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I feel like most surveys on this topic are not going to be a reflection of reality. People are tired of being at home for a variety of reasons, including child-care difficulties and their inability to do much/any socializing outside the home, plus added COVID-related friction when doing normal chores like grocery trips.

These stress points make people associate these unrelated negative things with "working from home", which, in normal times, need not be quite the negative experience. Sure, there are valid reasons to prefer working in an office: lack of a workspace at home, desire for professional social interaction, desire to separate work life and home life, etc. But I think a lot of people who are so negative about working from home right now would be more positive about it if the COVID-related difficulties were removed.

I'd like to see this survey repeated, say, a year after things go back to normal (or as normal as they're going to get).

This is actually a lot of Bloom’s point in all of this: this isn’t a good test of WFH, yet many people are already quite pleased.

See my other comment linking to the original survey description and results (this was done in May, and I think even a redo now would be illustrative).

Sample of one.

I’ve been working remotely at my current job for a little bit shy of two years. The difference before and since lockdown is crazy: the company definitely got more remote friendly, but the external context weighs heavily.

So to sum up:

Situation A: I work remotely and things are fine, even though the company isn’t the best at remote (but working in it)

VS, later

Situation B: I work remotely, remote things are way better, yet COVID context creates wildly underestimated pressure pervasively

Take what you want out of this but I made up my mind.

Agree. Everything is terrible now, but I’m optimistic it will lead to more remote-friendly policies going forward. I’m fairly confident my team would function best with everyone in the office two days per week and individual choices about where to work the rest of the time.

Some context: I am the CTO/co-founder of a company which has been remote-first since the beginning (one of our cultural values is "remote first") and has taken on the notoriously difficult hybrid approach of some folks working distributed and some on-site (in San Francisco). We've done this because our video messaging tool actually powers 100's of 1000's of remote teams around the world, and we knew we had to have structure and processes that resembled remote work if we were going to have deep empathy for the power users in our user base.

In practice, this has typically netted out to ~40-60% of our work force being on-site or distributed/remote (e.g. at times 40% on-site/60% remote or 60% on-site and 40% remote).

Some important things we've noticed:

1. Of the people who work on-site, many choose to work from home a couple days every week because of the cut down on commute, because they need to go heads down without any distractions whatsoever, or because they need to take an easier day and mix in errands. All of these points are totally legitimate, and I've found the productivity of our team is actually super high compared to full on-site teams.

2. When we absorbed any portion of our team, our communication processes ended up having to be remote-first, or we would see attrition/morale drop in the remote team members. This seems so obvious in retrospect, but I don't think a lot of the companies who will choose to do hybrid truly realize this.

3. People who have been working remote before the pandemic hit have universally said remote absolutely sucks given the current situation and they can't wait for things to return to normal. The normal they are talking about is still working remote.

I'm not dropping in this comment to beat the drum of "remote solves all problems", but I can confidently say remote is here to stay (or at least some form of it) in most technology companies. In practice, this means those companies will need to set up their processes to be remote-first or they will see attrition of some of their top talent.

The chart showing worker's preferences seems awkward to me. At first it looks like "wow, people in the US really like working from home 4+ days a week." And then you wonder did they separate out "never" and "rarely"? The cynic in me wonders if lumping them together would have undermined the thesis of the article too much as it would have been a large plurality of all answers.

Or to put it another way, 60%+ of US people want to work remote 2 days or less per week.

That response lines up with my personal experience. While I like working from home occasionally, I don't want to work somewhere where I don't have a desk available 5 days a week.

They did separate out never and rarely in the original research survey [1].

Edit: The question was "In 2021+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work days at home?“ (surveying "2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25").

The results seem to be:

- 20% Never

- 19% Rarely

- 8.2% 1 day

- 11.1% 2 days

- 11.7% 3 days

- 5.4% 4 days

- 24.2% 5 days

from the diagram [2].

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working...

[2] https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/page-w...

The list of companies announcing permanent remote work policy changes grows by the week. The hope for a quick return to normal continues to fade into 2021. On-site will certainly make a big comeback at some point and the Economist will no doubt write about it breathlessly. But things have changed and the future is not going to look like the past. The economy will redistribute prices and labor and there will eventually be a new normal. I agree with the article that we will eventually be better for it, but in the short term it will hurt many.

This "return to normal" narrative is starting to make less and less sense to me. It presupposes that there is this one special, immutable state called Normal defined as "exactly as life was right before the pandemic", and that we have to somehow get back to precisely that state.

