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.

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...

It's hard not to see this as the decadent end of a powerful empire (sound like the most famous case), where the people just want to party and they don't care that it will be killing them and greatly reducing their future prospects and their descendants also. They have lost trust in the institutions around them. Let's just go ahead and break up and let the west coast join Canada already.

We also went to Longhorn for dinner yesterday and they had everyone pretty spaced out (every other booth, no seating at center tables). All the restaurant employees were wearing masks. I'm not sure we were at more risk than getting takeout.

It has been really great mentally to go to the beach and have dinner outside the house.

I am trying to keep our distance and not expose ourselves or others to anything unnecessary... we would have definitely left the beach and/or the restaurant if it was anything like the pictures you posted.

I guess my point is I feel like it's possible to go out and not be too risky. I don't think every area reopening is getting crazy.

The thing that would worry me most about the Huntington Beach photo (being familiar with that spot) is not being on the beach. It would be getting too and from the beach. You're going to be shoulder to shoulder with others once your ascend from the sand and get back on PCH.

The other part of the risk equation is the consequences of catching COVID-19. It reminds me of Taleb's Black Swan characterization: small risks predominate but potentially catastrophic consequences in the event. And an accumulation of lots of small risks as people ellide long-tail risks and treat them as no risk at all.

I get the impression from online chatter (mainly Reddit) that most people around here are catching it working in hospitals or restaurants. I recognize it's an unreliable sampling. I wonder if it would help keep people safe if local health officials categorized sources of infection. I suspect they couldn't do so in most the US right now even if they wanted to.

Vox, by the way, put out a nice simple guide on the topic:

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/22/21266756/coronavirus-pandemic-...

As a result, it will appear from this graph that deaths are always declining whether they are or not - the more recent deaths have not yet been reported, so they're not anywhere on the graph. They do the same thing with their daily cases map, but they're a little more transparent there about noting that numbers for the past few weeks are basically meaningless.

Reported deaths in GA have been fairly flat, but hospitalizations are rising slowly:

https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard...

Most deaths are reported relatively quickly. If there were, as an example, a 2x increase in deaths it would show on the graph within a few days. It would show as something like a 1.8x increase before trickling up to the full 2x over the following weeks.

* A certain percentage of infections lead to death

* Death usually only occurs one or two weeks in

* Pandemics follow a logistic curve in their spread (and this curve has an exponential part)

* Most infectious transmissions happen before one gets symptoms (otherwise staying at home once you cough would solve everything)

This is why a sudden rise in deaths would indicate that a few weeks ago something went terribly wrong. This also means that a decline in deaths does not mean you are doing just fine right now — if anything, it means you did fine 1-2 weeks ago.

We should be seeing increased deaths from this in places that have reopened weeks ago.

The problem is, we accelerated deaths drastically due to insane public policies like housing the sick in close quarters with the elderly. In engineering, overengineering like this wastes time. In public health, it kills people.

My expectation is that we'll see an increase in infection rate, a decrease in new deaths per day, and we'll have spikes associated with pockets of the elderly who were previously not impacted being exposed.

Wisconsin has seen a spike come and go and death rates have remained about the same https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/wisconsin-corona...

It just feels odd that this isn't spoken about enough, and I think its because the media narrative is a bit too invested in the "danger" part of this virus ... to feel they can't point out that simple observation for fear of undoing their reporting about the virus, which is a shame. I mean deaths are down nationally ... by a lot, even as the cases have ticked back up.

My hunch is that the folks who are most at risk are taking drastic precautions, which is what is keeping the death rates down. I guess we'll just have to see for sure in 2-3 more weeks.

It feels odd that you blame the "media narrative" and then post two links to the New York Times.

Please point to the incidence of these cripplingly disabled healthy young people?

We have no reason to assume reinfection is possible prior to functional mutation. Functional mutation is likely, but at a much slower rate than the flu. However, what we know from other novel viruses is that mortality rate will usually trend down over time in successive, functionally different mutations.

Stop fearmongering.

