The coronavirus crisis will end, but the distributed newsroom is here to stay
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
WFH is almost unanimously popular among the HN comment section demographic. These thought pieces declaring an early victory for WFH tend to get upvoted because they tell everyone what they want to hear: WFH good, offices bad.
WFH is challenging. People who are new to WFH tend to assume that their workload will go down, that their efficiency will go up, and that they'll be happier if they leave their homes less. For some people, this is true. However, for most people it takes a lot of time and deliberate effort to reach the same levels of in-office productivity while working from home.
Coronavirus quarantine isn't even a good representation of WFH for many people. People with young children at home are struggling to balance childcare with their dayjob. People are struggling to resist the urge to binge Twitter for Coronavirus news and opinions all day. We're all going stir-crazy from the isolation. Many people's workloads have decreased as business has slowed down.
The author is exactly right that Coronavirus will force companies to refine their WFH workflows and tools, but I think it's not accurate to declare this an early victory for WFH. Ideally, we emerge from this with more options for those who prefer to WFH, but I don't see Coronavirus quarantine convincing the majority of companies or people that WFH is inherently superior.
Personally I think the push for WFH is much smaller and noisier than most people think. People who don't want WFH, like me, tend to be pretty quite on the subject because "the status quo is fine for me, thanks" isn't something you can get fired up about.
People are also experiencing unusually slow internet connections due to everyone being online all the time, which makes working from home a less pleasant experience than it was before.
The reason WFH hasn't taken off has nothing to do with want works best for employers. WFH hasn't taken off because having a physical presence has been a huge part of how companies not only control employees but show off their status. Startups had to be in SF because VCs wanted to see an office.
Now that everyone is forced home more companies are seeing that having an office is a liability, and is not nearly as necessary since everyone has had to learn to do remote work so the cultural inertia has shifted immediately.
I suspect we'll see a change to WFH, not because workers like it, but because it is cheaper and production doesn't change (not to mention it quickly reveals whose "production" is really just physically presenting in an office)
I’m unconvinced and very skeptical that on the average across all people that transitioned to WFH due to COVID-19 there is “no change” in measurable productivity.
*A lot of workers are surely working more hours to compensate, or out of boredom. This presents a whole different set of risks.
I think this’ll be less of a watershed moment for most industries.
I see people complaining about open offices almost every day on HN...
It has everything to do with it. If people were more productive at home than in the office, employers would embrace it. If they are less productive at home, they will oppose it. (Factoring in the cost of the office, too.)
I've worked at home and in the office for long periods. Working at home isn't all it's cracked up to be. There's a lot to be said for working in an office with your colleagues that email, chat, and video conferencing will never make up for.
I do not see that. I see the typical back and forth intellectual analysis and warning, but not strong arguments. The majority of stories are how good WFH is in some dimension(s). It's universally been bad for productivity, for any amount of time, in every single company I've worked for (25+ years). The billion dollar company I work for has self-recognized how productivity has crashed and have started to implement metric collection. Ultimately the low level managers and individual employees know and the upper management wants to blame something else than their own employees in aggregate (which won't help things).
I ain't cheaping out on current quality of life by having massive commute and adding stress, so shaving off those 20 mins each way doesn't mean much to me. Work-life balance is better with clearly-cut 'theatre' for work and life, having commute as a separator.
Oh yes of course team work with remote is inefficient, was before and will be in the future till we wire our brains together. Having a whole team nearby makes everything so much faster, and I don't even go to the topic of different time zones.
The only benefit for me - more time with my baby. But in these super-short bursts till another interruption from work comes, and they do.
Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned much - people are much less active in general, this will without doubt have bad consequences on their long term health (although these will be hard to track precisely). I am trying to motivate myself into weight training at home 2x per week, running 2-3 times per week weather permitting and long walks on the weekend, but its much harder compared to having gym, and I know literally only my parents (whom I motivate myself to do so) that are so active. Everybody took the 'stay on the couch' too literally. But that's another topic and maybe this is very local to folks around me.
