Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).
Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts your team had while you explored the options available? It feels like such a good move IMHO, I'm very interested in learning how you got there.
Do you or the EIU intend to make the study results more broadly available? (There was a good discussion of Nick Bloom’s recent surveys yesterday, and this would be a nice addition to that body of work)
Edit: it was in the blog post... https://lostfocus.eiu.com/
Edit 2: the survey writeup is great (and I’ve submitted it separately if people want to discuss that; Dropbox itself moving to remote allowed w/ studios is its own discussion)
REI I believe is moving to a model, after having just sold their massive new HQ to Facebook, where they will establish a handful of micro-offices around the country where their now distributed team can meet.
Plenty of kinks to work out I’m sure, but feels like the future of work to me.
Give 'screen control sharing' (for lack of better name?) software a try, two variants I've used are USE Together and Tuple. Being able to have two sets of input devices for the same screen is actually fantastic for collaboration - the pair-programming experience is arguably better than being there in person.
Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".
As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out.
I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
I'm sure I could have cultivated those relationships over the course of working there much longer but I don't think there would be any virtual substitute for that one soccer game.
1. They prefer a predictable schedule. 2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues) 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. 4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.
As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.
The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.
We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
Since you say politics reasons wholly because of this reason, it’s not like Slack is not available if you are not fully remote.
The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.
This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.
I’ve seen this work with unruly customers, too.
MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:
- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)
- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)
MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.
That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.
It's not for everyone, don't act like WFH is some sort of amazing thing that only people in bad situations or who are incompetent dislike.
1. is straight up incorrect anyway, my schedule has gotten more consistent since working from home. It's entirely based on your own ability to start and stop your workday.
Wanting to work somewhere other than your home does not mean you don't like being at home, nor that you have family or workspace issues. I would assume that some of us have a newfound appreciation for the energy and architecture of the modern cities and offices. I love my home but it's just not the same kind of space.
Even in tech, not everyone is an introvert.
Being micromanaged remotely isn't much fun either. Like having a stalker. I'd get voice calls within minutes of a Skype status update. "Ah, no, everything's ok. Just grabbing lunch. Thanks for checking."
I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something.
At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have.
It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)
Neumann committing fraud, poor cash management, and self-dealing conflicts of interest are what killed WeWork. Not the coworking space concept.
I could definitely understand the business model (it's cloud computing for real-estate!) and especially cool for remote/business travelers since from what I understand it was rather easy for a WeWork user to use any of their facilities.
Same way a WeWork is more expensive than renting your own real estate but it's probably simpler than getting into a long term lease. Plus if your startup has to scale up WeWork can accommodate, unlike your typical office rental.
WeWork makes more money from an oversubscription model, and thus could also make money from desks being unused. (Have 10 desks, rent out "13", and hope that all 13 people don't need desks at the same time).
Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company
I liked deploying Sun Rays back in the day too.
Who plugs it in? How hard is it to plug in a USB cable to your laptop that you need to ask who’s doing it?
It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.
Well, this makes sense, since IBM is effectively a consulting firm now. This is how all consulting firms operate -- there are tons of these all over the place in DC.
This is stated as fact everywhere but I've not seen supporting evidence anywhere.
I spend about as much time in my day speaking to other people as I would have done productively and by choice before. The only difference now is that I'm more able to avoid extraneous meetings and other drags on my time that don't benefit from my participation (because they're largely irrelevant to my work and vice versa).
In any case kudos for taking this step which I'm sure is not an easy decision to make given that it's a fairly seismic shift to how most companies approach work and employment.
It is obvious to me that the way you interact with people face-to-face is different from the way you would do with online chat.
I think you underestimate how much WFH helps people with social issues.
The people who say this are the people you never see doing any work. They use the office as a social gathering place. They seemingly have no real job, despite a lofty title and high salary. They are the bane of existence for high functioning employees.
This is one of the few hills I will die on. I've never heard of a productive critical employee complaining about not being in an office. Every single one loves remote work because they can actually get work done.
I prefer some combination of WFH and working in-office.
It clearly doesn’t apply to OP because Dropbox are shifting to WFH, but so many of the arguments I’ve seen for offices returning are a variant of “I miss the social aspect”.
Fine, say that, I often miss it myself too, but realise you’re also arguing to compel people in the near term into a situation that could lead to them contracting a disease that could kill them.
Even beyond that, while many people might miss the meetings, I guarantee there are at least some people in that room getting stressed out because it’s actively blocking them from doing their job for no reason.
This is anecdotal too but I’ve worked on new projects, with new people, since this started. I’ve not met any of these people face-to-face, but we get along great thanks to being able to video/audio call whenever we want or need to. Every conversation I now have contains exclusively willing pariticipants. It’s great.
Doesn't this also have the problem with neither flexibility nor community, especially for once a quarter? More importantly, this means that people now have to maintain their own home offices but still have to live close to a big city and pay the stupidly high costs associated with that.
Can you explain what you mean by WFH when you feel like it reducing flexibility?
Yeah this is 100% not remote work.
I think at once a quarter you're starting to look at the ability to live on the other side of the country and fly in when necessary, which I think is much more price efficient.
It just seems like a lot more work and hassle than being fully colocated or fully remote.
To my eye remote 4x a week forfeits most of the benefits of full remote purely for the sake of a vestigial habit. It seems superior to me that either the team either goes full remote, or reverts to a “remote work when errands require it” arrangement.
That said, there are plenty of people who want to go into an office semi-regularly and, if you tell them they're going to be 100% remote--even if financial arrangements are made to subsidize a co-working space in some manner--they're probably not going to like it and will probably leave for a more office-friendly company.
See? Totally makes sense.
Not necessarily. I work in a group that's very distributed and we get together (normally) a couple of times a year plus another once or twice with a larger group.
Of course, that doesn't work if it's more like getting together in person every week or two.
In any case, I agree it makes sense to collaborate. If you wander into the office and no one you know and work with is there, it doesn't make much sense to come in.
[1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/10/dro...
You can usually find a public company's leases in SEC fillings. I couldn't find one for Pinterest, but I found Dropbox's 200+ page lease agreement here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001467623/000119312...
(it's a 15 year lease, with the cost increasing from $45 million/year to $68 million/years over the 15 years. Hope there's some option to re-negotiate in there)
Maybe I am alone in this, but I care very little for culture. Perhaps it's because I am a freelancer. I work for a company to bring results and I just try to communicate clearly. When there's doubts we have a chat over Skype, since sometimes direct communication is just more efficient than using chat.
I believe people can work well as teams while WFH and some kind of company culture (whatever that means) isn't really necessary for people to be effective.
