Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

https://twitter.com/Sulliview/status/1275074784351543298

by danso • 6 years ago

474 392 6 years ago

umwbk9gagy• 6 years ago

I've always assumed most writers for these papers don't actually come into the office anyway. What's different? They're extending that to full time staff as well?

cbron• 6 years ago

Yes. I worked for a major newspaper and would guess that all the people in editorial make up less than 50% of the staff. You have business, accounting, tech, delivery, support, sales, security etc...

OldFatCactus• 6 years ago

A friend that works there told me that they have been polling their employees for strong feelings around going permanently remote

levesque• 6 years ago

I have strong feelings against permanently remote. I feel like this hasn't been fully thought out. Face to face interaction is much more high bandwidth than remote video calls (in other words, it conveys more information). Not to mention that this transfers the costs of office space to the employee, maybe this is why all employers are quick to jump on this bandwagon. Curious to see where this new trend will fall in 2021.

flak48• 6 years ago

Many companies have been reimbursing home internet and electricity bills since March. Mine even paid for an chair, desk, monitor and lamp of my choosing for my home office.

I hope this becomes the norm if remote becomes mainstream

wahlrus• 6 years ago

I don't think you're wrong. There will certainly be some sort of correction of the bullish remote-work spirit.

But the 2020 lockdowns will fundamentally increase the amount of remote work permanently to at least some degree.

Like how before Bernie Sanders ran for president, no one in mainstream US politics was even talking about socialized healthcare. Or how before Andrew Yang, no one outside of silicon valley had ever heard of UBI.

This is hyperbole, but you see what I mean.

machinehermit• 6 years ago

I think it depends on how much you like being social too.

Not interacting with people, not having a place to go, just being in the house all day is absolutely terrible for my long term well being.

If my place goes full remote I would have to consider renting an office.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

For some of people, probably more than you'd expect, work is pretty much the only social contact.

shougg2• 6 years ago

I’m happy to have the cost transferred (some parts are debateable, I need internet, a desk, and a monitor for home anyways) if it means no more commuting and no more open offices. My focus has significantly increased in the past few months.

ghaff11• 6 years ago

A fair number of people probably feel like you do. But I strongly suspect that, at least with many companies, a certain percentage of people never come back into the office except sporadically. So even for those who do return full-time, the atmosphere and work style will be changed for an indefinite period of time.

I know a number of people in the process of permanently moving out of cities--in several cases to rural locations many hours away.

For people with houses, the office space cost is likely less than the commuting cost. But it is indeed an issue for many in tiny city apartments.

the_gipsy• 6 years ago

Face to face interaction is much more high bandwidth

I'll take quality over bandwidth any day.

purple_ferret3• 6 years ago

The New York Times Building is nice but it's a terrible (although generally convenient) location

xhkkffbf2• 6 years ago

If you take a bus to Port Authority, it couldn't be more convenient. And I would guess that the Times Square subway stop may be the one spot where the most lines converge.

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

New Yorkers love to hate Time Square but it's really not so terrible, just crowded. It's in close proximity to everything, and it looks pretty at night. And as you said, it's really easy to get to.

spyspy4• 6 years ago

The Times has actually been very progressive about WFH policies. Partially because they've been consolidating the number of floors they occupy at 620 8th Ave, so there's legitimately less room for everyone. But every team was designed to be remote friendly and there was very little expectation to be in the office. Some people lived in NYC and still refused to bother to come in for months at a time.

Source: worked at NYT through 2019.

code4tee• 6 years ago

This seems to be the norm for many companies. Everyone is throwing in the towel on 2020 so far as the office goes with the goal to take a fresh look for 2021 at the end of this year. Many will likely never go back to the setup they had before.

If you’re in the market for commercial office space you can probably get some killer deals moving forward.

Loughla5• 6 years ago

Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.

So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope.

It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.

r00fus• 6 years ago

Does it make sense to name & shame these bad actors?

Loughla5• 6 years ago

The issue is, I know I would be fired, and cannot afford to lose this job. There is no one hiring in the area, and we're geographically locked due to factors around my child that I don't care to get into here.

So, the answer is yes, but there is no way to do that without losing my health insurance, and probably home. So that's neat.

agensaequivocum2• 6 years ago

In the current climate, we need less not more of this.

catacombs3• 6 years ago

Yes. It's all about PR, and if a company looks bad because it's forcing its employees to return to the office, amid a global pandemic and health concerns, that won't bode well, and they are likely to buckle under the pressure.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 6 years ago

Wow, I guess I'll just tell my team you want them to die and they should find another job

This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are still deciding what to do.

Edit: Be aware, I have enough emergency savings for around 3 years worth of fuck it. I'm not you and you should not be me.

dvfjsdhgfv4• 6 years ago

Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.

Loughla5• 6 years ago

As an institution of higher education, I believe that we should be evaluating all of our options and enacting what is equitable for our employees. Please note that 'equitable' does not mean everyone is treated the same. Some individuals have life circumstances out of their control during COVID. We are already working remotely, we know that it does work. Further, it gives those of us that need it the most the flexibility to protect our families, our students, and our programs without having to choose one over the other. It helps us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively simply because we do not have to choose between work or family. This should not have to be a choice at a place like [institution name]. In our leadership covenants, we sign onto a work-life balance, not work over life. Have we decided to simply eliminate this agreement in our covenants go to increase our (enrollment) profits for the college by having everyone back to work arbitrarily? I would desperately hope not. Was that necessarily the intention? Probably not, but it feels that way to me and probably to others.