1. Death is a lagging indicator. Based on new cases here, I'd predict an upswing shortly:

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

2. Some reports indicate younger people are starting to get it more frequently. Data and common sense suggests they will have a higher survival rate. But this does not mean they will not suffer serious ongoing health and economic consequences as result. They also risk infecting others close to them.

“The severity of what we are getting has declined,” said Gino Santorio, chief executive officer of Broward Health, the four-hospital system that serves most of Broward County. “The average length of stay is six days versus 10. Initially, Broward Health had the really sick COVID patients, those from nursing homes and cruise ships. Now, that has changed, as the demographics have shifted.”

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-f...

What I really want to see is general case severity. There's a whole range from "testing positive with no symptoms" to "bad flu" to "severe effects but not hospitalized, may have long-term damage." That last group is the scary one that, as far as I know, isn't being counted.

How is this downvoted? If you have evidence showing all of the new cases are from younger people or totally asymptomatic carriers go ahead and show it otherwise its literally a tautology, more cases = more deaths.

1. At the start of the pandemic, the older and more vulnerable were affected disproportionately. These patients had a high viral load.

2. Patients with more severe symptoms are now isolating at home or at hospitals. Previously they may have been contributing to serious super-spreader like situations.

3. PPE/Mask usage is more common now and these are possibly protecting most people against high exposure

4. Antivirals could be reducing the length of stay at hospitals and protecting workers from higher exposure

In other words, the virus is spreading but in a less severe form. However, I don't think fundamentally different (less virulent) mutations are the contributing to the lower death rate.

The main take away is the infection rate is not linearly correlated to the death rate.

High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others:

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-uniq...

There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.

Georgia now has about 1,200 new cases daily compared to ~700 in New York. Only a month ago, New York had more like 2,000 per day.

Is it controversial that it takes about a month for new cases to turn into new deaths? Do you believe that isn't happening or won't happen in Georgia?

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1257825352660877313

"Both Korber et al and our analysis show no measurable effect on patient outcome. Hence, the hypothesis at this point is entirely in terms of transmissibility rather than severity. 14/16"

The conclusion that mortality is higher comes from the higher death rates in European countries. However, there's a major confounder: when the epidemic exceeds testing capacity, only the most severe cases are tested and counted, and so the denominator in mortality rates (total cases) is inaccurately small. We know this is the case in much of Europe (and NYC): follow-up antibody tests put the number of total infections at ~10x the number of detected cases. That brings the mortality rate back in line with the ~0.5-1% that's been found in populations where everyone was tested.

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.

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

Should be careful about projecting that to the long term. During WW2, to increase production, the workweek was increased to 50 hours. Production went up substantially. But after 2 or 3 months, productivity dropped back below the 40 hour week. With subsequent experimentation, they found they could get sustained production increases by alternating between 40 and 50 hour weeks.

It's premature to declare victory for WFH. There can be long term deleterious effects:

1. the excitement and newness of WFH wears off, and the boredom and loneliness of it sets in

2. one loses connection with one's colleagues

3. one loses the serendipity of chance encounters and lunches with colleagues

4. you don't know your boss and he doesn't know you

We'll see.

WFH relies on communication, in multiple modes, more times a day than working in an office. Failure to do that will lead to issues.

They had a hard time justifying their existence.

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.

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.

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

I just said no, not comfortable with that. That was the end of it. The in-office was replaced with a call (that was later replaced with a chat on Slack as it turned out)

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.

Now, it probably isn't as correlated to butts-in-seats as mid-management would like to pretend it is, and maybe those people don't deserve bonuses for being bad mid-managers, but after the US just blew $2T+ on speculative bailouts, I do think that the goose is required to lay a few golden eggs.

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."

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.

At a certain point you have to recognize that it’s not about being safe or rational. It’s about bosses making sure they can hold power over employees.

The catch is, it takes a good manager to hire and keep good employees that can self coordinate effortlessly.

Many of them just don't have things to do when everyone is remote, and yet the work is still getting done.

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.

