1. It is a different vibe compared to working with co-workers, so instead you find collaborators who may not work for the same company, or perhaps you code with your friends that aren't working on the same project. I had a membership at a workspace filled with other go-getting, fun-loving entrepreneurial mostly young professionals and it was that same amazing social + work setting, but 100% divorced from my employment/client. If I lost a client that wonderful work community and environment wouldn't have gone anywhere.
2. It is harder to overhear things at the watercooler if there's no watercooler - if you're remote in a non-remote company you will be missing out, but in a remote-first company you're forced to find other ways to communicate. It's up to each person to open those channels and pursue it, but in 100% distributed teams this happens naturally (when there is no office). You do have to be a little proactive sending some emails though "So I hear you like cats" "So I heard in the meeting you're travelling to South America now, how is that?", etc.
I think what we'll see is the idea that your employer must get all your butts into chairs under the same roof is not the best way to do things for a few reasons:
- it's costly to the employer to shelter and provide for employees in real estate and so many other ways if they simply don't need to have a building
- it limits the talent pool they can hire from geographically for little good reason - a distributed team can hire anybody anywhere in the world and that definitely gives you a competitive advantage at finding talent!
After going this work-from-my-own-setting for almost a decade I feel like it's inevitable, and I think companies who don't use a 100% distributed model today will be competing harder than they need to and paying more than they should to do it.
I'm glad COVID has accelerated the schedule for all this happening, but I really hope most offices don't go back.
Here are some tips I've found for making the most of working from your own surroundings:
- DO customize the environment to your comfort: lights, sounds, smells, privacy, seating - if you could design the perfect environment for being at your best in that moment, take those liberties. It pays off in productivity
- DO get up and move around often throughout the day, or move from place to place. It seems sometimes you get into a funk and all you have to do to leave that dim cloud is just physically relocate and you'll be refreshed mentally. Get up and go make a coffee, go water the lawn as a break, go check the mail. These little breaks will help you keep up the pace and give you stamina.
- DO get out of the house (COVID-willing), if there are cafés or outdoor places with electricity and bathrooms and tables and chairs it can be good and here's a secret -> set goals when you leave the house for what you must accomplish before you return home. If a café has hours and closes down for the night you have tricked yourself with a very real deadline and sense of urgency that otherwise wouldn't be there. By setting goals for myself and using real time deadlines like this I can stay focused on what I'm supposed to be doing
In short, I envision that in 10+ years and for a long time we it will be normal for us to design offices at home, or share rent of work studios with our family and friends, and what used to be coworkers and office drama will just be the people you choose to live and work with, and you can get hired and lose your job and this social group of people you work around doesn't need to change. Overall I think it will be better!
If there is no demand or it dramatically reduces possibly a lot of us remote workers will find we also are no longer needed or far worse compensated.
We all need to look at the chain that feeds us.
What is going to replace the busy cities, airports, offices and all the infrastructure and it's supply chain?
A lot of IT roles will disappear also.
I like WFH a lot more than I like commuting and working in the office. As a youngster though I loved the cut and thrust of a metropolis. Especially the adventures after work.
I hope the current situation creates a permanent inflection in companies attitudes, which enables me to perhaps move out if this big city and find remote work for my last 10-15 years of work.
They still want to live and work in downtown cities. They still want to go to the office and mingle/network.
HN is an echo chamber.
I enjoy my colleagues and work environment (and wouldn't trade it for the world now that I'm mostly remote!), love to chat with them and keep in touch, but at the end of the day I already have my own friends with whom I have stronger bonds than the workplace, and I'd rather spend my free time with them rather than endless happy hours with work colleagues who are, in the grand scheme of things, really only present in my life for the duration of a job. Coincidentally, some of my favorite coworkers have this same outlook.
I concede this is all anecdotal, yes, but so is your generalization. I personally believe much of this youngest generation of professionals, of which I am part, already has relatively established social networks due to social media that someone even 10 years ago entering a new job in a new city would not have, hence the less need to rely on the workplace for a social life.
If you ask me, the future of the workplace isn't fully-remote or fully in-person, it's an office where everyone comes in 2-3 days a week, as necessary, and working remote or at-home the rest of the time.
I'm in the same boat as you, also early career but Please, NO. Being asked to go twice a week to the office is the worst trade-off. It means I still need to live in commuting distance of the office but I also need to rent an extra room to be my office where I'm expected to work for 3 days/week.
I favor a model in which once a quarter the whole team spends a week together as a "retreat". This gives you flexibility to really live where you want without that need to still go to the office. It also means the company doesn't even need to keep an office to start with.
EDIT: GitHub actually balances this beautifully, imo. They have offices in SF, NY, Austin, and Tokyo for those who want to go into an office every day or semi-regularly, though they also do a yearly company-wide retreat and quarterly team gatherings if you want to work fully remote.
