What coronavirus will do to our offices and homes | Hacker News Reader

What coronavirus will do to our offices and homes

bbc.co.uk

43 pointskarimford68 comments

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I don't think this will happen. People are affected by Corona, yes, but that is because corona is a thing today.

Once corona goes away, only the paranoid will follow these guidelines.

Pretty much majority of the population will go back to normal way of life unaffected.

Climate crisis is irreversible and nobody gives a shit about it. How can we think that corona will change everything?

That being said, if it does change people then it os a very good thing

Climate is seen by most people as something that might kill future generations hundreds of years from now. Carona is seen as something that can kill us today. So there is a big difference in perceived urgency between the two. I think it would be naive to think that there won’t be some permanent changes to society as a result of this virus, the explosive rise in remote work being the biggest one. Companies have been forced into it, and now realize that it works very well and saves them a fortune. We will see far more remote-only teams, etc. We may also see a large reduction in live events going forward, or at least significant changes to them, which makes me sad.

However, I believe you are correct that many of the precautions taken in this article will not stand the test of time and would be viewed as paranoid. I don’t think thermal cameras and masks will be a thing forever, and I doubt voice-activated elevators are going to be in widespread use anytime soon.

This is already happening. Commercial real estate is rapidly losing value in many countries around the world.

Nearly half the retail rents were left unpaid in certain parts due to the Corona crisis: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/coronavirus-possible...

Commercial real estate has to make big changes to accommodate the social distancing norms - including removing seats in cinemas, broadening corridors etc. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/opinion-commercial-real-...

There are many indications that commercial real estate is heading towards a huge drop in value: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-06-...

Commercial real estate is getting emptied out: https://www.fastcompany.com/90528263/coronavirus-has-emptied...

This crisis is worldwide - including in places like India: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/as-...

And people are moving to the suburbs to escape the high rent in the cities.

People leaving the Bay Area because they can and still keep their jobs: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/making-it-in-the-bay/n...

Our office closed in March, when the virus first hit Australia, and people went into full WFH for a couple of months. The office reopened in July, with people allowed to choose whether or not they wanted to work in the office, or work from home.

Most people chose to continue working from home.

Our whole company was told they could work from home or office as much as they want. Almost everybody was doing 4 days a week in the office, which is pretty much the way it was before.

A very small amount have been choosing between 0-3. But I’m expecting most of them will give that up after they realize how much harder it is to got pay rises, promotions or interesting projects to work on when you’re the only one in the team who’s never at the office.

You're in the US though, right (based on your username)?

Over here in The Netherlands, for one, I imagine a ton of workers aren't back in the office because our government is actively encouraging people to work from home. From what I can tell it's not mandatory, and I've heard from a few friends that they're back in the office more, but all those who aren't 'strongly encouraged' don't seem to have any desire to be in the office for four days a week and instead only show up sporadically (for meetings and whatnots), if at all.

While as a WFH freelancer I can't tell for sure how things are working these days, I've noticed a few things:

1. whenever I go to my coworking space, it's still much quieter than usual.

2. in the morning I hear fewer people leave the apartment block, and fewer cars leaving the area.

3. official numbers of people using public transport (quite common here) are something like 40% down.

I don't think fear of diseases will drive it. I will be driven by profits. Companies have realized that you can have 1,000 people in what used to be a 200 person office by having them work from home most days. The savings are substantial.

Employees too will save. You can easily live 50-100 km away in a suburb if you only need to commute to work once a week or maybe less.

Of course, when employees don't have to pay dearly to live downtown NYC or centrally in London, companies will soon realize that they can pay them less as well.

You could argue that this could have happened without corona, but culture is hard to change. What many companies have seen now, is that virtually entire offices can work remotely, and that even sales people and mid level managers can do their jobs remotely.

Also, technology has improved. Bandwidth is far better today than 10 years ago. Companies use cloud solutions to a larger extent where before employees were hooked up to a local server room. The work station is now a laptop connecting via WiFi. 10 years ago, most used desktops with cat cables.