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

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

Of course many businesses require employees to be present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Current rumblings suggest we are going back in July.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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.

Which is why I have approval to travel to other countries several times a year if I want to. If teleportation existed I'd probably work in a different office every day of the week, as a tech lead it would help the team.

When I was co-founder/CTO I never acted this way, because frankly it didnt make sense. But it happens so often in real life, I wonder if this is more about human nature.

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.

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

I guess that's what I get for assuming.

After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work.

I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe.

My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.

Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.

Which direction are you picturing this going?

I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net.

So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.

Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.

People do this regardless.

The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.

In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services.

Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.

As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.

Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.

[^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.

It's proof that powerful interests are successful in starving the beast so they can get away without oversight.

I'm sure we'll all talk about how this is all the Republicans' fault, and that may well be true; however, it doesn't excuse us from perpetuating the cycle of divisiveness at every opportunity; however, cathartic that may be. We need to work to understand and build bridges if we're to be more than Pyrrhic victors. Of course partisanship and tribalism will always be more popular until we've reached whatever low we're willing to accept.

It is hard to meet in they middle when both sides are extremely far apart, and each side has factions that are even further apart than ever before.

Really we need more than two parties dictating the agenda. It is getting harder for the far left to even want deal with Democrats, much less Republicans. The same is happening with the far/alt right.

Why would they try to appease people who weren't going to vote for it?

The article below goes into more detail.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/01/set-health...

So what's the point? One could argue that Republicans were responding in kind. You would disagree (as would I, but that doesn't matter). This kind of endless litigation only polarizes us--we each permit our own extremists because we believe they are slightly less bad than the other side's extremists. I think a multi-party system would be helpful, but I think the problems run deeper (especially since we're seeing the same trends toward polarization in countries with multi-party systems).

I think at its core the problem is that our epistemological institutions are corrupted by extremists. We aren't having an actual debate because the "hosts" or "moderators" of the debate are only presenting one perspective and only the facts that support it. The other side isn't going to have their opinions changed because their questions aren't being addressed, only shouted down and maligned. I think this lack of real national discussion drives each side to be more entrenched and more extreme, and I think this is somewhat by design--the media in particular seems to be optimizing for it deliberately.

I think we need to build a collective awareness of the manipulation we're subject to. We need to understand that the folks on the other side of the party line aren't evil, but that we're being presented with a distorted perspective (although certainly many on each side really are bad). We need to start moderating ourselves as individuals and developing empathy for people on the other side of the party line while demanding better of our institutions. We won't start agreeing with each other on everything or indeed many things (and certainly not overnight), but we should be able to have productive debate and work gradually through issues. We need to start humanizing each other and finding common ground.

It is very hard to empathize with conservative capitalists, libertarians or the alt right, when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy.

It's also kind of sad that rioting, protests and raw anger over recent social issues has been more effective at moving the needle than decades of political handwringing. I don't think this is going to help with any "see it from both sides and meet in the middle" arguments.

Right. He had the right idea. Of course things wouldn’t change over night. One man making positive gestures is important but insufficient to turn the ship on a dime. A lot of mistrust had been built up by that time and others were continuing to build that mistrust. I think he did a lot to stem the tide of divisiveness, especially given how quickly things fell apart in that regard after he left office.

However even with Democrats, there are a lot of people who think Bernie was unfairly treated, and that Biden is in bed with corporations, while establishment democrats think you should vote "blue no matter who", and that Bernie supporters were loons. Again, hard to come to a middle ground even within each party.

MLK Jr was not a moderate, and had problems with their ineffectiveness.

https://www.bustle.com/p/this-martin-luther-king-jr-quote-on...

The article is 2 years old, what was done in those two years to help prevent the outcome we're seeing now? More black men got shot by police with little to no action done about it.

Treat people as equals doesn't exactly need a list of demands, but the discrimination has become so ingrained that some need it spelled out for them.

This is a misunderstanding. The difference is not in the presence or absence of empathy, but rather in how that empathy is expressed: private interaction or government programs. The libertarians are not lacking in empathy; they just don't see it as a suitable justification for political action.