The world is so social, I have large circles of friends/aquaintences from my hobbies, from university, and from back home. I have my apetite of kind of, but not too close, friends more than satisfied, and would rather have alone time or time with the most important people of my life.
Everyone is different, but before I could work from home I stopped going to lunch because I just needed that time alone as the rest of the day was full of people. I'm not bragging, because I'm not sure if this really is better than "just" having your work and your few work-pals in life than the endless social circles and the hundreds of people you are strangely intimate with through FB, IG, snap updates.
But it is what is and I hope I never have to go back to office life, in that case I have to cut out some social media, some friends and/or a hobby from my life to survive.
I think the vast majority want to go back once it is safe to do so.
But most young people are not going to pack up and move to a small rural town in the middle of nowhere.
Companies came to big cities because that is where young talent wanted to live. Not the other way around.
The caveat is of course I have to be working on something I'm interested in with good people. If work was full of bad people or I didn't care about the work then of course I wouldn't be excited to go to work.
A couple of other things though: I hate remote communication because it's so different to being in-person and I feel like WFH stifles your ability to communicate what you're working on with people outside of your team.
Daniel Turner did a great peace on why he left the DC metro area: https://humanevents.com/2020/07/23/goodbye-washington-dc/
Other than that I think it will be business as usual.
And if you find yourself getting "cancelled" everywhere you go? Probably a personal problem.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that the parent was constantly being canceled. The actual problem is that nobody wants to be canceled even once, so they're forced to be perpetually on their tippy toes. The recent cancellations[1] for (arguably) non-hateful behavior creates a chilling effect.
>The actual problem is that nobody wants to be canceled even once, so they're always perpetually on their tippy toes.
This is how professional environments have always been and I don't agree that it's a problem. When a bunch of people with different beliefs get together its important for everyone to invest effort in keeping the peace so the focus can remain on work.
Thankfully there's still plenty of room for sharing personal beliefs with coworkers (even differing opinions) as long as you've put in the work to build a trusting relationship.
I guess it might depend on what sorts of things you're used to saying. I haven't felt chilled at work, and haven't felt any need to adjust my behavior or the things I say in any way.
> One wrong word and you’re cancelled.
I think many of those words have always been wrong, and it's only now that people are correctly catching flack for it, because people are willing to go to HR with their complaints.
The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions. It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone.It used to be _conventional_ to have scantily clad “booth babes” in pretty much every technical conference’s vendor room (worse at things like CES, but I remember going to a mid-2000s VMworld conference where there were some booth babes). At some point—in part because of pushback against the sexism of “booth babes”—it became embarrassing to have them. I remember discussions on various sites (IIRC, including HN) where people lamented “feminism” for the disappearance of booth babes. Ultimately, the people who lamented it couldn’t keep up with the changes in convention.
It used to be _conventional_ to be casually sexist or racist in the office. The convention changed. The people who are supposedly being “canceled” have been unable to keep up with the convention. It could be personal sexism and/or racism, or it could simply be systemic sexism and/or racism and they haven’t _quite_ caught the memo that the convention changed.
Parent comment: I haven't felt censored, therefore there is no problem.
PG essay: This isn't a good argument for the absence of censorship, since some people adopt their opinions wholesale from the dominant orthodoxy of their times, making it logically impossible for them to say anything heterodox. Such people would therefore never feel censored.
Anyway, that's my take. How do you you see them as saying the same thing? I think the PG essay does talk about conventions changing, which you did a very good job of illustrating with your booth babe example...though in the essay, he seems more interested in good opiions that run counter to current conventions rather than bad ones that convention endorses (like booth babes).
I expect that's probably because you happen to be of a similar viewpoint as the majority of the folks you work with.
> I think many of those words have always been wrong
True, but many of them haven't. Over time, it's gotten to the point where expressing a liberal view at a workplace that mostly conservative, or vice versa, is likely to get your fired for being a bad person. The same is true of a lot of specific talking points. Talking politics at work has never been a great idea, but it's gotten to the point where talking about anything that politics talks about is a mine field.
But she’s still worth a stupid amount of money and she still has her publishing contracts. She’s received some pretty disgusting hateful comments _back_ (which is inexcusable), but most objections are specifically because she’s repeating toxic hate speech.
Compare this with the 22 transgender people murdered in America so far this year: 22 transgender people have been killed so far this year — almost the total toll for 2019 (https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...).
Being told that one’s words are hurtful is not the equivalent of being purged in the early USSR (such purges were quite often literal with use of bullets).