It has already started by companies continuing the lock-down by offering limitless or plentiful work from home days for employees. Then, they will fund proper chairs and desks at home, maybe part of the electricity bill. It's far cheaper than having to pay for your cubicle in NYC.

Growing companies will delay the plans of leasing more office space. They will introduce work-from-home policies in stead. Companies in financial trouble will get rid of the office more quickly than otherwise.

I thought that at least employees in their 20's would want to work in an office. After all, office life is a large part of your social life when you are a young professional. But in the companies I know of that did surveys in the last weeks of the lock-down on who wanted to return to the office first, even the young employees chose to continue to work from home. These were surveys involving hundreds or thousands of employees and more than 60 percent of the young employees wanted to work from home although the offices were in new class A buildings.

Yes, you will miss out of the part of your social life that offices did provide. But that will free up time for social life elsewhere. On your own terms. Yes, there are certainly things that are more efficient face-to-face. But how many hours did employees waste commuting to the office, talking to colleagues at the water cooler, attending meetings, going for lunch breaks etc.? Office life was never super efficient either.

Yes there are pros and cons for sure. It eventually depends on people

I live 1hr away from office but I either read books or watch TV shows. 1yr ago i had red 54 books in one year

Also in office i walk at least 5km inside office, going up & down 6 floors of stairs + tea break and what not

At home, I'm sitting in front of PC too depressed to step out

I dunno, one of the big reasons to have employees in an office (in tech and knowledge work in particular) is for serendipitous interactions to spawn new ideas. A couple million a month in rent can be worth that next $100m idea.

I HOPE this will happen, at least to me in my job. The current WFH has been an eye opener as far as quality of life goes. No more commuting, permanent access to great coffee, a fantastic computer screen, lovely chair and view (I actually see the Alps from my home desk), lunch with the family, get to sleep / do the dishes / walk in between meetings, no more dumb water cooler chat.

Same goes for the improvements of my private life: less time spend in bars & restaurants, more cooking and board games, less contact with random people but more quality contact with family and friends. Less public transportation but more cycling, less shopping but more structured buying.

The only thing that worries me with this new behaviour is the socialising of my kids (in their early 20's). Like, how do they meet new prospective partners? How will they gather experiences? How will they explore the / their world? But I guess that is a generation thing, my live developed in a different way than my parents', my children's will be theirs.

WFH depends on your work culture

If your company culture is like us (Indian) then managers expect you to sit 1hr extra before and after shift for useless KT sessions because "travel time is reduced so do KT"

Almost everyone I know is overworked and depressed. There is no work life difference because "you are at home anyways where do you have to go"

So meetings are set since morning till 9pm. 12+hrs daily takes a toll.

I can't wait to go back to office.

At least work time if fixed in office.

I'm confused. The entire reason why you are not paid for commute is because it's on your personal time. As such, how can people accept being forced to work the "commute hours", when it was your time in the first place?

Exactly

Their mentality is that "since you are saving commute time why not we schedule 100 calls to utilize that time"

Can't wait for office

I very much agree with you. I do think that WFH will remain more common after the current crisis.

Most comments here seem to focus entirely on WFH though and ignore everything else in the article like touchless everything, dividers on offices that get deployed during outbreaks, heavily reduced elevator occupancy reductions, more distance even during physical meetings. Maybe anti-viral coating of surfaces will remain common. But I only see the vast majority of things described happen if COVID is here to stay.

WFH might stay in countries except India. Here we have special SEZs and nobody is going to allow employees to work from home because of that.

This is an overly fantastic crystal-ball piece and I don't expect things will be as far changed as this article is trying to sell us.

It reminds me of those old AT&T "You Will" commercials, which did eventually come true but in a vastly different way than first envisioned (newspapers by fax? come on.)

Also, most people (baristas, truck drivers, all those invisible service people and laborers in between) don't have jobs that look like this. This completely dismisses their experiences.

Yeah, this is pretty ridiculous. I'm putting a reminder for 2025 to reread this piece to see if literally any of it came true.