For the past 1.5 years I've been working for an Australian company. I do mobile dev from Thailand. There's an Indian team doing some BLE-related mobile dev from India. There's a guy in Vietnam also doing mobile dev. We have a guy in Taiwan doing low-level hardware programming. A guy in Japan doing hardware design. A Russian guy in Georgia who's doing we web-related stuff. And the leadership is in Australia. Everyone seems to be able to get along pretty well and without much misunderstanding. Perhaps it's also the nature of our work, the product we work on.
Why do people feel it's important to build some company culture? What does a company culture even mean?
I personally prefer having my own fixed workspace, tyvm. I'm just glad I was able to make it work in the various assignments I've had over the year (e.g. a fixed workspace).
For many (most?) people this has been the worst working situation of their lives, and attempts to minimize that are insulting. I believe it will be especially bad for those early in their careers, trying to find their footing, get mentorship, and build their network.
Productivity is not the be-all end-all of a career! Human interaction (of any kind) is important, "wasting" time going to lunch with colleagues is important, serendipitous encounters at the coffee machine are important.
I know for certain if my employer decides to go permanent remote, I'll be looking for another employer. This is not the way I want to live and work.
If you've watched Red Dwarf, the entire reason that Rimmer was brought back as a hologram, was so that Dave would not go insane.
And another crew member could have been brought back, but Holly determined that Rimmer would be best. The conflict, you see, was required.
Many here decry the "waste of time" of being interrupted. Their attention divided. Yet you're indicating that after a few months of endless, day long shifts free of interruption, productivity has dropped a bit.
It appears for some, Holly was right. You need a Rimmer.
Also, long hours are not equal to productivity, and believing that they are is a quick route to burnout (which sucks, and you should try to avoid).
I think people need to realize that human interaction exists beyond the office.
Also, I think we should fully support what's suitable for people. I want to work remotely, but I want you to be able to work the way to prefer as well.
1) If we have Dropbox Studios, who dictates the frequency of those visits? If a manager dictates, there will be resentment of some sorts. If its a democratic vote, what about the people that can't make that date?
2) Assuming the dates have been finalized, the people that cannot make that date are at a disadvantage. They might not be in driving distance to a hub or for other reasons. That would mean information again has to be propagated back virtually for all members.
3) If a date is set and all the necessary people have come together, is it essentially a company day off? If the goal is to meet and talk to people without doing solo-work, I would assume its filled with meetings or events. If this is true, this doesn't make sense to do it too frequently. If done infrequently, it defeats the purposes of these studios.
All of the thoughts so far don't even go through the cliques / groups that would form that can be gatekeepers of information for true remote workers that can't meetup.
The visits are either dictated by policy or agreed upon by the participants. A place will probably want both, a low frequency one by policy and freedom for the employees to set any frequency to themselves. Voting doesn't make any sense, you need all the participants to agree on a date.
The policy meetings ought to be fixed and with a low enough frequency that people can plan their lives after them. Like once every 6 months. Otherwise people will resent them.
After a date is set and the people come together, they can work on whatever they decided to have the meeting for. Of course, it's probably not for doing solo-work, but the company shouldn't dictate a lot here. It would go counter to the goal of the studios.
I imagine the company expects every worker to be able to meetup at some point.
- most ideas are bad,
- judgement is a crapshoot but improves the odds up to 50/50,
- trying and either rejecting or committing (or going bankrupt) gets the odds of the better solution prevailing in the market up to 60-odd percent.
Plenty of confounding variables, lots of opportunity to get unlucky and draw the wrong conclusions (or just have your priors overrule weak evidence against them), but it's science and we haven't found anything better yet.
I don't think I ever realized how much of this venting must have subtly happened in person, but since COVID I think most of it gets bottled up and people get very frustrated when they can't casually talk through these issues in person. My team has collectively agreed that these "venting calls" are great if only for the reason that they make you aware that you're not the only one with frustrations, and I think that really helps morale.
I hadn't considered this angle before reading your comment, but the psychological impact of this alone is huge. As any therapist will tell you, working through frustrations and integrating negative experiences instead of bottling them up is crucial.
This is something I already struggled with prior to COVID, and I've been seeing a therapist for years now for this (and many other) reasons.
The thing about bottling things up is that it kind of "works" for awhile. Until it doesn't.
So we probably haven't even started to see the longer term impact this will have over time.
I've noticed as of late HN has been riddled with comments such as: here is my extremely strong thoughts on X with my personal anecdotal experience Y, and therefore this is how the world should work.
> I believe it will be especially bad for those early in their careers
Agreed. I think it can be equally has bad for someone midway into their career who is thinking about taking on more leadership opportunities.
The pendulum is now swinging in WFH's favor and those who it benefits want to cement it as a very viable and practical alternative to the traditional office model.
There are a lot of incentives to stake out positions. People don't really want to be fully remote at a company where most of their co-workers go back into the office most of the time and people mostly don't want to go back into an office where it's mostly just teams having all-day meetings now and then.
Ehh I think this comment is what the root comment was critisizing. I think a more empathetic lens is that you can either provide a remote-first or in-office-first experience for a team, and that at a larger office many or most teams being remote-first would detract from the office-first experience. I think it's short sighted to assume that having 200 people primarily in the office would be significantly different than 400 people, for example, but going from 400 to 10 certainly would.
The good thing is that after companies finish out corona, engineers will have more remote-first work options and still plenty of office-first options - I don't think there will be much in the way of hostage taking, but I'm sure some folks will be (rightfully) miffed if they joined a team for one experience and post-pandemic are getting a different one. They are also able to find a new job :)
Replace Zoom with whatever meeting solution you like, but it's probably for the best that all meetings be on some sort of meeting platform long term.
At least in my experience, people seldom take notes during meetings; they rely on their memory and forget about everyone else that didn't attend. Not to mention that if you're typing on your machine during a meeting it's assumed that you're not paying attention. Even just recording everything can be good so you can go back later to review critical decisions.
> People don't really want to be fully remote at a company where most of their co-workers go back into the office most of the time
At least from my perspective, I dread this idea because, as employees who were already mostly remote found out a long time ago, employees at the office will typically neglect remote coworkers. Be it through not meeting in an accessible format, not sharing important decisions, or similar oversights.
I've personally experienced great improvements in terms of team coordination due to WFH: we've scheduled meetings in advance, we have notes for key decisions, there are proper documents for inter-team coordination (instead of relying on memory and ad-hoc discussions), etc..
> people mostly don't want to go back into an office where it's mostly just teams having all-day meetings now and then.
Do you mean the scenario where employees come in a limited number of days for meetings? Or where everyone is in the office 100% of the time with certain days that are all meetings?
Personally, I think the former makes best use of in-office time. This does vary per person, but I think the best use of the office is as a collaborative space; it's the main feature everyone seems to be lamenting. So use it for its advantages.