Her words are resonating with a lot of women, and more than that, there are many more women who are afraid to agree with her publicly. Brenden O'Neil does a great talk about Orthodoxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
I'm not going to say what I think about her statements, but I do think she has a right to say them. Dismissing them outright is dismissing the many people who are genuinely worried about legislation changes that affect what we can and cannot say.
Her critics also have every right to express their disgust with her support for transphobic “thought-leaders”. The complaints about “cancel culture” are _mostly_ that people who have never had their opinions challenged are now being challenged and called out for hurtful statements.
All I said is that similarly to the 1930s USSR rules of what is "hate"/"counter-revolution" are changing so quickly and abruptly that even people who had been dedicated to the cause are routinely found guilty. E.g. just a couple months ago Rowling was an inspiration for women, an advocate for LGBT, feminism and other causes. Now she is being told that her words are hurtful. It's as same as some NKVD officer, who busted the counter-revolutionaries for criticizing the great ally of the USSR, Germany, get busted himself for being a German spy. And no, I don't mean that Rowling was busting somebody for criticizing Germany or is a German spy.
It's also worth noting that trans people are a fraction of a percentage of the population. Most people won't know anyone personally. It's easier to hate a distant figure who you've never met, particularly when they only end up in the news for being near the Kardashians, leaking government secrets, or getting upset at a beloved children's author. Not a lot of people know who e.g. Lynn Conway is, and that's a shame.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2020/07/21/...
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/12/02/texas-education-agen...
https://stream.org/this-catholic-school-teacher-was-fired-fo...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/2/20751822/google-employee...
However, the be fair, some people have been fired by conservative companies as well:
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/12/lifelong-conservative-re...
However, you are far more likely to be “cancelled” if you don’t toe the left or far left party line. Especially at tech companies.
To go one step further: For a laser to work requires some kind of pumping, in order to get the atoms in a state where they can emit. By analogy, what "pumps" the hate laser?
Trolls do. Nuff said on that topic; we've all seen it.
Foreign governments do. The point of "agitation propaganda" is to get the population in an agitated state, that is, a state where they are ready to lash out. I think there is sufficient evidence of Russia doing this, and I suspect that both China and Iran are doing so also.
Domestic political parties do. "The other side is not just wrong, they're evil. Here, look how evil they are! Look what horrible things they're doing! Send us money so that we can fight them!"
And the media do. Especially social media, but the regular media as well. Outrage drives clicks, clicks sell ads, ads make money. (Alternately, media could be thought of as turning up the gain on the other forms of pumping.)
It's incredibly dangerous to talk about anything remotely controversial at work right now, if you're in 100% remote/lockdown work. I've heard this from multiple non-work friends. I personally avoid it whenever possible.
Hell, it's not even work friends. I know people who have completely stopped texting each other over narrow political views.
Current modern world and its problems can get to you and rot at work also.
Its very hard „not to” talk about some things.
America is in trouble...
#2 is claiming that in the phrase "the only people who were really invested in keeping confederate statues in place are hiding some deeply distasteful views and should be flushed out" should be flushed out applies to views and not people. I am not a native English speaker but it does not appear a fact, much less a straightforward one. In the pattern "X is Y and should be Z" Z applies to X and not Y in my understanding.
I thought that meant parent was saying about 50% of the electorate voted for Trump but I could have misinterpreted.
OK yeah that's a good point. I was wrong.
What? “Bad” is an opinion. Pretty hard to argue objectively bad.
We have laws that represent our current consensus of good and bad. They can change over time.
We also have cultural beliefs that function similarly.
So, when I say, racism is bad, if someone says, "well, that's just like, your opinion, man", are they right?
Seeing that its meaning is in an objective rather than subjective or biased way : with a basis in observable facts rather than feelings or opinions and bad here is used as morally objectionable "objectively bad" comes out as an oxymoron.
One common meaning of “objectively” in practice is as an intensifier of an inherently subjective description.
Severity seems to play a role, but by that mechanism (it's severe so it should be obvious, it's severe so it's worse if you miss it, etc) more than apart from it.
It's not a... literal use of "objectively", but words are frequently put to other uses.
Can we draw any moral or ethical conclusions about it at all?
Seems like this "what's the proper way to use the word objective" discussion misses the forest for the trees ...
But, I think we're kind of losing the thread here. Let's just pretend the post that kicked off our conversation said "Yes, because much of what trump is criticized for is bad" instead of " ... objectively bad", and carry on from there.
Because it's not about the use of the word "objectively". It's about the immoral and unethical (and probably illegal) behavior of the current President of the United States, and people who are dying because of how the current administration has mis-handled the Covid-19 pandemic. And white supremacy being a destructive force in U.S. culture, society, and politics.
Let's talk about those, instead of the proper use of the word "objectively".
