Hacker News Reader

Comment by levesque | Hacker News Reader

I have strong feelings against permanently remote. I feel like this hasn't been fully thought out. Face to face interaction is much more high bandwidth than remote video calls (in other words, it conveys more information). Not to mention that this transfers the costs of office space to the employee, maybe this is why all employers are quick to jump on this bandwagon. Curious to see where this new trend will fall in 2021.

View on HN

I think it depends on how much you like being social too.

Not interacting with people, not having a place to go, just being in the house all day is absolutely terrible for my long term well being.

If my place goes full remote I would have to consider renting an office.

> Not interacting with people, not having a place to go, just being in the house all day is absolutely terrible for my long term well being.

Could this just be due to a pandemic? I think in normal WFH, what you described wouldn't be much of a problem.

There's a thing I see all the time online where people massively underestimate human variance. While people have many things in common, they are all over the place when it comes to many important emotional and mental characteristics. There is no one-size-fits all for anything behavioral, not even close.

If they say it's bad for their long term well-being, they very likely know exactly what they're talking about even if your own experience is very different from that.

I initially read the comment the same way, but I believe they were saying that when the pandemic is over you won't be isolated, not that isolation wouldn't be bad for wellbeing.

I'm like the parent commenter in feeling office work helps me:

For me, I don't do social very well, but I still need to interact with people, I get on well with people (AFAICT) but seldom does anyone ever really want to spend leisure time with me. Work forces me to have social interactions that help my "sanity" (by which I mean: a vague hand-wavey notion of mental health).

I'm "happy" day-to-day with hiding away at home; but I tend to spiral downwards as I don't get much social interaction outside of work. Banter is good medicine.

For me this is a midlife thing.

YMMV, and the parent is probably quite different, but that's my recent experience.

Many companies have been reimbursing home internet and electricity bills since March. Mine even paid for an chair, desk, monitor and lamp of my choosing for my home office.

I hope this becomes the norm if remote becomes mainstream

This is probably not the norm. I have a friend that works in a call center, and they've been working remotely during the pandemic. Her company won't pay for anything; she uses her personal laptop, personal consumer-grade Internet connection, etc. The consumer ISP doesn't provide their stated upload and download ever, and the ISP charged her $100 to come out and investigate the issue without fixing it. (You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?) The company won't pay for the debugging. When the Internet dies, she's told "welp, you're done for today" and doesn't get paid. (She also works 4 days x 10 hours, so one bad day costs more than the average 5 x 8 employee.)

It is kind of a nightmare making every employee responsible for being the IT director for free. I imagine that most companies are not going to see good results here. (It's good when it's good, but what do you do when it gets bad? Nobody has a plan.)

All in all, consumer ISPs seem to be doing pretty good with the pandemic, but I worry that it's mostly a string of good luck rather than solid infrastructure investments.

Commercial internet does not cost a lot of money. I do a cable modem and while my speeds are a bit slower than the residential option (for the same money) I don't have bandwidth caps or 'talk to the hand' when an issue happens. Night and day between the two experiences. Worth looking into.

I agree. The problem is cost (higher, not being paid for by the company), and rewarding the ISP for their poor service by paying them more.

My philosophy is that you just have to accept that we messed up by letting one company monopolize the space, and pay them more for their better service... but not many people agree with me.

> You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?

Easy, the CPE equipment is garbage or placed in a shitty location. I'm a nerd, but my ancient wifi setup started to struggle with the entire family working and schooling all day. I upgraded to a Ubiquiti solution with multiple antennas and life is good.

We are talking about wired performance here.

I worked on the CPE team for Google Fiber, and indeed, WiFi performance is something that we spent a lot of time on and never got perfect. The average ISP using off-the-shelf CPE doesn't stand a chance. I fear that the CPE is not the problem in my friend's case, and the ISP is just aggressively oversubscribing, and so nothing can be done. Switching to the business plan won't make a difference unless they drop all consumer traffic whenever the business subscriber needs to send and receive, and they are not charging enough money to lead me to believe they're doing that. I don't know anything about DOCSIS, though... I have worked at two ISPs and they both used GPON. The limitations of GPON, however, I understand well ;)

That's unfortunate.

With COVID wfh, I've definitely heard alot of horror stories about local ISPs, especially with time of day based issues. (10 & 2) seem to be high-disruption periods. Where our folks have gotten engaged, 30/35 times it's wireless issues.

One thing that I would offer is for your friend to try to get input from neighbors in a rough proximity. I did have an issue a few years ago with Time Warner Cable where a contractor screwed up and hung the wrong grade coax on a pole.

I like the idea of surveying the neighbors. We will try that next :)

I work for one of the big US companies and I asked last week about this; the HR lady virtually showed me the finger, very polite, of course. Not a local policy in the local branch...

A fair number of people probably feel like you do. But I strongly suspect that, at least with many companies, a certain percentage of people never come back into the office except sporadically. So even for those who do return full-time, the atmosphere and work style will be changed for an indefinite period of time.

I know a number of people in the process of permanently moving out of cities--in several cases to rural locations many hours away.

For people with houses, the office space cost is likely less than the commuting cost. But it is indeed an issue for many in tiny city apartments.

For some of people, probably more than you'd expect, work is pretty much the only social contact.

I see this comment in every one of these discussions, but finding new venues for social contact is a fairly simple adjustment to make once you accept that it's necessary.

Depends on your social skills.

Don't assume everyone is as gifted as you are.

And even so, if half your waking time goes away as an opportunity to socialize, that's a big opportunity cost.

"A fairly simple adjustment"? I've been in therapy for exactly this for a year. For me, this shit has been tough.

Not saying your experience isn't valid, but would you please stop generalising?

I’m happy to have the cost transferred (some parts are debateable, I need internet, a desk, and a monitor for home anyways) if it means no more commuting and no more open offices. My focus has significantly increased in the past few months.

I don't think you're wrong. There will certainly be some sort of correction of the bullish remote-work spirit.

But the 2020 lockdowns will fundamentally increase the amount of remote work permanently to at least some degree.

Like how before Bernie Sanders ran for president, no one in mainstream US politics was even talking about socialized healthcare. Or how before Andrew Yang, no one outside of silicon valley had ever heard of UBI.

This is hyperbole, but you see what I mean.

> Face to face interaction is much more high bandwidth

I'll take quality over bandwidth any day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com