Of course, if you only discuss the problem from a political angle, and consider only political solutions, then it would indeed seem like they aren't interested in solving it at all, when in fact they are very interested in finding a solution—just one that doesn't involve force.

IIRC we did have a massive stockpile of masks, but it was only discovered at the start of the pandemic that they weren't being rotated out and most/all of them had degraded too far to be safe.

I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.

> Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.

We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.

I agree with this assessment to the extent that we keep electing poor officials, but I don't think it's a "one party is amazing and the other is terrible". In particular, the CDC's issues were around a long time before the prior administration (again, SARS was in 2003 and we scarcely made preparations in the intervening years). To the extent that the problem is the officials we elect, I think that's partially true--I think the government is an emergent property of the health of our body politic, but our body politic is highly partisan (as evidenced by your comment). This is partly due to a divisive media but also probably to our two party system. We will keep electing worse officials because those officials can make a plausible argument that they are at least marginally better than the officials in the other party. The bar keeps getting lower; it's a race to the bottom.

> We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.

The pandemic response team wasn't part of the CDC, but yes, disposing of that team was a bad idea in hindsight. It doesn't absolve the CDC; however, and it misses the point in the same way that the "but the government didn't properly fund the CDC!" argument misses the point.

It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.

And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan).

In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.

This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.

Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.

Absolutely jawdropping stupidity that is.

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

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.

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

Besides, by now it should be clear who is efficiently working remotely and who isn't. If there are problems, this should be a signal to reexamine the situation of a given employee. Everything should be based on clear metrics known to everybody. Riskng other people's (or, more likely, their relatives') lives for a wrong purpose is plain silly.

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.

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.

Unionize.

Private companies have been slinging political / social issues messaging all over social media in the past few weeks. COVID and the decisions made around it are political / social issues, right?

So in the name of not having things be one sided i.e. they get political when it suits their brand, I really feel like the right counterbalance is employee activism via organizing & leaking online.

A company that is proclaiming about lives mattering one week and then pressuring their staff to return to close-quartered open-offices the next week deserves to have their dirty laundry hung high for all to see.

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?

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.

Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings.

Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x.

If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs.

In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO).

If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence.

I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.

I think its more that other workplaces do not have this kind of interaction. I have found that a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.

For me time has stayed the same. I start and finish at the same time and I go for lunch for the same time as I did before. I don't have work email or IM on my phone so once I close my laptop work is done.

It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens.

In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't.

It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.

As you can see, that goes both ways

It's an office, not an isolation chamber. You have to work together.

That may be a frustrating concept for some -- from your comment it appears you only care about your work, you don't care if others' work is completed or the larger corporate objectives are met -- but that's why teamwork is so important.

Yes, it would be great if everyone could just singlestream on their own tasks but that's not how companies work. I'm sorry you find helping your coworkers to be such a frustration and distraction from your own personal achievements.

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.

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.

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.

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

Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It keeps your neighbor's shit from spilling over onto your desk, necessitating an awkward conversation (at the minimum). It also gives you a surface to attach taller, jury-rigged barriers, if you're so inclined.

Maybe a little bit, but I'd think you'd want barriers that are at least head-height if you wanted to to that.

Source: used to work in that newsroom

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Even though we would have a 2-3 hour window in the morning US time where meetings happen, there is lack of business context, and language/skillset barriers, the cost savings is just too much to overcome.

I talked to the director who was in charge of this and brought to light the impact on the customer base.

The response? We were paying devs on the order of 10% of what we would pay in the united states, and if they padded it to 3x it still would save us an insane amount of money.

There's nothing wrong with outsourcing per-se, but its lovely when the actual "we dont care about the customer's result" comes out of someone's mouth.

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.

The payroll company takes care of some of the problems, but for example, every state has different rules about worker's comp. Most states require you to get your own, but you still have to let them know. Some states require you to buy into their state system, which requires signing up.

