Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
This isn’t the controlled trial of remote work that these think pieces suggest. Instead, everyone is forcefully stuck at home without time to prepare. Parents are juggling childcare with getting work done, while fighting an uphill battle against IT systems that weren’t prepared for everyone going WFH for every job at the exact same time.
Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
I don’t think we’re going to look back on this experiment and conclude that it was a net win for productivity or even for worker happiness.
The question is, what are they going to do? There are two options... demand better tooling (I'm actually surprised about Microsoft Teams!) or go back to office and put up with everything related to a multi-hour commute - infection risk in public transport, gas/insurance costs, endless traffic jams, hours lost each day that can be spent with partner/s and children instead, or simply with sleep...
This one unfortunately (because, choice inertia)
1. Workers (that previously hadn't been remote) realizing that it has good parts and bad parts, that paying an extra 10%+ in rent/mortgage in order to get a proper home office can be the cost of working from home (and then the costs of utilities for a now non-empty home). That doesn't mean it's bad, just that it has pluses and minuses.
2. Companies realizing that people working from home _does_ have benefits, and it's _not_ just people sitting around in their PJs being unproductive.
Then I think we've gained something. It's not a backfire, so much as a better understanding that everything has tradeoffs.
I live in an apartment with three other people. It's fine when we're all coming in and out and spend all day at work.
But now that 3/4 of us are at home, and confined to our rooms it's getting annoying. There's no good public space, and none of us share any interests.
I live and work in a single room, and I wish so much I could move to somewhere with more space. If I were full time work from home there's no reason I'd need to live with other people. The only reason my rent is so high is because I live near a city which I have to do to work. I suspect this is true for other people as well, and if we saw a greater amount of full time remote people would spread out a little.
Where a one-bedroom is $4000, a two-bedroom is going to be $6500, not $4400.
Obviously a cheaper metro will have lower prices, but is the relative premium for an extra room also so dramatically lower?
Obviously many people have laid down roots in those extremely high cost of living areas at this point so just moving can be tough, but we need to spread out man, cause $4000 a month for a tin can just ain't a good life.
Otherwise though I'd generally agree. Rent is getting crazy in the US.
There really is no such thing. Remote teaching does not, can not, and should not work for young kids. It's not a university.
(source: life)
The first case is my wife, the second one me. We have two kids. For obvious reasons I had my office at home anyway. For two weeks bow it is WFH for both of us. Plus the kids at home. Tell you what, it works. Stress, sure. But it works.
Exceptions: weekly full-house meeting of 400 employees isn’t supported by hangouts so you can only participate in read-only mode
The only issue I personally have is my WFH broadband is horrible.
Basically what you’re saying is that “the company I work for does a horrible job of having it’s systems available for remote work”. But then it would also be true of other things
Those have almost always been 'meetings that should have been an email' in my experience. I think some leaders are just used to having an audience to be effective.
Edit: no children either, just easier to work with people in the same building sometimes.
I'll chime in here.. perhaps you don't like working from because you are childless? In my opinion it's the the opposite of what people are thinking... I think you would find that the people who like working from home are ones with kids (let's say >5 where they can at least take care of themselves long enough without worry of instant death.. infants/toddlers are obviously an exception here, unless you have a stay-at-home spouse and a separate part of the home).
The reason is that when you have kids you have a day-to-day schedule with them that is vital for the family's sanity. Your kids also will start to have schedules like school & activities. Also, you simply want to see and spend time with your kids. Being gone/unavailable from the moment you wake up until 6pm might not be an issue for people when they are a little younger without kids, because they still have the whole night to do whatever. I was like that in my 20s. I worked until 6/7pm and I didn't mind at all. I had plenty of energy afterwards to unwind without basically a care in the world.
In my late 30s with young kids, I am supremely lucky to work from home (I have done this full time for like 7 years so this is nothing new to me). I get to spend a LOT more time with my kids, take care of the house (billions of more things to do with kids around), and all that jazz without worrying about being fixed into a schedule where I would never see them.
I guess I could go on and on.. but that's my view on all of this.
Also after getting into full time work I realise I have no time for anything, my schedule after I get home is pretty much cook dinner, dog responsibilities, and 1 hour of spare time before I have to sleep (otherwise I'm yawning throughout the next day). I've just made an extra 3 hours free in my day because I'm not commuting to work.
It definitely takes more discipline to work from home because I get easily distracted. And I think I wouldn't mind it being on an on/off schedule as opposed to 100% WFH. I usually like being alone but I can see it starting to creep up on me. Our team recently did a virtual lunch and it worked better than I expected!
This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a no-go.
Non-parents don't get it. It's impossible to get anything done with kids around. The only way I can imagine it to be possible is if you were to abuse and traumatize your kids so they'd leave you alone because they're afraid of you. Maybe that's what some of our ancestors did.
