Working remotely crossed the chasm today
alexeymk.com
alexeymk.com
The moment half of the work force starts working from the office again, the dynamics are going to change. Those offtopic, face to face chitchats you have with your colleagues or boss hugely help your career growth. The WFH people are going to miss out on that.
One positive that this crisis has created though, is all businesses and institutions will take remote work seriously, and take the steps required to make it possible, especially as another wave of COVID19 is expected.
So apply to Twitter now :)
BTW, slightly off topic, but that picture of working on the beach? Too bright. Can't work. One day I hope I will finally be able to get an e-ink based laptop. I live within walking distance of the beach ;-) Perhaps sacrificing upward mobility isn't so bad...
I suspect there is a non-trivial amount of people who don't care about that. I've been writing software for a while now. I don't want to become team lead or manager. I don't care for the drama. I just want to do my job, get paid, and go home.
In that case, WFH is perfect.
(I find it amusing that this was downvoted when it's basically an axiom :-) )
>I suspect there is a non-trivial amount of people who don't care about that
> I just want to do my job, get paid, and go home.
Hard to get paid if you get fired...
Absolutely.
People are lowballing hard, trying to take advantage of the economy and are surprised when their offers are rejected.
This is one of the reasons why!
When a company must do budget cuts and layoff, it’s a big deal once in a few years thing. Not bi-annually.
Whatever the frequency is, it’s a risk. Arguably though if you’re remote you’re getting paid HCOL wages while living in a lower COL area, so being laid off isn’t as much financially dangerous as it would be in SF/NYC. Plus all these working years you’ve avoided the stress and drama that goes with climbing the ladder/getting in your boss’s pocket.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted though, it’s a legitimate concern.
Those have been gone for a long time, though - I've spent the majority of the past 20 years commuting to an office only to report to and work with people who commuted to an office in a different city.
Yep, this is what I think happens. When the boss goes back to the office and is annoyed that no one is around for meetings or when enough people on a team or group decide that it’s just easier to “optionally” be back at work to have hallway conversations...
Even saying “just come in on Thursdays for meetings” means the bulk of the work-anywhere dream many of the threads on HN have on the front page simply don’t materialize.
Normally the meeting is every month and only fits 50 people in the largest meeting room
At the top they are concerned - the main office is at 10% capacity (some things can’t be done from home - at least without 40g connections and large custom workstations), and after 10 years of cramming more people in they’ve realised offices cost money. They are looking to extend wfh significantly.
A meeting with one boss and 119 employees typically means 1 way communication Boss -> employee, with questions at the end, so that's easy to keep organized, Zoom or not.
You can even type your questions in the chat to be answered later, so it's more organized in a way
Everyone stays muted until called and contributes via chat window for questions etc
We also have a company wide weekly chat at the moment which is less useful but gives an idea on the thoughts of those at the top. About 11k join that, out of 40k.
Our own team level (15) have a daily chat in the morning for 20 minutes over tea, which is more connected than normal as we’re spread over multiple buildings. We then have a drop in session for other people in the wider department to pop in and have questioned manned by 2 of us, in lieu of the “drop by the desk”.
The main benefit of full WFH is that you no longer need to balance commute time against COL; you’re free to move further away or to a different city to leverage the differences in land cost. But with mostly WFH you still need to live close enough for the occasional commute and you have to foot the bill for a larger home with an office. This does not strike me as a winning combination.
I don't think this is true: remote in times of COVID is not the peak of the effectiveness or enjoyableness for remote working, by a very long way. There's no coworking options, there's the constant distraction & stress of the world imploding in the background, there's a variety of other restrictions on your lifestyle, there are kids sharing your WFH space, etc etc.
I think it's very likely that people's experience of remote work will improve as quarantines are progressively lifted, not worsen. Of course, this also suggests that people might write off remote work entirely in the meantime, by conflating it (explicitly or emotionally) with the pains of confinement in general.
