Google to keep employees home until summer 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Google to keep employees home until summer 2021

wsj.com

413 pointstysone376 comments

(Googler, opinions are my own).

I'm also a WSJ subscriber, and saw this notification from WSJ before I checked my email this morning. I think there are 2 important things to take from this for those that didn't/can't read this.

1) From the article: "Mr. Pichai was swayed in part by sympathy for employees with families to plan for uncertain school years that may involve at-home instruction, depending on geography. It also frees staff to sign full-year leases elsewhere if they choose to move."

2) This does not mean offices will remained closed. If Google is able, they will open offices and allow people to return, if employees chose to. This is more about giving people more options.

The school year thing is going to be a big deal for a lot of employers. Schools here are either doing full online or "hybrid", where half the time your kid is at home. In either case, working five days a week at the office isn't going to work for a lot of people this year, regardless of the safety of being at the office.

TBH depending on circumstances, working five days a week at home also won't work for a lot of people this year.

I have family trying to raise two kids during this pandemic. Turns out, children aren't just little adults who will go off and do assigned tasks unsupervised; they require attention and crave personal feedback, and those aren't things they can get from either teachers or peers in a distance-learning configuration. Not in the quantities they get them in school. A lot of working parents are going to find they're splitting their time between their day jobs and keeping their children on their tasks, which will be a huge adjustment for a lot of families (especially families with two working parents who can remote-work).

I don't know that the US has a firm understanding of how much the babysitting aspect of regular primary (and in some cases, high school) education adds value, and the whole economy is in for a rude shock come Q42020 / Q12021 as everyone's projections get missed unless companies are writing down goal-hitting expectations right now.

I haven't been this exhausted ever. Being productive at work and handling my children's needs throughout the day is unbelievably taxing, leading to Friday nights where I fall asleep with them ~730 and end up sleeping 12 hours.

I hope this leads to realization of how important work/life balance is here in the States. This Protestant work ethic simply isn't necessary with today's productivity.

I am moving to my parents’ city for this exact reason. My wife and I are full time professionals, and we are failing at educating our children.

Thankfully we live in the same city my parents live in, and they're retired. They've been an absolute godsend.

The (traditional) Protestant work ethic also assumed a Protestant community centered around a church as cultural / societal hub. Not even the PWE suggested people go all out all the time without community support.

Traditionally raising children was a multi-generational effort with grandparents often living under the same roof. Not to mention women were less likely to work outside the home back then. Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption. It'll be interesting to see how we figure out how to adapt.

Elizabeth Warren actually has a book on this very topic: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...

>>>

The “two-income trap,” described The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting. Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities. Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on. This last point is really the key to Warren’s specific argument about bankruptcy, though it’s the first two that would drive her larger interest in politics. Bad things have always happened to families from time to time. In a traditional two-parent, one-earner family, there was always the possibility that mom could step up and help out when trouble arose.

“If her husband was laid off, fired, or otherwise left without a paycheck,” Warren and Tyagi write, “the stay-at-home mother didn’t simply stand helplessly on the sidelines as her family toppled off an economic cliff; she looked for a job to make up some of that lost income.” Similarly, if a family member got sick, mom was available as an unpaid caregiver. “A stay-at-home mother served as the family’s ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability — insurance that had a very real economic value even when it wasn’t drawn on.”

A modern family where mom is already working has no “give” and is much more likely to be pushed into bankruptcy by job loss or family illness unless it builds up a big financial cushion.

To elaborate on the "no benefit" for the families, and Warren probably talks about this, but there is benefit for corporations. They get nearly double the supply of workers which drives down wages and gives them more productivity per dollar spent.

So in effect, a wealth transfer to equity holders.

It's bizarre that this, the largest factor by far, gets so little play.

Yep, it undermine's everything Peter Thiel said in his debate with Andresson and was amazing to me Andresson didn't bring it up. They were looking at wage stagnation over the period where women entered the workforce, but without ever mentioning it was the period where women entered the workforce en masse.

It's because it undermines the feminist narrative that women entering the workplace had 0 repercussions on society as whole.

Welcome to the feminist utopia, I suppose? Equal representation of women in the workplace, ignoring the fact that a large percentage of women (majority in my middle class social circle) would rather bear and raise children than slave away in a cubicle, if given a choice?

The article calls the book "controversial", but I don't see how the harm from effectively denying motherhood to women is "controversial" at all.

I mean the real problem is that we went halfsies and didn't actually build out systems that allow women to do both effectively, but then everyone got lumped into doing work because not doing so put your family at a distinct disadvantage.

In countries less allergic to establishing welfare programs, cheap subsidized daycare is used to boost workforce participation amongst women: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

It's hard enough to do _one_ of those things effectively, let alone both. Welfare certainly helps, but you're still half-assing both things at best, and the results are pretty self-evident by now.

I mean, it's also not clear that mothers are necessarily the best people to be raising children either, given that being a mother and being trained in childcare are not the same thing.

From the Quebec study:

> For those kids who are in Quebec’s public programs, known as centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), “repeated studies have found sharp improvements in child development,” Fortin said. This accounts for about one-third of Quebec’s children in care right now.

Now the problem is scaling up good childcare to the other two thirds.

Other than this I don't really see how you would put the genie back in the bottle for women juggling childcare with employment, without also screwing over women who want both or don't want children.

It's moot. Childcare is no longer a real option from the epidemiological standpoint. It's one thing when your kid brings back a cold or a flu from their preschool. It's another when they bring back coronavirus.

Besides, I don't believe anyone other than parents are "the best" to raise children, on average. That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good. We should just make it socially unacceptable to abdicate parental responsibility at this point, IMO. It's absolutely nuts that 6 months old children end up in daycare.

That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good.

As opposed to the average parent who is great at parenting, right?

Sorry, but many (most?) parents absolutely suck at raising their kids. They didn’t have good parents themselves and they never dealt with the psychological issues that resulted. And in 99% of cases, they’re totally blind to this, and think (as you apparently do) that loving their kids makes them good caregivers.

I’m not arguing for or against childcare, but it’s a mistake to think the average parent is well-equipped.

Average parent is at least predisposed to giving a shit about their progeny. And what constitutes an "average parent" is not a constant. If we could make good parenting feasible (which it currently absolutely isn't) and bad parenting socially unacceptable (which, in contrast, is almost expected, at least in the US), the quality of parenting would improve quickly.

I mean, if only we could radically and rapidly change the values our society, there's a long list of things we could apply that ability to.

But even there, just looking at developed countries around the world with arguably much better values around parenting, I still think we'd end up with most kids in childcare. Maybe not starting at six months, but starting pretty young. I'm biased as a parent too, just in the other direction. There are just too many benefits to both children and women.

But we did "radically and rapidly" changed the rules of our society. Lack of focus on family and kids is a relatively new invention.

Have you been in a daycare? They're basically staffed by generic retail/service workers. I thought they were highly trained folks like teachers, but upon touring them, I realized they're not and also learned they're paid very little, so it kind of makes sense.

A woman cannot rely on finding the perfect man to take care of her. That is just unrealistic. And likely, it will set her up for failure.

And a woman cannot rely on her parents to support her as an adult until she gets married. That’s too heavy a burden on her aging parents.

Really, the only way forward, is for the woman to get educated, skilled, trained, or certified, in order to work.

But, we as a society need a new and different social contract.

I'm really not following Warren's reasoning here.

First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.

This seems especially true during a bad economy when unemployment is high and people stay unemployed for long periods of time. With a dual-income family, the two often work in different fields. One might get laid off but the other's job is safe. You'll suffer, maybe even have to sell your house or something, but at least you can feed yourself.

Second, I've seen what happens when a spouse doesn't work outside the home for a long time. This happened to a relative of mine a long time ago. She had a short but perfectly fine career as a teacher for a while before getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Eventually she got divorced and found that, after being out of the job market for 20 years, the only job she could get was near minimum wage data entry. (She eventually got a better job, but it took many years as she was basically starting over.) Anyway, the point is I'm skeptical of Warren's reasoning that in a single-income family, the other spouse can just go out and get a job if needed. Over the long term, the single-income situation tends to damage the career path of the spouse who doesn't work outside the home.

> I'm really not following Warren's reasoning here. First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.

The general crux of Warren's argument, is that the fixed costs incurred by the necessity of women working is so large that it basically made household income a zero sum game.

Previously, one person made income Y, and if the breadwinner became unable to work then they made some amount close to or smaller than Y.

Today, two people each make X, and also have to pay childcare and additional commuting or other expenses of Z every day.

Warren's assertion is that overall, today 2X-Z <= Y, because women increased the labor supply so much that wages were suppressed; so that Y for one person eventually became X for two people in a household. Depending on how bad the decline is, X may be a lot worse than a new, untrained wife making less than Y.

I think the idea is with 2 incomes, both partners need to remain employed in order to keep up, since people's expenses usually closely match their income. So if 1 of the 2 loses their job, that 1 of the 2 needs to find new employment to maintain their lives.

In the scenario of 1 working partner, if that 1 person loses their job, you can have 2 people looking for jobs in order to get back to normal.

What makes a two-income household a "trap" is when both parents are forced to work in order to make ends meet. This creates a nominal rise in household income that masks the actual desperation of the household's financial situation.

The trap is: declining real household income for segments of the population. The "two income" part is a consequence of the trap, not a cause.

This matters because a lot of the increasing representation of women in the workforce is not the result of the two-income trap, but the result of women, individually, wanting to work. In other words, not every two-income household is actually in a trap. Many of them are formed by two people who each have jobs they like and want to keep.

My wife, for example, has advanced training and likes her job. She couldn't wait to get back to work after we had our first child. As a family, we could survive fine on my salary today... but she would kill me if I suggested this. Now we're struggling to home-educate our child while we both work remotely. If I suggested that she quit her job to be our family's "insurance policy", again, she would kill me (even if I invoked Elizabeth Warren).

My mom worked too, because she wanted to. Good thing she did, because when my parents divorced she was able, financially, to transition to being on her own right away.

Single-income families can be a trap too... for the person who is not earning an income. About half of U.S. marriages end in divorce. A spouse with no independent financial base and no job of their own is not in a position to leave when they want to.

This stuff is really important to understand, so we don't go down a fruitless rabbit hole of wringing our collective hands about the decline of the traditional family culture or whatever. Taking that broad simple view of two-income households runs a very real risk of simply denying the agency of women who want to work and make their own way in the world... even if they are married with kids.

Traditionally being when?

The US was settled by people leaving those old generations behind and moving west (be it from somewhere in Europe to the US or from somewhere in the US to somewhere less populated in the US) with their spouse and maybe young kids. You always had stay at home moms, because home was usually mom's workplace, often dad's too.

Multi-generational households in the US existed as the exception when early settlers brought their entire communities over or when first generation Americans moved West with their immigrant parents. Having multi-generational households was never the norm.

"early settlers" is a tiny slice of history.

Tradition being up to the present, actually, in large parts of the world. (Repeating a comment to another article:) I suspect that people living with family until 20s/30s is likely to be much more common than people here expect, and that not doing so is an anomaly of the current age occurring in only certain cultures, with a possible return to norm in the future.

If you're discussing "protestant work ethic"-based communities, and "multigenerational housing"-based communities, they are generally mutually exclusive.

I suppose it depends on whether by "Protestant work ethic", you are referring to people who are actually in the Protestant/Calvinist faith, or if you are using it as a euphemism for general workaholism, as there are many non-Protestant communities which espouse hard work and frugality as main tenets to follow in life, which do have a higher rate of multigenerational-housing-based communities.

Also, it would be interesting to explore exactly how and why "protestant work ethic"-based communities and "multigenerational housing"-based communities became generally mutually exclusive, whether there is causation, or just a happenstance correlation.

> Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption.

That's something my wife & I have been discussing recently. She pointed out that traditional family structures have more slack built into them, which comes in handy in times of trouble. The problem is that in the modern Taylorist world we treat slack as waste. But it really isn't, any more than insurance is waste.

The “Protestant Work Ethic” was built around the notion of a two-parent household with the parents specialized such that one works outside the home while one works inside the home. It also assumes a significant social safety net in the form of family and close community support via churches, schools, etc.

I understand the gist of what you mean, but I think you’re really pointing at the idea of the “nuclear family,” and the “two-income household,” both of which are post-war ideas. Specifically, Elizabeth Warren wrote an entire book about this “Two Income Trap,” how much more fragile it makes families, and why we should be working to get back to one-income being a reasonable option so that more people could choose it when their circumstances demanded it.

The problem with going back to one income is cultural. Men want to be the breadwinner, so it's going to end up forcing women out of the workforce and back into the home. There's no way to have one income viable again without halving the supply of people in the workforce.