This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.

jonathanpeterwu• 6 years ago

Building on this. If you have the risk tolerance. Just stating that you have to work remotely (if its legitimate) at-risk health, child care, family care I'm sure there can't be a ton of pushback on an individual level. Otherwise it might be a GREAT signal to leave a company who in the midst of a pandemic is irrational.

duxup3• 6 years ago

The implication being going into the office sucks and everyone has to do it to be fair.

I wonder if they're aware of that subtext....

caymanjim2• 6 years ago

That's not the subtext, that's exactly the point. I don't agree with it, but it's not a hidden message.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

Commuting would be easier with less people doing it too, so whilst going to the office is sucks, for many, due to transportation issues it would stick a little less with fewer people doing it. Even a single company can make parking easier if only half the company car-commutes continue.

Of course many businesses require employees to be present.

Consultant324524• 6 years ago

I wonder how long it will take for some fortune 500 company to get sued by their white collar office workers who catch COVID.

rebuilder3• 6 years ago

Or, that management thinks the work they're having employees do sucks, and their employees are going to slack off as much as they can if left unsupervised. Also, that management doesn't have much in the way of supervisory powers apart from tracking hours at the office.

jes5199• 6 years ago

companies who ask their employees to take risks with their health, without a compelling reason, are destroying any sense of goodwill or morale. In the short term, that change might be invisible, but over the long-term it destroys businesses

yomly• 6 years ago

It sends the message "I don't care about you" very loud and clear. Don't be surprised when your employees suddenly stop caring about your company

_jal• 6 years ago

I know one startup learning this. They're ~80 people, and I thought they had a decent chance of making it until this.

They lost their 'backbone' over the return-to-work plan. She was the one who kept everything nontechnical running. She felt the risk of bringing it home was too great, and $CEO pressured when he should have compromised. Now they're losing other key staff and it looks likely to become a stampede.

I'm sure there are many possible takeaways from this, and one would be to beware of soft-power/moral-authority rivals. I think a far smarter one might be about empathy.

asdfman1233• 6 years ago

I feel like American society is obsessed with safety and the value of individual lives, which has never made sense to me but I go along with it out of respect.

However, when your actions have a x% chance of killing someone, and you can mitigate it with reasonable precautions... ad what value of X do you go along with?

There's a disconnect there. Either people are really bad at math and science, or they do not care about other people's lives nearly as much as they think.

coldpie• 6 years ago

They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely.

But, this only increases the risk for those who actually do have to go in. Everyone should be vocally opposed to this policy, including (especially?) those to whom this policy is supposed to be "fair."

moksly2• 6 years ago

It seems insane. I work in digitalisation in Denmark, as a developer, so I can do everything from home. We’re running at 50% as our country is slowly coming back from a lockdown, but those 50% go to the people who actually need to be at the office, so I’m in no way a priority.

I wonder what management will do with the COVID data though. Our productivity is through the roof, but they’ve just spent several hundred millions building a new open office city hall because open offices were all the rage. Must be a tough pill to swallow that all those money were wasted because people work better from home where there are far less distractions.

divbzero2• 6 years ago

Public transit can benefit everyone, including people who don’t take public transit. This is an analogous scenario except with severe health implications.

meej• 6 years ago

The best way to protect the health of the employees who cannot work remotely is for those who can to stay home. It's appalling that your employer doesn't seem to understand this.

jb7752• 6 years ago

If that's their mindset with remote work, they probably have the "anti-adapt" mindset in other aspects of their business as well...which means they'll probably become dinosaurs and be out of business within the next 10 years.

ClumsyPilot• 6 years ago

I wouldnt hold my breath, these types are widely distributed

dvfjsdhgfv4• 6 years ago

They want to be "fair" to everyone

This is the explanation I hear most often, but when you examine it, it makes no sense. Otherwise you would need everyone to make the same money, which makes no sense either. People are different, their duties are different, some jobs are better suited for remote work than others - putting everyone in the same basket is plain stupid.

walshemj• 6 years ago

The trouble is from an IR (industrial relations) perspective that actually can be problem if one group perceives that some other group has something they don't have. (Brigit's Jones Smaug Marrieds )

Also how would you audit this "oh her she's friends with manger x so she gets o work from home etc"

notyourday• 6 years ago

Here's what I do not understand -- if the company had an open office floor plan , which is probably the case a very large if not the majority number of offices, bringing the workforce back into the office would require a massive expense as the state governments are requiring the social distancing / partitions. How are the companies going to accommodate that set of regulations with the current layouts? From a simply logistical standpoint there's simply no way there enough time between now and say end of August to have offices redone to accommodate the new regulations.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

How are the companies going to accommodate that set of regulations with the current layouts?