It's looking more and more like this deadly virus is going to be part of our lives for months or years to come, if not decades. So, instead of ignoring reality and trying in vain to get back to this idealized "ISO standard normal," maybe we are going to have to change our definition of normal. We're going to have to normalize things like WFH, wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding large indoor gatherings, instead of treating them as temporary measures. The world changes, and our concept of normal will necessarily change along with it.

I read it as returning to that feeling of normality. I won't think it'll go back to as it was before but when we as a society have high confidence in generally what we expect the near/medium term future to look likw, then it's a the new normal.

I'm an optimist -- I think with the arrival of multiple vaccines of varying efficacies, potentially needing to be "boosted" or recalibrated at varying frequencies, coupled with cheap/fast/accurate tests and a supply chain that can keep up, I'm confident we can get to a state which resembled the previous in at least a few important ways: social interaction is sufficiently derisked that social gatherings can resume, travel will pick up again, large gathering places like schools can go back to in-person if not at 100% capacity, then maybe at 80-90%. WFH will likely persist.

I personally miss going to conferences.

It won't be the same (no period is ever exactly the same as some period in the past), but it will have some of the same qualities as the world in 2019. That's my hope.

> It's looking more and more like this deadly virus is going to be part of our lives for months or years to come, if not decades

I don't understand this attitude. No, we will go back to normal. This cannot continue forever. We cannot live the rest of our lives in fear. This is not how we evolved and I'm honestly sick of it.

There is growing evidence that there is immunity out there beyond antibodies; including memory T-cells. It's likely we'll be fine long before a vaccine is produced, through a combination of herd immunity and just better therapeutics (there are some big studies on inhaled steroids right now that are promising).

Mississippi, Florida and other states are starting to go back to normal without any increase in fatalities (and don't go on about cases, because there is no distinction between people who test positive and people who test positive because they've actually been sick). Fatalities are going down across the board. Exponential growth does not go on forever. It ends.

Things should have been back to normal months ago. All these lockdowns have just delayed the inevitable. When this is over and we can prune all the data, I expect to see the same fatality rates between countries that did and didn't lock down, excluding places like NYC, northern Italy, Michigan and other places where we put all the elderly people together.

In 2030, we'll look back at this as a time of overreaction and mass hysteria.

Agreed, we are living through a mass hysteria event. The shared delusion is that through moral acts one can somehow avoid exposure to an endemic human coronavirus.

> moral acts

You spelled "wear a mask and avoid crowds" wrong.

> I don't understand this attitude. No, we will go back to normal. This cannot continue forever. We cannot live the rest of our lives in fear. This is not how we evolved and I'm honestly sick of it.

It's not about living in fear, it's about not catching the virus. The facts are that COVID-19 is still out there actively infecting people, deaths are still climbing at more or less a steady rate, and it doesn't really care about how you or anyone else feels about it. Many a school has opened under the rationale of "we can't just hide from it forever", only to go into shutdown again because of the inevitable outbreak that occurs when a bunch of kids are packed like sardines into a hallway or classroom environment.

> Mississippi, Florida and other states are starting to go back to normal without any increase in fatalities (and don't go on about cases, because there is no distinction between people who test positive and people who test positive because they've actually been sick). Fatalities are going down across the board. Exponential growth does not go on forever. It ends.

Just because COVID-19 isn't immediately fatal doesn't make it harmless. What are the rates of reinfection, and how does that impact a patient? What are the chronic effects of being infected, if any? You may have a cavalier attitude about the virus's effects, but plenty others (including the elderly, infants, the immunocompromised, etc.) do not, and the virus doesn't discriminate between who cares about it and who doesn't. It is far better to be overly cautious than not cautious enough in such a case, even if it comes at the expense of inconvenience.

It remains to be seen whether I'm right or djsumdog is right, but one thing is for sure: Nature doesn't care what we feel or think. The virus is not going to go away just because humanity is bored of it, or unhappy with it, or because we just have this desire to go back to some nostalgic definition of normal. Nature doesn't respond to a macho "I'm not afraid" attitude.

We see this again and again with the re-openings (and then the inevitable follow-up re-closings). When the re-openings happen based on clear, measurable criteria being met, they have been more successful, but still not 100% successful. When they are based on this vague feeling of "well, we have to get back to normal some time so why not now?" then hospitalizations go up, deaths go up, and everyone goes "surprised pikachu" and businesses have to close again. When we look back, the proof will be in the pudding, and I believe we will find that the outbreak spikes are strongly correlated with repeated efforts to re-open too soon.