> Men want to be the breadwinner

And there's the problem. I'd be totally comfortable if my future wife ended up being the financial supporter of the family. There's technical things I'd like to invest time and mental resources in that wouldn't necessarily make money, but would be fulfilling, and housework is already something I do a lot of and wouldn't mind being more responsible for if I wasn't spending 40+ at the office.

I can't imagine dumping my career whilst I'm the higher earner, but if she ends up making more than me (kinda likely actually, given some time), it might be the most sensible solution. Marriage should be a team activity where either partner is willing to take on whatever role is best for the family.

Both men and women usually prefer men to be the breadwinner though - this isn't just cultural - it has biological roots. Breaking away from that on a mass societal-wide scale will not be easy. Thankfully humans are one of the few animals who override their instincts so it's not impossible.

maybe raising children should be breadwinning?

In agriculture-heavy eras, it was, in the sense that children would contribute labor value as they got older (and with relative quickness; you can trust an 8-year-old with tasks like feeding the chickens).

I tend to agree, but women don't want to be home alone with kids. Historically, women would share duties with other women in the village so there was a lot more socializing and mentorship.

It must have been fulfilling to start out a young inexperienced women in your village and eventually become an influential matriarch, with knowledge in herbal medicine, nursing, textiles, pottery, basketry, child development, leadership, storytelling, etc.

> I tend to agree, but women don't want to be home alone with kids. Historically, women would share duties with other women in the village so there was a lot more socializing and mentorship.

Stay at home moms are always having get togethers, play dates, catching up for coffee, etc.

The more of your friends who are stay at home moms the easier it becomes to be a stay at home mom.

Honestly can we stop saying these type of claims that men are « biologically » made to be breadwinners and woman « biologically » made to do house work? Not only the claims are dubious, but even if they were true doesn’t mean everyone is the same.

For a lot of people including women housework is actually boring and they would rather have a fulfilling career.

Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

> For a lot of people including women housework is actually boring and they would rather have a fulfilling career.

For the vast vast majority of people there is no fulfillment in a career either.

> Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

I'm making an observation - I don't like it either.

> The problem with going back to one income is cultural

I think the problem is cultural and genetic. After all, we have thousands of generations where men were molded for the breadwinner role. Lots of scholarly articles on that topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=genetic+influence+on+br...

Both indeed, but what separates us from animals is not being slave to our instincts.

> Men want to be the breadwinner, so it's going to end up forcing women out of the workforce and back into the home.

I’d love to send my wife out to work for the family.

In fact I’d love to get multiple wives and send them all out to work.

I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone. Maybe it goes hand-in-hand with the American individualistic culture. Maybe it just happens in urban centers and I'm blind to places where it does not hold. But it is such a sad state; my best childhood memories are from being in a small town where everybody knew everybody, kids played together, and grandma took you on walks from house to house almost daily to sync up with neighbors. Oh and did I mention this is where our two working parents would drop us off for weeks at a time?

I almost feel as though suburban living forces this in the modern era... the area my parents moved to when they left the small town where I was born to for the sake of raising children with cul-de-sac and good school district had almost nothing to offer for me as a young adult, so I left and moved across the country to a place which was more in line with what I was looking for. There were few jobs nearby in my chosen field (or really any field for an educated young professional, service industries dominated) so my peers all left, too.

We've chosen hyper-specialization of our living areas. The places which are good for raising children are mostly horrible for careers and social life. The places where young people can get ahead and be social aren't as traditionally convenient for raising children (unless you have lots of money).

You pretty much have to pick where you live based on what phase of your life you're in, and I think for most people the expectation is still that once you get married you'll just move out to the 'burbs. Personally, I hate the idea, but I'm both not in a place in life where I'm too worried about children and also fortunate to work in an industry where its at least theoretically viable to afford to raise city kids and maintain a career.

My parents are getting ready to retire and thinking of moving to the mountains somewhere because being retired is no fun in a place where everything is optimized around children and everything is developed family-size. They won't be a support system where they are for my hypothetical kids anyways, and are eager to escape the suburb I grew up in as it has declined over the decades, so I wouldn't want to be there either.

Wrapping up that rant... quite simply, I insisted on moving away from where I grew up because there was nothing for me there and I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in that place. The fact that my parents still live there for now is mostly incidental. (But I also generally think suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing, none of the cohesive culture or community of a small town but also none of the variety, walk/bikeability, or cultural diversity of big cities, so my bias might be showing).

Maybe a contributing factor is that it is significantly easier and more acceptable to move house in America. Thinking back to where I grew up, the house we lived in was where my grand-grand-parents were born; it would be pretty much unthinkable to move (and was not even possible in previous non-capitalist regimes) so people stick around in close-knit communities. But maybe if moving was dead-easy like in the States this would naturally fall apart?

I guess it's already happening to some extent with Schengen and young talented engineers moving to job centers.

Another major factor you didn't mention is urban housing prices. Before kids, we lived near downtown Seattle in a walkable, urban neighborhood. It was great, and is where I would have preferred to stay long-term. When we decided to have kids, we knew that buying a large condo or decent-sized detached home within the Seattle city limits would be way out of our price range (housing prices in Seattle have almost reached San Francisco/Silicon Valley level).

So we moved out to the burbs, where we could afford a starter home big enough for our two kids and a mother-in-law.

>> where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone.

If you don't live in the larger metro areas, there aren't the same number of jobs paying good wages. So you move to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs you want are. If you're a software developer you probably don't want to live in Ohio, and if you're a defense contractor you probably don't want to live in Wyoming.

Is a better wage worth having no family around? I'd rather be in Ohio making decent money with family around than in CA making gobs of money with no one.

I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone.

Go west young man was not just a saying but part of America. Look at post WWII information on families moving to California for example.

Striking it alone by moving away from home has been a part of the American mythos since colonial times, when a big part of the Revolutionary War was the prohibition on settling west of Britain's declared Proclamation Line. And in future centuries America also soaked up all of the people in Europe who could be tempted by having a farm to themselves; they came to America daily by the thousands.

That being said, multigenerational households were really common up until the postwar period, at which point the US really started pushing the standalone suburban nuclear family as a way to avoid another case of excess industrial capacity. It takes a lot of workers and goods to build all the highways, infrastructure, and houses to support a two-story house with a white picket fence and a car in the driveway.

>I'm puzzled by how America ended up with this "lone-wolf" nuclear family mentality where families move away from parents and insist on going it alone

Because over a several hundred year period a large fraction of the people in Europe who were willing to risk financial ruin for a chance at a better life wound up here and our culture reflects that.

Specifically, the people who were already outcasts from the mainstream society.

No matter where you were born, the best career opportunities were likely to be somewhere else. So if you didn't want to get stuck in a dead end job then you had to move.

Much of America is inhabited by people who left their place of birth in search of better opportunities elsewhere. And most of this happened quite recently: the USA only consisted of 16 states in 1800 and 45 by 1900. I think this has caused American to be inhabited by people who are much more likely to value independence and (perceived) self-reliance.

What you experience is still quite common. Some of my siblings live 5 minutes from my parents and my nieces & nephews basically stay with their grandparents while their parents are working. A lot of my coworkers claim similar situations as well.

If my parents didn't live in an economic and cultural backwater with few opportunities and rampant political corruption, I'd be neighbors with them in a heartbeat. Sadly, they seem stuck where they are, and so am I.

It's not just America. One reason is increased costs of living in big cities. If you buy a house, you probably are not going to buy one so large that you, your children, and your grandchildren (who will only be born a few decades later) could all live there comfortably. Instead, you just buy one large enough for you and your children. Or just you and your partner, if you are not planning to have kids soon.

But this means that when your children decide to have children, they will have to move away. If they are lucky, they can buy a house near you; but if there are many people who want to live in the city, and the new houses are not built often, or at least not near you, then they will have to move further away from you. And this is still just talking about living in a city... I haven't mentioned proximity to job opportunities or schools yet.

I consider my family very fortunate that my wife's part to full-time chef gig did not call her back for spring/summer events for this very reasoning. We were previously both working, but fortunately we are able to change focus and she can do activities and learning with the kids while I work 9-10 hour days remotely from my home office. A lot of our friends/acquaintances are both struggling to work gig jobs or local retail of some sort and I feel for all of them while we're in the perfect position to save, teach our children, and then still plan our downtime together. We've not had any real fighting either, it's been better than having to work from the office this entire time, but I do still miss that environment. Oh right, that and our parents and the living grandparents also live nearby.

Or you could have affordable public daycare / public pre-school that starts when the kids are born. Why does everyone expect the government to take care of their kids from 6 to 18 but not from 0 to 6 in the US ? It's pretty ridiculous.

There's patchwork public daycare from age 3+, but mainly only for poverty cases. Daycare costs less than a job though, so you don't really need free day care as long as minimum wage is high enough.

Protestant work ethic. I used to believe in this but the hardest working people I spent time working with were actually Catholic.

I'm still uncertain how I'm supposed to lead twins through online Kindergarten and write software all day. They can't even fucking use scissors without my help.

As someone with a young one at home and that works from home, you cannot without help.

My advice is to not over-tax yourself trying to do two things at once. It is very tiring both mentally and physically to switch back and forth too frequently.

Focus on your kids when they need your focus and reserve your strength for planned time that you can actually focus on work. Like during nap time or after bedtime.

No doubt. Like between teachers and other kids, young children have eight hours of constant stimulation and it's absolutely impossible for a parent to offer that. Work from home productivity will absolutely suffer because of it, but what else are employers going to do? Unlike providing on-site daycare, stay-at-home nanny services don't scale well. :/

> between teachers and other kids, young children have eight hours of constant stimulation

Not always eight hours, sometimes school can be boring ;)

I ended up taking a 3 month leave of absence to take care of my 3 young kids (one of which has a disability). Ireland closed schools and universities on 13 March 2020 and we quickly realised that even with 2 parents at home full-time, we couldn't work and take care of our children.

We found a good balance eventually but it was only possible through the circumstances of my wife's role and my ability to take leave.

Many many people are not in a position (negotiating power, financially) to do that which makes this extremely tough mentally and physically. If you have the ability (time, money) to help friends, family, neighbours, please consider doing so (those that need it will very much appreciate it).

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but I wonder if this might be an opportunity for the people with means to pay for a babysitter (but not necessarily a private teacher) to hire some of the 2020 college grads who aren't going to find a job any time soon as daily tutors/online school facilitators for their kids? There are going to be tons of educated young adults out of work in the coming year and given their lack of experience they'll be less expensive than hiring an actual teacher, but they may be able to provide enough feedback and structure to give the kids a better quality online education. I don't have kids though so I don't really have a dog in this fight, just an idea. I used to enjoy babysitting back in the day and I would have loved an "academic babysitting" job like this when I first graduated.

Turns out the age old adaptations of having proximity to relatives really do matter. US is doubly vulnerable here - people move around a lot and the infra for childcare is simply not there.

This is being discussed from the well-off perspective of remote-capable jobs. The real pain is being felt by medical and other front-line workers. Gov. really need to look for options to support those in critical in-person jobs, starting with medical/fire/etc and then opening up to all essential jobs categories.

A lot of us were born in places that are no longer economically relevant. The retired are less geographically restrained - I wonder why they don’t more often follow their adult children. For example some of my Chinese coworkers don’t need to go back to China for childcare; their parents and in-laws rotate shifts here.

Also keep in mind, if both generations have kids at 30 (or even younger in a more traditional setting), grandparents are also still working age when the child is born.

>I wonder why they don’t more often follow their adult children

Because the cost of living where their adult children are reflects the incomes of their adult children.

That's fair, but the way I've seen this done is with a 2-bedroom apartment. A young family will need that eventually anyway. The second bedroom can be the caregiver's until it becomes the child's.

Also remote education is much harder one of my friends who is a classics teacher at a public (private) school in the UK confirms that.

And as its a public school these are small class sizes

You're right. I'm blessed to have my wife be a stay-at-home mom, and it means I can be much more productive during this time compared to people in dual income situations.

At the same time, we've forgone extra income by having her stay at home, so there's that too..

Will childless employees receive raises or be rewarded in some other way?

No. The reward is not having to do two jobs for the same compensation. If you’re childless, your reward is your freedom from this challenging time for working families.

To get to the root of this...You are likely hinting that it is a choice to have kids. But it’s also necessary for society that people have children and take care of them.

Disclaimer: I don’t have kids but might one day.

The GP was suggesting that, due to having children at home, many people will slip on their deadlines. It's natural to ask what happens to people who do not have children.

> You are likely hinting that it is a choice to have kids.

I did not, and my view on having children is not relevant here.

They might slip on their deadlines during a global crisis, or they might just work more than they usually do (childcare and regular work). Childless people will likely naturally move ahead in their careers.

Unless a social justice movement prevents it on equity/diversity/inclusion grounds, as has been mooted at my company.