Most likely, they won't. If they gave shit about this, they wouldn't push people into the office at all.

op03• 6 years ago

Some folk make more money renting office space to their own companies than they do from the companies.

cheez2• 6 years ago

Good observation.

timewasted2• 6 years ago

I'm in a similar situation, except with a worse reason for requiring everyone to come back to the office. We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company. I can assure you that NO ONE is going to say "well I was going to spend money with these people but they're not in the office, so I'll go elsewhere".

Further, we are being given less than 24 hours notice to come back into the office. It's just absurd, and it has eroded any trust that I once had in the company.

corobo2• 6 years ago

Name it, shame it. Not necessarily here but make sure places like Glassdoor know.

Nothing like a good public shaming to change a company's direction

Florin_Andrei• 6 years ago

We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company.

Wherein "optics" means the millions that the top shareholders and decision makers may or may not make in the future. That's what's at stake, and that's why your families need to be put at risk.

divbzero2• 6 years ago

What if enough employees simply refused?

coliveira• 6 years ago

The reality of post-coved is that such employers will start losing people as never before. Most businesses are now transitioning to remote work as default.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

Here they are asking for volunteers first, but there is a clear push from management to get people back in the office ( and that is despite the fact that by all official metrics of our unit, we are basically killing it ). Doesn't matter. They want control.

Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.

mattwad• 6 years ago

The thing is, having worked remotely for a year... the people working remote are the ones that become at a disadvantage. Because people in office may forget to include them in calls or conversations.

TuringNYC3• 6 years ago

or...they may "forget" to include them in calls or conversations

As much as I think WFH will be a huge win for workers, and the whole country (to some extent, ex SF/SV), I am skeptical it would work unless orgs are completely remote. In hybrid setups, I could see WFH workers end up getting edged out -- it has never worked any other way from what i've seen in the past.

downerending• 6 years ago

What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.

It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.

modzu• 6 years ago

without childcare cant work at home either..

maurys• 6 years ago

Depressingly, the easiest tactic is to keep piling on work, especially on remote workers.

The manager won't be able to tell if you're genuinely stuck or slacking off, and the benefit of doubt is likely to go against you if offices have reopened.

So unless you truly can't make it to work, you'll likely go back once the majority have, regardless of your apprehensions.

g-garron• 6 years ago

Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable. They think employees need an eye behind its back in order to produce. And if it is that way, it is their fault, they have chosen bad when hiring.

ThisIsTheWay• 6 years ago

Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable.

I'd wager most people understand it. Like you pointed out, it's an issue with the perception of lost control, and people are willing to trade productivity for power.

elliekelly• 6 years ago

If someone’s job can be performed from home and they’re at higher risk due to a co-morbidity it would very likely be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA to have them work from home.

UncleOxidant3• 6 years ago

It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolating/WFH. When in fact we have a lot more cases now, high levels of new cases and more than half the states have R0 > 1.0. https://rt.live/

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

Yes, but if you actually look at the death count, it has dropped in the past month and a half, despite re-openings: https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ Georgia being one of the earliest states to re-open, continue to see their deaths plummet even as their case count increases. What's the reason for this? I don't know. Better testing, maybe. Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. Not sure.

klenwell4• 6 years ago

This is the part that gets me, too. Here's a summary I put together of where the US stands on the latest "reopen" benchmarks:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU...

It varies region to region. I'm in Orange County, CA. (You may remember us from such recent news events as...)

This was Huntington Beach weekend before last (probably much the same this weekend, too):

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusOC/comments/h9max3/ny_ti...

This was a photo posted to Reddit this past weekend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/hczes1/pirozz...

mehrdadn• 6 years ago

That site looks amazing. It only seems to be state-level though. Do you know if it (or any other site) has aggregated local (city- or county-level) data?

edw5192• 6 years ago

They want to be "fair" to everyone

Where I work, discussing salaries is strictly forbidden and grounds for dismissal.

I demanded an increase and was told, "No. It wouldn't be fair to the others."

I asked, "How would they know?"

(weWantToBeFair) = enterprise(iWontCumInYourMouth)

spiznnx• 6 years ago

discussing salaries is strictly forbidden and grounds for dismissal.

FYI, a strict ban on discussing salaries is illegal in the United States and in many parts of the world.

xxpor2• 6 years ago

That's an illegal policy (if you're in the US), FYI.

neilparikh• 6 years ago

Costco did a similar thing at the start of the pandemic, where they forbid people working in offices from working remotely, to be "fair" to those who work in their stores.

An employee who worked in their offices actually died from COVID-19: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-cor...

Now, it's not a given they got it from the office, but they probably did spread it more, so it was a very irresponsible policy IMO.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

She was Joesie Krebs - Double-neumonia patient, 63 years old.

https://www.kens5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/woman-...

scarface744• 6 years ago

I quit my job and found a new one because my company was forcing us to come into the office to "collaborate" -- even though for the most part only the team leads are in the US and the rest of the dev team is India. My team was in another state.

I was already halfway thinking about another job because of the open office that was a mix of developers, QA, customer service managers, and implementation folks that were always on the phone and it was loud. Now with Covid and me working from home for three months, I dreaded going back into the office.

papito• 6 years ago

Collaborate. All you would do is sit at your desk in a mask and freak out every time someone walks by you.

noir_lord• 6 years ago

My employer is the same over here in the UK.

