the type of collaboration you can only get in person to figure out how to sell home phone, oversell data, mess up billing, charge people for devices they don't have, constantly spam customers, and most importantly, escape legal action.

I'm not sales or technical support. I'm talking back-end engineering and their software teams.

Tomorrow’s headline: “charter offers terminated employee job back. Employee refuses.”

Has there ever been a case of a company obstinately following its own HR policies into the grave? E.g., no sick days allowed, but then everyone gets sick, so everyone is fired and now the company has no employees and ends up liquidating?

It's usually a slower process that results in failure.

Companies who lose employees will hire someone to replace them. The more desperate they are, the lower quality the employees will be.

Just heard they tested wfh for employees for a week probably as a publicity stunt and are making everyone return to the office come Monday with no definite plans to allow cloud/software engineers to work from home in the immediate future. There are a lot of older employees in that company. This is really unacceptable! The CEO was paid $98M in 2016 while the employees saw very little compensation gains. There was a strike for 5 months in 2017 to protest. It’s clear where their priorities lie...

i think they dodged a legal bullet when said fellow resigned in lieu of being fired.

He handed in a resignation letter. Probably a bad idea to quit any job while this happens.

Would it not be constructive dismissal even with the letter of resignation? He was forced to resign only due to pressure and due to the danger to himself.

yes it could be interesting if he wanted his job back badly enough.

Name and shame. It is the only way to move forward.

i am grateful i work in a field where i can work from home. for some people around me, not going to work is synonymous to not working and not getting paid.

some people are laid off.

working from home is okay for some of us. but maybe we should not be taking it for granted...

I understand your sentiment, but disagree with the gist of it. I've been working from home for 20 years, and it IS fairly normal in tech. I mean, why should a 'cloud architect' have to go into an office to work on the 'cloud'?

I realize this isn't the case for all careers, but this always makes me wonder, should hourly employees feel special they get overtime pay because some people don't? Its just different norms for different positions...

I assume people will name and shame Elon Musk too: still way over his head - thinking he is smarter than the scientists.

He said the "panic" was dumb. Panic is dumb. Well-reasoned remediations and precautions are not panic.

He immediately followed up by claiming that the number of accidents cause more deaths than COVID19....

The love for Elon Musk in this site is super strong! He is certainly infallible.

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