Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

The people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done. Senior management / C-level types were content seeing sales figures and general output from afar.

Middle management struggled because they had a hard time judging work estimates for tasks and whether people had their butts in seats etc.

Just an anecdote but thought that was intriguing.

Further, we are being given less than 24 hours notice to come back into the office. It's just absurd, and it has eroded any trust that I once had in the company.

But, this only increases the risk for those who actually do have to go in. Everyone should be vocally opposed to this policy, including (especially?) those to whom this policy is supposed to be "fair."

An employee who worked in their offices actually died from COVID-19: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-cor...

Now, it's not a given they got it from the office, but they probably did spread it more, so it was a very irresponsible policy IMO.

I wonder if they're aware of that subtext....

I was already halfway thinking about another job because of the open office that was a mix of developers, QA, customer service managers, and implementation folks that were always on the phone and it was loud. Now with Covid and me working from home for three months, I dreaded going back into the office.

It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.

Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.

So I’m voting with my feet and actively looking for a fully remote job, it’s fucking insane to pretend an extra 2ft and alcohol gel will work when no one is following the rules properly.

I’d have been moving on at some point anyway since I don’t particularly like my job but it pays well so I have time to look for something that is a better fit.

So they’ll drain the good staff, I’m not the only one planning to bugger off.

Where I work, discussing salaries is strictly forbidden and grounds for dismissal.

I demanded an increase and was told, "No. It wouldn't be fair to the others."

I asked, "How would they know?"

(weWantToBeFair) = enterprise(iWontCumInYourMouth)

This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are still deciding what to do.

Edit: Be aware, I have enough emergency savings for around 3 years worth of fuck it. I'm not you and you should not be me.

Absolutely jawdropping stupidity that is.

This is the explanation I hear most often, but when you examine it, it makes no sense. Otherwise you would need everyone to make the same money, which makes no sense either. People are different, their duties are different, some jobs are better suited for remote work than others - putting everyone in the same basket is plain stupid.

The manager won't be able to tell if you're genuinely stuck or slacking off, and the benefit of doubt is likely to go against you if offices have reopened.

So unless you truly can't make it to work, you'll likely go back once the majority have, regardless of your apprehensions.

I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it.

Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc.

We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.

I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020.

> why exactly is that easier now?

I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates.

I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.

While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.

> there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)

There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.

And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.

Either you're getting your work done or you're not.

Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.

Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.

Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).

I work my full complement.. actually even more so.

But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.

For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.

Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.

This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.

Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.

Source: used to work in that newsroom

Now imagine half of them being on the phone....terrible.

So if we're talking about a US company, if you want anyone on the west coast, hiring continental Europeans will be tough, unless one of those groups is willing to work outside normal hours.

Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.

The most likely outcome of remote work is a lowering of salaries in the big cities and a raising of salaries in more rural areas, as salaries tend towards the national median.

Remote work has been a possibility for employers for a few decades now. Nothing has drastically changed since the new wave of WFH to change that, other than its more widely discussed.

> 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%)

is there a source for this?

I'm not convinced that the only reason "everything gets outsourced" hasn't happened yet is because employers are lazy.

What wouldn't surprise me though if/when remote becomes a bigger chunk of certain types of jobs, is if salaries across US regions equalize more given that local labor market rates become less of a factor for setting salaries. In the extreme case (which won't be the norm), your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18451311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 (parent)

(or at least it's famous to me)

Seconded. Employers are in a hard spot right now, because making an affirmative decision is going to cost them staff either way.

Those who've come to enjoy being at home and loving the flexibility of it, if told that it'll be back to the office in 2021 or ASAP, will start looking for a fully remote gig.

Those who dread the idea of being fully remote, if told that the company is going to remain fully or mainly remote, will start looking for a company that will offer more in-office hours.

They're probably looking down the barrel of a quick 20% turnover regardless of the decision they make, and so sitting here preserving the status quo is benefiting them the most.

These companies will continue to punish their employees if they are allowed to do so. The only way to create change is through leverage.

This goes for anyone facing this decision. If you have the ability to quit, you should absolutely do it. Take a year off, find another company that doesn't support archaic business practices, start your own business.

You owe it to the people that don't have that option. The people that are forced into commuting. The people that are forced into depression because they have to continue to pay their massive rents in absurdly expensive cities. The people that have incredibly poor mental health because they're pulled into gross office politics that pit employees against each other.

We must force these companies to change their bad behavior.

- Cloud security?

- Controlling physical safeguards remotely?

- Something different?

Most recently, a mid-July date was mooted for returning to the office, but a few days later it was announced that the union-negotiated work-from-home arrangements have been extended to October. It's ambiguous whether there will be a transition period, or if really nobody wants to go in.

But nobody seems to want to push things out as far as next year all at once. Some employees feel threatened and say they're not going back until there's a vaccine. I'm just kind of bemused for the moment, because I'm almost 100% sure that as things get worse, there is no chance of following through on the plans, yet the authorities keep making them, and then pushing the date out a little more.

I'm fine with going back to the office as soon as other people are and management can explain why we should. But I'm not sure that's happening in the forseeable future. Every day we get an email from our dear leader talking about going back as though we need to keep our hopes up, yet we are also told how well we are doing working remote. So...why return?

Source: worked at NYT through 2019.

In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand.

Care to elaborate?