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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

I hope that Google and other companies will encourage remote teams and divisions after this event. Having the ability for some teams to primarily work from home might provide some hermetic guarantee of continued development and liveness during a time of crisis.

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I don't think this is similar to normal remote work though. Schools are closed, so people can't work on home in isolation. On top of that people must be anxious. When people are worried about lots of other stuff their output may not be the same.

Even basecamp, which is highly remote, postponed their email service launch.

> Even basecamp, which is highly remote, postponed their email service launch.

I’m sure the added stress didn’t help, but I would imagine it’s more related to marketing. Do you really want to launch a new product at this time of uncertainty?

Considering that it was an email service, focused on making async communication better, one would think right now might be a pretty good time when a large number of people are working from home.

strategically perhaps, but the optics on that are so awful. I'd argue it's the wrong thing to do if you thought you'd be more profitable in a crisis.

It's not about being profitable. They could even maybe launch it below cost and that might help people even if it costs them. The parent talked about marketing. And people using something and benefitting from it, and then recommending to others is probably one of the best forms of it.

The optics are bad if you try to profit unreasonably. Launching something to help people become more productive, and making reasonable money out of it doesn't have bad optics.

There are plenty of firms not terribly worried about the optics right now.

I don't mind naming one particularly gross one - Knightscope is busy spamming about how "Security robots are immune from disease and work 24/7". I'm sure they practiced defensive patter about resilience until they could say it without smirking.

Didn’t stop Apple today from releasing new iPads, Macbook Airs, and Mac Minis...

I've seen forecasts that this may last a few months, or until a vaccine is created. We need to expand our options beyond death or economic collapse. Not only that, but this almost certainly isn't the last pandemic we'll see, I think we should expect another one of similar magnitude within 10 years (like we expected another major terrorist attack within 10 years of 9/11) and plan accordingly.

We techies are some of the ones best positioned to keep the economy going. No need to physically travel, can remote access resources, and the ability to value generation engines. In the information economy, we absolutely need to do our part. That should be what we take away from this tragedy.

it usually takes a year for a vaccine to come out between the time it takes to create a working vaccine & starting to distribute it.

But I really wonder if this time some kind of shortcut may be granted due to the unique, exceptional situation?

If everything works right now, then slowing feature-work down makes sense for products critical in the current situation (which is the case with ChromeOS for students doing school remotely, as you have described). Because imo the goal should be to keep things as stable as possible to avoid interruptions for people during critical periods and only issue hotfixes for bugs that break functionality and for security vulnerabilities. Feature-work could still be done in some capacity, but pushing it to customers in prod is too risky.

This makes sense and sounds like an empathetic approach. Even if it wouldn't be an adjustment to remote-first teams, it should be assumed this is an adjustment to many others, and that new problems will be uncovered especially for critical services. It's also nice to have a constant in a sea of change.

I work fulltime remote normally. With kids home and added stress of social distancing, I'm at 50% productivity at best.

Bingo. I've been full-time remote for a few years. I have little kids who are in the house a lot, and I've adjusted to the disruptions that can entail. But the stress and anxiety of the current situation are more difficult to adjust to. Hard to shake anxiety over something like this if you're prone to it.

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