Then there is corporate registration. Many states require you to register as a foreign entity. Payroll doesn't take care of that.

Then you have to pay state taxes, or if you just have employees, you have to file a form that says "I don't owe your state any income taxes".

There are other things different states do differently that the payroll provider doesn't take care of.

Filing state taxes requires your foreign corporate registration.

These are all things I had to do myself before payroll could process.

Sounds like taxes to me.

* 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.

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

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

(or at least it's famous to me)

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

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.

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.

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.

I addressed the privilege in my post. It's in bad faith to bring it up as if I didn't, also gaslighting.

> How does someone quitting their job because their work is playing a global pandemic step by step help any of the things you listed?

Playing a global pandemic step by step is not the issue. The pandemic exists. As a business, you were forced to do away with your archaic work-location policies. To then go back on those is repugnant. Simply keep the change the pandemic forced.

> 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.

For jobs that can be done remote, anything less than the option to work 100% remote forever is corrupt.

> These companies should absolutely change their behavior, but again, this was true before the pandemic.

Every company that forces employees into an office has gross office politics. The power dynamic of the commute is a self-fulfilling prophecy for this very issue. Asses in seats are office politics.

You addressed it in respect to the ability to quit. I'm talking in terms of the standard you are setting and projecting onto all companies. I don't see how that's in bad faith or gaslighting. I don't think you know what that term means based on your use.

> For jobs that can be done remote

This might be the key issue - it sounds like you are massively undervaluing aspects of non-remote work that are beneficial to both workers and companies.

> Every company that forces employees into an office has gross office politics.

We're gonna have to agree to disagree. I'm all for more remote companies existing, but offices are not inherently corrupt.

You made me second guess if I did in fact address the issue. I did.

> it sounds like you are massively undervaluing aspects of non-remote work that are beneficial to both workers and companies.

You're right. I am undervaluing it. Being in person has no inherent benefits over being remote. Maybe 20 years ago, but the internet has fixed those issues. Low-fidelity remote work is a cultural issue. Not a technology issue. Companies refuse to do remote work correctly so they can continue archaic co-located work.

Socializing. Clearer communication with better nonverbal interpretations. The ability to more easily drop by someone's desk, to whiteboard in a room, etc. For some, productivity. Separation of home and work life. Even an excuse to get out and about.

Yes, there are ways to get some remote analogs for some of these, but they don't magically work the same for everyone.

> Low-fidelity remote work is a cultural issue.

That doesn't make it any less of an issue to implement. If anything, that's harder than a technology issue. Why would you trust these bad companies to implement any sort of sane work culture in a remote setting than they do in an office? If anything, remote only offers more abuse vectors.

> Companies refuse to do remote work correctly so they can continue archaic co-located work.

I think you're far too pessimistic here. Laziness and resistance to change is far more likely than malice in regards to not going remote.

How is not bringing people into the office negligent? That's again the comment you are responding to - a company that sounds like they are trying to get back ASAP but only when it can be done safely, hence the month to month updates.

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

Wanting to have an office outside the home doesn't mean you are trying to escape - it means you are trying to establish the conditions for maximizing your productivity. Where you can work uninterrupted for long stretches of time - and even when you are interrupted, it is likely less of a context switch than the various daily interactions, temptations, and chores that happen while at home.

On a tangential note - my major complaint about the currently popular "open office plan" setup is that it has flipped the productivity curve for me. I go into the office for all the team interactions. When I need to get work done, I work from home (and hope for a day of minimal interruptions).

If you do wish to pay me to take care of my own kid I will certainly consider doing more of the latter and less of the former!

- Cloud security?

- Controlling physical safeguards remotely?

- Something different?

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?

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.

Could this just be due to a pandemic? I think in normal WFH, what you described wouldn't be much of a problem.

If they say it's bad for their long term well-being, they very likely know exactly what they're talking about even if your own experience is very different from that.

For me, I don't do social very well, but I still need to interact with people, I get on well with people (AFAICT) but seldom does anyone ever really want to spend leisure time with me. Work forces me to have social interactions that help my "sanity" (by which I mean: a vague hand-wavey notion of mental health).