So get the collaborative benefits and then let everyone else get their work done. This is much more personal, but I absolutely hated people dropping into my team neighborhood and interrupting me with questions/trying to locate someone. If you want some of my work time, that's OK, but you can't do it whenever you feel like it; schedule time and stop pre-empting my tasks.
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WFH in general seems to require more structure than in-office work. This adds some overhead for individual employees, but likely will result in massive gains long term. If your meetings are scheduled, there's more time to prepare. If everyone is taking notes, then there's less need for meetings to understand decisions made elsewhere.
Ancillary communication tools were severely under-used before WFH. I'd be happy if we went mixed-office after learning how to coordinate more effectively, but I consider it likely that in the rush to get back people will drop the ball and work will reset to in-office vs WFH.
What I meant is that individuals who would prefer to be in an an office come in and mostly the only other people there are other groups doing their own thing.
And I agree about the structure. Where I work, people have been pretty good about using shared docs--Etherpad for a long time and Google Docs now. But with everyone on video calls, shared docs are now used pretty religiously for most meetings.
Also agree about the use of office. I'm happy to come into an office now and then if it's for a particular purpose. I've no interest in coming into one to work individually or maybe run into someone and have a serendipitous conversation. Serendipity is fine but it's actually pretty inefficient.
The last 6 months isn't really representative of why we should or should not be encouraging WFH, but it at least seems to have opened more doors to accommodating it as an option in companies that would have previously been against it.
Of course, WFH is a mixed bag and I expect 100% remote to be rare but I do expect a lot more flexibility at many companies.
As a Product Manager, working remotely 100% of the time is absolute hell. And I say this as someone who was already working from home ~70% of the time before (and I was mostly ok with that).
I also wanted to pick on a few of the categories you mentioned:
> "only incompetent managers need to see you in person"
Some of the best work I've done is when I'm able to go brainstorm in a room with my leadership. Lacking the ability to do this as we plan our next release, or the next 3 year strategy or whatnot is extremely difficult.
Having competent management means that they understand when this is valuable and when it's not.
> "your co-workers aren't your friends"
I hear this a lot, and I have to feel bad for people who have never experienced true friendship at work. At each of my jobs, I've made lifelong friends. Friends I've since vacationed with, stood up as a groomsman in a weeding for, etc. This is part of what made those jobs so rewarding.
I think the general thought is that "jobs change, so that 'friend' might not be around next week", and that's true. But in my experience, if they're true friends, changing jobs doesn't change that.
This says more about me than anything, but where else am I going to meet friends?
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All of this to say, in addition to being tone-deaf in light of the current reality in the world, these sentiments are also suspect under normal circumstances.
These things may be true for some people at their place of employment, or for them personally, but it's hard to understand where this comes from.
The only thing I miss is taking walks with coworkers. That is where the real value was for me. Something about walking and talking that is so beneficial.
Can you do this in a virtual room? Yes. Will you achieve the same outcome? Early results (in my case) seem to indicate the answer is "no".
I want the ability to pace around the room at times. Look my collaborators in the eye. Pick up on non-verbal cues that are often impossible to see remotely. Step away as a group to share a much needed lunch break.
And when passionate people are involved, and many viewpoints are present, the ability to all argue/debate a topic vigorously - even show frustration at the right moments - and then all share a beer at the end of the day, is critical. Having that same vigorous debate on Zoom and then dropping off to our individual lives doesn't leave room for reconnecting with each other as humans - something that is critical for maintaining relationships.
Not every project requires this kind of interaction. But for things that do, the remote format just doesn't work well for everyone.
Given the ability to do so, I do wonder how much of the concerns around remote work could be resolved.
I won't say it's a perfect substitute, but not doing those things would be a disaster.
That suggests you and your team have communication issues and meeting in person is just a plaster over it. Why exactly do you need to see other team members in person?
> I have to feel bad for people who have never experienced true friendship at work
Why do you think getting friendly with people at work is appropriate? Mixing work and personal life will introduce unconscious bias and you will give different treatment to people who didn't invite you to their weeding. This is bad for business.
It seems like you just feel lonely and you use workplace to find friends. Can you see how wrong that sounds?
Did you think about finding a hobby, getting good at something other than work and meet people that way? (there is plenty of meetups for people sharing the same interests)
That's an interesting conclusion. What makes you believe that?
Would you say the same thing to a band trying to practice together...virtually/remotely? Why or why not?
> Why exactly do you need to see other team members in person?
I covered this in another comment under this thread.
> Why do you think getting friendly with people at work is appropriate? Mixing work and personal life will introduce unconscious bias and you will give different treatment to people who didn't invite you to their weeding. This is bad for business.
I see you're intentionally being snarky about my typo.
But on topic - again, I ask, what makes you believe that? There are plenty of studies and psychologists who would disagree with you. Go read some of the articles on Harvard Business Review that explore the dynamics of friendship at work, and how important / rewarding they can be.
> It seems like you just feel lonely and you use workplace to find friends. Can you see how wrong that sounds?
I'm not lonely. I'm also an introvert. But when friendships form, it's a beautiful thing.
Why do you believe this to be so "wrong"?
It's a simple matter of simplicity and practicality. I'm more likely to meet like-minded people in the workplace, and those people aren't necessarily even on my team or even in the same department.
As I mentioned in my parent comment, I do feel bad for people who have not had a chance to experience this - it seems you fall into that category.
> Did you think about finding a hobby, getting good at something other than work and meet people that way? (there is plenty of meetups for people sharing the same interests)
Of course! And I do those things, too. But my hobbies tend toward solitary activities (cycling, tinkering with electronics, coding side projects). Yeah, I meet interesting people at the local Raspberry Pi enthusiasts meetup, but rarely people I'll form close friendships with.
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Friendship at work might not be right for you. But don't mistake that with it being "wrong" or "inappropriate" for everyone.
I'm genuinely curious (and feel free not to reveal anything you aren't comfortable sharing), but I really wonder if age/geo/length of career factor into this.
Often, the mindset you're promoting seems to come from a lack of maturity and understanding of the importance of relationships in the workplace. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case for you, personally but I'm genuinely curious to understand where you're coming from when there's so much evidence to the contrary.
But it's also important to acknowledge that pre-Covid, only a tiny fraction of jobs were remote at all. People who preferred remote work had very little choice in the matter. Our society assumes that commuting to work and sitting in a cubicle (or worse) is fitting for 99% of the work force.
So what I mainly see here aren't the comments you cite, but a "ugh but I like the office", which gets very little sympathy from me in a society where, virus aside, the majority of jobs are office-only. Like, the world is already tipped in your favor.