Lots of educated professionals also work jobs that cannot be done at home. I think this BBC article is ridiculous. I can't do wetlab biology at home. And my university is busy firing people, not installing copper benchtops in the kitchenettes.

Ugh, I certainly hope not. In one sense, yes, covid has accelerated some things that were already in transition, like greater work from home. But why would we think this increased isolation, sanitization, and separation would be a good thing outside of a pandemic? There is no need for wide hallways, limiting people to 2 per elevator, copious hand sanitizer use, or touchless everything to avoid "grubby" buttons when we're not in a pandemic. Yes, germs are a risk, but there are also risks in thinking for some reason it is healthy to live in a sterile, and separated, environment.

I don't know, why would we continue to subject ourselves to useless TSA security theater rubdowns and millimeter wave scanners that can see your naked body under your clothes adding hours to the onboarding process when most experts agree it is ineffective and most logical beings understand that another 9/11 can never really happen again the way it did?

I suspect what will drive a lot of changes like these will be insurance. Companies will want pandemic insurance and insurance companies will not offer reasonable premiums without certain precautions in place because the cost of payouts is too high.

I thought what we’ve learned about TSA security theater is that another 9/11 could happen and what we’re doing wouldn’t prevent it.

That's the advertising. Human risk perception is very near-sighted. Over a decade ago is very blurry. Did that time even happen? Someone told me Seinfeld was funny then but I don't believe it.

Why are wage slaves doing demeaning work invading our privacy in long lines? Follow the money.

now would be the time to do it too, with less people riding planes to potentially fight back like flight 93.

The possibility of another 9/11 became non-viable about 10 minutes after a second plane hit the WTC. It's the reason Flight 915 didn't make it to Washington DC.

The passengers on 915 received the news of what was happening in NYC and the Pentagon and rushed the cockpit and the terrorists. You can't hold a plane hostage if the occupants know you are taking them on a suicide mission.

> when most experts agree it is ineffective

Can you please point to the source for this? I know it's a favorite to rail against TSA "security theater", but actually these days I don't find going through the security line to be much longer or more cumbersome than it was pre-911.

This is an exceptionally good point. My rebuttal is that it takes one institution to force the TSA theater on us but it would take thousands of organizations to make this article's predictions true at scale.

A counterpoint to my own is that it takes one person dying from something plastered on CNN to get every employer in America interested in signalizing a desire to protect hundreds of thousands who are actually not at risk.

So this outcome is, in that way, possible.

Basically, let CNN or Fox News drive and we'll live in that world.

Because its a jobs program.

Touchless everything sounds good to me, as something that's a very small lifestyle change if implemented properly [1] but should provide a consistent (if small) statistical benefit against disease. Similarly, making those things that must be touched out of materials with antimicrobial properties benefits everybody, with no particular special effort needed by any individual.

[1]: In this case, without the biometrics - there are other options with fewer privacy concerns.

Ah yes, like the geodesic domes erected over major cities that filter the toxic air, contaminated by the bioviruses released during the Great War. The mud-girls and mud-boys of the Sprawl fight over the scraps of obselete tech left behind by the chrome plated gods of New Eden; watching over the condemned above the gravity well.

Are start times for once-a-week work staggered in the Sprawl, too? I've never been there. I'm told the people there are happy and cared for!

What is this a reference to? “Chrome-plated gods” reminds me of Caves of Qud, but the other bits are unfamiliar.

A little of every cyberpunk novel, I suppose.

I don't think social distancing will be big in 2025, just as it wasn't in 1923, the same distance away from 1918.

I really hope we don't see a late 20th century style flee of cities either. The problems with that from last time are well documented.

But how many of those problems stemmed from the external requirement that those fleeing would have to commute back in 5 days per week, and for the most part all on the same 9-5 schedule? There's a version of moving away from dense urban cores that still accommodates community, transportation, public space, local necessities, commerce and small businesses, etc.

Many of those issues had nothing to do with how crappy commuting is for affluent people (a significant problem) but what happens to the people without the means to escape.

