Silicon Valley firms in no hurry to open up offices despite easing of virus ban
reuters.com
reuters.com
Silicon Valley has high salaries and very long commute times. But how does this apply to medium sized cities with low commute times and lower salaries?
How much more productive will employees be if they don’t have a dedicated office and if their commute time was like 15 minutes instead of the 2 hours someone from Silicon Valley may spend?
How productive is it for workers who have to work from home in their bedroom?
I’ve noticed this split in opinion from higher ups who have higher pay and thus have large, finished home offices versus others lower on the totem pole who don’t.
Also, I think WFH tends to isolate and stovepipe employees even more than they already were, which is a problem especially in larger organizations.
And the odds of fortuitous interactions drops dramatically while the latency for some red tape processes increases as well, since you have to fight an email chain with people with more and more disparate work schedules (and less tacit knowledge transfer and trust-building).
I think the narrative of WFH success is in many ways driven by the people for which WFH is a godsend due to really long commute times or having poor office workplaces (like open plan) and who either function well with very little guidance or who don’t but dislike the guidance.
But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
(Still a huge fan of having the option of WFH, but there have been massive productivity losses in my workplace from strict WFH requirements... in part because we do a mix of fundamentally physical lab work, not just sitting in front of a computer.)
Who doesn't have open plan offices? There are about three people left in the tech industry these days who still have a private office.
> But it’s potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it’s a bad idea.
Working in an open plan space is simply inferior to working remotely, except in rare cases where your team is in a bullpen and working full time on a specific project together. It's inferior for engineers because of distractions, and it's inferior for the company because of real estate costs.
I think there is a happy medium, where maybe offices cut back to about 25% capacity or so. People would instead drop in and work like a university library. You could go there and print stuff out if you didn't have a printer at home. If your laptop blew up, you could go there and get a replacement from IT. If you preferred, you could rent out a substantial desk with several monitors and a good chair if you didn't have the space at home, or focused better in that environment. You could schedule in person meetings with your team in a well appointed conference room if you wanted. You could host social events. Maybe even a gym or childcare facility. I think that's my ideal for the office environment going forward: less a sweatshop and more a clubhouse.
I'm not sure how many tech workers didn't already have some kind of desktop computing arrangement at home but I have to imagine it's a miniscule number.
> I've never heard of a business offering a stipend or remote assistance subsidy of any sort to their workers to cover any of this, from whatever great savings are reaped from saving on real estate costs.
My company does, I'm sure it's become pretty standard lately.
I thought the same as you, and then I saw a lot of people at work not have home setups, either because of space or other reasons. It was surprisingly common!
Sure, but it's your personal desktop computing arrangement -- not the company's.
With WFH, the company is effectively renting that space from you so you can work in it, but you're charging them $0.
Once again, in SV/NYC/etc very few due to real estate costs. Most of my peers who aren't married have room mates.
I recall Shopify was in the news early last year for offering employees $1000 stipend for WFH supplies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-shopify-gives-em...
I switched jobs during the pandemic. My previous job offered $25/mo extra to help cover utilities, $250 to cover any wfh purchases and let me borrow any office supplies, including monitors, chairs, etc... Although this company instituted a 20% pay cut for 3 months which made that all seem very silly.
My new company is doing practically the same thing, but without the pay cut and is much less strict about the type of WFH purchases.
My commute was only ever a 10-15min bike ride, but Ive personally benefited greatly from the WFH switch and my productivity has been through the roof. I definitely agree with you that maintaining some space to meet and work would be nice.
"Simply inferior" is a bit of a bold statement. Lots of people want to go back to their office for various reasons. For me it's wanting to see my co-workers (which are my friends at this point) in person every day. It's certainly not rare.
However this is all predicated on open office being a layout where your desk is made of wood, hardwood flooring instead of carpet, your coworkers Aeron is 5’ or less from yours, massive windows close by, and there aren’t any forms of walls other than computer monitors. Cubicles require me to attend therapy.
Unfortunately introverts are not well represented in management or the types of people who make decisions about seating.
Also unfortunately, many (most?) software developers are introverts.
I absolutely despise open office plans. I can't work in them.
My productivity shot an incredible amount as soon as I had no choice than to work from home in March, and everybody else in the office. Saved 2 hours a day. And I can use my own bathroom... that alone is worth it.
This is the opposite of my personal experience. The energy of other people distracts and interrupts. Collaboration that interrupts focused solo work has rarely if ever been a net gain.
There's a big range from true open-plan space (long tables with employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder next to each other) to private offices with doors.
Somewhere in between are traditional "cube farms" which provide some amount of semi-privacy, less distracting nightlines, noise reduction, and feeling of personal space. Most of the companies I've seen are still more like this.
Oracle is one company in the Valley with private locking offices with permanent full soundproof doors and outside windows with mountain views. I had one as an intern!
Sorry just want to nitpick - this really has not a whole lot to do with MBAs or any degree specifically. I think it would be a little bit more beneficial to swap MBA with management. Many of the things you're discussing are true of engineering managers, researchers with PHDs, and accountants and not specifically one group of people with one degree - they don't run the whole world and have exclusive ownership of "all the bad decisions".
Blaming MBAs for how companies behave is like blaming people with software engineering degree for writing buggy code. Not having people with MBA degree won’t magically make your company better, same as employing developers without a diploma won’t magically make your product more stable.
Now a lot of the time its gamed for points on immigration systems.