I'm "happy" day-to-day with hiding away at home; but I tend to spiral downwards as I don't get much social interaction outside of work. Banter is good medicine.

For me this is a midlife thing.

YMMV, and the parent is probably quite different, but that's my recent experience.

I hope this becomes the norm if remote becomes mainstream

It is kind of a nightmare making every employee responsible for being the IT director for free. I imagine that most companies are not going to see good results here. (It's good when it's good, but what do you do when it gets bad? Nobody has a plan.)

All in all, consumer ISPs seem to be doing pretty good with the pandemic, but I worry that it's mostly a string of good luck rather than solid infrastructure investments.

Easy, the CPE equipment is garbage or placed in a shitty location. I'm a nerd, but my ancient wifi setup started to struggle with the entire family working and schooling all day. I upgraded to a Ubiquiti solution with multiple antennas and life is good.

I worked on the CPE team for Google Fiber, and indeed, WiFi performance is something that we spent a lot of time on and never got perfect. The average ISP using off-the-shelf CPE doesn't stand a chance. I fear that the CPE is not the problem in my friend's case, and the ISP is just aggressively oversubscribing, and so nothing can be done. Switching to the business plan won't make a difference unless they drop all consumer traffic whenever the business subscriber needs to send and receive, and they are not charging enough money to lead me to believe they're doing that. I don't know anything about DOCSIS, though... I have worked at two ISPs and they both used GPON. The limitations of GPON, however, I understand well ;)

With COVID wfh, I've definitely heard alot of horror stories about local ISPs, especially with time of day based issues. (10 & 2) seem to be high-disruption periods. Where our folks have gotten engaged, 30/35 times it's wireless issues.

One thing that I would offer is for your friend to try to get input from neighbors in a rough proximity. I did have an issue a few years ago with Time Warner Cable where a contractor screwed up and hung the wrong grade coax on a pole.

My philosophy is that you just have to accept that we messed up by letting one company monopolize the space, and pay them more for their better service... but not many people agree with me.

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.

Not saying your experience isn't valid, but would you please stop generalising?

Don't assume everyone is as gifted as you are.

And even so, if half your waking time goes away as an opportunity to socialize, that's a big opportunity cost.

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.

I'll take quality over bandwidth any day.

Source: worked at NYT through 2019.

When I'm in NYC I often stay at about 42nd and 10th out of choice even if I'm not at a Javits event. It's near things but is out of the craziness of Times Square itself.

Compare with Google office in Chelsea or FB office in the East Village (ish). Those are pretty nice places to walk around.

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.

Care to elaborate?

- 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.

I work from home since mid 2007, I know the benefits and I know the price. I do go to the office from time to time without anyone forcing me to do it. Without physical presence there is a significant negative impact for employees, I think the best of the 2 worlds is 1-2 days per week (organized in any way, even 3 days every 2 weeks) when each team is in the office, while teams will be in and out on rotations, so you do save on office space and rent, have a significant portion of WFH but still have the teams meeting regularly. Even with video conference, it's not the same as passing by on the hallway, at the water cooler and having a 30 seconds chat with random people in your department.

Assuming your team isn't geographically distributed anyway--which it often is at larger companies--the day a week thing makes some sense. I've done variants of that in the past.

On the other hand, you're now telling everyone that they still have to live in commuting distance, even if it can be a bit longer because it's infrequent just so they can come into the office now and then.

On still the other tentacle, I absolutely agree that some F2F is useful. But maybe that's better done with getting together every month or two for a few days and just fly people and put people up in hotel rooms if they're not local. Where I work, most of us (not engineering, but the same applies to engineering to greater or lesser degrees) are scattered around multiple offices and fully remote people.

I had a colleague that worked alone in a remote place (~8 hours drive from nearest office) for 15 years. He did not went nuts, that's the best I can say about his situation.

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

Times New Roman Times Magazine Times Square Hmm.

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?

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)