So I’m voting with my feet and actively looking for a fully remote job, it’s fucking insane to pretend an extra 2ft and alcohol gel will work when no one is following the rules properly.

I’d have been moving on at some point anyway since I don’t particularly like my job but it pays well so I have time to look for something that is a better fit.

So they’ll drain the good staff, I’m not the only one planning to bugger off.

waltherg• 6 years ago

I've heard two C-level guys with two separate German SMEs say that the only part of their workforce that hadn't handled remote work well was middle management.

The people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done. Senior management / C-level types were content seeing sales figures and general output from afar.

Middle management struggled because they had a hard time judging work estimates for tasks and whether people had their butts in seats etc.

Just an anecdote but thought that was intriguing.

delusional• 6 years ago

One of the execs of the bank I work at made a public statement that they actually saw the productive output of the IT organization shoot up during the WFH weeks here in Denmark.

But of course middle management didn't agree so now we are back in the office.

nautilus12• 6 years ago

Maybe more of a statement about the necessity of middle management..

donretag• 6 years ago

"they had a hard time judging work estimates"

They had a hard time justifying their existence.

Havoc• 6 years ago

Yeah definitely. It's almost like an enforced maker schedule.

In workloads that are more collaborative it's less clear though.

people doing the actual work were happy WFH and simply getting stuff done.

I felt the same effect in my personal productivity too (real or not). Not convinced it worked on a team level. More duplication, more teams doing incompatible work etc. Sure getting stuff done...just the wrong stuff half the time (and very proud of their productivity!). Ironically resulted in me micromanaging them more (remotely) because the organic/grassroots collaboration & coordination is just gone.

nell• 6 years ago

No surprise here. This is because middle management is tasked with converting meeting room decisions to actionable work. Both ends of the chain - executives and ICs can operate independently. The intermediaries need twice the number of personal interactions to get work done.

rodgerd• 6 years ago

The frozen middle is real.

qu4ku• 6 years ago

'face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist'

mlthoughts20182• 6 years ago

What a disturbing notion of “fairness” - apparently forcing people to be subjected to daily exposure to a deadly virus (via commute & office spaces) is “more fair”?

Absolutely jawdropping stupidity that is.

mlthoughts20182• 6 years ago

By this logic, civil servants in a police precinct should be exposed to violent criminals because it’s more fair.

Apparently whatever is the maximum hazard experienced by an employee has to be shared by everyone to be fair?

ponker3• 6 years ago

More fair would be to allow people to choose to remain remote, but at a salary deduction, and give that salary to the people who are required to be on-site.

aronpye• 6 years ago

If you can, get another job. Don’t work for that kind of company. If you can’t leave or demand better working conditions then you’re virtually a slave.

killjoywashere• 6 years ago

The 1980s?! How progressive! I work for an institution that is culturally stuck in the 1950s.

niklasd• 6 years ago

I've heard now from a couple of people that they've enjoyed remote work and some have already sucessfully negotiated that in future they will work part time from home. So it really seems that some of the change will be permanent.

j0hnml• 6 years ago

Same here. I don’t think the majority of folks will start working remotely permanently, but I could very well see more and more people splitting time between WFH and working from the office. If some people on a team start to do it, others on that same team will start to ask if there’s still a reason for them to still be coming into the office every day. And I think this is especially true for densely-populated areas as people realize how much time and stress are saved not having to commute into the office _every single day_.

danielbln• 6 years ago

Before covid, being able to work from home once in a while was something of a perk. After a few months of fully remote it is now a hard requirement for me, a significant chunk of my work time has to be able to be home office, or I'm walking away.

ghaff11• 6 years ago

As someone who works at a company that is normally pretty split between offices and remote/WFH, I've seen this first hand. I don't actually mind going into the office now and then (and it's only about a 30 minute commute). But (increasingly pre-Covid), I'd go in and not run into anyone I worked with or even knew. Eventually I just gave up my desk when I had to move anyway. And pretty much stopped going in at all unless I had a specific meeting.

conanbatt3• 6 years ago

I've worked remotely most my life but as a new parent...I really want an office.

untog• 6 years ago

As a (not quite so new) parent I really want a coworking space that's a five minute walk from my apartment. That way I can do school dropoffs and pickups so much more easily. In my dreams expanded remote work means lots more coworking spaces popping up. I know, I'm a dreamer...

redisman3• 6 years ago

You mean a dedicated office at home or you want to get out of the house? For me it's given me a much greater appreciation for working from home as I can be with the kid all day rather than outsource that for the majority of her waking hours.

rainyMammoth• 6 years ago

so you want an office to "escape" your family and daily life?

It's sad but I would bet that's the case for a significant amount of parents and husbands.

elicash3• 6 years ago

Here's a photo of the newsroom so you can get a sense of the degree to which they work in proximity:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/18/opinion/sunday/18...

jmalicki• 6 years ago

So unlike a modern tech company, they sit farther apart and at least have barriers between their desks?

gruez• 6 years ago

agree on the bigger desks bit, but what difference does a 12" tall barrier make?

mFixman• 6 years ago

Most modern tech companies have a single height-adjustable desk per person, so most of the time your desk will be slightly higher or lower than your neighbour's.

donohoe• 6 years ago

No, thats just the core newsroom which is floors 2 and 3. Rest of the floors are a little different.