It depends a lot on the nature of your work.

I have a young child and, over the last 4 months, have probably spent less time than ever doing work for my employer.

At the same time, just by having the right idea/insight at the appropriate time, I've probably delivered more value to my employer in the last 2 months than ever before.

I think and hope that the outcome of all this in terms of my career will be a net positive. But I guess time will tell.

Practically speaking, I bet if someone crunched the numbers in 3 years, they'd find the childless employees had progressed further in their careers in 2020/2021 than the employees with children.

Not directly, but having fewer outside-work responsibilities always leaves more hours in the day to chase a promotion.

> TBH depending on circumstances, working five days a week at home also won't work

I am aware that this is an extremely unpopular opinion, but in my opinion one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them. That is maybe once you can take 2 days a week off as a parent, or there's UBI or something like that.

Would avoid a lot of unhappy marriges, parents and children.

Of course, most people seek to 'leave something behind', even at the cost of unhappiness for all involved.

I am not sure exactly what a good solution would be, but maybe 40+ hours a week isn't a good deal anymore.

Parents are spending more time with their kids today than was common in the past. There are huge economic/social upsides to having grandparents or schools cover more time.

> Parents are spending more time with their kids today than was common in the past.

And? How do we know it's enough? Based on the number of unhappy, abusive households, certainly doesn't seem so.

My point is that parents should have the economic means to spend more time with their children if required, such as during a pandemic, while facing minimum stress and economic disruption.

When parents have to work full time and often barely be able to take care of their children, it leads to stress at home and directly impact the child.

Maybe working 40+ hours a week isn't a good deal anymore?

Has the number of "unhappy, abusive households" increased along with the rise of dual-income families? That's what you'd expect, right?

It's all very well realising this in a major unforeseeable disaster, but it doesn't put the egg back in the ovary 6 years after the fact.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968936

> in my opinion one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them.

People that had sufficient time to dedicate to their children prior to the pandemic no longer do. It's not reasonable to suggest that all prospective parents should have forseen Covid-19.

You missed my point. Putting children in childcare is not 'having time for them' before the pandemic. They didn't have the time required even before the pandemic, it's just that there was a way to cover up for that lack of time before.

How is this different from buying farm-grown produce at the grocery store rather than raising it in a garden?

I mean, you can, but I don't buy an unsupported argument that says that everyone "should" do it that way.

> How is this different from buying farm-grown produce at the grocery store rather than raising it in a garden?

It's different in that you're not directly affecting the well being of people dependent on you by making that choice, apart of course from them being living beings.

> don't buy an unsupported argument that says that everyone "should" do it that way

Am not saying what anyone should be doing, you do you, just that I think many parents don't realize how much responsibility is it to have children and even if they do, the current way society is set up doesn't allow them to do their best, in most cases.

> It's different in that you're not directly affecting the well being of people dependent on you by making that choice, apart of course from them being living beings.

Can I infer that you think constant engagement with parents produces the best outcomes for children? Why do you think that?

That would indeed not be the correct inference to make, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23969103

> society should support such economic conditions that parents are allowed to spend more time with their kids [...]

I totally agree. But I'm not sure how you can use that to support your original statement.

> one shouldn't have kids unless they have the means to dedicate sufficient time and attention to them.

Do believe that no one in a deficient society should have kids whatsoever?

I'm pretty sure a kid only interacting with their parents for their whole childhood is a good way to get some really messed up kids. One of the things I've noticed really heavily during this pandemic is how much kids miss out from school and social interaction. Childcare isn't just "store children until I get off work", it's engagement. It's that child getting a variety of structured and unstructured time with educators and other kids.

I could have all of the free time in the world, and childcare would still be better for the kid than entirely time at home.

> I'm pretty sure a kid only interacting with their parents for their whole childhood is a good way to get some really messed up kids.

That is not an argument I am making. That is a good way to beat a strawman.

My point is not that they shouldn't be in childcare at all, but that society should support such economic conditions that parents are allowed to spend more time with their kids without having to compromise their economic prospects and so that when they cannot send their children to childcare, say because of a pandemic, it is only a minor inconvenience, rather than a significant burden.

> Childcare isn't just "store children until I get off work", it's engagement. It's that child getting a variety of structured and unstructured time with educators and other kids.

That's the ideal. When you're well educated, have the means to pick up the best childcare for you kid you can find, have done the research, but there's lots of families for whom, yes, childcare is precisely just "store children until I get off work", not out of malice, but because their economic situation hardly allows them to think about it much.

I find that low level anxiety has helped me to be prepared for the pandemic. I always worry about "what if", and that means that the possibility of (say) being without an income is already accounted for in my mind.

I don't have kids, but I've always worried. How the hell can you afford them? Have plans for them all the time? Never be able to leave the house without them, etc etc etc. Whereas some folks go into things just knowing "it will work" or "they'll find a way". I've watched friends and relatives raise kids; they somehow always manage to find a sitter, or the grandparents step in, or whatever. There are daycare options, schools, etc (in normal times). These are things I don't account for. When I think of having kids I think of being 100% responsible for them all the time, so the actual situation in the pandemic more closely matches my fears than it matches the "old reality".

I think of it a lot like planning for retirement and not expecting social security, or a pension, or an inheritance. Planning for the worst case scenario, I guess, but that "worst case" always seems like reality -- and them I'm pleasantly surprised.

Some people prefer some unhappiness over death. It's a rational choice.

My wife and I have already opted in to the virtual option provided here in South Dakota. I'm diabetic and she's pregnant, thankfully we're in a position where we both work remotely and my employer is incredibly flexible for at-home needs, particularly right now.

This whole pandemic situation has really opened up my wife's eyes re: my reasoning for insisting on working remotely.

Hey fellow South Dakotan. I've been working remotely here for over 5 years. If you want someone to chat with my twitter is tyler_mcentee

Oh awesome, another Dakotan. We'll have to grab a coffee or something if you're in the SF area.

This read really oddly to me as a non-Dakotan. I was like "Why are you asking if he's in the San Francisco area when you're both in South Dakota?"

I gather you're referring to Sioux Falls though.

Haha yeah, definitely meant Sioux Falls. I can see the ambiguity, sorry about that!

I traveled to Sioux Falls to get LASIK surgery done at VTV.

Lovely place.

Vance Thompson is absolutely incredible. One of the best aspects of living in Sioux Falls is the world-class health care.

Glad you enjoyed it here, come back soon, there are some awesome reasons to visit :)

I just finished watching Fargo Season 2 last night... the massacre at Sioux Falls. :)

Same thing happens with SDSU, normally people are referring to San Diego State Uni, not South Dakota State Uni.

As someone from lower-speed-limit Dakota I appreciate the sentiment of unity

Working from home and help your kids with schoolwork isn’t helping either! I did this from Mar to June and it was exhausting. Along the way I did manage to piss off my kids too by screaming at them for some simple multiplication. I am a bad teacher and I hope I wouldn’t become a bad parent homeschooling them.

As others have noted, this is going to be rough for most families irrespective of whether workers are allowed to return to work.

I believe this is consistent with at least one other FAANG company.

Right on, the keyword here is "optional". Offices will still be open and employees are allowed to return at their choosing.

I agree that this decision was probably predicated on 1) no vaccine until next year and 2) schools may be largely closed so emphasis on helping employees with kids.

It's so annoying that this gets misrepresented in all the news stories and discussions about this. I guess the non clickbait headline - "Google will let people WFH for 11 months regardless of offices reopening" is just not as appealing.

People who hate clickbait headlines should start clicking the non-clickbait headlines. The authors themselves rarely have any control over the headlines and we know that all of the major publications are A/B/n testing various headlines for news, at minimum, and are most likely feeding that information back into some automated headline generator.

Not to turn this into a meta discussion of the responsibility of media outlets, but they could have probably gotten better CTR with the headline "Top 10 celebrity boobs". There's a difference between phrasing headlines more dramatically and misrepresenting your story.

Did Google ever site any other factors like a vaccine timeline or forecast of cases in the Fall as contributing reasons to extend WFH until Spring 2021?

Just wondering if there is any other interesting data out there pointing to things persisting to be bad until Summer 2021.

Everybody seems to be celebrating the opportunity spend more time at home, but I have the opposite view.

I live alone(it seemed like a good idea at the time[pre-corona]). My family lives hundreds of miles away on a different land mass. At the weekends I can meet up with people and do activities, but everything I used to do midweek(e.g. swim training) is now shutdown indefinitely due to Coronavirus.

I am utterly miserable in Home Office. It means from weekend to weekend I have no human contact with anyone except my reflection in the mirror.

I have no idea what to do. If I demand to work from the office just so they I get the chance to occasionally chat to someone, it takes away valuable capacity from people that actually need it.

Could you work at home where your family is? I'm in a similar spot and seriously considering it.

Considering the way you explained your situation, it doesn't sound like you'd be taking away anything from anyone more deserving. You sound like you need that valuable capacity as well.

I feel you. I'm going through the same thing. I'm an introvert who recently became extrovert and I can't do 90% of the activities that made me an extrovert.

Here's how I'm coping:

1. Reactivated my introvert side with

   a) Reading more books

   b) Learning to play music

   c) Online singing lessons

   d) Exercising at home: i) Strength ii) Following through Supple Leopard (book)

2. Going outside once a day for a walk. No exceptions.

3. Chill at the emptiest park on the weekend.

4. Going on a hike during on some weekends.

5. Small talk and saying Hi to random people on the street.

6. Cleaning the house

(same profile & problems here)

I started two weeks ago with #2 (a ~10 minutes walk in the morning) and it does seem to have a positive impact (more relaxed while working, less feeling of being "stuck at home").

Concerning #1a I started reading again some books that I already read in the past, but in a different language.

Additionally: cooking. I previouly used to cook just some veeery basic stuff but now I tend to experiment more and raise a little bit the difficulty level (e.g. Tom Kha Gai soup, fish cooked in the owen, etc...) => interesting, and it changes a bit your usual day, and it provides something about which you can talk to other people => nice (but dangerous - always have a plan B available, hehe)

How can someone change from introvert to extrovert. As per my current understanding this kind of thing is a very fundamental personality trait. Not saying it's impossible to change, but curios how to do so.

I never view it as a binary situation. I personally see myself moving along the scale between the two based on situation and my mood. I view myself as mostly introverted but occasionally surprise not only myself but also wife with my extroversion when the conditions are right.

Perhaps the original poster just found the right conditions for their extroversion to blossom.

For me it was mostly a matter of managing my anxiety, once I had a better handle on it I had way more bandwidth for being social and was able to enjoy it and be energized by it.

It's all mindset...I leaned introvert in high school and was locked inside for 1-2 years coding after college, went hard INTJ. 18 months later, after a lot of small changes (moved, added a friend group, got an apartment in the hip part of town, pitched investors, more employees), I was a hard ESFP

It really makes me hurt to be stuck by myself for this long again. There's some net benefits to introversion (more time, mostly), but theyre minimal and don't increase much

Myers-Briggs is a state measurement, not a trait measurement.

Filed under yet another reason why Myers-Briggs sucks.

From my experience introversion is relative to your environment, so if you move or get some new friends maybe that might help.

You can change almost anything about your personality.

As others said, I don't think of it being introvert/extrovert as black-and-white. I think the most effective ways to add qualities of an extrovert were:

1. Ask yourself why do you have to be an extrovert. Several advantages come to mind: More connections, more confidence, better relationships, no stage fear, better small-talk, better dating life etc.

2. Understanding why you don't like being social/going outside. Write about it. Start from the first moment. Is it because of your parents? Did your siblings make fun of you for expressing your emotions/feelings? Is it your classmates in kindergarten/primary/secondary.. etc.

3. Now that you understand the cause, have hobbies that make you an extrovert. Covid examples: Online group lessons, hiking, walking in the park. Post/Pre-covid examples: Social dancing lessons, Meetup.com (weird crowd sometimes but hang in there), group lesson in any topic you're interested in, toastmasters, team sports. Think of something you always wanted to do.

I think another option would be to accept being an introvert and not see it as bad thing that has to be changed.

I don't think it's a bad thing. Although, being an extrovert gives you some privileges you don't normally have when you're an introvert. Same thing applies if you're exclusively extroverted

Thanks for sharing this list, those sound like healthy activities.

Could you share how you're doing those online signing lessons? Is there a specific website, or did you find a personal teacher and get lessons via zoom/Skype? I'd be very interested in hearing about that.

Yes, I started 1-1 lessons with a local teacher about year ago. Now, we're doing it over Skype. Since we already know each other it works well. I feel that real-time feedback is essential for beginners like me.

Thanks for getting back to me on this, I appreciate it.

Do you use a service for online singing lessons? Or just Youtube videos?