Kind of frowned upon now.
Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. You can't start contributing to society until you're 20. Everything easy has been automated or outsourced.
One year is nothing, really. As a farmer, the work I do required about a decade of study before I could be productive on my own, and I'm still working on mastering it. In the days of yore, farm kids had to start engaging with their teachers as soon as they could as it was the only way they were going to be able to be capable of attempting the practice once they reached adulthood.
> Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything.
Well, you need four years of college to get past the gatekeeping. Gatekeeping that is setup because the work has become so much more accessible, necessitating means to cull competition. You don't have to start as a young child nowadays like the farm kids used to have to. You can easily coast into adulthood without even thinking about a career.
School and college is pretty much just to waste your time. None of the things you learn transfer well into work life.
A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told my kids 'if you can play all morning, without fighting and screaming so loud that I can hear you, and not interrupting me, I'll pay you what I normally would have paid the baby sitter'. It was the first time they could make their own money, and it worked perfectly. I tried again a few days later and it failed and haven't had to try since. Maybe an idea for all those that now work from home the first time?
Examples of nonobvious consequences of parenthood include:
- Parents of pre-teens tend to be constantly late for everything. That's not because of lack of organization, but because the kid will randomly soil their clothes or do something else that needs to be taken care of immediately.
- Parents are also constantly interrupted. Especially with the first kid, it seems everything is a life-threatening emergency, so the moment it even looks at you funny, you'll start calling your spouse at work to consult or coordinate a doctor's appointment. Some workplaces accommodate that (mostly those staffed by other parents), some don't. It becomes a question you start asking about on the interviews.
- Say your company offers to send you to a conference or a training seminar. You'd probably jump at the occasion (yay, free education and zero responsibility, all on paid company time!), but you might be wondering why your coworkers all refuse to go, and don't even show any excitement about it. It's probably not because they're lazy, or just dispassionate 9-5 workers. It's likely because they're parents, and you can't just go to a conference as a parent. It's a huge logistical challenge.
- Parents like big cars because of storage space. Going up and down the stairs with stuff gets tiring really fast, so you end up e.g. storing trolley and surplus diapers in the car. If you didn't want a car before, you'll start to want one now. This goes against the general trend of environmentally-conscious living.
- If you aren't addicted to coffee yet you will be after having a child. You'll also learn that polyphasic sleep is a real thing (if it wasn't, nobody would survive the first months of parenthood).
- You'll start talking about shit with other people. And I mean literal shit.
- You'll bankrupt yourself if you try to buy everything new for the kid; you'll likely and out of a sudden become super frugal and very aware of all local clothes/items exchange/giveaway groups.
- A babysitter isn't a luxury, it's mental healthcare in the city.
I could go on and on, but it's late and my kid will wake up in about 5 hours. I'll be drinking an extra coffee tomorrow.
when we moved from communal intergenerational lifestyles to the insular nuclear family. David brooks wrote a great piece about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from the office either, so I'm not sure what this means.
That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".
I wouldn't call it impossible, and I've been working from home on and off for quite some time. And no, my kid isn't traumatized.
It does take some juggling with time, the 9 to 5 schedule no longer applies as you have to spend time during the day with your kid, but it's no worse than the random and useless meetings and conversations you have at work. And you have to be patient and expect interruptions.
It can be done with some discipline. You shouldn't generalize.
The lack of time for child care is the problem. I've observed a sibling that does have children being severely taxed daily (in occasional video calls across the country).
It isn't the working from home aspect that's broken, it's how little time "a normal job" affords parents, or even those of us who've yet to find a life partner.
Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot.
If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fundamentally against remote work will do just that.) If one worked remote during a hurricane, and pretended the hurricane wasn’t the dominant factor, it would also be ridiculous.
But it is time to be asking, how could we be better set up at home? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our tools? Does the current schooling model work in the 21st century? Or is it too fragile and dependent on an old societal structure? Should we be paying teachers a lot more than we are?
Conversely, we should be talking about the ‘wisdom’ of open offices. Hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn’t regular old offices with doors that close implement a fair amount of physical distancing?
While this virus does survive in aerosol form, it is not strictly airborne; This means that a non HEPA filter will likely stop it and that, from the return side; it's more likely to settle on the carpet or furniture than particularly infecting a human.
The more likely issue would be meetings of more than 1 person in a poorly ventilated room with no airflow; where aerosol virus would linger.
Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video),
I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.
Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.
For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.
That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.
So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.
My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.
As a parent, I see two big problems with it:
1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)
2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.
I was a homeschooling parent and was, briefly, on the board of directors and the lead mod for an educational organization because of it.
Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.
This is not true.
One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.
Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.
Public school teachers typically deal with classes of twenty or more students. Homeschooling parents have a much better student-teacher ratio and the one-on-one teaching is much more intensive than public school education.