Krasnol• 6 years ago

What a nightmare.

Now imagine half of them being on the phone....terrible.

jrockway5• 6 years ago

I don't think they do the same kind of work that we do.

ghaff11• 6 years ago

People are on the phone much of the day in lots of jobs. And the newsroom in that picture isn't some modern open office fad. Go look at any film that's concerned with the newspaper business. It's more or less how newsrooms have looked for many decades.

spyspy4• 6 years ago

It's surprisingly quiet actually. It's not a trading floor with people screaming at each other.

Source: am a former NYT and worked in that exact room.

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

I wonder if that's a great representation? They're all posing for the photo, there may normally be less people there.

elicash3• 6 years ago

I just meant desk setup. Context of the photo was a celebration of Alissa Rubin winning a Pulitzer in April 2016.

spyspy4• 6 years ago

That's actually pretty outdated. The newsroom (and all other floors at 620 8th Ave) have gotten standing desks that are slightly wider apart.

Source: used to work in that newsroom

kevindong• 6 years ago

That honestly looks more cramped than any office I've ever been in.

dijit2• 6 years ago

I thought the same thing initially; it looks terribly cramped.

But the longer I look at the picture, the more I realise that they have more personal space, sound isolation and visual privacy than I have in my office.

jb7752• 6 years ago

Not a good time to own commercial office real estate. Office rental rates will likely race to the bottom as more and more businesses decide to stay remote.

purple_ferret3• 6 years ago

I wonder how good their remote security is. I imagine every single government regularly tries to hack them.

xhkkffbf2• 6 years ago

Yeah, but now the governments have to manage multiple platforms. Some are writing on Android tablets, others are using Windoze. There's probably some joker still running a TRS-80 Model 100, the former favorite of the sportswriters everywhere.

ryanSrich5• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean by remote security?

- Cloud security?

- Controlling physical safeguards remotely?

- Something different?

purple_ferret3• 6 years ago

physical security of remote devices

superfamicom• 6 years ago

Companies who were the butt-in-seat type most likely didn't have a sudden realization that WFH and telecommuting was productive, most likely they want you back in the office but they just don't want to do the required work to transform the office into a safe environment.

TACIXAT• 6 years ago

I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments. My partner and I went to Austin for a month and a half and now are back in the Bay Area to hear the next decision on her office reopening. 2021 is 6 months away. That's not enough to move somewhere else that would make the pain of moving worth it.

ryanSrich5• 6 years ago

I say this with all seriousness, and I understand some people don't have this luxury, but if you do, please quit.

These companies will continue to punish their employees if they are allowed to do so. The only way to create change is through leverage.

This goes for anyone facing this decision. If you have the ability to quit, you should absolutely do it. Take a year off, find another company that doesn't support archaic business practices, start your own business.

You owe it to the people that don't have that option. The people that are forced into commuting. The people that are forced into depression because they have to continue to pay their massive rents in absurdly expensive cities. The people that have incredibly poor mental health because they're pulled into gross office politics that pit employees against each other.

We must force these companies to change their bad behavior.

adjkant4• 6 years ago

The things you describe are far from the charged language you're using, and also much of your description may not apply at all to the post you responded to.

How does someone quitting their job because their work is playing a global pandemic step by step help any of the things you listed? This approach is a very logical decision and honestly complaining this loudly about that step is incredibly privileged in a time where many are facing layoffs and pay cuts. Oh no! Your company has kept paying you, you're working remote for a job you were hired for in person, but you can't get a guarantee of when you'll be back in the office because of a pandemic? The horror!

That's not to take a "be happy with what you get and lick the boot" approach at all, but many companies have quite nice policies in regards to how COVID-19 is being handled.

Your issue appears to be with non-remote work in general, but you also make it seem like high COL cities are the only option. If someone is not able to be mentally stable working in the bay or Seattle or NYC etc, there are plenty of small cities with tech jobs that will pay good money with low COL and a short commute they can go work at. They absolutely should quit, for themselves. That was true before any pandemic.

The people that have incredibly poor mental health because they're pulled into gross office politics that pit employees against each other.

Again, where was any of this mentioned? It sounds like you are projecting the issues of some companies. These companies should absolutely change their behavior, but again, this was true before the pandemic. I'm not sure how someone quitting will tech them a lesson either as those places probably already have high turnover and they won't have much issue hiring n the current market.

You say you create it through leverage, but I see no such leverage being developed in quitting even if all of this was true.

product50• 6 years ago

what bad behavior? providing a 6mo heads up that you don't need to come back is pretty reasonable. while you are at criticizing these companies, do know that a lot of smaller companies are requiring their employees to come to work in lots of places.

redisman3• 6 years ago

This seems like very dangerous advice to give on the precipice of an economic depression.

cmdshiftf42• 6 years ago

I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments.

Seconded. Employers are in a hard spot right now, because making an affirmative decision is going to cost them staff either way.

Those who've come to enjoy being at home and loving the flexibility of it, if told that it'll be back to the office in 2021 or ASAP, will start looking for a fully remote gig.