To put it into perspective, I was so desperate for a fully remote job that I took a $50,000 salary for it when I was making $130,000 in Austin, Texas. Now I live in South America on a beach doing exactly what I want to be doing.
I don't like the optics of calling Covid a "good thing", but it must be pointed out that it got offices (like my former job) that were adamantly ass-in-seat only to go remote-only. It spurred fundamental (hopefully lasting) shifts in our work culture. And a lot of them were a long time in the making and waiting. How many of these companies that were firmly ass-in-seat are now fully or mostly remote realizing that the sky isn't falling? I hope we reach a better equilibrium.
Ideally our employment options would have something for everyone without you needing to go for a $50k job to get what you want. Another culture change I'd like is for WFH options to come with a signing bonus to get your home office sorted out, something that's sorely lacking.
It's completely understandable that work has taken such a central place in many people's lives. It's probably not ideal, but it is completely understandable.
As to space, co working isn't the same as an office and having an home office requires moving and spending a lot of money. Many of us don't have expensive commutes that offset that cost
Cars were invented in an era where cities were not as dense, and where jobs were mostly done in person. With the advent of the internet and personal computers, this is changing, that you want it or not.
Redesigning cities is glacially slow even with a clear political will, but taking a bunch of people off the roads at peak times is quick and relatively painless.
I hope in the future companies will allow people to work the way they prefer, whether that's in office, remote or something in between.
Wanting to work from home generally means just that, wanting to work from home. Not wanting to work from home however usually really means "I don't want others to be able to work from home", it's about taking options away from other people. The exception being people who don't want to work from home because they have a pack of screaming children at home, etc - in their case saying they don't want to work from home is actually honest.
Your comment is a good example. For your perceived issues to be resolved, we need to make other people work at the office. The idea that others shouldn't have the option to work from home because them being at the office helps someone else build their network is not something I can agree with.
Sometimes the commute is just too stressful, even if you live in the city. My partner's well-being has visibly improved due to going into the office only when necessary.
Maybe WFH should be renamed to something else. It doesn't capture all the subtleties of flexibility and choice we're asking for.
If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
everyone has to get out of the house and making actual friends in life. co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. we all need human interaction... join a club, a gym, yoga, bike club, whatever, just interact with people that doesn't involve talking about work. and sitting home and playing video games while good, isn't getting outside.
I consider my coworkers to be my friends and it's one of the reasons I like working at my current company.
I agree that having lots of different outlets for connection is great, and I also acknowledge that there are a variety of ways in which work can complicate friendships. But, if I'm going to spend 40+ hours per week on work, I'd like to do it alongside people I genuinely like and care about.
i did that for almost 20 years where i previously worked. i thought of my co-workers as family and friends and it got me no where and caused lots of stress (its hard to say no to someone when they are friends). i don't know, maybe it had more todo with co-dependency than anything else.
now i've been working at a place for almost 3 years and i'm not friends with a single person here. i don't let these people know my business and have a complete separation of personal and work relationship. i honestly have less stress cause i can say no without giving a crap if my co-worker gets mad at me or doesn't want to talk to me (which i prefer). i do my job and go home to be with my friends and family.
also, if another opportunity comes my way, i have no problem giving my 2 weeks notice and packing my bags. life is a lot better now.
It really saddens me whenever I see this (apparently common) sentiment on HN. Through every job I've had, I've met some of my very best life-long friends. My wedding party is over half people that I met at work. A couple of my former bosses are people I see every couple of months (pre-covid) and are invited to my wedding. Even one of my past clients is someone that I keep in touch with regularly (for nothing related to work).
Not everyone at work is going to become your best friend, but if you're automatically assuming that anyone you meet through your job is completely "off limits" for friendship, you're really hurting yourself. I can't imagine working at a place like that.
Outside of work, my "work friends" and I go out to eat, go play sports together, hang out at each other's houses, etc. We talk about work sometimes because it's obviously a common interest, but our friendship doesn't revolve around it, and if someone severs their relationship with the employer that we have in common, it does not mean our friendship also severs.
tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.
I treat work friends as a sort of "probationary friend". I'm happy to meet up and do stuff outside of work, but I'm a bit more guarded than I would be with someone I don't work with. I might hesitate to introduce them to some of my more "out there" friends (for whatever reason I seem to attract a lot of very weird people). once we no longer work together, they can just be a normal friend.
I would absolutely share this with my "work friends" and even my current boss. When one of my previous bosses shared with me that he was having trouble at home with his spouse, it wasn't like he suddenly became a bad boss. If anything, it helped our work because it gave me the opportunity to be more understanding when he seemed more worn out or needed to leave early for the day to go spend time with his family. If he had told me he was struggling with drinking, then I would know that maybe we should go play sports rather than to our weekly happy hour. We build each other up, both inside and outside of work, because that's what friends do, and it has the nice side effect of making our professional careers better, too.
Perhaps I just have had a lucky stream of working on unicorn teams, but I would hate to work at a company where I couldn't share details of my life with the people that I spend 40-60+ hours a week with. Obviously every workplace and relationship is unique and you aren't going to share everything with everybody (I'd share the above details with my current boss but by no means with all of my bosses), but I don't understand this attitude that you shouldn't share anything with anyone that happens to have a common employer.
To me, work is just another facet of our relationship alongside the many other facets, no different than if we had met through volunteering or went to the same gym. I don't share everything with every coworker, just like I don't share everything with every other person that visits my gym. But I also don't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they are my coworker, just like I wouldn't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they also use the same weight set that I do.
also, I would say work is quite a bit different than a gym. it's a lot easier to find a new gym than a new job, and it's much less disruptive to your life if you have to do so.
My boss and I have a good enough relationship at work where I'm 1000% confident this wouldn't happen, and if said boss did "perceive" some kind of drop in productivity, their response would be to help me with that rather than turn it into a negative. Indeed, during COVID when I expressed to my boss that I was having a tough time, his immediate response was to ask how he could help and to offer me a couple days off to recharge.
And the reason we have that relationship is specifically because we treat each other as friends that also happen to have a working relationship, rather than letting the work relationship dominate all else.
Not everyone will have that kind of relationship with their boss, but I believe it is something everyone should aspire to rather than immediately rejecting it as even a possibility.
Some people will dislike you; most people will be neutral. But it's all wetware and basically instant
I've met plenty of good friends at work, but I'm very happy my social network includes mostly people doing different things with their life. It means there is much more breadth of perspective, and you realize very easily that work isn't everything.
It sounds like you also might not have had much experience in the current "everyone is friends!" startup office culture. There's a pretty strong pressure to socialize all of the time, during lunch and after hours, with everyone. The people get laid off and they are erased from that social circle, typically people won't even communicate with them anymore. It's repulsive.