But you most of the time need also basic knowledge of fundamentals, and that can be enough to be just ok at your job.
It indeed is. Just the other day, when the news came out that Backblaze is sending private info to Facebook, the top comments on HN were along the lines of "I guess some MBA decided it was going to make more money, so they did it."
It really takes a special level of blind hatered to blame an MBA (where there is no evidence one was involved) for sending one's information to a company founded and lead by a Harvard computer science major. But yes, let's blame all ills in this world on MBAs.
EDIT: Another example I remember was that commenters here started the usual MBA-bashing on an article about how GE's financial engineering became their downfall, until other pointed out the person behind it was GE's former CEO, whose BSc, MSc, and PhD are all in chemical engineering.
I think there's a current trend -- perhaps not entirely unjustified -- of skepticism towards academic elitism and a bit of a divide, in the U.S. at least, between those in ivory towers who issue edicts, and boots on the ground. Not taking a side, here, especially being that I'm in management.
I do have to say, when I hear of "ethicists" and I recently spoke to someone who taught "medical ethics" while at Google they fired a controversial "AI Ethicist" I have to raise an eyebrow. Ethics are morals. Somehow someone studied them and can tell us the correct ones. Maybe I've mischaracterized this in my head, but it sounds awfully similar to a priesthood.
There are some cases where it actually is perfectly ok to extract value from a business before winding it down. But that doesn't mean that all of a sudden anybody with an MBA degree is some sort of ruthless capitalist.
I got an MBA because I wanted to learn more about business, network, and hopefully adjust my own personal career path.
I can say for Fisher (Ohio State) we spent a lot of time focusing on not just great ways to make money or improve a business, but on people too. At least that was my experience. I'd guess if you spend a lot of time around "ruthless MBAs" you should take a look at what universities they're coming from and see if they have anything in common.
That’s the main problem I have with MBA sentiment here. Somehow knowing about something is bad. That’s a very naive viewpoint.
I didn’t experience a lot of what you described in my MBA program as an engineer, though. Usually it was the opposite, but I think that comes with the maturity of the program I was in where you knew that not only was engineering important and valuable, but so were sales, accounting, nursing, and all sorts of other disciplines.
It doesn't feel that way though because having an MBA doesn't guarantee a minimum floor of capability. There is no such thing as losing your MBA for making a dumb decision.
Yea, i'm very pro-WFH, but i've built my life around it. I own a house with an office. I can't imagine trying to WFH on a couch or some desk in my living room while my wife cooks/watches TV/etc.
With that said i still hope people see more chances to WFH, and can start buying/renting homes with this in mind. I have a three bedroom house, turned into 2 offices 1 bedroom, and it worked wonderfully for my wife and I during these WFH times. My wife fwiw was not a WFH person before Covid, but she is currently, and she has adapted quite easily with a dedicated office. One of her coworkers however lived in a tiny apartment with two children and no office. Her QOL was miserable.
I believe MBAs are going to love this new world order. The privilege to show your face in the office will become a sign that you've "arrived" and all your time before that will be working towards that privilege.
Any office will be the new corner office.
Related to that I’m interested how office cliques will work. It’s pretty damn easy to exclude someone if everyone is working from home. Unless they are scouring calendars they may not even know they were left out of an important meeting. Seems like a nightmare for a office with more passive-aggressive types.
Face-to-face conversations have such a huge latency/throughput advantage over online discussions that the remote employees are typically left out of the loop.
(At least, that's been my observation at dedicated remote vs hybrid companies. Maybe things will change post-pandemic, but I'm not optimistic.)
Offer remote work and then offer no advancement opportunities until they quit, so you don't take the unemployment hit. Voila, you have shifted the costs unto them to go find a new job.
That's the definition of a senior developer and senior employees.
For junior developers I've worked in pre-covid with juniors in wfh environments and success rates are lower. For everyone 1 developer who finds there way you have another who can't setup there environment. If someone held your hand in school or if you relied on working together I could see things falling apart quickly online. I feel like the new grads will have wfh school experience from this year will adapt well.
I’ve had a couple interns lately, and the WFH experience with them has been much less successful than past in-person internships have been. They’re able to basically moonlight on a remote project, and there has been actually MORE handholding required as it’s much harder to judge when they’re struggling or if they have things under control. There are a lot more non-work distractions for them and they have developed less camaraderie between each other as lunch times, social activities, and fortuitous interactions have been rarer. The lack of established trust also has significant overhead.
So I agree that this is in many ways a senior vs junior and a maturity divide, however these are digital-native students and they’re still struggling, so I’m not sure I agree it’s going to get much better. I think some of the WFH productivity gains are coasting on pre-pandemic trust and implicit knowledge transfer that aren’t happening as much any more. You can see how hard it is for young people in particular by seeing the drops in performance due to school-at-home.
(However, WFH is indeed forcing some familiarity with remote work for many institutions that resisted technology and teleworking arrangements, so there definitely has been some improvement in some areas. It has been a godsend for some people, and that will be a lasting benefit of 2020’s forced WFH experiment.)
Often you don't even know what questions you need to ask, and the give-and-take of a 1:1 face to face meeting provokes all sorts of useful tangents.
MOST technology knowledge involves a good deal of tacit knowledge which an only be transmitted person-to-person in an intern/mentor/supervisor mode.