Based on the US's obesity statistics, I don't think lack of access to a gym is Americans' problem.
Spending an hour plus commuting every day is probably more of a problem.
Between getting ready in the morning, getting kids ready, making dinner at night, putting kids to bed, that extra hour or two commuting is what replaces various other activities. And working too much in general.
Precisely. Tied to this is how we zone everything so dam far apart from another. It's ridiculous to have parking minimums within a 500' radius everywhere when there's no living minimimums. If most were able to bike or walk to work then we'd kill 3 birds with one stone: transportation cost, excercise, and environment all at once.
This is the root cause for people commuting 1 hour plus everyday in the first place. You automatically sort your neighbors by who can afford to commute that far, and as a result, sort the schools your kids to go to.
To live as a community, people have to believe they are a community, and I don't believe this is possible with current levels of income/wealth/future potential gap. And the only solution I can think of is wealth re-distribution.
Hate to break it to you but a huge portion of Europeans also commute for one hour plus every day since they do it by public transport.
Not everyone lives in a quaint Dutch city 5 minutes bike ride away from work.
That little bit of walking to public transit definitely helps with sedentary lifestyle.
The difference is they eat right and spend their weekend either hiking in the mountains or running or mountain biking or going to the gym.
So no, it's not the driving to work that causes the obesity problem, it's how you take care of yourself the rest of time that makes the difference.
riding my bike home from work (a bit over 3k with >100m net elevation gain) burns less than a chocolate bar worth of calories.
It does not seem to me that way. I have the same amount of communication as before. I am communicating from home to people who are home too - effectively peers in same situation which is actually improvement over what it was like during majority of last decade for me.
But these guys relied upon a team that was 'just there'.
The corporation had done the work - the knowledge on how to make a TV programme was implicit in the whole organisation, not in one persons head.
I think this is the real 'reveal' - it is possible to have much smaller corporations, you just need much higher skilled (perhaps broader-skilled) employees.
In HN terms, very very few companies need vast Spark-enabled data centres replicated across multiple time zones. You can go a very long way with the data centre equivalent of pro-sumer.
It's also a nightmare trying to hire for broad skillsets. Increased specialization is the only way to scale on the business side of the house. Even YouTubers have agents and managers who handle the money side of things. The influencer management companies largely act as a studio from a distribution standpoint, and most are owned by major studios at this point. There is no free lunch; those YouTubers have a huge centralized infrastructure with an army of specialized people, it's just funded by management fees paid by the talent instead of a corporate budget.
Don't discount the level of professionalism behind most YouTube content; this shit has been heavily controlled by established media interests (Comcast/NBC, Disney, etc.) for at least 5 years. It just looks different than the old media model, but it's all owned by the same players.
I beleive you - but would love to read more about it - any references?
But yeah -- the real money in video is still in negotiated campaigns that target a specific channel or set of channels. There are only so many ad buyers, so there are benefits to centralizing ad slot sales as well as SSP activity.
Those kids doing a billion views have a magic combination of personal charisma, work ethic and well-connected, pushy parents in the media industry. Things were different pre-2015 but the level of sophistication required to get big in online video is much higher than people think. There are a lot of talented, charismatic people out there making videos; the ones who find financial success are the ones who can amplify their voice above the crowd (which really just takes money).
There's no way this is ever going to be seriously disrupted in my lifetime; middle management has too much information gating ability and justification making ability to ever let the power of being in control of the working class by using offices/on-location work places wane.
They all seem to be using a mish-mash of cameras and microphones. Some good, and some not.
The station should have shipped them all kits with high quality gear, software to blur the background where needed, a list of tips (e.g, don't let your kid play Steam when you're on-air,etc.), and so on.
I do see the shortage on webcams, but good (or at least better than a laptop built-in) microphones seem still available.