Those who dread the idea of being fully remote, if told that the company is going to remain fully or mainly remote, will start looking for a company that will offer more in-office hours.

They're probably looking down the barrel of a quick 20% turnover regardless of the decision they make, and so sitting here preserving the status quo is benefiting them the most.

fierarul• 6 years ago

Everybody talks about online mobs and trolls but what happens when the entire workforce is online?

How vicious can one (mob) be against another co-worker when you can't phisically see him to calibrate what's really going on and the reaction to what you do?

dannyw2• 6 years ago

Well hopefully you don't have vicious mobs at your workplace.

tsm• 6 years ago

My generally-pretty-friendly workplace has recently had quite a bit of viciousness about:

a) bbatsov's response to calls for Rubocop to be renamed

b) The use of "master" as the canonical branch's name in our main git repo

c) Linking to xkcd #75 (which uses the c-word) (the link was provided in response to a thread about mixed levels of profanity)

SpicyLemonZest2• 6 years ago

I don't right now, but I certainly have people who dislike each other for some reason or another, and I'm worried about what that looks like when they all start going 3, 6, 9 months without seeing each other.

momokoko• 6 years ago

Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months.

Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work in an office, I would be saving every penny and working on a career change ASAP.

yingw787• 6 years ago

For a contrary opinion, see this famous Hacker News post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18451311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 (parent)

(or at least it's famous to me)

ghaff11• 6 years ago

Eh, companies have had this option and many have engineering offices in lower cost of living countries long before the current situation. There are a lot of reasons for companies to hire in the US.

What wouldn't surprise me though if/when remote becomes a bigger chunk of certain types of jobs, is if salaries across US regions equalize more given that local labor market rates become less of a factor for setting salaries. In the extreme case (which won't be the norm), your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.

bobthepanda• 6 years ago

IMO FAANG is doing its best to try and hoover up all the tech talent that wants to work for them. Which is to say that while they won't necessarily have to pay people an arm and a leg to attract them to overcrowded high-COL areas, they do still want to hoover up people who happen to already live in high-COL areas.

COVID has shown us that remote work is feasible, but it still introduces frictions that employers/employees may not want to put up with, and the main thing attracting people to high-COL areas in the first place is the relative ease of networking and switching jobs. The death of the high-COL tech hub is greatly overexaggerated.

TulliusCicero• 6 years ago

your decision to live in a high CoL city is no different from your decision to live on expensive oceanfront property.

That's certainly possible.

Of course, that would incentivize people to move out to cheaper areas, which would reduce the demand on expensive big cities, with the end result being that the price delta would become somewhat reduced.

protonimitate• 6 years ago

Ah yes, the outsourcing FUD train is ramping up.

Remote work has been a possibility for employers for a few decades now. Nothing has drastically changed since the new wave of WFH to change that, other than its more widely discussed.

50%(and sometimes as much as 80%)

is there a source for this?

I'm not convinced that the only reason "everything gets outsourced" hasn't happened yet is because employers are lazy.

Consultant324524• 6 years ago

I have an anecdata. I work for a fortune 500 financial company. I am personally acquainted with someone who transitioned from our offshore (India) team to the US. His salary went up 3x doing the same job with the same title, and all he changed was geography.

robbyking• 6 years ago

I worked as what would now be considered a full stack developer during the dotcom bubble (and bust), and during that time thousands of engineering jobs were outsourced overseas. There were a couple main issues that I'd be curious to see if modern development teams would be able to overcome:

* The communication lag. When developers are working opposite hours from the rest of the team, small issues can take a day or longer to resolve. Even simple stuff like "can I cut the branch or is your feature not QA ready?"

* Rigidity. Specs are almost always incomplete (or inaccurate) in one way or another, and remote developers who aren't familiar with a company's product and goals have a difficult time distinguishing between what a product owners wants and what they ask for.

These aren't insurmountable issues, but they were the two things that really slowed things down for the teams I worked with.

jedberg4• 6 years ago

Time zones are still a thing. No matter how remote someone is, if they're more than a few times zones away it becomes problematic. More than nine timezones across the company is nearly impossible to do well.

So if we're talking about a US company, if you want anyone on the west coast, hiring continental Europeans will be tough, unless one of those groups is willing to work outside normal hours.

Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.

The most likely outcome of remote work is a lowering of salaries in the big cities and a raising of salaries in more rural areas, as salaries tend towards the national median.

marvin• 6 years ago

Also: Culture barriers, language barriers. Even if the cheaper market speaks decent English, there will be a greater communications overhead.

Also, skill compatibility. Maybe your labor pool is bigger, but so is the employer pool of everyone with world-class skills in whatever domain you're operating in.

scarface744• 6 years ago

Inside the US is a solved problem. I haven't worked for a company in 20 years that did its own payroll. ADP, Insperity among others solve this for you. You can even set this up with a small business account through Bank Of America.

naveen99• 6 years ago

For the amount of money on the table, some people would probably be willing to do a night shift from the wrong time zone.

ttul• 6 years ago

Waving from Canada, the big cheap nation to the north... with subsidized free healthcare.

amiga_500• 6 years ago

Exactly. Econ 101: outsourcing here we come.