For me, being co-workers is just one small facet of our friendship. We do talk about work sometimes, just like sometimes we talk about sports teams we have in common or other hobbies. But we don't only talk about work. I don't feel that my perspective is limited at all because my co-workers have introduced me to their spouses, who might be in totally different industries, or to new hobbies such as surfing or soccer, or brought me along on trips to new places or encouraged me to volunteer. All of these things have expanded my perspective greatly, and if you trace them back far enough, all of them are originating from my co-workers.
In your startup example, I have been on teams where this culture was the case, and certainly with some people I have completely lost touch after they/I left the team. But for others, even though we worked together work was not the dominating reason that we were friends. When I left the team we lost that one facet of our relationship, but our friendship still survives because we have many other facets that facilitate it.
So I think the problem isn't when someone's social circle aligns strictly with work. I think that's fine. I think the problem you are describing is when it turns into a "work-dominant social circle" rather than "a social circle that just happens to have the same employer in common".
Furthermore, I think the "anti work friend" attitude is counterproductive to this. People are saying "don't spend your time building friendships with co-workers because if you leave work you will lose your friend". But if you carry this attitude and don't build a friendship that is strong outside of work, then of course your perspective is going to be limited to work, and of course you will lose your friendship with that person once your work ends. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
According to what "law"? Introverted lonely people having most of their social interactions at work is a fact of life mate.
Former coworkers who are also lifelong friends.
Current coworkers I enjoy being friendly with.
It's not either/or.
It’s all just how you manage it. :)
I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful that live close to me that I can still see. It's not as safe as completely isolating, but I also weighed the risk of completely isolating myself from everyone and I decided that I had to be okay with a certain amount of risk of infection. People don't really talk about the death toll of mental health problems, but it's substantive in certain demographics. I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone.
Complete isolation is not a sustainable plan. I've been looking at what my lifestyle is going to be like until we start getting this under control, which doesn't look like it's coming in the short to medium term.
> I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone
This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too.
No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
This is preposterous. Each individual must evaluate their own risk tolerance.
If you're waiting on the world to decide something for you, you're playing life as a waiting game.
Please don't shame people for having a different risk tolerance than you.
But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.
Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.
Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.
The balance is different for each person. Being intentional about the people we share space with goes a long way; nobody I know is going to concerts or crowded bars which makes contact tracing a lot easier.
globally is a bit of a stretch, but people already do this on a local level. this is what is happening when the government imposes/relaxes restrictions on the number of people that can be at an indoor gathering, the types of businesses that are allowed to be open, whether restaurants can offer indoor seating, etc. as long as the person isn't exceeding the limits set by their democratically elected government, shouldn't they be free to set their own risk tolerance?
Hah, I feel the opposite. Having my family at home is what makes WFH unbearable. I'm constantly exposed to the stress of getting a child through the hybrid learning school schedule.
I get absolutely no quiet time or alone time during the day, whereas my office has many quiet places for me to clear my mind for a few minutes.
During COVID I would say this is more of a problem but in my 8 years of remote work I don't really miss the office at all. In normal times you can get out if you want to head to a coffee shop or something. We do video calls which seems to help some of the team members feel better about the situation. Having a commute was absolutely the most stressful thing for me.
I do most of my socializing outside of working hours. Being alone and remote doesn't seem to effect me but I'm also super introverted. I understand this may effect extroverts differently.
Sure, all people need social interactions. But these interactions don't need to be defined by work. I work in caffe 10 meters from my apartment. Sit with laptop in the park. Meet with friends. I don't drive, don't use public transport, but walk an awful lot.
And thanks with great, mostly asynchronous communication at my workplace, I sleep as much as I want to, and work exactly when I feel like it, and never ever hear or see my colleagues — only text, mostly comments as opposed to instance messaging. Sometimes I just slack off for three days straight. Sometimes I go into work binge for a non-interrupted 20 hour refactoring session. Not even because there's some deadline, feeling of responsibility or any other kind of negative motivation like that — just because I enjoy it and don't want to stop!
I feel like I've been on vacation for the last three months, and yet repository stats show me that I'm more productive as I've ever been.
Oh, and the best thing about all of that? I live in a country with much lower cost of living than US, but thanks to headlines like this, I feel that I'll soon be competing for exactly the same jobs and salaries that SF engineers.
I'm sure some cases of it happened somewhere, there are some papers, and some appeal to authority is a given, but do we really know if WFH equals mental health issues en masse?
For example, I wonder if: long commute, all the preparation before/after a work day, and resulting overall diminished free time causes more mental issues or not.
What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?
Seems to me when "office" is heard everyone thinks of that one nice summer evening after work and had a few beers yada yada, nobody seems to remember that cold-ass winter day where you would rather stay in 5 levels of blankets yet had to go to office, then slipped on ice and landed on your ass.
Maybe it's true and WFH will turn most people to madness. I'm just saying it's not an established fact of life, and opposite is also very much possible.
Losing in-person work relationships at the same time as social relationships is rough. Luckily I get along well with the person I live with, but the lack of ad-hoc social interaction is unsettling.
Once the pandemic is over, of course.
We're already in a loneliness epidemic, WFH will make that 10x worse.
People used to also have extensive social networks outside of work through various religious and social institutions, most of which have withered in the past 20 years or so. This is a huge part of this “loneliness epidemic” you mention. We should rebuild those so that people alternating their work structure isn’t a debilitating blow to their social network. This is particularly important since people change jobs much more rapidly now, which disrupts any social network based on work.
That being said, I agree with you here. I our current work situation right now is causing a ton of stress and mental health issues, but COVID and our current political climate have a much bigger hand in that than just the WFH part. What WFH looks like right now is not what a 100% WFH lifestyle would look like in a year or two. I've had the ability to WFH when ever I wanted for the past 4 years and I can tell you, my current WFH situation is much more draining that it ever was before.
I think your video game analogy is pretty spot on. There are problems with 100% WFH, but "mass mental health issues" just seems like a boogieman.
Are you describing working in an office or working from home?
Wait till people who love WFH say "You just need the proper setup".
Yes, I need a proper setup. An office, please.
WFH doesn't require building a sensory deprivation tank.
Since going remote, I work in a swimming pool about 50% of the time. I have a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, a Panasonic toughbook, and a "floating standing desk" (a raft turned upside down). I smoke a cigar, sip a nice whiskey, and crank through my work. Then I go spend time with my family and friends.
It's not quite a concrete bunker beneath my house. But I'm not coming back to an office anytime soon.
It's not my goal to shoot your anecdote with my own.