You and your children will both experience rapid burnout if you try to spend eight hours a day actively teaching them. You don't need to and you really shouldn't. It's an unsustainable pace.
You can check Learn in Freedom for ideas etc, authored by tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult (he's a teacher by profession, but homeschooled his own kids):
We live in a rural area with essentially no school age kids nearby, so we're very aware that during summer, Christmas break, etc, we have to arrange ways to keep our 10 year-old in contact with kids his age. In summer we usually sign him up for the in-school daycare a couple days a week so he can see his friends and we also arrange to visit other families with kids he knows frequently, trips to the park, library, etc.
However, in the current situation, that's all gone flying out the window. A least, because of where we live, there's lots of space to go outside and play without coming into contact with anyone outside this household. I shudder to think how quickly we'd all go insane trapped in a small apartment!
And this is also exactly what I feel the people who are now pushing for online schooling in general don't get (apart from the fact there's a non-negligible part of the population that doesn't have consistent/good internet access). There's a lot more to school than just going and learning 'stuff that doesn't affect real life', as some seem to believe. It's about social learning as well, and they're completely underestimating how much this happens in schools.
Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit. People like me who'd needed it the most didn't get any of it during school. There also wasn't much in regards to an education. In hindsight, school was a complete waste of my time, that at times negatively affected me because of bullies nobody did anything about. If only beating was still a thing when I went to school, then the teachers maybe would have beaten the shit out of the bullies, so they'd have to first spend a week in the hospital before getting suspended on top of that. Sorry, thinking of school always makes me angry.
Not to put too fine a point on it—but I don’t think that very many people who work in education think this way. Especially not the teachers running the classrooms. You leave children to their own devices and you get Lord of the Flies, which was written by William Golding, who based the book on his experiences as a schoolteacher.
My personal advice, as someone who “survived” school, is that intense feelings of anger in reaction to school add too much color. You have to wait and let the logical, non-angry patterns re-emerge in your own mind each time that anger reappears.
If you never had a friend all the way through college, you are nowhere the majority.
Without these measures a lot of folk will die a lot sooner than they should.
Isn't that same for every junior in high school? Are recruiters going to be happy to miss out an entire year?
Basically, anyone is disadvantaged who would normally have a small window of opportunity to prove something right now.
Not meaning to rant, just something I wanted to get off my chest since people keep talking about being trapped indoors when practising social distancing (not quarantine. people under quarantine need to stay as isolated as possible).
But as I said above, we, adults can understand and cope with it easier than kids. And sadly, when we make our decisions, needs of children often is an aftertought.
Another thing that surprised me, many of my colleagues don't have a good working environment from home. They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids, and mostly don't have an office or even a good laptop.
> Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
That's most likely the reason why they "work in the office by choice".
Back when I was still working in a physical office, I couldn't understand why someone would want to escape from their home into an office. As a WFH father of an infant, I fully get it now. Working with a small child nearby pretty much precludes any regular focus or deep working sessions.
> Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
Indeed it does. I've never wasted so much time obsessively reading the news like over the past month.
I live in very small flat and I simply don't have space to separate work/home related stuff. I'm really struggling to focus on work task and when I finally do it I have problem to stop working (and end it too late). When in office someone will always ask why I'm still working or I will get hungry and food is waiting at home so I need to leave. Also video conferencing is poor replacement for talking with others.
+1 for this. I'm 100% remote, as are many members of my org, and we're struggling to deal with the big changes happening. Webex and Zoom occasionally drop audio or just straight up drop people.
Also can't underestimate the kids thing. For example, my boss has 8 year olds who LOVE to sing as loudly as possible -- ask me how I know :)
It's part of American work culture. It's a form of virtue signalling. By showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their investment in you. Executives and managers won't give that important signal up.
"Showing up is 70% of everything." [Woody Allen]
There's a term for that:
In spite of this, I have been pretty worthless the last couple of weeks, primarily due to all the distractions of what’s going on.
When you consider that for many people, WFH started immediately with little time to prepare a proper setup, who are also trying to figure out how to be part-time teachers, PLUS the distraction of the current state of events, I suspect that most companies that didn’t do WFH before the crisis will reconvene when this is all behind us and say “WFH was a disaster, productivity was trash, and we’ll never do it again.”
If that happens, it would be a sad outcome, because under proper circumstances WFH can be a great lifestyle benefit with equal or greater productivity than an office environment.
Pros:
- Able to be at home all day, feel I have more flexibility.
Cons:
- I miss cycling to work.
- I miss getting out the house
- I miss chatting to colleagues
- I miss lots of indirect help from other developers.
I might feel differently if I had to drive to work, as I hated that. Now though, my commute is a 15 minute cycle down a clean, wide, and seperated cycle path which I love (especially in the sun!).
