From where I’m sitting, it feels like the laptop class liking WFH is one of the brakes for a return to normality.
But that even assumes there's a chance to return to "normality" to begin with. The virus is out there, it's going to be out there for a while longer if not permanently. On top of that, the winds of change have been blowing hard for going on two years now. One's desire to return to The Before Times is a dream; IMO, things will be different, in one way or another, from now on.
Now that there's a small chance that this could kill me, I have zero inclination to return to the office whereas I used to go to the office quite a bit during the summer when people weren't usually sick and avoid it during the winter months especially around the holidays. You asked.
Put it another way. I offer you a job for a $1M salary but there's one catch: every year I drag out the least productive employee (100% according to me) and publicly execute that person in front of everyone else. Would you take that job?
Regardless, you still should get checked out by an immunologist. Often, it is treatable with immunoglobulin.
While I do not have primary immunodeficiency, I have 2 rare immune mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, and I am on subcutaneous immunoglobulin as a treatment. I infuse it twice per week.
I have not had a respiratory infection since being on subcutaneous immunoglobulin, and it's been about 5 years since I started this therapy.
I also feel your pain. I cannot work in an office environment due to health reasons, but some reasons are not due to immunological issues.
Example case studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7652023/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20542704209210...
Wasn't that also true before covid?
I'm 100% on team life finds a way (tm). I don't need you to think that way but I'm going to continue thinking that way and we'll see how that goes.
As for life finding a way, I do think we should expect to continue to see additional waves of covid, mutation and infection, but I'm not sure why you would expect that to lead to a high risk of death?
As for the risk of death. I know people who prefer normality with a ~0.5-1.0% additional chance of random death over continued isolation. I get that. I prefer isolation to that myself but I won't impose my views on anyone else. Why can't we just politely accept both sorts have to coexist? Go back to normality if you wish, be my guest even, except where we have to mix upon where you put on a mask or GTFO. Why is this unreasonable? Because apparently this is crazytalk to some.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
I'm less worried about dying of the thing than I am of an indefinite and impossible to cure case of long covid and all the horrible things that come with it. People have literally killed themselves over it. But your body your choices and all that. Just remember that goes both ways.
Neutralizing antibody titres remain stable even 13 months post infection[0]. This isn't an upper limit, it's just that there's no data beyond this. And despite whatever you might have heard, reinfection remains extremely rare across all variants. All data points to immunity acquired after an infection being more potent and robust than that imparted by vaccines.
I'm not unvaccinated, I'm not American and I don't work for Google. I don't have a dog in this particular fight. But if you decide to spread FUD and misinformation on your way to find new scapegoats, expect to be called out for it.
0: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-021-07057-0
What you're suggesting here is go catch a very serious case of covid and nearly die so that one has that multi-year long-term immunity. Not planning to take such advice but I welcome you to do so (for science of course, you can get a Nobel prize for doing that if you live after all). Too bad if a new variant like omicron comes along and skips past those antibodies though but those are the breaks.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
In fact, let's take this stupidity all the way home. Let's all go back to the craptastically ventilated open offices for 8-12 hours 5 days a week. And since there's no vaccine mandate, your eventual chance of exposure to COVID is 100%. There have been ~180K breakthrough infections that led to ~11K hospitalizations or about a 6.4% chance of ending up in the hospital so far.
https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-breakthrough-data
If you end up in the hospital, that's anywhere from $100K-$500K of medical bills.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/average-charge...
All of that is pre-omicron which seems evolved to evade vaccines. You may to wish to take that risk, that's your business.
Can you please point to where I made such a suggestion? You are arguing against a straw man. My comment was in response to your attempt at scapegoating:
> But I hope we agree that anti-vaxxers suck. And they are providing a pool for the virus to evolve past the vaccines
To repeat myself, unvaccinated people will eventually catch the virus and in the overwhelming majority of the cases recover and develop potent and robust immunity against future infection. Apart from possibly putting strain on hospitals, they are not a threat to your health.
> All of that is pre-omicron which seems evolved to evade vaccines.
This is speculation bordering on fearmongering. There is hardly any data on efficacy of vaccines against Omicron. Although there is some preliminary evidence that reinfection rate due to Omicron is higher: A whopping 1.27%. Which is again, much lower than the rate of breakthrough infections.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.11.21266068v...
If my employer wishes to pay the total cost for risking my health to work in a closed space for the sake of looking busy, and in the event of a hospitalization they will agree in writing to pay 100% of the uninsured costs, plus take out a $10 million life insurance policy in the event of my demise, I still wouldn't take the deal because I don't hate myself. But I do hate the tech sorts that think bringing everyone back into the office wearing masks all day is a good idea right now. Even Google's leadership knows that's a bad idea. Just more arguments in favor of not going to startups led by sociopathic TLAs for crumbs of the equity pie when you can make six to seven figures working for the big guys.
Further, I doubt any employer would take that deal above. They know that once you factor in the total cost it's a terrible risk. Just like unless you're a TLA at a startup you're taking a really bad deal with less than 2% equity. But you wouldn't believe that listening to any TLA sitting pretty with 5 to 25% of the pie telling you why they're going to be just like FAANG one day.