I started taking lessons with a local teacher about a year ago. It's the same now but over Skype, even though we live about a mile away from each other lol

Make lunch dates with coworkers or friends.

A stationary bike or row machine or an aerobics video is a good home exercise (and can be done on video chat)

> If I demand to work from the office just so they I get the chance to occasionally chat to someone, it takes away valuable capacity from people that actually need it.

Isn't that a premature optimization? How do you know that's going to happen?

I agree with you. I have friends/family close but we're all honoring quarantine pretty well. I have a lake place I can go to on the weekends but generally speaking I find myself "losing routine" during the week.

I rather enjoyed working from the office, it helped me timebox work and provided a break in between parts of the day.

I'm in a similar situation, while all my family is in Europe I live alone in Bogotá, Colombia which has been in varying degrees of lockdown for 18 weeks and will be for at least another month. So both my usual midweek as well as weekend activities have been impossible for the most part.

What I started doing, is to go for 1-2 hour walks every day. At first just to get some physical activity and change of what I'm looking at all day, but later friends joined for a chat and I had a bunch of dates and work related meetings this way. Although it feels a bit silly in the beginning, it definitely helped a lot with loneliness.

I have been hitting up friends/co-workers/family members and doing Zoom/Google Meet/Microsoft Teams/Discord hang out sessions. Basically anything I would do with those friends in person we just try to get in online. The game Jackbox party can work over Discord if your people have 2 devices. I also have joined a local online baking club, once a month we cook bread/cakes/treats for each other and take slices and drop them off at people mailboxes the day or two before the online meetup, and then the day of the online meetup we all eat our bread/cakes/treats and just shoot the breeze and compare baked goods.

Its definitely much harder to socialize while under physical distancing conditions, but it is possible, it just takes considerably more effort and imagination to come up with fun things to do.

This isn't really a function of remote work though... it's a function of everything being closed b/c of COVID.

Hey man, if you want a friend to talk to, happy to do that!

As many already said - get outside as much as possible/safe. Fresh air and exercise do magic.

On the human contact side, getting into massive multiplayer games might be interesting - there are a lot of interactions and cooperative play. Team sense of accomplishment and belonging do develop, which might help a bit with the sense of isolation.

Last but not least, we do video conferencing happy hours and drinks/game time with my team, which also takes the edge off.

Ultimately, this isolation has nothing to do with WFH, but rather with the pandemic.

Maybe consider a pet :) My dog is awesome and walking him gets me out

I've been wanting to do this but the shelters are all closed indefinitely and I've had bad experiences with Craigslist.

I've settled for meeting my neighbor's pets.

I've had to come to work every day during the stay at home order. Everyone tells me how lucky I am that I can "escape" being at home, and in some ways, they are right. My commute and finding parking are a lot easier than they used to be. Still, spending the whole day in an empty building is hard. On a good day, I'll exchange a sentence or two with one other person. The emptiness and silence of this place is difficult to deal with. I don't think it's any easier than working at home in our current situation.

I think if there’s a positive to be taken from COVID-19 it’s that we have time now for reflection. I think many of us have neglected human connection in our lives and COVID is exposing just how lonely we are. I am sure it’s difficult being alone but it’s also a chance to think about what you value most. A serious question: should we rely on work for a social outlet? Should we instead try to become more a part of the communities where we live rather than where we work?

In my case I had a strong community outside of work: local theatre. Unfortunately that's now dead and likely to be amongst the very last things to return. I've seen a lot of friends since lockdown lifted but it's not the same as the regular rehearsals and annual shows and socials to look forward to.

Don't you think you need it? If not you, then who?

Same situation for me so I acted quickly and moved across Germany closer to my family and old friends. Idk how the situation is in the US regarding moving and getting a new location going but I think it's still so early that moving makes sense.

Definitely such a big mental improvement, it's crazy

I wonder if people will start to make co-working collectives? Imagine a number of people in an area such as a small town or an apartment building rent a work space where they work together remotely. They don't work for the same companies but they do the things like in Office Space.. birthday candy, water cooler, bowling league...

To the OP, I feel you! One thing I would say is that you can bet a lot of people are in your boat and people will invent new creative ways to connect.

If you can work from home why not move in with your family? Obviously there are many considerations to take into account... But just a thought.

To me it (the sudden acceptance of WFH, not covid-19 obviously) has been the Best Thing Ever. I loathed commuting 60+ minutes to my desk job and wearing noise cancelling headphones so I didn't need to have impromptu 'chats' with lonely people. I loathed that 600 sqft apts in Berkeley were $3000/month. I loathed that remote positions are few and far between, and, now that I'm an employer, the number of workers who are used to working 100% remote were few and far between. I loathed seeing my wife only ~4 waking hours per day. This sudden shift to everybody-wfh has been the greatest vindication of my work- and life-style.

Pools are one of the few things I'll miss, as they are truly communal. Even billionaires generally don't have private 25m+ pools (from what I've gather from those $50M real estate listing videos on youtube).

I feel for you, and it shows the current transition is too abrupt.

But I personally don't mind moving forward in society where your default friends or not defacto your colleagues.

Google employee, but opinions are my own.

As a parent I'm grateful for the flexibility to choose where I work until next summer, however it has become very clear to me that a large number of lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed.

This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system. Given the immediacy and severity of this crisis, people in my community are trying to figure out if they can repurpose existing social service foundations, like school PTAs, to raise funds from more well off community members to support others who are in this sort of childcare bind.

But it's very hard going, not at the least because everyone is in their own personal logistical crisis and it's hard to think about others' childcare needs when you are trying to figure out your own.

My child goes to a small-ish catholic school and coming up with plans for childcare and other services have been a big focus, at least on a contingency basis as everyone expects that school will not remain open in-person for long. Utilizing PTOs and such have been a big part of that.

It's tough that school districts and municipal gov are all on their own to plan things, and the lack of consistency makes it impossible to collaborate.

I see the lack of consistency (diversity) to be a good thing. This is a unique situation, doesn't it make sense to try many things and then converge on what works?

Education has been mostly unchanged over the last 100+ years, it's probably time to try some new ideas.

We’re only likely to get the diversity, not the convergence. Just gathering and analyzing the data from how thousands of school districts handle this will take many years, and this will be long over by then.

Why should gathering and analyzing the data take years? We can and should do better than that.

Why can't schools districts share the information in near real-time?

Communications and change management is hard with all of the stakeholders. People organize their lives around school schedules.

Then the solution should not be to expect the federal government to come up with a plan. That's one of the few entities with even more stakeholders than schools.

There will be 2 separate subgroups of "diverse" approaches.

One group of approaches will be used by people with money who spend it on innovative small group supplemental learning/childcare pods via hired tutors.

The other group of approaches will those used by those with very limited means scraping together whatever childcare they can afford with little ability to tend to academics or social development.

Which group of approaches would you want your child in?

I think communal support in this manner is a good idea. Schooling children at home on a lower income is possible, and I've known people who have made it work successfully (pre-COVID). I also think things like homeschool "pods" or "co-ops" where families form isolated clusters to help share the burden can help.

Worth noting that, at least in California, a decision was made to allocate funding to schools based on last years enrollment numbers, rather than this upcoming school year's numbers.

One major implication is that charter schools that are more prepared to help parents deal with schooling at home will not receive increased funding to help with the massive increase in enrollment applications these schools have received.

> Schooling children at home on a lower income is possible, and I've known people who have made it work successfully (pre-COVID).

Very often these are people who are highly educated themselves, having college degrees or are self-taught and whose work is intellectual or creative/technical in its nature. It's not a solution for people or communities who don't have those built-in advantages.

You can't expect low paid essential workers (grocery store clerks, janitors, etc) - people who have no higher education and even limited primary education but on whose labor we are all heavily dependent - to form home-school "pods" that provide anything like what their children had access to in their school. Doing so would be (and by all accounts currently is) exacerbating the inequities already present.

The public school teacher to a less educationally resourced community is much like rural schoolhouse teacher of the past was to theirs. Those teachers were often the only person in the community with any higher education at all. The parents within rural community weren't resourced to teach their children the basic skills needed to operate in an ever more sophisticated world, which is why they often imported a schoolteacher from a nearby city or town.

That said, even a lot of parents with higher education struggle to help their kids with subjects that they haven't considered since their own primary schooling, like algebra or critical reading and writing.

It's a way to make the best of a bad situation, not a long-term alternative to brick-and-mortar schools.

Providing funding for childcare services (from public school budgets) would also be a good idea, but if we are going to have large-scale child-care services, why not just re-open schools? If the point of closing public schools is to minimize the amount of social contact in order to keep the spread of the disease low, then it necessarily means more parents will need to care for their children at home. Homeschool pods and charter schools make this process less of a pain.

Btw, not all homeschooling families are well-educated. Many do it for religious reasons, or because they have concerns about the safety of the school environment, or because they have a child with special needs that aren't accommodated by the public school system. Charter schools that facilitate homeschooling have teachers who are resources for the parents and a variety of pre-packaged curricula that parents can choose from.

> It's a way to make the best of a bad situation, not a long-term alternative to brick-and-mortar schools.

Agree 100%

> Providing funding for childcare services (from public school budgets) would also be a good idea

There is no money in public school budgets for this. The pandemic hasn't lowered expenses for public schools by any appreciable amount.

> but if we are going to have large-scale child-care services, why not just re-open schools? If the point of closing public schools is to minimize the amount of social contact in order to keep the spread of the disease low, then it necessarily means more parents will need to care for their children at home.

The idea is to provide financial assistance to help low income parents pay for child care when they must leave the home for work, and do so in smaller pods to minimize disease transmission. Parents with high incomes and/or high work flexibility or work from home jobs are already forming these pods and hiring college students as childcare/tutors. Poor families with inflexible work are not able to do this.

These pods are a net increase in cost, since the safety and care function was previously provided by the school facilities and staff has been lost. As you say, it's making the best of a bad situation. The problem is that only people with particular privileges either in job flexibility or income can afford to make the best in the situation.

> Btw, not all homeschooling families are well-educated. Many do it for religious reasons,

I'd argue that from a literacy perspective, a religious home schooling family is better educated than many others even if they don't have secular credentials. The Bible isn't that easy to read, after all.

> This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system.

COVID tragically exaberates inequities in basically all systems.

If you compare it to WWII or WWI, those wars were obviously awful, but they had a sort of equalizing effect economically. When you drop bombs on cities and factories, the rich — who own all of that physical infrastructure — get harmed more than the poor. Physical wars destroy capital, so they tend to reduce economic inequality.

But this pandemic is the exact opposite. It leaves every physical object untouched and only harms people. And, as has always been the case, it is the poor who always end up in harm's way. So this pandemic is making the poor drastically poorer while leaving the well to-do mostly alone.

It is horrible and profoundly unfair. This is exactly the time where you need a big government that is not afraid to do wealth redistribution to even some of this tragedy out. But, instead, here in the US we have Trump and the kleptocracy who are only interested in redistributing wealth into their own pockets.

If we don't get a better government in 2020, the US is going to be in very dire straits. We need an FDR right now, and not to re-elect Hoover.

> lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed

Because I live in a middle-class bubble, I wonder what most of those folks do ordinarily while school is out for the summer.

They rely on family. Grandparents or older siblings watch over the younger ones.

Depending on the area, many summer day camps are subsidized for low income families.

Many of these programs are also provided on school grounds. Of course the hard reality is that many kids just slip through the cracks in our left to their own devices for the summer.

There's a lot of celebrating about working from home and the convenience that brings, but there is no free lunch. A social trade off: now it is (the people who WFH) your responsibility to separate your work/family/life boundaries. I cant speak from experience (introvert, no family), but I think I understand people enough that many will be lulled by the convenience/comfort and not put enough effort into keeping those boundaries up. Expanding: your routine before the shutdown (gym, night classes, public talks, etc). Each of those now require two trips to participate (to and from), instead of hitting them up after (or during) work -> more effort to keep boundaries up.

Additionally, staying in the same place all day cuts out hundreds/thousands of opportunities (over a year) to meet people.

I disagree with people pushing for WFH to become the norm. As convenient as it is, I think it is a net negative to society/our social fabric. IMO, life is already too convenient. That being said, it may be possible for local (neighborhood/town) culture to bloom. It will be challenging in our hyper-political, 'can find people who agree with me anywhere in the world' environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

There was an HN post with great discussion that I cannot find about the wiki article. Third place's were already in decline in the USA.

Lastly: This has been posted many times, but many of the employers costs could be transferred to the employee in a WFH environment.

EDIT: I should add, I've been working from home for > 5 years and live in a big city. I've watched my self discipline decline over the years (or maybe that's due to getting older, or being too comfortable). It's been very difficult to build a social network of friends.