So simpler tasks that have zero barriers-to-entry for automation can be done without this. But for more complex stuff, not so much. This is the same for B2B sales - that will ALWAYS be person-to-person - it simply can't work via e-commerce like selling books or CDs on Amazon.
What advice would you give to an intern's mentor to improve the remote internship experience?
Also, an existing vs new employee thing (which is not the same). I'm doing fine with WFH because of the relationships I have built here over the last 5 years and my knowledge of the company culture/organization/processes. If I were a new employee (even coming in as a senior level experienced hire) I would not have any of that and it would be far harder to get established. Usually by the 5 year mark I'm looking to hop, but I've been holding off for exactly that reason.
Don't worry: It won't be the last time it happens. How many shops have I heard say they are "Just like Google" only to find out that what they mean by that is that they have beanbag chairs?
> But it's potentially a lot cheaper up front not to have offices, just like open plan offices were cheaper, so I fear MBAs may discount these drawbacks and make WFH the default in many, many places where it's a bad idea.
They'll learn that they need a higher caliber of employees to make it work. Incidentally, these employees are also now hirable by competing SV firms that can and will outbid them.
That depends. As an ex-FAANG employee, I happily add a sizeable premium to my salary at the prospect of working at one of those again.
This was something I wanted to do as well - only to find out that the local coworking doesn't let you do calls in the space - you have to walk out into halls or limited number of "booths". And I found this common in coworking spaces around here. Which is a stark contrast with how open layout offices I worked in worked (you were expected to keep noise down to tolerable levels but if you didn't want to be disturbed by noise you had headphones).
The idea sounds excellent - I live 5 walking from a nearby coworking space that's really well equipped - but in practice it's not ideal. + having to leave my equipment around strangers isn't the best either and I don't want to meet randoms in a coworking space before I can feel comfortable leaving a wallet on the desk when going to the toilet.
I might end up renting a private office there - but the smallest office they have is 2 people and that's a lot more expensive than a coworking desk.
I agree with everything else you said - I love walking out with my wife and son around lunch time and flexible work hours are much better - I tend to be most productive later in the day anyway - which usually meant I spent mornings in the office socialising and procrastinating and then having to work late - I get to spend that time with my family now.
People who thought they could talk as loud as they want / hold an impromptu meeting by your desk and thought it was your problem to sort out if you didn’t like it are a lot of the reason why I hated open plan offices so much.
Wildly distracting and frustrating when people do this.
No noise canceling headphones do not block out voices.
This is why that old, stuffy, sclerotic behemoth named IBM used to have individual offices with doors.
Funny that.
It is like that when people go there to socialize. It is different if company culture treats offices as places to work in.
As somebody who seems to be in a leadership position, you need to realize that building relationships and improving morale are part of your work.
I don't have a home office either and no one would confuse me with being poor. Until COVID, I had no use for one.
I agree that a lot of people can't afford a full size home office. Nonetheless most of them will probably also only have a small cubicle or less at work.
My statement doesn't negate what you said, but do keep this perspective in mind also.
Is that a perfect fix? No. But many remote friendly companies are already doing something like that. In 2020 people didnt really have a choice and many had kids at home. That is not a normal WFH situation for many.
Similarly, people who homeschool their kids often remind others that having your kids at home learning remotely because the school is closed, is not the same as the usual homeschooling. (And similarly, many of them hope that current experience will make more people consider homeschooling as an option.)
I know lots of 'lower totem pole' employees with a nicer WFH setup than many managers.
From what I've seen, there is a more significant reason higher ups like WFH. PG wrote an essay about the creators schedule versus the managers schedule. A managers schedule (the higher ups) spend their day flip flopping between meetings during each hour increment. Imagine having to walk/transport to a different building on/off campus for a new meeting a many times a day. It can take a lot of valuable time & potentially be exhausting. In WFH, you just click a new link to join a zoom meeting. Much more convenient.
The people doing the low level work such as coding tend to be younger. They are looking to make office connections and define their career path. Working out of an office allows for progression in both.
The large organization I am consulting at right now had a larger than average number of employees (also higher level employees) quit over the lockdown which has given management the idea that WFH frays the social ties and makes it easier for people to consider leaving.
It does fray social ties. We're social beings, made for face to face interactions. That's how we operate. There's a reason almost every language has a proverb along the lines of "out of sight, out of mind".
Many would argue that eating right and exercising is healthy, yet 30%+ of people in developed countries are overweight and the percentage is increasing.
At some point we have to accept reality. People are flawed (yet they somehow manage to live their lives :-) ).
For others they prefer their co-workers over forced social socializion due to family relations.
For YEARS now, the #1 most reliable way to see your username on the front page of HN is to post a link about David Heinemeier Hansson promoting remote work, or a story skewering Marissa Mayer for squashing it at Yahoo.
It's only after 12 months of sitting at home in our sweatpants going crazy, that I'm starting to see more people discuss offices a bit wistfully.
There is a huge difference between advocating for the option to WFH for yourself and arguing to force everyone to WFH. Few if any are advocates for the latter.
The thing is, 100% WFH means that you probably kneecap your career if the others don't do the same.
Mixed environments are significantly more difficult to sustain. FTF discussions are such big wins when it comes to volume of information shared and ability to quickly redirect to other topics as needed, that the employees who are remote will often find themselves cut out of the loop entirely.
So, given the choice, I'd much rather work for a remote-only company than be left out of the important conversations. It's not a deliberate decision to exclude the remote workers, it just happens naturally.