Local tax base diminishes, concentration of low incomes leads to a sort of ghettoization, etc.

Personally I think density and varied income levels within that are good for a number of reasons.

Reading this article one thing shocked me: Do a lot of homes not have double glazing in the UK? I thought it was a standard, because it's so much more efficient at keeping cool/warmth inside/outside (depending on season)

Modern homes are built with it, but we have a lot of old houses here too.

I used to live in the UK 10 years ago and back then it seemed like double glazing was some sort of luxury while where I moved from it was the standard and people were converting old houses to it as well. Where I live now people use triple glazed windows...

In London huge number of (old) houses are listed as protected, you can't just change your windows like that.

I would say it would be unusual not to have double glazing these days. It has been a thing for decades and there are grants available to make your property more energy efficient.

That said there are a lot of a) old buildings that are protected and so can't have the windows replaced easily/in an economically viable way (e.g. each window needing to be hand-crafted in wood to non-standard sizes to look identical bto what was there before), b) a lot of just properties nrented out to single people who rent a single room etc and the landlord simply doesn't care/bother, c) houses that were lived in by someone for the last 30/40/50 years where basically no maintenance or decoration had been done - they've died and someone else had moved in.

My house in Surrey and several others around me were built in the Edwardian era 1900-1910 and they are all single glazed. The windows are made of timber with very attractive moulding around it. Most double glazed windows are made of PVC (plastics) and they look very plain. Double glazed timbers windows are extremely expensive.

All the previous homes I lived in had mould fungus growth on walls and behind wall papers. The double glazing ensured air-tight house but lack of air circulation. Single glazed windows seem to be really good at preventing mould growth, of course at the extra cost of heating bills.

So I’ve been wondering about this. In the states at least the trend in home design recently seems to have been toward big open floor plans with a couple of large spaces, a kitchen, and bedrooms.

We have no such concept as “breakout” rooms at home for studying or work, or other things that might demand privacy or focus. I certainly don’t want to go back to the “old” 70’s style home with a bunch of similarly sized partitioned rooms, but I’d like to have some small “focus” spaces or something more cleverly named, similar in concept to the breakout rooms that run along the edge off most shared professional office spaces.

Some homes have a library or home office, but I’ve yet to see a place that has two offices of equal size. Some people have converted a spare bedroom into an office - but - what if you actually need the bedroom, or in our case, what if you need two offices?

I’m sort of waiting for that to become a thing. It’d be pretty sweet.

“One day, the virus will subside. It could be eradicated. But even then, life will not simply return to the way it was before Covid-19. Spurred on by the coronavirus crisis, architects have been rethinking the buildings we inhabit.“

I've certainly made the jump to a fully-thought-out home office[0], but masks are conspicuously absent from this article - facial recognition? Good luck when I continue wearing my nice face covering in public long after this specific virus is under control.

Things like the virus-killing HVAC system are interesting. Makes you consider our current buildings from a future perspective, like in what ways they'll think we're hilariously backwards, hygiene-wise.

[0] https://ahelwer.ca/post/2020-08-09-home-ergonomics/

There are already quite a few biometric detection options in production out there that can ID you just fine with a mask on. Just your eyes and forehead are probably enough for a lot of facial recognition and then there is gait detection that can identify you by how you walk or even heart beat rythmn detection that I believe requires a laser sensor of some type.

Realistically, the changes will be the ones that have a minimum cost to implement: downsizing offices, working from home, movement out of expensive cities and back into suburbs, and offices retrofitted with cheap solutions like hand sanitizer dispensers, plexiglass dividers, and spaced out desks. Things that require a huge investment like copper surfaces, plant dividers, fewer people per square meter, simply won't be worth it when the alternative is not to invest in office space at all.

> It also reduces the humidity to help prevent germs multiplying

Too low humidity is also bad: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0266/9493/files/Humidity-H...

The antimicrobial obsession on full view here is recognized as being the cause of maladaptive immune development

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/health/immune-system-alle...