Real world: nearshoring (Canada), and WFH outside the metro are at lower wages.

t-writescode• 6 years ago

Honestly, even 3 time zones is a pain.

* You get in at 9, the other team is at lunch (12)

* They're ready to talk to you after their lunch and a bit, and it's your lunch.

* You get back from lunch and it's almost time for them to leave.

citation: used to have a job where the parent company was on the East Coast while working on the West Coast.

deathgrips• 6 years ago

Management doesn't care about this. They don't care about language barriers, cultural differences, time zones, etc. All they care about is reporting to their boss that they cut expenses by 50% and hired people who at a glance look just as suitable for the job.

jrlocke• 6 years ago

But many preexisting remote-focused US tech companies are not heavily outsourced. They've gone "through the initial pain of setting up remote work" and are subject to the same economic forces. If these companies haven't been tempted into heavy outsourcing, why should we imagine that new companies entering into their situation will?

irrational• 6 years ago

Same with my company. People who must be on campus can go back to the offices by the Fall, but everyone else - probably not until next year.

SupriseAnxiety• 6 years ago

“The End Of Times is Neigh”

Times New Roman Times Magazine Times Square Hmm.

zoolander2• 6 years ago

how much of these permanent WFH will impact Uber's revenue? I swear work commuting is a big chunk of their revenue

perl4ever4• 6 years ago

I don't understand how people could possibly do that; apart from the cost, my experience with Uber and Lyft was awfully stressful. Something new and unsettling would happen in 5/6 rides - I didn't particularly feel like it was worse on average than a regular cab, but I didn't feel secure either. Drivers taking their hands off the steering wheel, fumbling and accidentally hitting the SOS button, tailgating...I only used them when I absolutely had no alternative.

staysaasy3• 6 years ago

Remote work is such a fascinating leadership challenge given how dogmatic both sides have become. The tone of the debate is verging on a religious argument (on both sides), but it's all centered on work-related topics which typically don't engender such extreme responses.

k__2• 6 years ago

"religious argument (on both sides)"

Care to elaborate?

staysaasy3• 6 years ago

Yup for sure. I (generally) see two camps on the remote work debate:

- WFH / unlimited remote work is the future, forcing people to come into the office is oppressive.

- Remote work harms culture and collaboration, we all need to get back into the office ASAP as we can't be effective remotely.

Overall I've just been surprised at the intensity of the remote work discussion, and surprised that we don't see deeper analyses on cost of rent, employee retention rates, productivity across jobs, environmental effects of less commuters, etc. My point was simply that as this topic elicits strong feelings, it presents an interesting leadership challenge.

ghaff11• 6 years ago

A lot of individuals have very strong preferences. And those who want to go back to how things were also realize that, if many companies shift to a more patchwork employees can continue to WFH if they're able to and want to, many offices won't ever go back to the way they were.

In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand.

staysaasy3• 6 years ago

"In addition, many feel (probably with some justification) that there's a real opportunity at the moment to influence policies that favor their personal preferences. And you won't influence if you don't take a strong stand."

This is a great point, and that's exactly what makes this an interesting leadership challenge IMO.

deegles• 6 years ago

I'm in the worst of both worlds right now. Unable to commit to fully remote but still having to pay to live close enough to commute. I think a lot of people are stuck like this until their companies decide on a long-term solution.

jkaptur2• 6 years ago

Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new normal, citing long reopening timelines, their own preferences, increased productivity, Twitter's policy change, etc.

But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).

I wonder if what we've seen since March isn't really "working from home", it's "working from home during a pandemic", and there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care).

The current situation has actually been good/neutral for my personal productivity, since I'm more able to easily chat with my colleagues across the country... but why exactly is that easier now? Are they more available because they're working from home, or because they're stuck at home?

riffraff• 6 years ago

I am unsure this is the answer you were looking for but I do make a distinction. I've been working remotely for 10+ years, and the 3 months of lockdown were the worst I've had, for the simple reason that _my family was locked in with me_.

I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it.

Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc.

We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.

Polylactic_acid4• 6 years ago

This seems to be the primary issue I see at work right now. People without kids are loving wfh and people with kids are struggling with distraction causing some of them to come back to the office just to work remotely with the rest of us.

chipgap98• 6 years ago

But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies

I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020.

why exactly is that easier now?

I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates.

I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.

nsilvestri• 6 years ago

Although regular WFH and pandemic WFH are functionally the same, being forced to work remote has a different effect on me than elective remote work. As someone who prefers working in the office, mandatory indefinite WFH is much more...mentally taxing(?) than when I choose to do it.

kanox• 6 years ago

Personally I can't wait for this to come back to normal: being inside an office for 9 hours every day helps me be productive and focus.

aianus• 6 years ago

Me too, man.

We can't be the only ones -- the library at my school was full of people studying independently despite absolutely zero external pressure to do so. I found myself much more productive in that environment than in my home and the (admittedly short) commute created a nice, clear separation of work vs. rest.

Foivos• 6 years ago

I guess it depends on your WFH situation. If you live in a big enough house to have a dedicated office room, probably it is better to WFH. If you live in a studio, where you do everything in a single room, then it is better to go to the office to change the scene a bit.

nafix• 6 years ago

Same here. I live in a 950 square foot apartment. I can't stand being in the same space all day long. I need a change of space, and I actually enjoy working in the company building. It's a very modern work space.