(As I said elsewhere, it's possible that will change post-pandemic, but I think that it's mostly an inevitable outcome of the typical office dynamics.)
Remote-first companies have specific policies about meetings and unscheduled conversations. For example, all meetings must be announced, available over video, recorded, with a write up at the end. All spontaneous chats happen over email, slack, or a wiki to make sure they are documented.
This levels the playing field for anyone working remote, so that they aren't completely isolated or left out of important decisions by those in the office.
That's just anti-human. I'm all for working from home but people in the office are going to chat just as the people working from home are going too. The bitch sessions about the boss just happen in the 1 on 1 video calls.
REI sold their corporate campus in a move to 100% WFH:
We have made the decision to pursue a sale of our buildings and land in Bellevue’s Spring District—and, with that sale, to step toward a new model for our headquarters that will better serve the way we live, work and act as a force for positive change.
Remote working will move from a temporary solve to a more engrained, supported, and normalized model for many of our headquarters employees.
Target recently sold its downtown offices as well:
Minnesota-based Target says that flexibility is behind the decision to shut down the company's City Center operation in downtown Minneapolis, and relocate 3,500 employees to other locations in the city and elsewhere.
"None of us knew what the future would hold or how long we’d be working from home, but in just one year we’ve proven that we can drive incredible results, together, from our kitchens and basements and living rooms," Kremer wrote in her email.
With the end of the pandemic hopefully in site, Kremer says Target is moving toward a hybrid system called "Flex for Your Day" that will incorporate both virtual and on-site work and collaboration when employees "gradually return to headquarters later this year."
Capitol One is doing the same thing:
Capital One Financial Corp. said the majority of employees at its U.S. call centers for cards will work from home even after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
For the rest of its staff, the card giant extended remote operations until the end of March, according to an internal memo. Capital One had previously said employees would work remotely until at least the end of this year.
At the end of the day markets are efficient. Some will make mistakes and loose, some will do the right thing and prosper.
Work from home is attractive because the alternative is so awful, I watch old movies from the 50's and everyone had an office sat back with their feet on the desk while thinking, also long commutes weren't a huge thing - everyone caught the bus, long lunches were a thing, granted hours were long then but things haven't improved. The modern workplace is a toxic environment, working from home is a little better but really its pretty awful to - no socialising, no energy etc.
The easing of bans without a vaccine is dumb. Once you have the vaccine, then you're free to go back to normal.
Without it, nothing has really changed.
Government policy around restrictions has been stupid since the beginning. It makes sense for companies to protect employees and wait for the vaccine - especially now that it's so close.
In California the vaccine is still restricted, but hopefully we'll get wide availability by the end of April. I've see lots of people on Twitter get it with nebulous pre-existing conditions. I wonder how many people are just lying.
I won't discount how hard remote work has been for many people, but the fact of the matter is, continuing to do it for a little while longer is far less risky from the company's perspective than pulling the trigger in the first place, 1 year ago. It's largely been a successful move.
As for lying to get the vaccine, yeah. I'd say that once the 65+ population had been eligible for awhile, and the state opened it up to a lot more people, whatever moral hesitancy towards lying that there might have been, has largely evaporated. I've heard plenty about strategies, what vendors don't check.
I'm no in a huge hurry, so I'll wait. But that's just me.
Every state and locality can have different rules, which I get is frustrating from a consistency and public messaging standpoint, but people get equally frustrated with a top-down approach where the rules don't make sense everywhere. Each locality has generally started with healthcare workers, old-age homes, and 65+.. beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted. shrug
It doesn't seem to be affecting the speed of vaccinations, which seems quite good, so I'm okay with waiting. I'm also somewhat okay with people jumping the line because at this point I think it's mostly important to get the numbers up, not gatekeeping.
I agree it's important to get the numbers up at this point, so just make it GA.
> "beyond that I think there are diminishing returns with slicing and dicing the populace more carefully, so some states throw open the doors and others try to be more targeted."
I agree - which is why I'd like it to open up. 40% of people over 16 in SF now have had it - let me get it too. https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1375131053518508033
I have friends that work retail floors who are required to work in person, but aren't considered essential, so no early vaccination. WTF?! Just because a job is deemed less useful, that doesn't make the people less susceptible...
<rant> Corporate America has grown so greedy, so disconnected from reality, it hurts a lot of people without notice nor reprecussions. </rant>
Food processing gets priority because closures of large facilities due to outbreaks caused significant disruption last year. Kind of meh to reward an industry for having low spare capacity, but it is what it is.
Retail, restaurants, etc workers have higher risks, but disruption is limited. Maybe a restaurant has to close (and several did over the past year), but there are other restaurants. Same for retail, even supermarkets.
I think there's a limit to how many people you can prioritize over general population before people start really gaming the rules even though I know some people have been gaming the rules since the beginning. It's not reasonable to expect vaccination facilities to check patients' employment to determine priority, so it's going to be on people to follow them.
My SO is protecting herself as best she can, but every time she comes home from work, she has to hope everything went perfectly and she's not bringing it home to me.
It's a bit like, "Shit, shit, shit! I was coughed on, talked to without their mask, etc. I hope all my protective gear holds up and my shower cleans me up before I see my SO," or more simply, "Shit, I hope today isn't the day I kill my SO." That's a LOT of pressure.
Oh and so you understand how dire our situation is: we live in/share a studio apartment.