Joking, but the sports channels have been broadcasting a lot of "classic" (and not so classic) sport events that I remember from as far back as a teenager, and the quality is so bad I can't believe we used to watch it.
Pro tip: If all you see is the sport on the screen with no graphics (or the score/clock!) it's > 25 years old.
The quality wasn't that bad, the recording you're watching is. On the one hand, a friend of mine who's wife is apparently enjoying Columbo reruns, commented on the pancake makeup being quite noticable. Which I suppose it would be if pulling from the original tapes or whatever. On the other hand, my wife and I watched a few reruns of Taxi (late 70s) and I know if it looked that bad back in the day, I wouldn't have watched it.
There might not have been a lot of lines of resolution, but SD TV looked better than many recordings would have you believe. And remember that you're probably watching on a TV three or four times larger than what was used to originally view it.
Of course it is, we collectively didn't spend the money on moving to HD because it's the healthy thing to do. Arguing that HD isn't superior to SD would be silly. Good thing that wasn't what I was saying.
What I am saying is that if you were to go watch an old episode of Taxi on CBS All Access, it did not look as bad when it originally aired on a CRT as it does on CBS's rip from whatever source they used.
This has all been pretty sudden and taken everyone by surprise, I think. And every sort of business is struggling with this sort of thing. A lot of folks who aren't used to working from home are being thrown into this new way of doing things. Not to mention schools closing so kids are home, spouses working from home too, and a slew of other things they now have to worry about during the day.
I highly doubt these stations have a storage room filled with unused gear just for moments like these. And certainly not enough that they can send out a full, high-quality kit to every single one of their on-air people. This type of equipment can get very expensive, so it likely just doesn't make any sense. And now I'm sure there's been a sudden run on equipment making it harder to get.
Have you seen how big a professional camera actually is? There are basic physics reasons why they need to be so big. They are complex machines backed by a team of experts.
https://petapixel.com/2019/12/03/this-video-explains-why-tv-...
A film/tv studio is a factory and, just like a steel mill, what it does cannot be replicated in the home. What we are all watching from these in-home shoots is sub-par footage more akin to 1980s soap operas than modern studio footage.
Watch the various Linux Tech Tips episodes about their storage woes. When you film/edit on 4 or 8k raw footage, just editing together a simple youtube segment requires racks of servers, another thing not practical in homes.
I'm suggesting the station help them with better webcams and mics, and tips/help for their setup, like where to put the table lamp.
There's clearly room for improvement, as some of the reporters have decent audio and video (for home equipment), and others don't. Some are barely audible, pixelated, washed out / overlighted, etc.
In short, I mean "higher quality home/consumer gear plus some training".
The issue is likely the suddenness of the shift.
The news studio likely had whatever number of 'field' cameras/mics/lights they use for those "on site" shots, plus a few spares of each to cover for the normal damage that would occur from "in the field" use.
But they very likely did not have enough spares to give the twelve on-air personalities that make up a typical broadcast their own local gear, and still have enough "field" equipment to do those "on site" shots they want to do anyway.
The problem is very likely simple logistics. They had not, ever, planned to have every on air personality who normally works the studio all working from home at the same time, and so they simply did not have enough spare equipment to outfit everyone all at the same time.
That video explains some low-hanging fruit changes that would massively improve the quality of at-home reporting. About $1,000 or so.
all these reporters are using potato cams with some highly filtered high latency public streaming service and it might as well be some kid in his basement - speaking of which why do you not even have a backdrop, we don't want to see your ugly bookcase or oddly posh kitchen
also these journalists are using wifi to connect to their router and when someone in the house uses a microwave, etc. the connection goes out or dramatically loses quality from poor signal
someone needs to make a "professional webcam kit" with a pulldown rear greenscreen, a wired connection and a private network service to transmit with error-correction and time-sync back to the broadcaster - enhance the video and sound would be a big plus