This is honestly the most ridiculous article/amazing visual journalism possible.

Bear with me here....This article assumes that we either a) have no path around COVID-19 via a vaccine and/or b) we spend five years failing to follow the data on infection morbidity risk as high for those with established co-morbitities or old age and/or c) that even if we succeed at a and/or b that future pathogens are detected by body temp or mitigated by hand washing.

And even if I'm completely wrong about all of the above, this article relies on zero empirical data to predict 2025.

This is a sign of our media times. It's a movie script, not journalism. And each click and scroll reinforces to the creators that they should create more of this empirically hollow print.

Hmm.

I think as soon as we get a vaccine, or even just a test that will tell you if you will end up in ICU or not, 95% of people will head back to the office.

Even among the people who at first found WFH a huge productivity gain, I've noticed a recent trend of people fatiguing of it. The initial boon to concentration (assuming you have a quiet home which not everyone does) and not having to commute etc was great, but it seems like for a lot of people it is starting to wear a bit thin now.

Pre-lockdown I used to work from home quite frequently and would happily put up with video calls, but I am growing to hate WFH now. Video meetings are increasingly grating due to their latency and people's patchy wifi. Ad-hoc informal collaboration/chats are down to zero - everything now has to be formally scheduled and arranged vs when you'd just bump into someone in the corridor/getting coffee etc. Getting a feel for what the team is working on is hard, even with regular stand-ups etc there is no "overhearing" people talking about stuff around you.

Personally I do not have the space for a dedicated office set up where I live - I have a desk in the corner of my living room which is the same room that the rest of my family use while I am trying to work. I do not like the idea that I will have that there forever now - if my job wants me to work from my house forever, they can increase my salary 200% so I can stand a chance of buying somewhere in/around London with space for an office.

As soon as we have a vaccine, or a test to know if I will end up in ICU vs being asymptomatic, or there is just some pill you can take if you test positive that means you get a bad fever and not a near-death coma etc, I will be right back there in the office a usual no questions asked.

The article asserts that a bunch of things will change in the future, but it doesn't say why. We'll live in more expensive houses, further from work, renovate all of our offices and homes, and change all of our daily and weekly routines, because of a virus that everyone is vaccinated against?

No, because because of the next virus.

In what, 100 years? How many global pandemics have we had?

Regulations usually kick in shortly to mitigate crisis like this happening, just like the 2008 financial crisis regulation. Without regulation no economy in the world can sustain another similar hit within the next decade.

That's true. There is always a tendency to fight the last war, especially when it comes to bureaucrats. That said, of all of the things that could really knock us out, I'd still put viruses among the smaller threats.

Societies that are able to accurately assess risk and their ability and cost/benefit to mitigate it will tend to outperform societies that don't.

Well, we seem to averaging on one every 20 years or so.

Spanish Flu, 1918-1920 Asian Flu, 1957–58 Cholera pandemic, 1961–1975 Hong Kong Flu, 1968-1969 H1N1, 2009-2010, Covid-91, 2019-????

More fear porn from the Beeb. Please don’t post this noise on HN.

> Laila makes a coffee in the kitchen area

Seriously? You're worried about viruses and yet you're still gonna allow the "coffee petri dish," where hundreds of grubby dirty hands fondle communal cups, bowls, coffee machine buttons, creamer, sugar, stirrers? To say nothing of the giant "catered lunch" buffets with no sneeze guards.

> The air conditioning system uses UV light to kill pathogens. It also reduces the humidity to help prevent germs multiplying, responding to a stream of data from sensors fixed around the building, and wearable sensors used by staff.

Yet it's still got 50-year-old unmaintained fiberglass insulation inside the ducts, which, because the overlayment breaks down over time, streams tiny particles of glass throughout the office to be inhaled. (this has probably been happening in your office for some time if it's an older building)

> The staff got fed up with plastic everywhere a couple of years ago. They said it made the office feel like a hospital. Laila prefers the plants.