Edit to add: The other industries have workers in the same situation too, I don't mean to disregaurd them. Those living with the (young && vulnerable) have to hope/pray/whatever they do everything right. And practically no state cares about that situation.
You could do age bands to get old people in, but once they stop coming just keep expanding the age or open it up to everyone.
I'm leaning towards favoring first come first serve. The early stories around people throwing out expired vaccine were awful.
Actual agricultural work is rarely the ‘farmer driving his tractor in a big empty field’ - contract labor has pretty harsh working conditions in many cases.
Last week, the Governor threw open the sluice gates and announced general availability starting today, so I grabbed a vaccine appointment faster than you can say "RTX 3060 at MSRP". I just got my shot today... so I naturally wondered if I should start obsessively refreshing the Pennsylvania vaccine page like I had been the Utah one. I'm already bugging friends and family in Utah whenever appointments are open, so I figured I'd Slack ping the entire company once Pennsylvania general availability is announced. I go and check... and that state's still in Phase 1A.
Both states have similar per-capita vaccination rates - it's not like Pennsylvania is actually behind on shots, since the vaccine distribution in the US is based on state population. In Utah, we got 75% of 65+ before we opened it up to 50+ and people with pre-existing conditions; and about half of 50+ before today when we went to general availability. I say that the priority system did it's job: cases are down and the most vulnerable (old people) are protected. Every state should be moving to either general availability if they're at the same benchmarks, or at the very least an "anyone who can't work remote" standard (which would exclude my entire team, but w/e).
(The ideal vaccination system would be to specifically target superspreaders. If we could do that, then we could achieve herd immunity at really low vaccination rates. However, that's still speculative since there is no diagnostic criterion for that and "just forcibly vaccinate anyone who violated a mask order" probably isn't a great proxy for superspreading.)
As a nominally-healthy, young(ish), 100% remote worker, I'm focusing more on facilitating the more-vulnerable/eligible to get vaccinated ASAP, both to protect them, and to keep that curve growing toward herd immunity.
"Food processing plants" (really, mostly slaughterhouses) had the largest workplace COVID outbreaks last year. This is how management responded: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/business/tyson-coronavirus-la...
First link from a quick googling: https://www.bbc.com/news/53137613
It’s not “the science” it’s the arguments. Throughout this pandemic “science” as authority has argued masks don’t work, or that they only work for healthcare workers, or that second order effects make it worse, or that it’s not spread via the air, etc.
The school arguments are similarly dumb. In an enclosed poorly ventilated space the disease will spread and infect parents at home.
I don’t buy that schools are somehow magic places not affected by this. Just because kids don’t have severe cases often doesn’t mean they don’t transmit the disease.
Unless there’s a compelling mechanism that suggests otherwise I put “schools are safe to open” alongside “masks don’t work” in the group of dumb arguments that don’t make sense when you think about it for ten seconds.
And to be brutally honest, closing bars and restaurants so that schools can open seems like a fair trade to me (and our child is six months old, so this isn't a self-serving argument).
https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/covid-19-outbreak-data/reso...
There have been 119 outbreaks at California schools in the last 2 months. That's hardly what I'd call "safe".
In both cases, the important thing is the exponential growth (shrinkage?) in the other direction. Not the absolute numbers right now.
Also are you sure about that metric? This chart looks like deaths/day are 2X above summer levels (30 vs 15): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/10/nation/latest-coronav...
"Only" 2X deaths per day when cases are 5X per day is an improvement, but I am not rushing to eat indoors or go to a concert or gym. In fact, I am nervous as hell that loosened restrictions are going to increase spread the way they did last fall, and a bunch of people are going to get sick, suffer, and maybe die who wouldn't if we just buckled down for another month or two and got vaccinated.
To my knowledge they’re not saying that and that’s the important bit.
Only after a critical mass of people are vaccinated, otherwise vaccinated people can still spread the virus to those who are unvaccinated.
That said, masks will still likely be common for a while due to unknowns around variants and just the logistical hurdle of not knowing who has had the vaccine and who is lying about having it so they don't have to wear a mask.
Herd immunity relies on the fact that either having been vaccinated or recovered from the disease prevents you from spreading the disease to those that have not yet been vaccinated or can't get vaccinated.
That can get misscommunicated/misunderstood, and in addition lots of public health folks have been very conservative about saying anything that wasn't demonstrated in the trials, which didn't measure overall infection rates (they tracked symptomatic infections).
Data is finally coming out about overall infection rates in vaccinated people and they appear to be very low.
Still though I agree it would have been useful to regularly test all trial participants - the US really could have done a lot better job with testing more generally.
The studies coming out that did regular testing focused on easily reached populations (medical workers) that may not have been representative of the wider population (so not suitable for the trials).
Maybe I'm underestimating complexity (typical for an outsider), but just seemed surprising to me when I heard that.
"There are two main types of immunity you can achieve with vaccines. One is so-called 'effective' immunity, which can prevent a pathogen from causing serious disease, but can't stop it from entering the body or making more copies of itself. The other is 'sterilising immunity', which can thwart infections entirely, and even prevent asymptomatic cases. The latter is the aspiration of all vaccine research, but *surprisingly rarely achieved*." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210203-why-vaccinated-people-may-still-be-able-to-spread-covid-19
"Nearly 40 years ago it was observed that sterilizing immunity against [Malaria] could be achieved by exposing human volunteers to the bites of irradiated mosquitoes carrying sporozoites in their salivary glands." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/sterilizing-immunityThat's pretty much where I'm at. I like the idea of hopping into the office maybe once or twice a week to interact with my co-workers, but otherwise I'm extremely productive at home especially without having to endure the 1-2 hours commute.