My post above is more about the tendency to focus on WFH as a mental health tragedy, while WFO is never held under this scrutiny. Is it possible that herding millions into offices [of various quality] had no major impact on mental health? Yet it's called an apocalypse when opposite becomes a trend.
One's "mental health apocalypse" is another's relief from pressure. If you often hear one angle maybe it's now becoming a chant rather than rational discourse.
Maybe we can do better than approaching this from that one specific angle, and consider both as valid options. Leave the people with choice, and let them pick whatever is best for them. [1]
[1] My anecdata shows most people given the choice pick their homes or places they like over the office, and offices nowadays are almost empty. But obviously it's anecdata, doesn't mean "everyone" wants it that way (they don't) and YMMV.
Things like an unhappy marriage can be dealt with by being at the office a lot, or working at home in a big enough home that you can remain isolated. The current situation forces a lot of these issues to come to a boil.
Even if you're just unhappy with who you are and what 'home' means for you, being forced to deal with it can be rough. Work is to many workaholics the same way a bar is to alcoholics. It's a place where a coping mechanism becomes not just a way to deal, but a sign of success.
I've always tried to keep my work, domestic, and social life separate. I work in an office and I live with flatmates/roommates who aren't close friends. My work problems stay in the office, my domestic problems stay at home, and my social/relationship problems don't follow me home. It's less about one or the other being a coping mechanism, but my (lack of) capacity to deal with multiple problems simultaneously.
Why should an employer be responsible for teaching people how to socialize with others?
My dog is my work buddy. He's always around, gives me an excuse to take a lunchtime walk, always available for cuddles when I need it. I have a family, that are with me in the evenings, but a pet during the day is a great companion.
The room I slept in was my office and my dining room as well, not to mention my entertainment room. Instead of seeing all my coworkers (who I was fond of) every day in the office, I now saw my small team during our 15 minute stand ups, which would only occur about 2 or 3 times a week. I saw the gas station clerks more.
I hated it, and I didn't really have a support system. I'm in my final year of university now (that work experience was an internship), and I will definitely look primarily for places that will have an actual office environment.
Not to mention that some people, for financial reasons, must live in places far too small to spend their waking lives in along with their sleeping lives.
I like the break from my family. I didn't get it during WFH. Enjoying being back in the office now.
It's all just different strokes.
Having some companies that choose to go all in on remote gives those people who it suits them some options and for those of us who prefer WFO we know to avoid those companies.
It's polarizing, so I think it's good if companies kinda just go one way or the other.
Now, many people carefully plan out these occasions to make sure they're not bringing anything back home to their own family members. The same can be applied to childcare and even senior care. In normal times, you wouldn't have your kids home all day to interrupt you and require help with schoolwork (or even logging into Zoom).
Additionally, I've found the hardest part of this year is that there just isn't much to look forward to on the weekends - no big group dinners to celebrate birthdays, no vacations to other cities, no bar nights with old friends.
But it will likely just be on the employee to pay for all these things, and the companies will reap the benefits.
Of course, with new contracts being negotiated, not having to pay for all these expenses will give an employer more leeway in terms of salary. However, remote work also increases the candidate pool, so the net effect is going to be lower salaries.
I have a good setup. I know it works.
It's not as feasible to get my own standing desk in each time so I let that go. But they always give me everything and I just set them aside and use my (superior) tooling.
I don't think that's paying the company. That's just me buying tools that are optimal for me. I don't really need each employer to do that for me. These things are mostly buy it for life (except for the desktop and IDE license).
1. The 2 minutes it takes to file an expense report is a good trade for $200 (I don't make $6,000 an hour at my job)
2. It's the principle; they should pay for it, not me.
I've been using my IntelliJ licence at multiple jobs on my own and AFAIK if I don't get it reimbursed I don't need a business licence.
¹ https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
I don't see the value calculation as an emotional one, I truly don't see a reason not to fill out the expense report
Sorry, needed to clarify that, but I really don't want to argue this point with you.
In the before times, they would be put at a workstation with a $2-3000 desk, a $500+ chair, reliable Internet and power, and usually a new(ish) computer, monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Those engineers don't have the income to get all those pieces for home use; they'll get a cheap Ikea desk and chair, a middling-quality monitor and keyboard, and if they're lucky, their workplace provides a reliable computer at least.
But even for 'overpaid tech workers', there are some tools of the trade you invest in for your own good, but the company should also provide the basics (e.g. reimbursement for things used primarily/exclusively for business).
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
Note that this really should be a recurring stipend. Nothing lasts forever; everything has a service life. I think a three- or four-year depreciation makes sense on a lot of these items, although this is probably something which should be considered an industry standard.
A cheap Ikea desk is perfect for my needs. It's a wood counter-top board and 2 adjustable sawhorses. Cost me about $200. However where I spent the money is on a good 5k monitor. With these 2 (and a saddle chair), I have everything I need for a workspace that is far more functional than an expensive modular furniture desk (ie. cubicle) with a low-res monitor.
I'm a junior engineer and I already happen to have a nice chair, computer, and monitor at home. my desk is a piece of trash from walmart, but it gets the job done. altogether, it's about $3500 worth of stuff if bought new. I wouldn't be happy to pay for all that in one go for work, but it wouldn't be an extreme hardship either. I would gladly pay that in exchange for permanent WFH.
a) Setup the same configuration of laptop, multiple monitors, a desk phone, and an Ethernet jack into my router.
b) Sufficiently insulate the background noise on the hours of Zoom meetings I'm expected to join every day from my girlfriend working in the dining room, and the cacophony of screaming children in the apartment above me.
This solution reeks of tone-deaf executives who would think, "What? You mean all of our employees don't have freestanding houses with a spare bedroom or basement that they can easily convert to a home-office?"
I was about to post on this topic as well when I saw your post. There are people on our team who have been working in less than ideal circumstances at home for more than six months now, and who are really struggling as a result.
Even if people do have a good space to work, if partners are working at home together there's often only enough room for one of them to use that good space at a time. Again, not ideal.
My priority at the moment is securing some office space so that people have some respite from the endless grind of working at home under these circumstances.
But I'm not sure what you want done in the current situation?
Exactly why do you seem to be on the employers side here
In general, I think employers should provide some sort of outside-home working space once practical, at least for employees who didn't sign up to work remotely.
But most people don't know that there are massive tax benefits to working from home (at least in Canada) you can write off the percentage of your house you work in of your rent and stuff like that. That alone can equal a $1000 a year or so.
But from a company point of view, getting rid of the office is a massive save in money, so I suspect some will increase salaries or offer other perks such as skipthedishes accounts or what not. Most will just pocket it though.
You don't have to do that in Canada.
“You may have to report a capital gain if you change your principal residence to a rental or business property, or vice versa.”