Alexey - please make sure to use 'Copy of Presentation Final Final [2] (Matt's version) (Copy).pdf' going forward. Presentation Final Final [2].pdf is out of date.
Thx.
Joking aside WFH makes these sort of problems even worse I have considered suggesting we make all documents source controlled and use git to handle check in and out.
And trying to get people to use office 365's scs is going to be hard and if all your technical docs are in git makes sense to use on scs
next is organizations getting over the hurdle of educating people how to use version control.
Also - I think the current generation of office stores everything in XML, which can then be processed through git, svn, etc.
It was a nightmare. XML does not work well in git.[2] I even thought I could resolve some of the issues by sorting elements so they'd be in a consistent order, but none of the elements had guuids or anything to allow me to do that.
1: http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2010/10/14/eagle-open-xm...
2: https://blog.joepairman.com/2016/11/26/xml-in-git-mercurial-...
I have had that thought in the back of my head for a little while with my own eagle projects, thanks for making the mistake for me!
We are living through a black swan event, so it's a healthy exercise to forget everything you think you know about how the world works. I don't know how this is going to play out.
Not in a recession
As someone born in a small North Carolina town into poverty who has lived in Portland for close to a decade, this is both hilarious and depressing.
Bay Area tech folks are really suffering from some sort of economic Stockholm Syndrome. I’d love to see what would happen if one were to move from San Francisco to a city like Chiang Mai, Thailand. It can’t be much different than winning the lottery.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/05/07/northern-tha...
[1] https://www.kgw.com/mobile/article/weather/air-quality/portl...
For instance, I'd love to let my kid ride a bike to school. I don't because of cars (well, drivers, really). That's a form of pollution, in a sense.
Also, I'm generally bearish on remote-friendly or half-remote. Either the culture is set up for it, or it isn't. You can't be just a little bit pregnant.
They'll either adapt or have a bad time finding office workers.
I don't see why. I actually think half remote is the way to go to preserve the advantages of both worlds. It's a big question how the post corona world will look - are we just gonna forget it ever happened or are we going to try not to pack people in very small places? I don't have an answer to that question yet. It really depends on what's gonna happen in coming autumn / winter. A second and third wave of this thing will probably change things for good.
It's also a way to preserve the disadvantages of both worlds. For the company, it means having to retain an office in an attractive location and design it with an estimated capacity based on the whims of the people employed there.
For the employees, it means having to both retain housing near an office in an expensive location, which usually comes with not insignificant sacrifices, _and_ set up some sort of office for yourself at home, which may not be possible due to those sacrifices.
It also means employees, when some but not all are remote, are going to be put in the position of having to juggle onsite/remote meetings which are very difficult to get right unless you mandate it to being remote-first, which doesn't gel well with open office spaces.
If you're only commuting twice a week I don't see why you can't live 1 - 1.5 hours away from work. That should bring cost of living down significantly.
The analogy also doesn't work.
Perhaps imagine a party where some people enjoy cramming onto sofas playing games, others stand around the kitchen retelling stories, some sit spaced around a fire staring into the flames, and yet others stand far out in the open yard, tossing a ball back and forth. Everyone is part of the party, interacting in the way that works best for them, and if it ever makes sense to move to another part of the party, they will do so.
Unless this means London, Ontario, it's unintentionally hilarious that this guy considers Europe's largest city and financial capital to be a has-been 'city emeritus'.
It goes along with the idea that because some microblogging website is allowing remote work, that suddenly the idea is mainstream.
For an industry that claims to think big, the tech startup world is surprisingly small and insular.
For now nothing actually changes, British citizens are still EU citizens, a London bank is still an EU bank.
In principle the country is "rapidly" negotiating a long term arrangement on everything for completing by the end of the year. This hypothetical "deal" would set up the relationship from 2021 onwards.
In practice there are two schools of thought. Maybe the intent is to get to the end of the year and accuse the EU of having somehow failed to achieve a deal (even though the EU was always clear that would take much more than a year) then break off with no relationship and suffer a huge economic down turn as a result. Maybe somehow that works politically? It's hard to see how, but it's not as though Brexit made sense anyway.