Also, who's getting infected? I don't recall exactly where I read it (some NY Times article, probably), but a lot of the summer cases have been in younger, less vulnerable populations that don't tend to die from it. However, there are signs that cases in elderly populations are now increasing, which, if true, foreshadows a future increase in deaths.

The facts are that COVID-19 is still out there actively infecting people

As are many other viruses.

Many a school has opened under the rationale of "we can't just hide from it forever", only to go into shutdown again because of the inevitable outbreak that occurs when a bunch of kids are packed like sardines into a hallway or classroom environment.

It's now well established that schools are not significant drivers of infections. Which is actually rather surprising; it's a reasonable hypothesis that lots of kids would get infected and then pass it to vulnerable family members. But the results from schools around the world show that that's not happening to any significant degree.

It is far better to be overly cautious than not cautious enough in such a case, even if it comes at the expense of inconvenience.

You can't make that general statement without quantifying the harms on both sides. Denying education and socialization to children, throwing millions of people out of work, and telling people they can't visit family or friends for an indefinite duration goes well beyond "inconvenience".

>In 2030, we'll look back at this as a time for overreaction and mass hysteria

Well no actually. We'll look back on this as a time of mass stupidity, selfishness, racist/classist politics.

Had Trump just followed the Bush/Cheney pandemic plan, and listened to the CDC, before they were all threatened with termination. We could have easily got control of this back in January, instead we decided that the virus was a hoax, or just like the flu, or was easily handled, etc. So we are now stuck in this yo-yo pattern.

We semi lock down, everyone gets tired of wearing masks and limiting contact the state opens up; the cases flare up, the hospitals start to fill and the state semi-lock down again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

20% of the cases are severe, and 5% are critical, if we follow your plan and just open things up, hospitals quickly get overwhelmed. Mississippi has 10,000 hospital beds for 3 Million citizens, in July when things were good Mississippi almost ran out of ICU beds, and were quickly running out of beds (1).

I would like to see your plan for developing herd immunity quickly, which for COVID is close 80% infected and hopefully immune. When you talk abut herd immunity I'm assuming you want it to happen quickly because we are on a slow path to herd immunity. The only way to herd immunity quickly would be to remove all restrictions, no masks, no social distancing, no restriction of gathering size, back to normal.

For Mississippi, only 10K hospital beds for 3 Million people. For herd immunity, 2.4 Million people will get infected, 480,000 will require hospitalization. With all restriction removed we should see a similar pattern of infections like we do with the flu. So the majority of cases will happen in Dec, Jan, the peak in Feb, and Mar, the breakdown is about Dec (20%), Jan(20%), Feb(40%), Mar(20%) The average COVID hospital stay is 3 weeks(2), for young people it's actually longer than for old people.

In December we'll see 96,000 cases needing hospitalization, give or take, 10X the number of beds, and those cases will be there for 3/4 of the month which means for the rest of the herd immunity event about 400,000 people won't be hospitalized. What do you think happens to the death rate when people need to be in the hospital for 3 weeks don't go to the hospital? Yeah, they die. What do you think happens to households that have COVID patients who should be in the hospital but can't go to the hospital.

Once hospitals get overwhelmed the death rate will skyrocket, about 13% of Mississippi's population will die to achieve quick herd immunity, kind of looks like the Spanish flu numbers doesn't it? Frankly we'd be better off to not admit anyone who has COVID, at lease the hospitals would still be able to function for normal issues.

Let's not forget about the flu, because that will be raging at the same time, I bet getting the flu and COVID at the same will be really bad, so how many people who get mild flu and mild COVID will require hospitalization, but it won't really matter because there won't be any room anyway.

Now lets imagine this event playing out all across the country, that will be mass hysteria.

(1)https://www.modernhealthcare.com/hospitals/mississippis-five...

(2)https://www.kpcnews.com/covid-19/article_8ab408ad-8fb0-5f74-...

>In 2030, we'll look back at this as a time for overreaction and mass hysteria

Well no actually. We'll look back on this as a time of mass stupidity, selfishness, racist/classist politics.

Had Trump just followed the Bush/Cheney pandemic plan, and listened to the CDC, before they were all threatened with termination. We could have easily got control of this back in January, instead we decided that the virus was a hoax, or just like the flu, or was easily handled, etc. So we are now stuck in this yo-yo pattern.