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
However, it looks like there were some changes that may allow you to avoid it (business use was a small fraction and you didn’t take advantage of tax benefits from business use).
That's generally not true for workers in the US. If you are self-employed, yes, you can take a home office deduction, but not if you are a W2 employee.
The US used to have an "unreimbursed employee expense" itemized deduction, but even then there was a pretty high floor (had to be more than a couple percent of your total income) so most people couldn't make use of it. That deduction was eliminated in the 2018 tax law.
The "massive tax benefit" is not that large for most people. Perhaps if you have dedicated office space and a large mortgage.
I did the math for my T2200 and the total tax benefit was $500/yr.
The biggest issue with me for WFH has been the quality of my internet connection and it was entirely on me to get Comcast to come fix my lines and run my own ethernet to my basement "office".
I tried one in my old place and it was really poor - much worse than congested WiFi (dense neighborhood in a large apartment building).
[0]https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html#improvespe...
Also, joy, hiring contractors. My favorite thing to do with my time.
Although, come to think of it, it might make sense to mark some amount of money as an "equipment stipend" or similar on paychecks. That way, it's clear to both parties what the funds are intended for, even if there's no actual mandate on how to spend them.
But the IRS right now doesn’t enforce those small amounts. They only care when you use the corporate jet for personal travel.
But when you leave, if they let you keep the stuff, they either have to include the depreciated value as income on your last check or you have to pay them for it.
When I left my first job they let me keep my computer and phone and I paid them $60 for it, which was the legal depreciated value.
> Loss of focus due to distractions translates to an estimated annual salary cost of US$34,448 per person in lost productivity, or US$391bn for US companies in the sectors analysed, equivalent to 28% of baseline salary payments
In short, for remote working employees (any employee that spends >30% of their time working outside an employer-designated office/client site/etc over 3+ months), all employers must have a written contract with the employee, that must:
* Define the tools & workspace necessary to provide a sufficient & safe workspace, for which the employer must cover any costs
* Define working hours (with some requirements on flexibility)
* Be voluntary, in both directions (employers can't fire people who don't want to change to remote work, employees aren't entitled to remote work if employers don't agree)
* Detail how, if at all, the employee's productivity might be monitored, and do so with reasonable regard to privacy and ability to disconnect from work
* Ensure equal treatment of on-site & remote employees, including pay, job stability, promotions, etc.
There's some caveats in there for force majeure, such that this doesn't immediately apply for the unavoidable remote setups created by COVID, but will apply for ongoing remote work where that continues in future.
Office rent is nothing in comparison.
Companies will make decisions based on employee productivity, which IMO, means having people in an office.
Not for long, surely. Workers' productivity has presumably not changed much and the companies remain in fierce competition for employees so why would a drop in de facto compensation be the new equilibrium?
I think this is strictly worse than providing employees with the option of where to work (office/remote/some WFH). Something missing in this announcement is that you still need to live in one of the main cities with offices (SF, Seattle, Austin, Dublin) in order to receive full pay. Moving anywhere gets your pay adjusted to the "local market".
So to avoid a pay-cut you need to stay in an overpriced city, but you don't have a nice office with meals/snacks/nice desk setup that you can go to.
someone invent a murphy bed that converts to a desk that converts to a toilet so our workforce can live in a space smaller than solitary confinement.
You could be local but within "commuting distance" of the office, which could include Sacramento, Tracy, etc. for an SF office. I think you could get a 2BR in Sac for the price of a studio in SF.
We might also see some exodus from the Bay Area, which would put a downward pressure on tech salaries till they hit some equilibrium.
I also wonder what enforcement mechanisms exist short of an IRS audit to make sure you're actually "local" and not in a cheap cabin in North Dakota. Employers could monitor corp traffic, but I wonder if it's actually worth the cost to enforce and they'll just go by honor code.
And "full pay" is relative to the cost of employment for each area. For instance the adjusted amount you would receive in say Kansas still is quite a lot for the area.
I was watching an interview recently, might have been buried in the middle of The Social Dilemma, where the speaker mentioned that this class of concierge service risks infantilizing people, and in particular in a time when code that young programmers author effects more and more of the population, that's dangerous.
The implication was that we need people to grow up. If they're going to be responsible (in the specific case), then they should be/get prepared to take responsibility (in the general case).
In Canada, those who are overleveraged with massive mortgages far away form the office, are rewarded with mortgage deferrals and low interest rates.
Those who save money, rent, and made sacrifices to live close to work, are the ones to are losing.
Graph of SF office space availability: https://socketsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/San-Franci...
Lots of us were remote before this, even if we were commuting distance from an office.
But, in general, I don't disagree. I expect a lot of people will move back to being in an office at least 1-2 days a week.
Yu miss all the fun with coworkers, all the fun side projects, productive or not...
..on the other hand, working from home, especially when they promote "whenever you feel like it", means you're "on call" all the time. Having "core hours" (eg 10-15h, weekdays) and having everybody available then (for calls, meetings, skypes,...) is ok, but I imagine this will mean ealy morning and late night calls and tasks, and workers will never be able to fully separate work and free time.
It definitely doesn't work for some people, but a lot of problems I've seen people bring up can be rectified by the employer. Some of them can't be, but those that can shouldn't be expressed as fact.
Just wildly speculating here, the result could be the opposite. But it strikes me as possible that this could been seen in retrospect as a damaging trend, sort of like open offices.
Also, once the kids go back to school and single people move back to the city or new suburb, where things open back up, this will also play into the debate.
Why work from home when you can venture to the office (or corporate co-working space), find a little nook and work with fast internet, free snacks and a change of scenery.
This was interesting: "Next, we’re embracing what we call “non-linear workdays.” We’re setting core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones, and encouraging employees to design their own schedules beyond that."
I've been WFH for about 8 years and have found this just happens naturally. At least for us it did. My team is in 3 different timezones and do work for people in 9 timezones. There is no "9-5", it's just not practical.
I'm working with people across the globe, no doubt a circumstance of a thousand small decisions. Scheduling some meetings is 100% impossible, and often times it involves taking meetings early (7-8AM) or late (7-9PM) in order to make things work.
Even if you carve out time during the day to compensate for those, it's not what I would describe as "practical."
With WFH being permanent I’m about to move out of my 2bd apartment into a 5bd house all while saving large amounts of money. This is a win for all parties; work pays less for an office and I pay less for better housing.
Well, I guess this WFH policy would help leveling the playground. Bar culture sucks.
At least for me, I want the company to treat me as an adult and trust that work can still get done well regardless where I am sitting.
This is a good move and upgrades Dropbox in my mind.
The negativity is that many of these companies may start trending to a required work from home model as opposed to an optional/hybrid approach.