Or maybe the idea is to build up the tension and then announce we've belatedly discovered that it isn't possible to finish the deal immediately and so we'd like an extra say, two years to finish making a deal, kicking the can down the road. Who knows.
The UK actually left the EU on January 31st, 2020. We're still 'Europeans' (inhabitants of the continent of Europe) but no longer EU citizens.
You're correct, British citizens are no longer EU citizens (though there are court cases that dispute this) but all the freedoms they had as EU citizens continue until transition ends (currently supposedly at the end of 2020).
I just think it's amusing the idea that London has weathered the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Plague, the Blitz, and the Brexit vote, but what will finally dim its star is Twitter sanctioning WFH.
And I've also worked on a completely disjointed and disfunctional remote team.
Only the team can make it work, not any mandate from above.
It just applies just as much to in-office as remote.
I am imagining a world where coming to office everyday isn't a requirement. And it is probably going to be true.
However, I am not sure WFH will become the NORM. I definitely feels that my co-workers close to their manager gets more attention and thus their career tracks faster.
All need to be put under perspective.
However, over the last three months with everyone remote, all the time, it's worked generally well, apart from when access to the labs or R&D plant was required.
I've been missing some of the face to face interactions, and meeting in person can move some discussions forward quicker. My volume of email has dramatically increased.
In the future, I can see two or three days per week remote working being completely plausible and healthy for productive work. A couple of days per week in the office will still be useful for access to specialist equipment, personal networking and team building.
The most attractive part of the office are the water cooler conversations and social activities completely unrelated to work. And that's why I still think there's a place for shared workspaces. Companies will shrink their large centralized headquarters and start building satellite presences. No need to fit everyone into one big mega-campus.
As the author notes, once companies figure out a streamlined and scalable way of onboarding and supporting a remote-first workforce, we should see much greater adoption of this approach.
Also chat tools are causing huge distractions and work needs to be better organised than that.
It sucks here with the NIMBYs, the boring endless sprawl, the high taxes and bad public services, and the insane housing costs. But I've always thought people were generally happy about living in NYC, Seattle, Boulder, and Austin. (Though of those cities I've only lived in New York)
NYC has insane housing costs too. And high taxes. The public schools are hit and miss. Some are really good, but most not.
If you want to live in Manhattan you pay a lot but it at least feels like you're getting something in return by being walking distance to the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world.
The Bay is nearly as expensive as Manhattan but for the most part it's indistinguishable from any random suburb in Florida or Texas or wherever. Lawns, Costcos, car dealerships - really not worth $4k a month.
My experience has been that few people drive to the other side of the campus for a run of the mill chat or some random presentation. Unless it's in the same building, and unless it's something important, you just call, mail, chat, send office365 links, do skype presentations... you know, the remote stuff. So above a certain size, it's in the company's best interest to embrace remoteness anyway.
Not so much true if you look at the numbers. It's more just additional growth in the other areas.
Github or Gitlab?
Reasoning:
Acceptance of remote working, or at least not coming to the office, is boosted. But not everyone can work comfortably at home: Distractions, discipline. So a local co-working place nearby becomes attractive.
There's no WeWork where I live but there is a local library and (before lockdowns) it's packed throughout the day with people studying or on their laptops.
Upside: Free. Downside: No possibility for calls or video.
I'm pretty confident that ultra-local co-location working facilities could take advantage of demand for people that don't want to work at home but also don't want a commute.
It could be as simple as a house in a neighbourhood with solid internet, a few extra tables, the kitchen's already there, and a few bedrooms converted to private areas for video conference. Perhaps a good franchise model. I'd be on-board as a user.
Ten other people in a 2000sqft house would fund it pretty easily: Zoning and an SLA on the internet connection seem to be the only hurdles.
Edit: Thinking about it, I have friends that do this already informally by renting a cheap apartment.