> There's a lot of celebrating about working from home and the convenience that brings, but there is no free lunch. A social trade off: now it is (the people who WFH) your responsibility to separate your work/family/life boundaries. I cant speak from experience (introvert, no family), but I think I understand people enough that many will be lulled by the convenience/comfort and not put enough effort into keeping those boundaries up. Expanding: your routine before the shutdown (gym, night classes, public talks, etc). Each of those now require two trips to participate (to and from), instead of hitting them up after (or during) work -> more effort to keep boundaries up.

I'm also an introvert and live alone, so I guess I don't have much to offer on this topic. all I can say is that setting these sorts of boundaries is something we already expect from college students, who conduct pretty much their entire life (work, sleep, socializing) on a fairly small patch of earth. in college, it's very tempting to let social time bleed into "work time" or (for some) to let work strangle their social life out of existence. but to graduate college at all proves that you have at least some ability to manage work/life balance without the aid of strong physical boundaries.

as far as third places go, I would expect WFH to be a major boon if it weren't happening in the midst of social distancing. I feel like I have much more energy to go out and do stuff after a day of working from home than I normally would after my thirty minute commute.

Since working 100% remotely for a while now, I no longer spend the majority of my time on work. It's easily shrunk to my #3 time allocation behind spending time with loved ones + taking care of myself & my home. It's really tied for #3 with hobbies/personal projects.

It's kind of shocking how many years I could've been forced to spend in the office away from what's important. Cats have short enough lives as it is! And I only get this one with my wife :)

Due to this, boundaries are pretty easy. I just use a planner & make sure I stay on task. I fit it in whenever and just hit requirements for the week. Get paid & spend the majority of life on things that directly benefit me. Highly recommended.

I think that is a unique perspective, and not invalid, but think about what lets you do that. A salaried job with few meetings per day.

Hourly tech workers, or those who have to be available 9-5 anyway, don't have this luxury.

I agree with the parent that WFH does have a lot of long-term potential downsides/changes for society.

I forgot to add - I am "available" 9-5. If I get pinged or emailed, I do respond. If something needs fixing or investigating, I'll jump in. Availability & the trust-building it brings allows you to get paid for existing.

I have a salaried job as a BigCo (not a FAANG or even a tech company) - If I were to work hourly (say, consulting/contracting) I don't think it would be too different. Pay would be more sporadic but also work requirements would be more in my control so it just trades off. Eventually I'll probably drop the BigCo job and get paid less but on my own terms as my finances allow.

I agree I'm in a position that allows for this. I had to get through school and cut my teeth in industry before I could get a position like this. But I knew I wanted it & pounced on the first company that would remotely hire junior me despite my lack of remote experience. Pretty much every career choice I've made was guided towards working remotely like this.

Pre-covid it was so trivial to find gatherings for shared interests (meetups, clubs, tournaments, rec sports, art walks, classes) that I think society would be fine if you stopped forcing people to associate with others that get paid by the same corporation. All the things I listed are a bigger signal of shared interests.

When you WFH, no one knows you're a cat.

I have never heard of third place before. Its a really cool idea. Its something that I have missing from my own life but I can really see the value. Do you think that you have a small social network of friends due to a lack of third place in your life?

Let me know if you find the HN article on the decline

related, but not the third place submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468767

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547295

I agree with what you're saying, there are a lot of Pros and Cons. I've balanced the socializing with getting to know my neighbors more and spent time with my family. EDIT(again): Third place is awesome and necessary. I've tried to supplement work friends with neighborhood, but have benefited from D&D and volunteering with youth for what I need from Third Place.

I've seen the idea that cost is pushed from employer to employee. But I'd argue this is actually a mutually beneficial cost savings.

I don't have to drive. I can get cheaper car insurance. If I was completely remote I could honestly get rid of one of my two cars (wife and me).

I can look into tax benefits such as deducting part of the house as an office if it's not single purpose.

I do experience more usage on my house. I do have to work in a non-optimal area (in my case a shed), but if I value my time more I also save 1-1.5 hours a day.

That was all cost I was paying. So it's a mutually shared cost exchange.

Also many companies have had to quickly invest heavily in their VPNs and other remote technologies, while still being stuck in a lease for large offices which may even be required (by law) to be cooled although there is only one or two people there.

It's fair to say that this change has had pros/cons for many people. Some heavily weighed towards one side or the other. This goes for companies too. Non-tech companies who have done business the same way since the age of remote are HURTING. Sales are down, they don't know how to sell when their people can't hop on a jet and go talk to clients in person. Etc.

That long rant was me saying, I don't think we can simply say, companies have pushed the costs down to employees. I've seen a ton of benefit from my company being remote full time right now. Whereas I know other people who's companies are not in lock down and are forcing employees back to the office with little to no appropriate social distancing in place.

Weighing all of those pros and cons I'm so happy to be at a company which is understanding enough to let me WFH until my kids can go back to school (not google but similar policy).

Can you deduct your house as an expense if you're a salaried employee? I thought only the self-employed could do that.

I did not find the boundary issue to be a problem for me since we switched to WFH. As a matter of fact I enjoy it immensely; even with the family at home I am able to reasonably focus on work (ANC headphones, closing doors, etc. help here). If there is a productivity hit the lack of commute makes up for it, and in exchange I get to spend more time with them.

The main downside of WFH, especially for introverts, and which I don't think is being noticed yet, is the workplace social network / face-to-face bandwidth. The former has been established through working at the office until this March, and we are now coasting on those connections. Who to ask for help with X, which people to get together to socialize a project, etc. I would hate to be a new hire in this environment; there is so much less social contact and less rapport building.

Then, there are instances of when you need to tackle a hard problem with several people in a group, and focus. Usually we would do this in a closed conference room with a whiteboard. The f2f bandwidth is hard to match here.

For the above two reasons I think companies that restart office work (even if a year from now) will be more competitive, and the "WFH Spring" won't last.

I don't think you can apply your opinion of "life is already to convenient" to this situation. Life could never be too convenient as long as it doesn't contribute negatively to overall well being of the individual or society. I think that saying "I want things to be this way because of the way I feel regardless of it being a positive for society" is not a good way to go about this. Unless you can show via a study or and lots of scientific support one can't surmise that all of society should conform to one's on personal opinion because of "I think". If it's not working for you -personally- then the onus is on you to change that by finding an employer who wants you to work in the office or convincing your current employer that it would be better for -you-.

I've worked from home for quite a long time and building a social network is a hard aspect of it. Doing it during a pandemic is hard, but I made it a point to go do something almost every day when I started working from home. It made a huge difference.

In my opinion it's great. Often times our coworkers are people we're forced to socialize with because we don't really have a choice. Working from home brings that choice back, but it does mean that there's some groundwork to lay down.

As someone at a non-silicon valley non-FAANG company, how are those guys treating their hardware teams?

As an embedded hardware engineer, I've been coming in to the office on an "as necessary" basis. Reading between the lines, I'm rolling my eyes. 99% of what I do can be done at home with the equipment I have, yet our business unit has been the one R&D group expected to have butts-in-seats the whole "shutdown" due to being an "essential" (i.e. medical devices) business.

Hearing all of these tech companies taking the pandemic seriously is giving me some serious grass-is-always-greener feelings.

I have access to my (Google) building to allow me to get to the hardware lab there, but it's somewhat discouraged to do so.

Equipment is not to leave the lab, but we are encouraged to set things up to allow as much to happen remotely as possible. So I've got remote power, remote debug probes, a brace of EM100 QSPI emulators, etc. The net result is that unless I need to physically change the cabling on something I can work from home. I work on data center hardware which makes this pretty practical. I don't know how folks on the consumer side of things are faring.

I have a Googler friend in the consumer hardware side, and I heard they're given more freedom to bring equipment home with them...

Roommate works in hardware at a FAANG, they were the first "back" in the office but since he doesn't really need to do lab work (he coordinates with overseas vendors) he only goes in once a week.

They are serious about not having people come in unless they need to be there for there work (e.g. actual design and testing).

Silicon Valley non-FAANG hardware + software company here:

If you need a lab, you are allowed to use it with approval from your VP. If you don't, you WFH.

I read somewhere that Apple had ordered their employees to set up a secure cabinet or locker at home for Hardware storage.

One of my family members works in hardware engineering here in the valley. They have been going to the office seven days a week for weeks, but only four hours at a time (and then working another six at home).

Their labs are open but at 1/2 capacity for social distancing, so they have to trade off who gets to be in them (and have to wear masks the whole time, temp checks, etc.)

Their deadlines haven't changed, and their counterparts in Asia are working normal hours, so they have to work seven days a week just to try to keep up since the lab is producing 1/2 the work it normally does.

>>[...] their counterparts in Asia are working normal hours [...]

Bingo. Global competition and productivity will likely be the larger factor than our (in)ability to balance work-life. I feel this pressure more so managing a remote distributed team around the world, even though we're software-only.

Are there clear advantages to having butts in seats, aside from that 1% and the chance that new work will require quick on-site coordination? Or is it just an "optics" thing?

Not Silicon Valley or FAANG, but I'm a MechE that makes "non essential" consumer products. We're officially WFH until 2021, with lab access available as needed. Most of the time that I'm going in to the office is when I'm getting things from our 3D printers, modifying parts using the machine shop or other large power tools that I don't have at home, or running tests. It probably works out to 1-2 days/week on average, but varies greatly depending on what's going on. We also have the opportunity to bring small lab equipment home with us as needed.

Think this is a smart move - a LOT of other companies spending energy trying to figure out when and how to phase people coming back to the office, this approach shifts it down the road and says lets just focus on executing here and now.

Reality is if people did start coming back to office that could easily get reversed in a few months.

So again I like the idea of kicking the problem down the road given what we know today.

A friends company is planning on bringing 50% back to the office in October.

Which effectively means instead of 4-8 hours of Zoom meetings at his house, he can take them sitting at his desk in the building, while the other 50% sit at home.

Not sure how well that is going to work out. This is an old school Financial company though, so it's not overly surprising.

My (higher education) institution had a really nice gradual phase in plan. Small shifts of workers for a few months when the state opened back up, with more people coming in as we approached semester. An emphasis on in-person classes, but with options for folks who were uncomfortable with crowds.

Then administration caught wind we were 14% off on students.

Two days later - mandatory, everyone back in the office, no remote work to be allowed, for any reason.

It's depressing, and I have no other reason to type this out, other than to complain, I guess. 99% of my, and the folks in my office's jobs can be done, effectively, remotely. But that's not an option. Just ridiculous.

Name and shame I say

Given that, you school must be pushing hard to have regular school in the fall with student's at the school in classroom seats and in dorms. What will happen when the extremely likey covid19 spread leads to a sudden closing of your in-person schooling?

>What will happen when the extremely likely covid19 spread leads to a sudden closing of your in-person schooling?

Faculty are given the choice on whether to teach in-person, remote, or a hybrid.

It's the staff that aren't given a choice, and also aren't given an avenue to deal with concerns or questions.

So, the answer is, if there is spread on campus, the faculty will be told to go online, and staff will be told "you're safe, because there are no students now", much as we are being told today, in the current summer semester.

To quote the President from his most recent update for staff about enrollment, "Please join me in being part of the solutions to the many challenges we face now and in the very near future and refrain from the negativity and participation of those wanting to be part of the problem. That individual choice is yours. Please make it wisely."

> Then administration caught wind we were 14% off on students.

What does 14% off on students mean? 14% fewer students registering for classes?

14% fewer students this year compared to the same day last year.

14% revenue drop too. I think a lot of colleges would be happy with only a 14% revenue drop! They must have thought not having in-person classes certain was reducing student signups.

What's the reasoning? Why is being off 14% of students a reason to bring everyone back? To show that things are "normal" to encourage people to come back?

At the beginning of July the company I work for divided the employees into two groups and have each group come in 2 weeks at a time. I thought this was silly until I heard my friend also has a 50/50 split but it was every other day. We both work in tech and can do our jobs very well remotely.

Sitting in an office besides someone having a Zoom meeting sounds is my personal version of hell.

I probably wouldn't make it as a telemarketer.

I agree. It seems to me that the best course of action at this point is to continue aggressive safety measures. I'm not a virology expert by any means, but it kinda makes intuitive sense that natural herd immunity will build over time. I mean I've been being as careful as I reasonably can, but it's doubtful at this point that I haven't been exposed to the virus many times by now, at least in some capacity. I think some people underestimate the multifaceted nature of your odds of survival if you catch this thing. It's not just a roll of the dice; things like your viral load and your overall health matter immensely. So doing our best to make sure people aren't doing things like spending long periods of time in close proximity to one another with recycled air flow seems like what we should continue doing.

In San Francisco the guidance has been “you idiots keep having social gatherings, this is why we can’t let you go shopping.” But to me it seems absolutely insane to spend our “exposure budget” on shopping, or on a return to the office. There are perfectly good substitutes for these things. Not so for friends.

