Contrast this with contractor body shops, small or medium businesses in regular buildings where your day is a screaming hellhole of a tiny cubicle with low walls or an open plan office that also has support with loud headsets next to you, the only lunch option is an overpriced sandwich or salad, the commute is over an hour each way in a cramped, standing room only transit and not a private company shuttle with wifi and clean seats.
If I was working out of MV I would be more inclined to spend a day or two a week voluntarily at the office.
If I was in an open plan cube farm where I give myself mild tinnitus just having noise cancelling headphones cranked up to eleven for the entire duration, then an hour and a half ACE/Caltrain/BART multiple transfers home, fuck that, 100% remote, if I get pushback on the remote part I leave.
> At the same time, we recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities caused by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office. This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it. We’ll continue watching the data carefully and let you know at least 30 days in advance before transitioning into our full return to office plans.
Latest official numbers for the UK, Delta variant:
CFR 0.03% for fully vaccinated < 50 years
CFR 0.03% for unvaccinated < 50 years
https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1418562741246300167
(I checked his numbers with the official source, they are correct in this regard, although rounded from 0.026 and 0.028 respectively)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
There's evidence that, at least, the vaccines (possibly with hypothetical boosters down the line) are effective in keeping those afflicted out of the hospital. I can only speak for myself, but it did do that. It sucked; about as bad as an influenza bout I had a couple years ago. Go down the list of symptoms and I checked all of them. Ten days later (almost to the day, amazingly), it cleared up.
What does the return to "normal" look like? Well, nothing will ever be normal again, if you define Normal to mean "the way things were in 2019". It isn't going away. Delta is no joke; so we wait until it clears up? Until we have another vaccine? And what about the 2022 variants? You want to wait until 2022, and we'll be in the same exact situation then, and you'll want to wait again, because the Omega Variant is no joke. And in 2023, the Zeta Variant will be no joke. No one is joking.
What do you want "normal" to look like? For many people, it may mean more opportunities to work from home. That can't work for a remotely significant portion of the world; tech is privileged in that it can, sometimes work, but that privilege is born on the backs of thousands of workers in healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, services, supermarkets, food processing, etc who don't have that privilege. This isn't "I can work safely, but most can't"; it's "I can work safely because most can't".
I don't want Normal to mean that. Sure that means we need to be smarter in every industry, to make work and gatherings generally safer. Get vaccinated. Wear masks. Quit it with the open offices and everyone two feet away from each other. But at least for me, it also means, I don't want to work remotely. I don't want that to be the norm in our industry. I want to collaborate with coworkers in person. I'm tired of zoom meetings. I'm tired of the PlayStation in my living room looking at me every time I walk to the home office. I'm tired of bringing on new coworkers and never knowing them beyond a line of ASCII text in a Slack direct messages list. Most of all, I'm tired of saying "yeah we're still work from home for employee safety" to my friends in healthcare and manufacturing, who inevitably feel jealousy and derision because not only was that never an option for them, but its only an option for me because it was never an option for them.
There are higher goals than safety; a time for it, certainly, but that time has passed. The world is not going to get safer. The only reasonable option is to adjust our expectations to be alright with a less safe world. You will get sick. I can say with certainty; it sucks, and may actually be the end for some people. This is going to happen, guaranteed, no matter how isolated you remain. You will make a mistake; you will get COVID; and you'll feel like an idiot, having made so many sacrifices to spend 18 months in isolation only to end up in the exact same place as those who didn't care.
You cannot say these things with certainty. The evidence so far is overwhelming that a significant percentage of people who become infected with SARS-COV-2 do not become symptomatic. If the numbers in the recent study from UWashington are correct, the percentage of Americans who have been infected but remain asymptomatic has been massively under-estimated. The evidence so far is overwhelming that fully vaccinated people are extremely unlikely to become notably sick (though of course some will).
The influenza virus remains a potent killer of human beings, occasionally (as in 1918) developing a variant that kills millions of us world-wide. SARS-COV-2 (especially Delta) is more transmittable than influenza, and has a higher death rate, but that's really the best model we have for how this plays out. And how is that? Most people do not become sick with influenza each year, most variants of influenza are not particularly worse than the others, there is a vaccine that dramatically reduces the likelihood of severe symptoms (but does not guarantee immunity), and tens of thousands of Americans die from it each year anyway.
That's the likely end-game with SARS-COV-2 based on everything I've read. So not "you will get sick", but "you might get sick, but you're much less likely to do so if you're vaccinated, and either way, next year could be different". The world does indeed get safer sometimes, but then it also gets less safe at other times (and sometimes both at the same time, for different reasons).
Most people don't have COVID. Hard to believe, but its the truth. Most people are perfectly healthy, at least in terms of communicable diseases.
Returning to work does mean that mistakes will happen, and someone presymptomatic or idiotic or whatever will spread it. Its inevitable. You can't control everything. It happened to me, and I don't blame the person who spread it in the slightest. They didn't do it maliciously or deliberately. It just happened.
That's life. Things will happen to you that you can't control. One of these things, at some point, will kill you; its a virtual guarantee. Maybe its COVID, maybe its getting hit by a bus, maybe its cancer. Living your life in an attempt to control everything, safely living in a bubble, is just another way to destroy your life. We've seen mental illness explode during the pandemic; people, overwhelmingly, aren't built for isolation and fear. There's a reason our society was the way it was in 2019, and its mostly human nature.
I'm not sure what's being shared externally, but that Oct 18 date is itself contingent on offices entering a stage which is considered safe. It's the earliest that people can return, not an absolute date. October 18 could come and if an office is located in an area with case counts above a certain threshold (or vaccination rates below a certain level) people will not be expected to come back.
Google was one of the first to send people home. I was home weeks before my kids were definitively sent home from school. We are likely to be one of the last to be asked to come back.
Given the lack of information, no major company should be committing to the end of WFH until the results are clearer. That definitely isn't going to be the case until well after Labor Day.
I don't understand why the major tech companies are so hellbent on re-opening the offices in the fall. It's like they've drawn a line in the sand and they can't even consider reversing course. Which doesn't even make any sense, because for all intents and purposes they've been doing fine. Most tech company's stock price and profits are above their pre-WFH levels. Surely extending WFH until January isn't going to ruin their business.