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

I can't wait for it to back to normal because my employer has done an absolutely terrible job of making our infrastructure work well for remote development.

No source code allowed on laptops, but my work is on hardware devices I have to sit next to. So I have to shell to my workstation to produce binaries, port forwarding to my hardware devices to push them over, slow slow awkwad...

Part of the code base I work on is open source, so for my own sanity I'm mostly just doing that portion of work... but on my own personal (underpowered) computer. But not allowed to expense a new machine... Doing work for the corporation using my own assets...

And forced to use a chromebook as my laptop, with its awful ssh support...

Sorry, this can't end soon enough. But it won't for us until January or so. They need to fix this, or I need to find an employer who is competent at WFH.

triceratops• 6 years ago

policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).

And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.

shadowfox• 6 years ago

IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused

While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization.

there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care)

There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.

edw5192• 6 years ago

pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused

Either you're getting your work done or you're not.

Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.

RankingMember• 6 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The point at which you start trying to tell people how to do their work and "oh well you logged on 5 minutes late here" and "oh well it shows here you always log off for an extra 10 minutes here" is the point you begin holding your workforce back rather than allowing them to perform at their best.

treespace89• 6 years ago

I feel the change that has happened is that managers _had to_ figure out managing remote workers.

Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.

rezeroed• 6 years ago

I absolutely consider working from home different from this, which is almost house arrest. WFH I am able to spend time working in coffee shops, am able to use the outside world to sync my clock with everyone else. Being stuck on my own in a London flat is driving me nuts, and I'm introverted. I've been going to bed at 5:30am for no reason other than my clock has drifted.

bragh• 6 years ago

(WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).

This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.

dijit2• 6 years ago

employees not getting on VPN for days at a time

Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.

Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).

I work my full complement.. actually even more so.

But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.

For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.

ponker3• 6 years ago

Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN."

Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

My workplace is pushing aggressively to eliminate remote work, with 50% off remote work in the next couple of weeks. I'm in one of the biggest hotspots, and as the last few months have shown, a significant amount of work has been perfectly viable from home. But before this shutdown, my workplace had a hard ban on WFH. It's the "the workers will be lazy if they're not in the office" mentality. As though you couldn't be lazy at work as well.

k__2• 6 years ago

Next step in work evolution, I'd say.

Now we just have to increase entrepreneurship by some orders of magnitude and things will scale like never before.

ubermonkey• 6 years ago

A cycling pal of mine is an in-house lawyer at a big oil company here in Houston. They were told a couple weeks ago that there were no plans to go back to the office until at LEAST 2021. All the work is being done just fine.

perl4ever4• 6 years ago

Working for a unionized public sector employer, they are nevertheless doing the charade of "well, we'll go back next month, oops, maybe not" over and over. So I guess it's not just the heartless capitalists.

Most recently, a mid-July date was mooted for returning to the office, but a few days later it was announced that the union-negotiated work-from-home arrangements have been extended to October. It's ambiguous whether there will be a transition period, or if really nobody wants to go in.

But nobody seems to want to push things out as far as next year all at once. Some employees feel threatened and say they're not going back until there's a vaccine. I'm just kind of bemused for the moment, because I'm almost 100% sure that as things get worse, there is no chance of following through on the plans, yet the authorities keep making them, and then pushing the date out a little more.

I'm fine with going back to the office as soon as other people are and management can explain why we should. But I'm not sure that's happening in the forseeable future. Every day we get an email from our dear leader talking about going back as though we need to keep our hopes up, yet we are also told how well we are doing working remote. So...why return?

heavyset_go2• 6 years ago

Big telco company is also telling their employees not to expect to return to offices until at least 2021, and to expect maybe even two years of working remotely before returning to work is reconsidered.

aphextron• 6 years ago

I've been trying recently to wrap my head around what life is going to be like from here on out. Where do we go? Things will never be the same again. Remote work will now be completely normal, that's for sure. But how do we get back to living our lives? Fundamental assumptions I've had about the things I've wanted to do in life are now basically no longer an option. Will Silicon Valley no longer really be a "thing" anymore with physical meetups, hackathons, conferences etc. being a thing of the past? Surely at some point we have to reckon with this, rather than just hunkering down in our caves.

raz32dust• 6 years ago

This is not forever. We will likely have a vaccine at some point, may be within a year or two. We will also keep getting better at treating it over time - in identifying susceptible populations, developing cures, and hospitals being better equipped.

geomark3• 6 years ago

Near term availability of a vaccine seems like wishful thinking. The data is noisy, but some of it indicates antibodies to the virus are short lived. That would implicate the usefulness of a vaccine. And that's if one can be developed, a serious question given the lack of success in developing vaccines for other human coronaviruses.

holidayacct• 6 years ago

That's good for their sysadmins and softwar engineers. They love to raise anxiety levels and create ambiguity interpeters (people who start believing there is meaning in people and objects around them) in NYC. Yes, this is a real thing... Don't ask for details, the short story is someone discovered they could exploit people with genes for paranoid schizophrenia to make them anxious and afraid to the point they look for meaning in things around them.

Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

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