I like the phrase "exposure budget", I hope you don't mind if I steal it. I've been thinking of things the same way, though my #1 "budgetary priority" right now is probably "open schools" over everything else, including seeing friends—and I say that as someone with zero children.

Same I haven't seen that before and I hope the op is stealing this. I'd like to see more people thinking in this way.

Thanks! I suspect that public health authorities wouldn't like this, as they do not want people to feel that they can "spend" at all unless it's essential. But that doesn't seem like something we can actually sustain until the vaccine, so I have found the concept helpful.

Even child psychologists have reversed their stance on returning to school. They've realized that the trauma of having a teacher die is worse than not socializing for a few more months.

At the current virus levels, it is expected that at least two teachers and 60 students will die every day in the USA if we reopen schools.

That is of course out of hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students, but if it's your teacher or your friend, it doesn't really matter how many millions didn't die that day, does it?

>a few more months

People keep saying "a few more months." What is the evidence for this? We are not going to have a vaccine developed, tested, and deployed to 300 million people in a few months. Nor are we going to grow Asia-level mask compliance, quarantine enforcement, and contact tracing within the Trump presidency. Now that it's a tribal issue, it probably can't be done at all.

It really seems like we're in this for a few years.

I was being optimistic. Although during the 1918 pandemic, after the third wave, mask compliance went way up as people finally realized the thing was real and was deadly. So maybe it'll get better.

Also, at least right where I live in Santa Clara county, we're almost at the point of reopening again. I see 99.9%+ mask compliance here, and the numbers are trending down (albeit slowly).

I suspect based on the Governor's new policies that my kids will be back in school before Thanksgiving, until things get bad again and the have to leave again.

Picking out that you said "current virus levels" I completely agree.

There is no timeframe for getting the virus levels under wraps. It's a matter of determining what the risk is.

I'd put it like this for myself, if the risk to the students and teachers is MORE than some already known risk factors we have out there (driving) then let's not do it.

If the risk to students and teachers is similar or less than some already known risk factors then we can consider opening.

I'd also like to see a plan of something like (not exactly this I'm no expert).

If someone from a class is confirmed with COVIDthe whole class closes for 2 weeks (goes remote). If there are 3 cases at the school they close for 2 weeks. If there are 3 schools in the district and there's less than XYZ miles then the district closes for 2 weeks.

This is a rough idea but we can easily handle 2-4 weeks off at a time given a case of COVID. So if we're opening lets be cautious and imitate other countries who have done well.

What you describe is very similar to the new rules in California. When the county gets to a certain level of containment, schools will open, and otherwise will basically follow the plan you just described, with closures based on cases within the school and/or district.

If we reopen schools, how many teachers and students will die in traffic accidents that could have been avoided by WFH? Should we WFH forever and wrap the kids in bubble wrap to avoid that trauma too?

Also, where did you get those numbers from? I would have expected teachers to be at far higher risk of death than students.

> If we reopen schools, how many teachers and students will die in traffic accidents that could have been avoided by WFH?

Many fewer, especially given that for students it usually involves walking or short drives through residential neighborhoods.

> Should we WFH forever and wrap the kids in bubble wrap to avoid that trauma too?

Obviously not. There is clearly a point where it makes sense to go back. But now isn't that time.

> Also, where did you get those numbers from? I would have expected teachers to be at far higher risk of death than students.

It's based on the CDC mortality data combined with the number of school kids.

The teacher estimate is harder because we don't know exactly the age breakdown of the teachers, but it's based on the assumption that 30% of teachers are over 50 and putting the rest in the 20-30 risk group, which is probably too low.

The actual number of teachers is lower just because there are only about 1 teacher per 30 students.

Which is why your numbers look wrong, because if there's 1 teacher for every 30 students and also 1 teacher dying for every 30 student deaths, that implies the risk of death for the two groups is equivalent.

My broader point, though, is that life requires calculated risk and tradeoffs. If the standard is "no child should ever experience a teacher dying from corona", and we WFH until that risk becomes <1/adult/year, then we're disregarding things like kids committing suicide due to isolation, health issues left untreated due to the pandemic, domestic violence etc. School is a literal lifeline for many children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Non-US, non-Google regular enterprise IT here. There is absolutely zero reason my team needs to be in office. Management has stated multiple time that our productivity has increased. And yet, our official WFH policy keeps getting extended on the last day the government regulates an extension.

Overall it has left a very sour taste in my mouth, it almost feels as if we will be called in office the moment gov removes restrictions. It also tells me my company doesn't want us making any medium term plans. In another words, we are expendable.

I'm ready for high-tech, work-from-home workers to build a trailer park in some remote location (as long as it has great internet), where you have to quarantine for two weeks on the way in, but once you're in your kid gets to go to school with other kids the same age, your infant gets to go to daycare.

I mean, really, a lot of Bay Area people would probably end up with MORE living space in a mobile home.

Either that, or maybe I should just be trying to move to New Zealand.

Next year, thanks to Starlink, all remote locations in the continental US will have great internet.

https://sneak.berlin/20200129/starlink/

I'm hopeful, but skeptical.

Eternal September is about to get turned to 11.

This is what Bay Area techies wish the Bay Area was

I would love to move to New Zealand, but I don't want to renounce my US citizenship and I don't want to pay double income tax.

Why would you need to renounce US citizenship, and why would you pay double income tax? The US has a tax treaty with New Zealand[1] to minimize (but not eliminate) these types of double-taxation issues.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/newzld.pdf

It's always interesting when I hear US citizens whinge about paying more tax. Heaven forbid you get a functioning healthcare system and a government that actually governs

I was under the apparently mistaken impression that NZ was one of the countries where I would have to pay US tax and NZ tax. I'm no opposed to paying more tax for sane healthcare or functional government. But paying two countries taxes would be prohibitive, and NZ is not exactly cheap.

That's not how it works. If you moved to NZ (or any other country with a US tax treaty) you would basically pay an amount equal to the greater of the two tax bills.

You should do more research if this is an option you're seriously considering.

While this was probably a necessary move due to ongoing covid19 impact on families as well as pressure from other companies (e.g. FB and Twitter having announced broader WFH policies), it's fascinating to see Google do this and how it'll impact their workforce in the longer term.

Google arguably pioneered the model of "office will have everything you need" to incentive current employees to come to the office as well as lure new recruits. It's been a win-win for the company and the employees: Google gets focus/dedication and the synergies of colocation, whereas employees can enjoy the many onsite perks.

One major irony is that for a company that sells products that facilitate and enable WFH, such as the GSuite, it's actually not very open to allowing its employees to WFH. Covid19 has seemingly forced the company to change, or at least adapt in the short term.

But what happens in 2-3 years? As tech employees everywhere are used to WFH, Google probably needs to de-emphasize the onsite requirement aspect and consequently change their culture/workplace model.

I am not a fan of WFH. One thing I do wonder though is, now that I've bought thousands of dollars worth of home office and gym equipment, why would I want to forfeit that? I suspect many employees who sprung for the HM chair and the standing desks won't want to leave those unused at home very easily.

That's easy, just give up work-life balance and work another 40 hours a week at home on top of the 40 at the office.

> Google arguably pioneered the model of "office will have everything you need"

No, that was company towns, which are frontier era.

'We provide everything you need' is also a good way to run a cult. The cost of leaving is that you lose everything, including friends and family.

Right now Google can't get your whole family working at the company so they don't have quite the lock on people that they could.

In some ways it’s actually kind of annoying to get a medium-term commitment. My partner’s job at Google can be (and of course recently has been) done remotely. We would rather move somewhere cheaper and closer to family, rather than being chained to a particular office location.

Now we have confirmation that remote work is basically all fine, except we can’t take real advantage of it because there‘s no reason to think it will continue to be possible in the future.

I appreciate that companies are offering flexibility, but it would definitely be better if there was more thinking being done about the long-term restructuring of work.

>I appreciate that companies are offering flexibility, but it would definitely be better if there was more thinking being done about the long-term restructuring of work.

There is. Your partner has information on that internally. It's a big decision for a company of 120,000+ full time employees across 150 countries so it will take time to figure out a permanent plan going forward.

That’s a fair point. I was a little annoyed to hear a kind of vague medium-term plan today rather than something more firm or adventurous, but it’s fair to say that it’s understandable given the scope of the change.

Very fair but I think even announcing a 1 year plan is incredibly fair given that many similar companies (e.g. Apple) are still WFH on an ongoing basis, ready to come back as soon as the COVID rates hit a certain threshold. Now that would suck.

(Googler, opinions are my own)

Personally, I think it's because of Google's focus on collaboration at all costs internally, which just isn't possible if everyone is working remote. IMs and Meets can only get you so far, but there's no substitute for overhearing a co-worker chatting about something or popping over next to them for a moment to see what they're working on.

I made the move anyway. We'll see how it works out long-term.

I'm enjoying being back home, especially since "home" is in a country that has their shit together a lot more than the US does right now. That means I can go to the gym, visit parks, and have a basically normal social life. I do miss my friends in the (US) city I normally work in.

If my employer forcibly recalls everyone to the office, I might decide to take a slightly lower-paid job in my home city, especially if the US is still inundated with COVID cases.

You should be careful of the tax implications. WFH outside of the state your employment center was based in opens you to possible complications around how your employment is viewed by the IRS.

Yeah, treading very carefully there. This won't be my first complicated tax year...

If I was able to receive a definite answer from my employer about a real remote date, I would have purchased a house for under 100k in Montana months ago by now.

Do it if that's what you want!

I'm sure a small percentage of people would do the same!

On the other hand, I think the large majority of people want to go back to the office (once it is safe to do so)

Citation needed on the large majority of people wanting to go back to the office?

Anecdotally, a significant number of my colleagues hope to be able to remote forever. Some are looking at finally realizing their dreams of buying a nice home; a third of the price as it'd cost in the city.

Two of my teammates have literally moved out of state. When I do go back to the office it's still going to be a smaller circle.

Have surveyed this at my (large) office and it’s about 50/50.

I don’t know what the exact numbers would be aggregated across the entire population, but from comparing surveys across my own office and several other large companies I think there are two large minority positions (want to WFH forever / want back in office) and a third slice of undecideds.

Similar results at my (reasonably large) company:

* 20% want to go back to the office

* 30% want to WFH forever

* 50% want the flexibility to WFH 2-3 days a week

I was firmly in favor of working for the office pre-pandemic because my organization's WFH infrastructure wasn't really there yet despite a pretty liberal policy allowing us to WFH pretty much whenever we wanted to.

Post-pademic, we've figured out and fixed a lot of the tech and culture issues years faster than we would have otherwise and I'm suddenly much more comfortable staying remote indefinitely.

I'd be curious to know if my own change of heart is unique.

I really doubt a large majority of people want to work in the office. Most people do not. Nearly all of my friends (computer geeks) enjoy working from home, it's more of the marketing/sales/manager types that want to get back in the office even though if you corner them they will say they really aren't any less productive at home and can still communicate with whomever they want. Maybe they should go back in and leave the rest of us happy at home.

100k in Montana will practically get you a palace on 100 acres lol

Eastern Montana, for sure ;)

Depends where. Used to live in the western part of the state near West Yellowstone (parents still have a place there), and the prices there are kind of surprising. Even ignoring the Yellowstone Club, there are a lot of multi-million dollar homes sitting on relatively small plots of land (relative to other places we lived in the midwest, not relative to SF).

The western part of the state is where most of the picturesque landscape is, and there were a lot of expensive developments in the area and on the Idaho side of the border from us too.

Tangentially speaking, what does say about Bay Area housing? Anecdotally, I used to look at Google's performance as an indicator on South Bay housing prices.

Housing prices are in a bubble for sure! They are artificially being kept steady.

Rents are still the same but with 1-2 months free deal (which translates to around a few hundred dollars per month down from pre-covid).

Rents are down 10-30% in SF. I received a 10% discount on my lease renewal along with 8 weeks free.

>Housing prices are in a bubble for sure! They are artificially being kept steady.

Artificially only in the sense that most people who would have been selling their house right now are cancelling their plans due to the pandemic, not some sort of organized conspiracy.

I think its not realistic to expect employers to know this right now.

If everyone's moving to remote working. Do you believe this will push for dumping wages as well? I don't mean moving jobs to India, but rather recruit remote workers in relative low-income areas of the US?

Not discrediting the amount of skills available on the US East coast but why wouldn't FAANG try to source new remote employees elsewhere in the US?

Some employers will probably try, but since I've moved to a lower-income area of the US, I've noticed that there aren't a ton of other developers in my community, especially with 5+ yrs experience.