We semi lock down, everyone gets tired of wearing masks and limiting contact the state opens up; the cases flare up, the hospitals start to fill and the state semi-lock down again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

15% of the cases are severe, and 5% are critical, 20% requiring hospitalization, if we follow your plan and just open things up, hospitals quickly get overwhelmed. Mississippi has 10,000 hospital beds for 3 Million citizens, in July when things were good Mississippi almost ran out of ICU beds, and were quickly running out of beds (1).

I would like to see your plan for developing herd immunity quickly, which for COVID is close 80% infected and hopefully immune. When you talk abut herd immunity I'm assuming you want it to happen quickly because we are on a slow path to herd immunity. The only way to herd immunity quickly would be to remove all restrictions, no masks, no social distancing, no restriction of gathering size, back to normal.

For Mississippi, only 10K hospital beds for 3 Million people. For herd immunity, 2.4 Million people will get infected, 480,000 will require hospitalization. With all restriction removed we should see a similar pattern of infections like we do with the flu. So the majority of cases will happen in Dec, Jan, the peak in Feb, and Mar, the breakdown is about Dec (20%), Jan(20%), Feb(40%), Mar(20%) The average COVID hospital stay is 3 weeks(2), for young people it's actually longer than for old people.

In December we'll see 96,000 cases needing hospitalization, give or take, 10X the number of beds, and those cases will be there for 3/4 of the month which means for the rest of the herd immunity event about 400,000 people won't be hospitalized. What do you think happens to the death rate when people need to be in the hospital for 3 weeks don't go to the hospital? Yeah, they die. What do you think happens to households that have COVID patients who should be in the hospital but can't go to the hospital.

Once hospitals get overwhelmed the death rate will skyrocket, about 13% of Mississippi's population will die to achieve quick herd immunity, kind of looks like the Spanish flu numbers doesn't it? Frankly we'd be better off to not admit anyone who has COVID, at lease the hospitals would still be able to function for normal issues.

Let's not forget about the flu, because that will be raging at the same time, I bet getting the flu and COVID at the same will be really bad, so how many people who get mild flu and mild COVID will require hospitalization, but it won't really matter because there won't be any room anyway.

Now lets imagine this event playing out all across the country, that will be mass hysteria.

(1)https://www.modernhealthcare.com/hospitals/mississippis-five...

(2)https://www.kpcnews.com/covid-19/article_8ab408ad-8fb0-5f74-...

>this deadly virus

the deadly virus with the extremely high survival rate?

>maybe we are going to have to change our definition of normal

no we won't. things returned to normal after much more serious pandemics. people are already realizing the risks of this virus were oversold and starting to move on.

> extremely high survival rate

COVID-19 is (so far) about 10x-20x deadlier than the common flu which we have vaccines for and approaching about half of the total death toll of the 1918 flu which is considered the deadliest in modern history.

What is your basis for "extremely high survival rate"?

I guess people see ~2% death rate and assume that's low?

> approaching about half of the total death toll of the 1918 flu

Approaching half of 17-50 million dead?

"We" is the United States here, right?

> In the U.S., about 28% of the population of 105 million became infected, and 500,000 to 850,000 died (0.48 to 0.81 percent of the population).[129][130][131]

We're pretty close to half of 500k.

Growth mindset.

covid has killed 25 million people?

I don't think people were ever arguing that the virus is particularly deadly. Like ~2% death rate is really really high for a flu but it's not the black plague or anything. If you're a young-ish healthy adult with a normal immune system then (statistically speaking) quarantine likely didn't benefit you at all.

The thing that makes COVID novel is that it's extremely contagious. Your part in quarantining is not spreading it to the more vulnerable/unlucky people in your life. Because a 2% death rate in a country of 300 million people is still 6 million dead in an entirely preventable way.

our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself, and the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met.

where is your 2% number coming from? CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio as: 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

> our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself

That can happen from failure or from success. The far more important comparison is response vs. what the virus would have done without that response.

> the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met

Criteria like what? The only one I've seen is trying to get the rate of spread down and we really haven't managed that.

> our response to the virus has caused more harm to more people than the virus itself,

That’s not a bad thing. A bad thing would be if our response caused more harm that the additional harm the virus would have caused but for the response, but that it caused more than it allowed the virus to cause is not a problem.

> and the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met.

No, they haven't. It's true that both the restrictions in place in some jurisdictions and the criteria for step down have been revised based on better understanding of the virus and associated activity-related risks, but that's not the same thing (and has resulted in loosening of some restrictions directly and easing of some criteria, as well as tightening other a restrictions and criteria.) But they haven't moved in response to meeting preexisting criteria.