If I lived in a rural area I'd probably be outside working on a new deck or garden, but I live in a city and I'm stuck in an apartment.
You need a company policy that gives at least a $1k budget for home office supplies like chairs and desks.
And you do need some offices for people to congregate to and for field operations if you have them. And you need policy to allow for personal office rental for those that don’t live within a commute to an office and can’t work at their home.
And employees need to get used to a more independent way of working. That they can set their own hours, etc.
I am working for a company where all decisions are made and communicated during lunch break in the canteen or near water cooler. At the moment the managers look pretty clueless, they have no idea how to start written communication.
Additionally, you want your employees to have a comfortable environment as it makes them more productive. If you're going to make your company a distributed company than you need to take some of the savings from not operating large offices and invest it in the remote experience.
From the perspectives of the companies it's also unfair to look at their hiring habits and speculate on their attitudes to working from home. Many companies are struggling to meet payroll, fighting with uncertainty, and desperately trying to form new communication structures in order to support the business. During such time, of course hiring is not going to be a priority.
Speculating on the outcome of this nightmare seems somewhat foolhardy, and extolling the virtues of working from home myopic given the many people who now find themselves struggling or out of work, ill, or forced to work in what are increasingly dangerous environments.
These are the companies on the forefront of technology and zero opinions have changed.
As someone who's made a living in the restaurant sector most of their career, this is both terrifying but also exciting. Delivery was never the most exciting prospect because the economics were, for the most part, worse than dine-in, but in the absence of dine in maybe people will want expanded offerings? Lots of things to think about.
In my opinion, a bad economy is the best time to get an education. My extreme hope is getting closer to our cyborg future by furthering advancements in digital communication and human-computer interfacing.
Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American?
Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.
This may go hand-in-hand with a (degree of) rolling back the uber-capitalism of sacrificing long-term "anything and everything" for the potential of an immediate bump to the stock value.
For work that doesn't require a lot of communication and collaboration, it'll be easy to outsource to other countries, just like now.
For work that is intensely collaborative, having the team speaking one language in one (or adjacent) time zones is key.
Don't allow the stress of the situation to color your judgement of work from home. It is a good thing in our modern time.
But a lot of people treat work as more than a transaction. That's fair but not for everyone.
I began doing remote work about 8 years ago while homeless. It was a good solution for my circumstances and it was a good solution for my health issues that were the actual root cause of my financial problems and homelessness.
Doing remote work has helped me protect my health and grow gradually healthier when that's not supposed to be possible. So I can't help but wonder how many people with serious health issues could be healthier if they lived more or less under quarantine.
I also homeschooled my special-needs sons for years. One if them has the same medical condition I have. They also have other issues.
As a homeschooling mom, I was a remote volunteer worker for an education related organization. They helped me get to a related conference on the other side of the continent where I was a very low level presenter.
I feel strongly that people with "quirks" -- health issues, ADHD, etc -- are the ones at the most risk of homelessness because they just can't make a "normal" life work and we do a generally poor job of telling people that there are lots of other ways to live and work, you just have to find the ones that work for you.
I've spent some years trying to develop websites and the like to help homeless people and people at risk of homelessness to find ways to make their lives work. I think remote work and other "irregular" work options are key to that.
I've never gotten much traction and the past decade has cured me of childhood brainwashing where I was always at the top of my class and the world around me kept saying I mattered and all. At this point, I'm quite convinced that I shall always be perpetually ignored.
I think I can make my own life work, so I sort of don't care anymore. But it seems like a missed opportunity because I already know so very much about germ control, working remotely, etc.
I'm not sure what my point is. I'm not sure I have a point or that there is any point to trying to talk to with people about this. Recent years have painted me as some kind of clown that no one should take seriously.
I think a lot of these decisions are going to de facto be made by the usual suspects for whom "normal" life works well, which is how and why they got into power. And I think that fact will help insure that people conclude that this doesn't really work and it needs to be temporary and it's imperative we return to "normal" as soon as possible.
But working from home was the historic norm. Family farms and craftspeople with a shop in one part of the building and their home in the same building and even retail establishments with the owners living upstairs was the norm for much of human history. Separating our living and working spaces is relatively recent. It's the weird and new thing.
My father was old enough to be my grandfather and I grew up with a garden in the backyard and a father who hunted and am mother who sewed a lot of my clothes. It was, in some ways, like a throwback to a prior century.
So those "old ways" are kind of living memory for me. And I never know how to effectively talk to people and say "No, seriously, it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to accept these kinds of problems as the price for having a paycheck or something."
I hope we embrace a philosophy that gives people more options, not fewer. I hope we can find the opportunities and the upside in this situation.
But most people don't really want that. People don't like change. They hate hearing that something like this has a silver lining. So I'm not very optimistic that we will.
WFH everyday is a joke.
Disclaimer, I have done a lot of remote work.