I joined a company last last year and they moved to this hybrid model once they found there was practically no efficiency loss with respect to moving everyone to remote. But some people still missed going into the office so they re-opened their physical offices albeit at limited capacity.
Is the question phrased in a way that distinguishes between "working remotely as you have during COVID times" vs. "working remotely post-COVID"
I think it's important to distinguish that in the mind of the responder. At the very least, get people thinking in terms of "What would WFH be like if the kids were at school much of the day?" or "What would WFH be like if we could meet with friends at 17:30?" or whatever.
What we've experienced over the last year is far less social, and far more stressful than what WFH could be.
Personally, I'd like to WFH most of the time, with sprint & release planning sessions in person.
Your company has to pay for desk space and for meeting space?
Yes, I think that's an entirely reasonable expectation to be the norm. It's what was the norm/expectation when I started and I do not see a reason that should change. My boss has said that it will most likely be the expectation once it's safe to return to the office, so I am not alone.
> Your company has to pay for desk space and for meeting space?
Yes, actually. They aren't paying for my home office and it wasn't an expectation in the original employment contract. Further, we work with specialized scientific hardware. We need the space anyway.
* At home schooling * More people needing help at odd hours (nights/weekends) * Lots of normally well adjusted folks stressed/angry about minor things
That and there was a lot of corporate "make sure to take time for yourself" and "be realistic about schedules", however there were clearly roles/orgs where that was not an option.
Specifically, if you’re in the 63% of people who want to “pop into the office sometimes,” and you come in on some random Tuesday.... is anyone else even there?
It seems like the probability of seeing the people you want to see by chance (when 83% are either always or usually remote) is very low.
So my guess is that for the hybrid thing to still have the social aspect of office work it probably needs to be paired with a policy like “we all come to work on Tuesdays.” But if you do that then the all-remote crowd isn’t getting what they want (they still need to live in travel range if they have to be in the office once a week).
So the alternative is to do something more like “we all come to the office for one week every quarter,” and in that case it’s more of a company retreat than normal work.
So as I said, I’m curious how things will unfold as life opens back up.
My best guess is we’ll end up converging on 2-4 different archetypical models which will become part of a company’s identity and recruiting pitch, and people will self select into the work style they prefer.
Your personal desks go away replaced with work stations / long tables where anyone can dock. It become more like a school libruary where everyone is working on different things .
Then you have these community meetings every few months where everyone comes in for a meeting but there are not enough work stations so everyone just hangs around until people trickle home.
I wish more companies were talking about the "we all work from the same place for a week or two" per quarter. It gives almost all of the flexibility of working remote along with much of the benefit of being in person. Plus as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
A few days per week in the office is the worst of both systems. Some remote workers and some office workers isn't a ton better.
True, but I think that range expands significantly if one comes in only once a week. Living 2 or more hours away might become reasonable, and even getting a hotel room once a week can easily pay for itself when taking into account housing costs.
My work are now looking at getting rid of a load of desks because they are expensive and unproductive.
Far better to spend the money on free beer for collaboration days.
I tend to be a fairly black-and-white thinker, so it's easier to envision 100% office or 100% WFH, and harder to get my head around a mixed arrangement. Particularly if that mixed arrangement means I don't have my 'own' desk and equipment in the office.
That said, even though I've done WFH in bits and pieces here and there, I've enjoyed WFH this past year a lot more than I thought I would. I'm thinking of my post-Covid schedule being in the office tues-thurs, so that I still have a consistent block of time where I'm going in "every day" for a few days, rather than every other day.
how did they measure this?
We hit all, so no measurable loss on productivity.
Folks are overall more productive, yes, but at a cost of more hours worked. The marginal productivity and its rate of improvement is not as high.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/research/the-...
- people get equal access to important projects
- businesses do not try to cut the pay of remote workers
- in office folks work to be inclusive of their remote counterparts
I now have a multi-office hybrid team and these are the things I'm focusing on.
I have yet to interview with a company that offers a truly competitive SV TC while allowing the employee to be remote forever. Most every says, “you need to choose where you will be based as your pay is dictated on that, remote pays less than in-person in our SV office”. If you think you’re gonna get $400k+ tc in BFE, you’re mistaken. There are much cheaper people in Romania available to do that.
Honestly, I’d prefer full remote and full in person teams. I hate dealing with remote workers when the majority is in office and I hate being remote when the majority are in office. I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
I'd like to solve the use case where a dev in Oklahoma makes $80k or a dev in Texas makes just above six figures while doing the same work. Maybe that helps clarify the problem. I can't accept that the delta is just for COLA and commute to work.
> I’ve had to deal with both before and it’s always bad. I’d be cool with remote teams but I pray we don’t have to mix. It’s such a huge drain to accommodate both styles in one team.
It works okay, as long as you don't have any grossly strong personalities on your team.
The delta is because $80k is the best option an OK resident has (or the best option the person selling money thinks the OK resident has, and same for TX resident at $100k. If the OK resident accepts $80k, then this shows the person selling money was correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
Employers are selling money, employees are selling labor, if they agree to a price then both parties have agreed to what they think their best option is at that time.