The plants are plastic now. Too many finicky potential problems like mold/mildew, they're hard to clean, not maintenance-free.

> It's face-to-face with colleagues - but all at a safe distance.

We don't even practice social distancing now. It's not gonna happen at work with people who feel comfortable around each other. And honestly, what's the point indoors? You cough and the overhead A/C pushes microscopic water particles way farther than 6 feet.

> It's 16:00 and time to go home. Laila moved to the suburbs with a friend after the lockdown in 2020. It's a longer commute, but she doesn't mind as it's only once a week.

There a lot of roommates in the suburbs? Most middle-class young people working in offices like this will still need several roommates to afford rent, what with cost of living constantly increasing but pay not adjusting as much (news flash: covid-19 has not fixed income inequality). The suburbs aren't actually much cheaper in most parts, because people who work in cities live in them. People will continue to live in cities because there's still more access to everything in them.

> she knew she would need a home office [..] There's a new standing desk, a properly adjustable office chair and storage for documents

I work from home now and I don't need a home office. All you need is a table and a chair in a corner of a room. With kids, I get it, but otherwise, what's all that extra space going toward? Every "document" I own fits in a single box. If anything, apartments will just become "Tokyo-ified".

> She never realised, before, how important it was to have good lighting, so she had spotlights installed in the ceiling and bought a proper desk lamp.

Ok, now you're jumping the shark. Nobody's installing track lighting just to do computer work. One good desk lamp is all you need.

> She's near a big road and she needs to concentrate hard when she's working - sound-proofing is an issue she hadn't anticipated.

Headphones worked for the office, they work at home too.

I presume installing track lighting is for video calls. I have mounted video lights on my office wall for that purpose.

I've been working at the same desk I had set up for my personal computer since quarantine started and it's mentally a disaster when the difference between personal time and work time involves zero physical movement (not to mention it's harder to have all of the personal equipment I want + work equipment I need to fit all on one desk and I haven't exactly set up my apartment in a way that really fits two desks in here without giving up on some other hobbies).

One reason (among many) why I'd be very resistant to permanently working remotely is that nobody is going to be paying me extra to move into a 2br apartment so I can have a home office, despite the fact that all the employers would hypothetically be saving a killing on their real estate.

At risk of overselecting on the coffee thing, that really ties the ribbon on my judgment that this is a wish fulfillment fantasy. We’re going to radically transform all business norms to fight disease risk - except for the parts I like, which will of course remain un-transformed.

isn't the insulation outside the ducts?

Amazingly, no. Most commercial offices have fiberglass inside the ducts because it saves them more money. But the sealant breaks down over time and air turbulence makes the fiberglass fly. Larger particles cause symptoms like an allergic reaction, smaller particles can cause asbestosis if they are found in large numbers, though estimates so far indicate this is unusual. But it still seems stupid that we're pumping fiberglass throughout our offices. (To say nothing of mold/mildew if the fiberglass gets wet...)

I did not know that and that's quite a scary thought.

This seems insanely over engineered, we are in the midst of the pandemic and people are already acting like it’s over. I think things start going back to normal the second corona runs it’s course or a vaccine appears.

I live in the Bay Area and was initially planning on joining the droves of people going fully remote. On second thought I am going to stay, I would rather have the bargaining chip of being one of the remaining local devs instead of one of the growing army of fully remote programmers.

With all due respect, what kind of bargaining chip is that gonna be if U.S. dev work starts shifting to remote as the norm? Your higher cost of living in the Bay Area would count against you.

Many of the bigger companies are continuing to expand their office footprint even though they have nobody in offices right now, and it’s very much conventional wisdom among the people signing checks that in-person collaboration makes a big difference. More companies are certainly getting more friendly to it, but a near future where remote work is the default seems very implausible.

I don't think remote will be the norm in 5ish years, I could be totally wrong, but I think in person work offers things that remote cannot, and things will go back to the way they were in a few years. In that case companies looking for in person will be pulling from a smaller pool of engineers who stayed in the bay area during this time of exodus, hence more bargaining power.

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