I'm a strong believer in attaching dollar figures to decisions and I know these CEOs are not continuing to allow working from home out of the goodness of their hearts. You may choose to believe otherwise of course
This is frankly insanity. You can't think this right minded?
So you go from that, to all human interaction is evil?
I agree, and I wish people were more honest about that aspect. I quit my old job over a mandatory return to the office policy and took a full-time remote position instead. If you’re posting on HN chances are you have a highly in-demand skillset and can get remote work if you want it; hiding behind COVID just drags out this diet dystopia longer than its natural lifespan. I realise people have different tastes but the taste of “covid culture” has got rather stale for many people.
So, people liking the what works for them makes them "brakes"?
And normality is forcing people to do what they don't like, for the sake of what exactly?
Sorry to break it for you, friend, but people liking things is not an obstacle. It's an business opportunity.
It's the people who are insisting on not moving with the times that are "brakes". And that's anyone who calls 9-to-5 asses-in-seats "normality".
Ain't nothing normal about that. And that ship, too, has sailed.
I'm not the person you asked, but for me it's the virus. Not only for myself as a healthy 20-something year old, but also for the family and other people that I see outside of work as well as for my colleagues. We're all vaccinated, we have tests in the office and you're recommended to take one in the morning and take your mask off only after the results are in 15 minutes later, but still we work from home because I really don't fancy dealing with spreading corona to my parents and grandparents and I guess it's similar for the others.
It's not all terrible of course, I dread having to get a bus subscription again (80 euros a month to do with whatever I want is a lot of entertainment), I dread the commute time, the inflexibility. But I also miss my colleagues and the 'flexibility' of going into the city for something small and silly because I'd already be there for work. I have a much harder time concentrating on work at home. Some people have no problem with that and I kept it up for a while too, but it's been pretty bad since about mid-summer this year. At one point it just really hit me that I'm done with covid.
But then this shit happens https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... and I figure: okay then, let's be good for another holiday season and then I'll see about going back to the office again. It also feels stupid because it's never me, like, I haven't gotten covid at any point, I've been responsible, I'm not part of the problem. But then I'm also privileged in this ivory tower making an above-median amount of money early in life while just sitting at home. It's mixed feelings all around.
In short, to answer the percentage question with a percentage: let's say I like office/home 60/40 (not as a time share, but as advantages vs. disadvantages). I'm not dying to go back, but the virus is definitely the reason that tips the scale.
Edit: Wikipedia on omicron actually looks quite complete already and answered some things I was curious about, but keeping up with the edits (it's currently updated like every 20 minutes) would be a bit hard as a news source. Maybe I should just check the most interesting sections every now and then.
Or best guess, and it's all just guesswork for at least the next few weeks, it's more contagious, evades the vaccines, but it's potentially less lethal. That's good and bad.
https://secureservercdn.net/50.62.198.70/1mx.c5c.myftpupload...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03619-8
More as the situation evolves (literally).
E.g. I'm willing to add a fully vaccinated office to my risk profile, but how do I get there? Even if I could trust everyone in the office was vaccinated (I can't), public transit was my only option before. Will the company send me a taxi with a vaccinated driver? Of course not.
Companies are asking people to take unnecessary risk for questionable speculative gain and burdening employees with figuring out (and paying for) how to do it safely.
I see what you're saying, but you can't separate WFH from fear of the virus, so I think you're assuming nearly all workers don't fear the virus at all.
It's a real risk for anyone in the high-risk group, but a lot more people also face real risk if they: interact with older family members, go to church services or participate in gatherings outside of work, have small kids, have at-risk family members living with them, interact with unvaccinated people, or interact with health care workers.
I still reduce my interactions because even being vaxed + boosted, I know I could spread a new variant. Asking me to go into a cramped, shared office space for many hours per day would not sit well. Even worse would be if I knew it made me less productive and eliminated some of the flexibility I had in my schedule.
There is no future without scheduled, forced vaccinations. That is not normalty returning. That's insanity.
So it’s a bit of a pickle to claim working in an office is equivalent to killing others, when we all accept buying products that clearly weren’t made by people that were working from home. Are we casually supporting these people killing each other, just so we can buy a hamburger?
See also: "I am a man, therefore everything I do is a manly act".
> one of the brakes for a return to normality
I hate how so many have simply defined "normal" as "exactly the way we all lived in November 2019" and then just assume that we must get back to precisely that. As if that moment in time represents some objective Normal Right Way to live. Framing that moment of time as "normal" is preventing us from moving forward to a new normal, with things like more opportunities for remote work and better in-office health-and-safety.
Open offices were already a craptastic idea before the pandemic but no amount of data overrode their cost savings so they were portrayed as a perk. I'm pretty much Eric Cartman singing the social distance song by nature, but I get people don't all agree with that. That's your lightcone, not mine. May we never intersect.
Personally, IMHO, if someone isn't wearing a mask in crowded public places and getting their vaccinations, it's mind bogglingly hypocritical to be claim to be afraid of returning to the office.