Until businesses provide free transport to work and pay employees for their commute time I'd say it's reasonable to offer lower pay for remote work than on-premise work. This doesn't have to involve cutting pay but could rather take the form of a commuting subsidy or an on-premise bonus. The lack of a commute is a real tangible benefit and should be included in any compensation package.
This is what I don't understand - company essentially gets a worker + office in one package and they think this is of lesser value than a worker in their office?
This sounds great in theory, but in practice I feel like it actually encourages and even rewards those that choose not to come in to the office. Which might not be inherently bad, but I don't think companies should be expected to do that if those aren't the things they want to reward.
> Box Inc said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
That's probably the most reasonable timeline for tech workers. And even then, we'll probably see tepid support for that. Things aren't going to go back to normal in 2021.
What I want is not another day sitting in a god forsaken office after sitting in crappy traffic but rather the ability to go have a coffee, grab some lunch or just hang out and "Talk shop" with people regardless of being direct co-workers, friends, peers and whatnot. Those are the kinds of people who called me, messaged me and asked me how I was doing. THe only other former co-workers who keep up with me are ones who quit and found new jobs too - it's like since we're not still suffering we're no longer friends and all too often we see that as fulfilling social interactions without question.
I guess with hindsight I actually see the "office" as anti-social - it creates bad/poor behaviors, people find solace in common suffering and 9 times out of 10 all of my co-workers were actually dicks who only showed up to work to avoid their unhealthy home life and again, with hindsight, I see they tried making me ancillary to their unhealth work life too.
hard to explain it in a small text box, but I guess i just see the office environment as extremely fake, demoralizing and depressing - even though i've had some great memories through it - i'd rather not be captive to sitting in a cubicle chair and actually develop much more rewarding, enriching and valuable experiences that translate to more productivity and creativity in the end.
Often times i don't even get to choose my co-workers and if I did, those teams are often short lived and i think that corporate disruption to things that matter on a human to human level is something we're refusing to challenge/change because "it is the way it is". I get thrown on a new team, and its not new friends, it's now colleagues to suffer with and build empty relationships.
That's an entire mini-lifetime I'd be giving my employer. And I don't think I ever will have to - I can force myself to be remote the rest of my working life. And that mini-lifetime is mine..and that's priceless.
I've had 1 or 2 coworkers out of hundreds I became any level of "friends" with, and the closest of whom I didn't even work directly with. Actually, one of the coworkers I'm friends with, I met in a remote team with us living across the country from each other.
The option to go as I please (which would probably average one or two days a week) would be excellent, though!
Some people have been really struggling with WFH and just can't make it work well for them, and they understandably want to get back to the office. That's great, and they should do it! But why not also let people who have been thriving under WFH continue to do it?
I have extensive experience managing and working remote and non-remote and I've never seen any benefit to non-remote work. Productivity and creativity are higher with wfh and stress and burnout are way lower.
It took me a few years to realize the effects of loneliness and the lack of social interaction.
But I do have one extra point: if work is fully remote (i.e., every employee is remote) things work much much better than when only part of the team is remote. You need to at least make sure your manager is also fully remote.
Huh? The reason why offices of big tech companies are closed is SOLELY due to covid.
But here's a fun question: If you aren't permanently in the office, do you need a personal, permanent desk in the office? Because that is going to be the first cut that comes when we all "go back, some of the time". And half the people I pose this question to get upset about it.
My own prediction is that teams are going to book sets of desks together the same way we book meeting rooms. They're shared and you'd better have a reservation.
But "your" desk with your photo of the spouse and kids, your knick-knacks, your notebooks and "your" monitor? I doubt you'll ever have that again.
What is the quote again?
"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. " -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
They already had a heavy work from home presence, but it was typically 2-3 days a week with some scheduled collab time for teams in the office.
AFAICT, most engineers have the option to put in 1-2 days a week remotely, and in-office days can be significantly shifted(i.e. I know a guy who works 6am-3pm).
FWIW, I might personalize an office, but if I have a cubicle I keep it pretty sterile. I'd be happy to share a cube with another engineer provided there was a way to switch the configuration(monitor positioning, keyboard, mouse) fairly quickly.
Companies will not want to spend money on office space to seat 100% of employees when the hybrid model means that on any given day there’s only ~50% in the office.
Thankfully they took your knick-knacks and set them up for you, so it wasn't a really big deal, but the idea of a permanent seat seems crazy to me.
If someone was to have said that giving up personalization was the price to pay for being mostly remote, I wouldn't have blinked and just asked where the garbage can was to dump my desk trinkets.
Have you ever worked on a facilities team? When a company removes a provision like an personal office and moves to open office layouts they also rationalize their facilities spending. Theoretically, it's easier to clean and maintain the space. More often it's an excuse to find a way to pay less.
I'm not convinced that employees or facility operators are motivated enough to deliver your vision of your stuff being at your desk in any sort of reasonable way. I can't imagine folks being comfortable with packing and unpacking their stuff regularly. For a lot of people, although not me, having people touch their stuff is the root problem. Having different people pack and unpack this regularly would be a nightmare for them.
In fact, the mouse and main notebook would probably go in their backpack.
It's actually amazing how everyone in favor of offices only ever talks about how it's better for socializing!
Working from in the pandemic is simply not the same as doing so voluntarily with a good setup and proper social circle. Hell, even remote first companies get together in person periodically. The framing of WFH as all or nothing forever is toxic and not true.