There is also a smaller worry that these companies will offload a lot of the cost to their employees (i.e. not paying for internet, space, food, etc) without compensating them for these perks that were otherwise promised/expected.
It was clear that it's going to be a domino effect. Each time another tech company moves to permanent WFH it puts more pressure on other companies to do the same. They wouldn't be able to compete for talent otherwise. FANNG can still compete without moving to permanent WFH because of their reputation, salary and benefits, and the fact they have offices everywhere. But most companies cannot.
Exactly. That's what I miss and there'll be folk at Dropbox who miss it too. For folk who live in cities and/or don't mind commutes they might give serious consideration to moving to a company with a traditional office.
I know personally that if post covid my organisation scraped the office or if enough folk WFH permanently that it was dead, I'd start looking for a new job
We’re in the middle of the storm right now. We’ve all been bailing water for 7 months or so, and lots of people think that we’ll be bailing water forever now, even after the storm clears.
I’d wager that within a couple years at most of COVID being squashed, most if not all the companies declaring themselves remote-first and remote-permanent will reverse those policies. Despite the added costs, there are just too many advantages to offices.
Companies which have offices will out-compete the rate of innovation for remote only.
Marissa Mayer, coming from Google, the first thing she did when she took the helm at Yahoo was reverse the WFH policy because execs realized it was a huge productivity loss.
Ok, I missed Yahoo's logo redesign by her. It was the most important thing. Canceling WFH was second.
I have not met any of my team face-to-face, but they have also not embraced what I would consider modern temote-working tools. We don't have Slack (see above, 'Large Enterprise') but we do have Teams - except nobody uses it. We have a team email alias - except nobody responds to it. The only communication appears to be Skype for Business (i.e. Lync) calls - notwithstanding that some cow-orkers are in noisy environments, one regularly has unreliable enough Internet that he can't connect, and one has mic problems which means we hear about half of what she says. It also took a week and a half after I started for me to get my corporate approval to use Skype for anything but text, which meant we had to abandon my arranged first-week 'meet the team' session because I couldn't hear or speak.
I'm working in (approximately) devops, and things are, let's say, not well automated here, so they're justifiably terrified that if one or two people get infected, and others get quarantined, it could have a significant material effect on the company - so not only are people working from home, they are banned from entering the office. Except me, for some reason I haven't managed to ascertain...
If you were in Bay Area and leave you get a pretty drastic but somewhat negotiable salary nerf.
RSI: Repetitive Strain Injury
[0]https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/1999-...
Notwithstanding all the downsides of WFH, I will happily permanently WFH since I can move to cheaper place and enjoy a large house to myself, even if I need to accept a lower wage (but not so low that the cheaper house price is no longer worth the move). As for all the socialization, I'd rather find it outside work.
As for the mental health some people talk about, being able to afford a large house will do tremendously better for my mental health than being able to interact with people face with face, especially when those people are only bonded to me by money.
I think companies will increasingly adopt this model as the "big guys" (ie MSFT, AAPL, GOOGL etc..) start to give clarity to their employees that WFH will be the norm.
To counter-balance the solitude, offices will be team building destinations.
WeWork may transform itself into a "business travel company" powered by technology of course. Companies will host off sites once or twice a month in different parts of the country - or the world - and WeWork is positioned to own the entire vertical of managing transportation, housing, event spaces, food...
One of my clients is worried about this, that employees will get hurt from having bad office chairs, and-what-not, and having to pay up for it. The solution during the pandemic has been to allow employees to come in and grab chairs, monitors, etc., from the office.
It's an interesting development of what a workspace is.
If anything, I have more energy due to less distractions and this gives me more energy for collaboration.
The extra energy also makes the collaboration that does happen better because I can concentrate easier.
Apart from that, my productivity working on code as an engineer has gone up probably 2x what it was in the office.
One of my favorite pieces of trivia is how social greetings changed post-industrialization.
Now when you meet people you ask: “What do you do?” which implies a utilitarian view of ‘what is your role in the economy’
Pre-industrialization, one would ask: “Who are you?” e.g. where is your family from, how are you related, who do you know, where do you live, etc.
I've been imagining a scenario where a bunch of WFH people collectively pick a random town near a decent CS college, move there, and once they have settled in, begin cooking up their own startups.
A VP recently told me that he expected 15-20% attrition if he demanded a return to the office once this is over.
On the coffee shop front, the most likely outcome is that remote workers will move to smaller cities away from NYC and coastal CA. Coffee shops and restaurants will still get patrons, but there will be more of them in Denver and Austin than SF and LA.
Bars and restaurants have been either on strict lockdown or reduced capacity since early March, a lot of them that have been around for decades are closing.
So now we have an exodus of small businesses, tech workers, and reduced tourism. The city will have to convince tech workers and small business owners to come back while they probably increase taxes to work off the deficit. The lack of small businesses and increase in squalor will impact tourism even after COVID and the longer COVID goes on the more damage there is.
I don’t see the SF govt cutting expenses until it’s absolutely necessary. Overall it seems like an uphill battle. I feel really bad for the small business owners in SF who are likely never going to recover from this.
in general, yeah, but do the shops and restaurants that exist to serve downtown / office park workers need to survive? I'm not convinced that WFH changes the net demand for these services. if these businesses move away from places people commute to and move into places where people actually live, I would consider that an improvement. I'd much rather spend my food budget on happy hour at a local pub than a rushed 30 minute lunch.
Here in the UK,I'm hoping this will happen. We've been suffering the 'death' of the local high street for years, and many local communities are non-existent because there are no longer local social hubs. For every coffee shop or pub closed in the centre of the cities, another could open in a rural area. We'd all be better off for this, I know it.
The reason food/drink service does so well around offices is that there are 1000s of people in multi-floor offices in one area. All within 5-20mins walk of good places to go.
An average town may have more people, but they are spread over miles in houses or flats. Unless you live right in the town centre the convenience of going out to eat/drink is just not the same.
Popping out after work with friends (or just colleagues) is convenient for everyone as well. At home you have to round up your mates and all agree on a time.
I'm sure co-working spaces will still have high demand so many office spaces would turn into that.
None of these are truly permanent, unless the company started that way (gitlab, for example). Just as they shifted from office to compelled WFH, they will shift back, with some lag time, when this is over.
Microsoft: Getting tired of WFH.
Shows who really believes in their own "Team" tools and remote working software :)
- Microsoft - Twitter - Facebook - Shopify - Slack - Upwork
Hilariously enough, they used to allow this kind of remote till 2018, when they killed it.
It's the circle of reactive tech decisions, I guess.
My suspicion is that companies that will fully embrace the "internet way" of doing things will have success.
Took a Pandemic to change these companies minds about WFH or flex schedules, etc.