You think we should just ignore new information ?

It's not 2%. The WHO currently pegs IFR at 0.5-1%, and that's heavily tilted towards known risk groups, particularly the elderly.

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...

1.5-3 Million still feels like a lot, regardless of if it's my parents and their friends or if it is me or my friends.

It is amazing to me that anyone takes the "permanent" thing seriously. It's as permanent as the current management regime. If they ever decide to change it, it will no longer be "permanent." Statements without penalties have effectively no stickiness.

100% of corporate policies should be viewed as ending with an implicit "for now."

https://web.archive.org/web/20201012172005if_/https://www.ec...

For some reason this page does not load for me in Safari on iOS. Safari says: “A problem repeatedly occurred on” and the URL of the web archive page.

https://outline.com/DgaZfM

I am on the road to developing a nervous tick around people in my house trying to talk to me while I'm sharing my screen in a meeting. The mute button goes away from the screen, and the touch bar, and I just freeze up trying to recall where to find it.

Is there a handy solution for this or am I just screwed?

Get a microphone with a physical mute button, or see if you can configure “push to talk”.

Yeah, I love the physical mute button on my mike.

https://mizage.com/shush/

Alt+A in Zoom will mute it, I think it works if you aren’t in focus (although I can’t remember).

I recently learned that if you mute yourself in Zoom, the space bar acts as a push-to-talk button.

You're hosed if you're switching focus away from Zoom (i.e. presenting). The keyboard shortcuts (Alt-A or holding-space-to-unmute) only work when Zoom is in focus

I have 2 monitors, and drag the zoom controls to the non-presenting screen

Getting a headset with a physical mic is probably your best bet

Side note: noise-cancelling headphones are way more useful than you'd think. I delayed for 5 months before buying them, and regret every minute I didn't do it earlier. Doesn't help with the mic, but I didn't realize how much extraneous household noises contributed to my malaise.

Headphones don't help with the particular task of controlling the mute button, but I can say the microphone of my noise cancelling Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones is significantly better than the laptop or camera microphone.

There are mic-end noise-canceling headsets too. I have a Jabra Evolve 40 UC which cancels out fan noise, street noise, etc. (it doesn't have noise-cancellation on the headphone end though -- the more expensive Evolve 75 does but costs $240)

https://www.amazon.com/Jabra-Evolve-Stereo-Professional-Comm...

For other mic-end noise cancellation, you could pay for krisp.ai, or if you have NVIDIA board, there's the free RTX voice virtual mic. Zoom to has background noise suppression you can turn on, and MS Teams will have NN-based noise cancellation in Q4.

Lots of options.

While this pandemic will definitely create global shifts and city shifts, it's a bit unfair to look at the losses of service sector jobs and call them permanent.

I'm sure there will be permanent job losses but the majority of major cities are no where close to being 100% reopened, and the public even in open cities hasn't returned to normal life.

If anything what the article highlights is that it is easier to shift your job if you were spending all day on a computer to remote work, and a service level job can't do that.

The V-shaped recovery stopped for service level work and basically shows to watch extent major cities are still "closed".

https://archive.md/H6XVX

https://outline.com/DgaZfM

Ah, yes, the excellent track-record of predicting the long-term effects of unexpected shocks for which there is little data in recent decades.

I'm sure there are going to be some long-term effects. I don't know what they will be. Neither does the Economist.

I wonder how Covid will affect labor mobility for white-collar jobs. Driving past the company logo each morning and being surrounded by corporate imagery all day must have some kind of effect.

https://archive.is/H6XVX

This article is paywalled, which makes it difficult to read more than a few paragraphs.

Very annoying, but there is a relatively quick workaround for those that don't know: On Chrome, Inspect the page and go to settings, then click 'Disable JavaScript'. Reload with Inspect open and you should be able to bypass most paywalls.

Does this trick work on mobile safari where you can disable JS?

Edit - It does! Go to Settings > Safari > Advanced > JavaScript, and turn the toggle to “off”.

I’m sure lots of things you are used to no longer work when you disable JS. I’d recommend making a shortcut!

I'm reading it on Materialistic HN app

The browser inside the app has JavaScript disabled

Why on Chrome? Works identically in Palemoon — and so I’d presume in Firefox.

https://archive.md/H6XVX

https://outline.com/DgaZfM

Zoom and Gloom