I personally want flexibility. There is little point for me to spend days in the office running from one conf room to another in 30 min increments, often taking up space that could be used for 5-6 people just by myself because I’m coordinating with another office a lot. On days like that my home standing desk is fine and more efficient. When we need to brainstorm and whiteboard, sure office is fine.
If they want to put an office near me, I'm glad to show up every now and again. But I'm sure as shit not moving to San Francisco.
Companies have to weigh the tradeoffs between whatever benefit you get from people being physically together when they're working versus the benefit you get from being able to hire anyone and not just people who either live within X miles or who are under 25 with no house and no family and will gladly move across the country for you without you needing to pay them seven figures for it.
Weirdly, when I interviewed somewhere pretty cool last fall they made it clear that this was an in person NYC role and I have to be OK with working in NYC (where I live, so it's not a real problem). It was a little odd to hear that from a tech company, tbqh. I ended up taking a different offer before we got to the end of that process, so I have no idea how that continues to shake out there.
As an aside, I kind of really like working in central time for a company operating in pacific time. Works well for my sleep schedule and gives me a couple hours of pure productivity in the morning before the rest of the company “wakes up.”
Yes, that's not going to happen.
Employees who were hired remotely during the pandemic, or even those who moved away during the pandemic, are not just going to move back once the pandemic is over.
It's especially clear for those who never lived in SV. These folks were happy to live and work locally in remote locations for their entire career so far. They chose to stay in their location for years, over moving to SV.
If you try to force them to move to SV, they'll just quit and continue working locally as they've done before.
If creating new knowledge and processes is important to you you just have to invest time and money into it. I’m not sure what worker proximity has to do with this? To clarify (a simplified version of) my management approach is to find the current organisational bottleneck and remove it ad nauseam. This can drive immense amounts of new knowledge and processes creation.
I do think you write off the value of worker proximity too quickly though. Particularly many other comments in this thread are talking about the real struggles junior devs and interns are facing getting up to speed without in-person mentorship. Those are the long-term impacts I'm worried about. By moving to full WFH has an organization just broken their hiring pipeline and thus is now doomed to fail as people retire and they can't grow?
Judging from how academics across the world, and even across decades if not centuries create new knowledge all the time, I'd say it's not a barrier to work remotely, whether that's in time or space.
Let’s not get overly greedy.
If I'm WFH forever, I need a larger living space with an office. It's been horrible the past year posting up in my kitchen, with the family running around the entire time. And since many companies are doing the 1-2 day in office hybrid model, it's not like I can just up and move to a cheaper area.
Or maybe have some dignity? How simply demanding a payment for use of your property is greedy? I don't understand this logic.
There's also a reasonableness part to any business relationship. The extreme entitlement of demanding work pay for your home because you're able to WFH during a pandemic just comes across as obnoxious.
It's like the employee that complains, "sushi again?!" in the free lunch cafeteria. Not everything is a zero sum game, your relationship with your employer doesn't need to be adversarial.
companies are merely a tool for extracting wealth. it's not a family. it has no emotions. it doesn't care about you, because it's a tool. so leverage it accordingly.
this doesn't mean you have to be nasty with people or unpleasant in any way.
Making it more unpalatable to companies just removes the option entirely and we're stuck with the status quo.
I value my time so much that I've taken decreased pay to work fully remotely without Zoom meetings. Freedom is part of my compensation and not something you can buy retroactively.
Trying to squeeze some bonus fees from employers for a little justice boner does nothing for me.
cool, good for you. I'm happy to take the money while you sleep easier at night.
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/income-and-deductions/ded...
You forgetting one of the ways people are exploited is the commute time and associated costs that are not compensated for now, a few square feet of office space in the home is nothing compared to the lost time.
Why the hell would they open up again?
I'm curious how it'll play out in the long run.
In a lot of ways I dream of a job I could well and truly leave at the office.
I'm saying now that we're in the info age, we can do away with that and for the first time work from home or the environment of our choosing.
Every worker has their own preference about where they work best. If you don't allow remote work, how do you weigh the risk of losing good employees who don't want to return to the office? If you go remote-first, what about employees who really value the office? If you try to do a mix, how do you do it well? And there are other effects to think about, like on costs, company culture, and productivity.
As time passes after COVID is no longer a large risk (which isn't guaranteed), I think we'll see tolerance for remote work decay at large companies. As fewer other companies offer flexibility for remote, the office will return across the board as the default.
I think the lasting change will be an increase in flexibility, though, like allowing WFH N days/week and more frequent exemptions for some employees to work fully remote. A few companies will recommit 100% to the office and a few will allow greater remote work, but the majority of employees at medium/large companies will again spend the majority of their time at the office.
So - they were given subsidies to build/occupy there such that the claim was that it would stimulate and heighten the surround area and businesses...
So if Twitter is 100% WFH option, then why give them massive subsidies when their well paid employee population is no longer present on-site?
However, they may have already expired?
My assumption is that one important driver has been the company’s legal team. Imagine the potential workers comp claims if there are covid flareups directly traceable to your jobsite.
At least for me, I don't want to spend 2 hours commuting.
Since, the job pays well, I will go to office if asked for it.
Good riddance to the Valley. Maybe having everyone go home will create an actual diversity of opinions, not the myopic progressive echo chambers that give rise to one Facebook after another - keep up the stock value, society be damned, but make sure no one gets offended in the process.
Yet imho that exists nowhere in the US. Companies might as well provide a car to commute in