So far we have two opposite opinions. Neither is objective and both reflect the poster's experience if we assumed good faith, as we should.
Next step, the side A brings in evidence: allegedly you cannot openly support conservative views in many coastal firms. It's not some strong, factual evidence but hearsay. Nevertheless it is an argument. So what does the side B do in response? It proclaims that conservative views are inherently, objectively bad and thus cannot be possibly supported at workplaces.
If you drop "objectively" from it then it's not an argument at all. It would actually mean that side B agreed with the side A: yes, you cannot show your views because we don't like them, deal with it! It also fortifies the original argument about the partisan divide.
But no, the side B does not agree. The side B makes an argument that supporting one of the two major parties and/or a president of the USA is inherently bad so this is not a partisan issue at all. It's just a fact of life: water is wet, sky is blue, Trump is evil and so are you.
So you want to discuss why you think Trump is evil? I, honestly, don't care. Neither I want to explain why I think he is not. I can, however, discuss, why neither party is objectively good or evil.
But look man. A part of me wants to back you into a corner, rhetorically. But honestly this conversation really isn't helping anyone. We're both probably rage-posting at this point.
I think all this started with someone saying that "racism is objectively bad."
To circle back to that, it's my own belief that the killing of George Floyd was a terrible reminder of how white supremacy subtly functions in our society, and, of our responsibility as citizens to work to improve our Union and make a more just society.
I think that doing that would ultimately be to everyone's benefit, because I believe that an injustice done to one person is, eventually and ultimately, an injustice done to everyone. We're all from the same (human) family, at the end of the day.
My arguing with you probably didn't help either of us. That's my bad.
Now, imagine that instead of discussing their findings directly and arguing about them, both made some judgment about their answer and discussed just the result of that judgment. E.g. Alice asserts that the answer is positive and Bob insists that the answer is negative.
How well would they fare if one side, say Bob, insisted that the other side claims that -1 is positive and hence is completely nuts and objectively cannot perform as a mathematician due to inability to compare -1 to 0? And no, Bob does not think questioning correctness of his answer by Alice is feasible because people who do not understand that -1 is negative do not deserve a courtesy of an argument.
I posit that even if both agree on what numbers are positive and negative there is no discussion and no agreement possible unless both sides allow to discuss the roots of the equation.
By the way you might find this interesting ; )
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
LOL OK I should stop my linguistic dick-waving.
It’s pretty damned easy to argue objectively bad. It’s lazy to argue that “bad” is merely an opinion when there’s some pretty clear examples that prove you wrong.
Would you prefer that we call Trump’s policies “evil” (which I believe that they are, but usually avoid that term because it typically has a metaphysical meaning people associate with it that I don’t mean as someone who doesn’t _do_ metaphysics of any sort)?
No one is covering the violence. Not one ABC clip covers the rioters breaking fences or setting things on fire. The NY Times recent video places the blame on untrained DHS/US Marshalls while independent journalists like Andy Ngo show the constantly destruction every night.
Modern US journalism is yellow to its core. It's so limited, so one-directional, so divisive and so misleading that everyone should greatly question the narratives put before us and view every alternative before coming to a conclusion.
This is why you need two perspectives. Let's take a look at another one:
Curious. Examples?
I am a bit confused though. Big corporations support all sorts of things - arts foundations, politicians who pass policies that will help the corporations make money, environmental groups, union-busting groups, groups against climate change legislation, children's sport's teams, etc.
So I end up speaking more with co-workers from the same country I am from because it becomes easier. This ends up forming bubbles :(. I wish I was able to speak freely and make friends with people from other countries also. But the risk seems much more than the reward.
If you can't be kind or professional enough to have an enjoyable working relationship to have drinks with your coworkers, I don't think it's the corporation or HR department that's to blame.
> or you forget about a sensitive demographic of people when proposing an idea.
Both of those can be true, I imagine. I think the general idea is, though, in America, people who weren't white guys always have had to deal with those same concerns.
My privilege as white dude has included, until relatively recently, _not_ having to worry about those things because my "norm" was the norm society enforced over the norms of people different than myself.
But if I were younger I personally would be kind of bummed out for a couple of reasons:
1. It’s just a totally different vibe working with close colleagues in person. Work was just a fun place to be when I was young (and single.)
2. Getting a feel for what else is going on in the company and who might be good to work with seems a lot more difficult. Just prior to the whole COVID shutdown I had been temporarily shifted to a team to work out some specific issues. That has changed and I’m sort of stuck on this team for a bit.
Working on a less interesting thing I feel less connection to my team and much more like a contractor.
Finding other opportunities within the same company, where you want to have a feel for the personalities involved just feels tougher.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out if it keeps up for a lot longer. It just feels like some places will suffer from a lack of cross-pollination.