I think location will factor more into salary discussions moving foward, but it's not like there are a ton of software devs in South Dakota ready to take the jobs of the SV folks.

>it's not like there are a ton of software devs in South Dakota ready to take the jobs of the SV folks.

Yet.

That's the point. They're in places like SV, because they're required to be, right now. If remote work really takes hold, and folks can move to places like South Dakota, I bet that changes. That's the entire point. Right now there aren't folks out there, but there will be in the next 1-3 years, I imagine.

Also, South Dakota is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from SV. Today, there is a sizeable population of talented developers living in the suburbs of major cities with a COL of a third or less than the Bay area.

If this became a big enough trend, I wonder if it could lead to a revitalization of rural America.

I mean, the nearest town to me (pop.<600) has fiber internet. Many rural/small towns have local co-ops that no one talks about who are offering fiber. What else would you need?

Personally, a fairly liberal set of laws in place to maintain my current set of rights and options let alone those for my female partner. I won't be moving to a state that insists in conservative social policies like banning abortion and cutting education or basic infrastructure under the guise of lowering taxes. I like living in a functional democracy, at as a state, and happy to pay taxes for things like better schools and roads.

That's actually one thing I really like about living in a Northern Rural area. The rural attitude of 'live and let live' and 'leave me the fuck alone' carries over to relationships and home life. Nobody really cares about my relationship with my partner, as long as I'm willing to leave them the fuck alone.

I say 'northern' rural area, just because I've never lived in a rural area in the south of the US.

I don't have anything against that or moving to a location that meets your values.

It's more that I'd prefer to support schools and social programs, and have those open to me as best as possible, than get away from it all. I've been in a spot where if it wasn't for the ACA I'd be dead (specifically extension of parents insurance until child is 26) and if I didn't have strong local schools growing up I probably wouldn't have gone far. We do better when we work together and pool resources for all, including the next generation. It's hard for me to be a part of that by moving somewhere rural.

And I can't bring myself to move to a red state unless it's flipping purple and willing to basically pull a Virginia. The social rights differences between colors is serious and unfortunate.

Worthwhile options for dining out, drinking, entertainment, social interaction not centered around religion, preferably a social circle that has at least some liberal viewpoints, and a nearby airport so I can take vacations without multiple connections. I don't live in the Bay, but I doubt a tiny farming village would offer even half of what I'd like. I could probably get by in a city as small as 100k if I wanted to work from home forever, but I don't -- I enjoy the social aspect of an office.

>it's not like there are a ton of software devs in South Dakota ready to take the jobs of the SV folks.

There are tons of software developers in Canada though.

Wages typically match the market rate salaries of the employees location so it's expected that remote workers wages will be lower. Many employers are not offering promotions and bonuses now because of the coronavirus uncertainty. I do think companies will try to recruit employees from anywhere now instead of local or domestic since theres no office to go into now.

What really hasn't gotten the same level of attention is the fact that Googlers will be able to work from anywhere in the country their main office is located in. I predict there will be some exodus of Googlers from places like NYC, SF/Bay, LA and Seattle for places like Austin, Colorado and Florida.

Edit. I have two small kids and child care has been the bane of my existence since March. This (and flex time) has definitely helped my families situation. I'm grateful for the luxury and I'm deeply concerned for everyone who is in this situation without this flexibility (friends and family included).

/Googler living in a middle state, thoughts my own.

My how things change. Last year my manager and director at Google wouldn’t let me be away from the office to work from another location for 2 weeks without forcing me to take a family leave. To quote “remote doesn’t work, if you can’t be in the office you need to take a leave or vacation”. Apparently those two L7 geniuses weren’t consulted before this decision :)

Honestly, I still think remote work doesn't work.

The sole exception, however, that it can sort of work if everyone else is also remote.

Lots of companies seem to be proving the opposite, from 37S to GitLab, even before the pandemic.

Github too.

In a company with offices around the globe and projects all over the place as well, remote or in-office makes very little difference.

really? ever have to work on project split like that?

Its easy for key features to be lost - and a lot of time and $ to be wasted.

I wont mention any names but I found out today that our team should have been on a call about a major website rebuild - I have a suspicion that some key areas have been missed.

Everyone working at a large tech organization above a certain size on projects of central importance to the organization has worked on projects split like this.

Does no one have a project management/coordination role for your team? It's literally their job to make sure this doesn't happen.

I can say with all sincerity, that I have been on projects like that.

And because "remote' is such an incredible afterthought, co-dev production is harmed immensely as a kind of collateral damage.

I have worked in companies that did this right, we had offices in NYC/London/Bangkok and we did everything over RT tickets+IRC, mostly because it was incredibly frictionless (yes, I know IRC and RT are not the best tools in the world, but once they were set up and everyone was in people preferred using them to taking in person meetings).

Contrast with today: we have teams in Sweden, UK, North Carolina, San Francisco and Helsinki- and we use Jira/Teams/Confluence as our "tools".... but they're so /slow/ that we have to be dragged through the coals to use them, we much prefer in-person meetings, we much prefer hashing things out over a coffee.. and thus, our co-dev is very much out of the loop, and it's "odd" (as in, not default) to include them. So what happens is we carve out bits of responsibility and we restrict immensely the communication channels.. in fact some peoples entire job is to ensure those communication channels run smoothly.. and it's still very many shades of terrible.

I want to blame the tools, but really, it's the culture, if you're more comfortable engaging over IM/Tickets w/e then it doesn't matter if you're sitting 10ft away or 100mi away.

I've worked on projects like this at two separate companies, both of which had people on opposite sides of the world and across the US. It was easiest at the smaller start-up because communicating via Slack/Hipchat made this work fairly smoothly, aside from the occasional situations where we had to go on a video chat at 7a or 10p.

For the start-up I worked at, everyone around the world was working on the same APIs. Issues and priorities were just bubbled up via chat.

The larger company I work for now is more difficult because more people = more questions that need to be resolved via video chats. We have a PM that talks with the people on the other side of the world and also a "team liaison" on the east coast that hops in their planning meetings, and communicates with us if there are any issues we need to be aware of. The project we're working on is being completed by three separate teams, all in different parts of the world.

The smaller team I am on has people all over the US and Canada. That itself hasn't been much of an issue. Prior to COVID, we would have the occasional fly-in to San Francisco so we could do team stuff in person, go out for happy hour, etc.

The most complaints I've seen where lack of communication within team members which contributes to siloing, but that is more of an issue with how many services our team has assigned to it and less to do with having team members working remotely (although it does contribute).

> remote or in-office makes very little difference

(Genuinely asking) what makes you think that way? From what I have seen, remote works only if everyone on the team is remote and timezone differences are somehow taken care of. If you are the only remote member of the team and everyone else is in office in close proximity of each other, you are going to suffer mainly in terms of career growth.

Here are the things remote members miss out on when a lot of team members are in office: water cooler conversations (great to forge bond and trust), quick one-minute clarifications, grabbing a minute from your super busy bosses (when they are walking from one meeting to another), grokking and perceiving things that are not said during in-person 1:1's (important for managers or leads to understand the issues of their team members) etc. If you are missing out on all this while the rest of your team members have these advantages, guess who is going to be more productive in the long run?

Doesn't work as well - I think is a fairer way to put it.

I've been working remotely for ~12 years now, it's working just fine for me thanks. I'm incredibly productive and I am producing good work.

It also doesn't matter if you would be more productive in-person or not. Maximizing productivity isn't some moral truth we must satisfy. Corporations for good reason try to get workers to think it is.

Glad to see you bring this up because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I get the feeling that many people are on board with the idea that productivity trumps all and are willing to be like rags to be squeezed by their employers until every last productivity drop comes out.

I think this needs to be talked about more with an eye towards reducing the amount people must work.

Its not a moral truth, its an economic one. If you want to charge a premium price for your labor, you had better be offering a premium product, or your customers won't buy it.

Can you elaborate a little on how maximizing productivity is directly related to offering a premium product? For what it's worth I disagree, this doesn't seem like a truth at all.

It's also not an economic one. My salary is locked in. So long as I don't get fired, I get paid the same. So I can give different outputs and get paid that same "premium price." Just have to meet the bar. So it's in my interest to reduce how much work I do in order to increase my de factor hourly rate. If you factor in promotions etc, it's the same thing - just a different bar.

I guess you could say I'm offering a "premium product" either way and be right, but my original point stands. I don't need to be giving 100% to get that money. And the longer I'm at a job, the more I can understand the effort bar I need to meet and influence it downward.

Do you seriously think that you should get full pay for part-time work? If you only want to work part-time, then by all means feel free to pursue part-time employment. But if your employer finds out that they've been paying for full-time labor and getting only part-time labor, don't act surprised and indignant if they fire you.

Yes I should get paid my current salary for my current work. Feedback on my work is that it is "Good" which means the employer is happy paying me for my contributions. I'm not being paid for my labor and time - I'm being paid so long as my employer thinks what I'm giving them is worth it. I'm not grifting anyone - I'm just in an at-will employment arrangement.

Caring about hours worked is for bad managers, plain and simple. The biggest reason to not work in the office is that it's easier to avoid these bottom-of-the-barrel, butts-in-seats leaders. With them out of the way, you're free to tune your output in such a way that keeps your employer happy while also freeing up your life.

Its not about "hours worked." Its about available throughput.

If you're under-loaded, then a good manager can shift the balance around the team. Maybe someone else is over-loaded. If the whole team is under-loaded, then maybe the team can deliver more features. Maybe its a good time to pay down some of last year's technical debt. Maybe its a good time to take a bet on a higher-risk research project.

If I spend 4 hours working and the result is enough throughput to make my team and manager happy, then that's what I'm going to do and I'll do everything in my power to keep it that way. Everyone's happy, what's wrong with that?

I just can't relate to this mindset that is oriented around optimizing company success. I'm more focused on my own success.

My peak throughput isn't necessarily there for the company's taking. I guard it as my greatest secret. My manager only gets 2 signals from me regarding load: It's good..or I'm overloaded. Never the truth when I'm underloaded if everyone's happy - that would just be harming myself for some company's benefit.

To be fair, I'm also happier now than I've ever been in work too. It turns out that I produce much better work at a faster rate when I'm happier.

I think it's heavily dependent on the company and the employee and that blanket statements about it oversimplify the issue.

Full-remote companies like GitLab seem to have an effective remote-work culture, while others seem to be struggling to convert their existing processes and communication avenues to remote. On the other hand, I dramatically prefer working from an office, while several of my coworkers prefer working from home.

Even if it's strictly less productive than in-person..you can get the job done. Why in the world would an engineer advocate for optimizing productivity at all costs instead of benefit for themselves?

I'd rather get a job at 80% productivity and have control of my time instead of maximize productivity & spend more time solely focused on work than sleeping.

I've worked remotely for almost a decade on my own. It works.

I downvoted you because this is objectively not true. Many companies have been successful at having some remote employees.

If you or your company can't handle it then the problem is with you or your company, not working remotely.

Found the L7 genius

That's a huge assumption. There are certainly situations where it doesn't work but to have a blanket policy of refusing to do it is right up there with luddites hating the internet. Companies should be smarter than that.

Fellow Googler here. You need a new team.

Wouldn't that person's replacement just suffer the same fate?

It's better to correct the bad behavior than to kick it down the river.

Most teams wouldn't bat an eye at a few weeks working somewhere else. The managers will change their tune if they lose engineers over such a stupid policy.

I've seen managers have over 100% turnover in 6 months and still not change their approach.

Doesn't Google recognize that 100% turnover on a team might be a management problem?

There's (for better or worse), quite a lot of "vote with your feet" at google.

I worked from a company that was acquired and about 1/4the people in the building were left working in a building for about 4x the number of people there.

All the layoff horror aside, it was glorious working there for a while before they started renting the unused space.

The executive bathrooms were real treat. it was always quiet, every common space was sort of a private lounge.

I wonder if folks in the office are having the same experience.

I find it interesting how this situation is beginning to feel normal to me. I'm only 20, so I've never really consciously lived through a world event of anything even approaching this magnitude before. I'm finding that my whole outlook on life is being majorly altered by all this. As utterly horrible and tragic as everything is right now, I'm hopeful this will ultimately turn out to result in some positive lifestyle changes for me at a personal level, as long as I don't die.

I'm only 20, so I've never really consciously lived through a world event of anything even approaching this magnitude before.

Those of us approaching 60 haven't, either. Arguably the Cold War, but unless I happened to watch The Day After recently, I never gave that much thought.

Good thing. I think that other major companies too will follow the same step Google has taken now(WFH).

PS: Typing this wondering when the corona phases out.

Once there is a vaccine in the US, readily available.

I'm not even sure I believe this anymore. Seeing how many people out there believe masks are BAD for you makes me skeptical that most people will actually get the vaccine...

Keep in mind (from a pandemic perspective):

- The current population density of urban and suburban areas, is prone to pandemic scale events. However, density is great for a lot of reasons and this trend will continue.

- The latency and throughput of travel being so good, is prone to pandemic scale events. However, current travel is great for a lot of reasons and improving latency and throughput will continue.

- Bio-engineering advancing quickly, will be prone to cause pandemic scale events. However, we need to advance this domain for better medical treatments.

With these points above, the next large-scale, remote-work event is guaranteed, the only question is when.

Keep in mind (from a for-profit corporation perspective):

- They value stable productivity rather than productivity peaks and throughs.

- Land, buildings and infrastructure are 15% of employee costs.

- Pandemics are not the only form of churn requiring remote work, so are natural and unnatural disasters, etc.

- Reacting to the event, will always lag the event. Creating a vaccine or cleaning up a fire / flood / earthquake will require a few months at the least, everytime.

As a company making a decision today:

- If the employees working remotely have less than 15% productivity loss (but the company pays 15% less for real-estate), then remote-work is viable today. Like with Google, et-al.

- If the employees working remotely have a noticeable (i.e. 15% or more) productivity loss, then remote-work is not a viable option. However, maybe the increased stability is worthwhile for the company, and remote-work will be deemed viable.

In either case, it seems like a no-brainier to start investing into tooling to support automation or remote-work with increased productivity (Slack, Oculus, remote controlled robots, etc). While the word "covid" will phase out, the mentality of remote-work and hyper-hygiene (e.g. masks and hand sanitizers) will only accelerate.

This is similar to the change of era where "parents allowed the kids to play outdoors, unsupervised", these eras are sadly over.

The cynic in me sees the cost savings. Suddenly you're at work 24/7; no office space or workplace overhead, no office perks or food.

You should be paid well enough that free food isn't a factor. This is truly a FAANG world problem.

(I work for Google but opinions are my own)

It’s more about convenience than the cost.

And the convenience is something that you simply cannot replicate with money right now.

The only way to place gyms, makerspaces, and all the other fancy amenities right next to everyone's house would be to have very dense "techie towns" where the population (would have to he at the very least hundreds, better thousands) are all roughly like-minded, and even then you'd have issues with access control and trust (which requires a lot less friction inside a company, where too-far-out-of-bounds behavior is kept in check by the implied collateral of your high-paying job).

Or, just, you know, a city with modern density levels. This is entirely achievable even without some “techie town” if the density of an urban area is sufficient, as it is in many cities in the world.

The city would have to be really dense to put all of this within 5-10 minutes door-to-door distance.

It adds up if the workforce is large enough. Don't be surprised if the cost per workplace is a sizeable fraction of your annual salary.

There are many TVCs at Google for whom the free food is a non-trivial benefit. Think about cleaning staff or other low paid jobs.

great point. I sometimes see TVCs absolutely loading their plates with food, and it makes me think about what a blessing it is for them to be able to access high quality food at least once per day.

I agree "for them to be able to access high quality food at least once per day" is a good workaround in the current economic climate but, is "blessing" truly the right word?

Don't you think "access to high quality food anytime they want for their whole family" (ideally through appropriate pay) be a minimum bar before they consider themselves, or we consider them, even close to "blessed"?

FTI: TVCs are "temporary help agency workers, vendors, and independent contractors"

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56878

While I agree with the notion, this is fairly short sighted. There are a lot of TVCs or "non-tech" employees of FAANG for whom free food makes a huge impact on their livelihood in high CoL areas.

I'm with you. I'd love a one-time budget for modifications to my home that will actually make it viable as an office. I've invested in a better chair, monitor(s), peripherals etc. That money shouldn't have came out of my pocket.

That's being said, I don't work for Google, but the guarantee that I'd be able to move some place cheaper for a year would make these expenses easier to swallow.

That's a good point and I will use it during our next all hands meeting.

So like https://www.forbes.com/sites/beasleydavid/2020/05/27/google-...

Google did give employees about $1300 to spend on office equipment.

That seems to cover either a decent workstation OR a good chair, but not both?

You don't need to buy a 'workstation'. It's mainly for furniture. Everyone gets corp laptops and monitors.

Googlers can't use our workstations at home, but we can use our laptops for remote desktop/SSH. Everything else is processed in data centers which means great performance everywhere. We've also got monitors and office chairs to bring home.

Wait a minute, you now have to do all your work on a laptop? For 8 hours a day? That sounds like pure hell.

My company (in Norway, so not FAANG) shipped all their office stuff to us. So before the first week of WFH was over I had gotten my chair, desk, screen, keyboard etc all set up at home.

But if these things last longtime or become permanent, I think people will start reconsider where they live. For instance, we could need an extra room for a proper office.

You will even more so if your part of a couple - a lot of places wont want your SO listening in of conference calls.

Yes the company legendarily known for providing so many amenities its staff don't really need to leave the office is doing this to save a few bucks.

I think you're both right.

The primary motivator isn't to save a few bucks.

But also, it's going to save them a lot of cash. Those amenities are incredibly expensive. So much so that the IRS has probed around as to whether they're properly taxed at a compensation level commensurate with their value.

I think that's the point in the UK HMRC is super strict on that.

I recall 20 years ago a large UK company wanted to offer free tea and coffee as a perk.

And avoid also to avoid every group having its own coffee/tea club - which lead to messy looking offices and also incidents when some ones decides to take Wally" to task for not contributing.

Basically HMRC said oh that's nice here's the tax bill so that was the end of that.

Ironically it bit the HMRC in the ass as the CFO used the ability to distribute profit based tax free shares as a big F&% you.

Companies change over time. Google is doing fantastically well financially but they'd be remiss if they did not use this to get rid of a large chunk of opex if they could. Note that that company is happy to send customers invoices for $30 so I'd go on the assumption that if they can save many millions they'd be interested.

Google has been cutting down on those amenities for years now.

If you're "at work" 24/7, you're doing it really, really wrong.

0700-1600 only for me (almost four years 100% WFH).

Clearly, you're an employee and are not self employed.

The context of this thread is "employees" so your comment is a non-sequitur.

I am an employee, and I am not at work 24/7.

My experience is I'm at work 4-6hrs/4-5days depending on the week.

> The cynic in me sees the cost savings.

There are major cons to WFH - less collaboration, impact on productivity. I don't think Google cares enough about the 'cost savings' aspect of it, if it has any impact on productivity.

Yeah, Google's problem is they can't spend enough the money fast enough. Cost savings have marginal/zero benefit to the business long term.

https://archive.is/8XT8c

And this marks peak tech salary.

Anyone know what the US tax implications are of long-term working from home, specifically for deducting "home costs" for the employee?

I’m not a tax expert but my recollection is that the 2018 tax reform bill removed the ability to deduct home costs from your federal taxes. However, some states may still allow such deductions.

You can’t deduct home office costs. Working from another state has complexities too. But the money saved from not living in the bay more than pays for the CPA.

you can't deduct home costs unless you want to get visited by the IRS. If you are running your own business it's fairly easy, if you're working for someone else as a direct employee DON'T DO IT. you will get audited and have to pay those taxes and penalties if you're lucky and don't get charged with tax fraud. It's not worth it. If you need to set up something expensive make your employer buy it (new computer you are borrowing, laptop, audio equipment, whatever) and give it back to them when you quit/get fired/done with it.

https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2226/2020-0...

As other comments mention protracted WFH reveals and expands many inequities;

- A good chunk of the FAANG workers are young immigrants, which means they cannot move back to their parents’. Whereas most of their American counterparts can do this if they choose to and enjoy multiple benefits from rent savings to moral support of having a community.

- A good majority of the workers are single young adults. Multiyear shutdowns including the office space will make couplings suffer. It is already harder for immigrants to find partners (e.g. large intercultural gaps) but this not only amplifies the current isolation but also delays people’s life goals significantly.

- A good portion of the workforce don’t have enough savings for a downpayment and usually live in HCOL locations, which means they are renting smallish apartments. When the primary locale is home, it makes a huge difference what that home is like. Be it sufficient noise isolation from neighbors, to having space for exercise / hobbies (even more important where gyms and other entertainment venues are closed), a dedicated office, a yard to get some sunshine and fresh air.

I forsee mental health of these demographics taking an extra hit that will ripple for the next several years, even decades.

Absent from most coverage:

This and the related issue of school closure,

are necessitated only because in this country we were incapable of embracing, or even in any meaningful way, articulating, the necessary and obvious solution to this pandemic: • support individuals and businesses 100%, while • developing effective test, trace, treat, and control

There is no mystery here. The examples of successful variants are everywhere: literally, everywhere else in the first and some of the second world.

The arguments for UBI, single payer, and not least, the eradication of right-wing indoctrination networks which cultivate a meaningful subset of the populace to be uninformed, uninformable tribal victimhood-rage-junkies divorced from consensus reality and hostile to science, have never been more stark.

Yet nowhere are these self-evident truths being articulated, debated, trumpeted, defended, forced.

Every vehicle which the right habitually paints as "left" liberal or biases that I follow,

is so laughably mealy-mouthed, equivocating, both-siding, and self-constrained in its framing, let alone advocacy, as to provoke nihlistic despair.

The question is not why Google is resigning itself to WFH.

The question is not why employees must now form micro-schooling pods out of pocket.

The question is why there are not pitchforks and torches forcing the obvious basic systemic change in this country necessary to bring us in-line with every other functional variant of 21st c. intelligent capitalism.

We have been committed by short-sighted billionaires who backed social tribalism as a tactic to wealth consolidation,

to a path of total cultural and political self-destruction.

So f--king tiresome and so, so, so unnecessary.

So a mischievous question : if everyone can work from home, which means they can work from anywhere and not really needed in USA, will Google reduce H-1B applications for the next year?

I'm pleased to see that WFH is becoming more normal.

It isn't becoming normal, it's being forced due many factors: risk of getting sick with no proper treatment, possible schools not opening which forces to deal with your kids, no vaccine, etc.

"A Gallup poll found a majority of American adults working from home would prefer to continue doing so “as much as possible” after the pandemic."

The word "possible" is doing a lot of work in that quote. Notably, if enough people go back to the office because they prefer to do so--especially if they're managers or others who can influence things like good reviews and higher raises--there will certainly be a tipping point where more people see themselves as "needing" to return to the office in order to further their careers and money.

And if even more people return, the habits like remembering to make meetings accessible to people who aren't physically present will fade. Not that meetings were particularly accessible, even in many tech industry companies, before. Conference room audio equipment is quite bad in a lot of places.

Possible seems to me to mean if almost all people in a company, group, or department are working remotely, if working remotely isn't seen as a career impediment (or working in the office isn't viewed as more of a boost than working remotely would take away from), and if people can still participate in groups, then perhaps.

What I figure we will see is a hybrid, where people are in the office a day or two per week and at home the rest of the time. That still means you have to be within commuting distance of an office and still have to make child care and other appointment arrangements.

Many people have gotten a taste and are not going to go back. I know multiple people who are now making remote work (not just covid-predicated) a requirement for their new job search.

Of course but it also serves as a proving ground to some reluctant old fogies who act like "it will never work". Not everything about coronapocalypse has to be negative. Maybe when the next pandemic hits people will be working from home more, more acceptable of masks and distance, etc. The next one in a decade or so may be even more virulent and deadly, so this may be a time to learn for all of us especially us stubborn people in the USA.

The government wouldn't let Google create housing at the site of its office, so it created Google offices at the sites of its employees :)

Feel bad for people in the US, which seems to effectively to be back to March/April.

Why not work from home forever? If it works now it’ll work in a year.

This is the first person/company that actually has a realistic (still optimistic) Coronavirus timeline.

Prior to this, everyone had unrealistic "fall 2020", then pushed to "January 2021".

This still assumes a vaccine and production of the vaccine will be finished in under a year.

A more realistic estimate seems to be 2022.

I don't understand why this is so hard, you can look at pandemic physics to know that Coronavirus is not going anywhere. And you can look at previous vaccine and medical production to understand how long it takes to make hundreds of millions or billions of vaccines.

Are most people willfully ignorant?

I think it's such a hard pill to swallow that it's easier for a lot of people to incrementally move the goal posts from a psychological perspective. Nobody wants to suggest 2022--lest it become real from the mere suggestion that this is the case. Everyone keeps talking about a vaccine, but I don't see a lot of people facing the realities of what will be required for the vaccine to succeed (70% of the population inoculated). Nobody wants to talk about the potential for a less than desired durability in the vaccine (i.e., the scenario where you might need to be vaccinated 4x per year). All of this just seems to be too soul crushing and horrific to make it part of the regular dialogue, and I understand why--the reality is brutal.

But increments cause bad decisions to be made.

Extend and pretend!

So many non-government institutions can see what's obvious!

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