Either they're worried enough about the virus to protect themselves and the people around them, or they're not. And if they're not, then how can they be too worried to be in the office?
* Leaving aside the issue of the minority who medically can't vaccinate.
Perhaps nitpicking, but it isn't just a matter of whether you can vaccinate. For example, cancer patients can often still receive the vaccine (depending on their health and current phase of treatment), but that doesn't mean that they aren't still at a dramatically higher risk from exposure to Covid than others, despite being vaccinated.
There's a legitimate concern about people being coerced into "volunteering" to return to the office by their employer. Perhaps not most people at Google, but even there some employees will be in a situation where their manager can bully them into the office.
That said, I do hope that remote working will continue to be an option for those who want it as there are advantages besides virus exposure.
The evidence indicates that another coronavirus HCoV-OC43 probably caused the 1889-90 pandemic and killed millions of people worldwide. The same virus is still endemic. It doesn't kill many people today because most of us get infected as youths and then retain some level of immunity which protects us later in life.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
There's more to life than avoiding disease. I'm not going to put my life on hold and hide.
As for vaccines, we obviously can't have any data on long term effectiveness. But short term effectiveness against severe symptoms is pretty good, and periodic boosters are available to those who want them.
For one, there might be vaccines that work more broadly and give immunocompromised individuals better protection in the future, or cures/remedies that help your body fight the virus better when you do fall ill.
For another, right now hospitals are starting to overflow here and if I decide today to start going out and about as if nothing is amiss again, me or a loved one might end up there at a time where they're actually full. That is not cool for the covid patient, the medical personnel that usually already do overtime during normal times, or the people whose treatments are delayed again because it's full of covid patients again. We do still have a period to work through, either by (booster or initial) vaccinations or by forced inoculation for anti-vaxxers (aka having covid).
It's not about being too short-sighted to see that it's very likely we'll all be exposed eventually.
The 2020s: when residents of the wealthy West discovered that “elective” procedure doesn’t only mean cosmetic or gender-affirming surgery, but anything that isn’t literally preventing you from dying right now, or a baby coming out.
I can be cautious and likely avoid significant exposure for another year or two at least, but not if my employer disallows it.
What is this obsessive need to bring everyone back into the same poorly ventilated rooms? What business goal is served here other than literally making them look busy? Do you want to wear a mask for 7 to 12 hours a day on the job when you could be at home?
But also for those who feel that doing so is better than working from home, more power to you. Just don't make me join your club. It's just not my thing.
To that end, opening up all the corporate offices for those that feel the need to be in the office once again whilst 100% allowing work from home seems the best of both worlds. We have vaccines. But we also have a rapidly evolving virus and a perfect storm right now for it to evolve further. I'm betting on the virus to win this one in the short-term. But I'm also betting in the long term that it's doomed, fortunately.
Except that's not what's likely to happen. Even if 100% WFH is the official policy, people will be leaned on to come into the office. And as the number of people working remotely shrinks, that will only get worse, because it's very hard to be an outlier when everyone else is communicating real-time face to face.
I've seen all-remote, all-local, and mixed environments. I just don't have faith that mixed environments work well, but every situation is different.
Of course, when I stated I'm less than happy about that, they claimed it's very safe. Yet all workers are traveling by bus and masks are not mandatory.
Aside: genuine bona fide former bench scientist who used to work in a hot lab here. I stopped working in hot labs because the safety practices of my coworkers terrified me. Many of them are dead of cancer now, decades later. While there's no strong evidence for it, I cannot entirely dismiss the lab Leak theory here based on my prior experience working with fellow scientists and their cavalier attitudes towards safety. Had I stayed I think I would have lost my mind.
During the peak of the pandemic I was still going to my office at Oxford University. However, this other institution I'm potentially joining has much more relaxed safety measures.
I think having a low-density office is a must even if there is no pandemics. I want to be productive, and I don't want to be surrounded by tens of coughing people during the flu season. It's just commonsense.
"All of that is pointless. You're inevitably going to be exposed to ionizing radiation many times throughout your life regardless of what your employer does. Whether you're exposed in the office or somewhere else hardly matters."
Viral loading matters a great deal.
> Fortunately the vaccines and other treatments make the risk minimal.
For some definition of 'minimal', for most people, this is thankfully very true.
One of the biggest sources of infections in the already vulnerable has been nosocomial vectors. Should your hospital admissions be assumed as a dangerous activity that is optional at your own risk?
Children get on average 5-8 viral infections a year. Should parents be told that they should sacrifice their child's lifelong immune health and rectitude to prevent themselves getting a common virus as has been our custom for millennia?
Or is this your way of saying that you're opting into getting a free smallpox infection this year because children get 5 to 8 viral infections a year? We still have some small stockpiles of smallpox if you're so inclined.
I genuinely can't decipher what point you are making?
Open Office floor plans already were Petri dishes for infection before the pandemic. Now they are an incremental risk factor for premature death. Who needs that? The world has changed. People trying to return to the before times will be foiled by biology itself.
But also I 100% support people opting into going back to the office with zero protection or any liability for their employers should something unfortunate happen. They should be forced to sign a big release indicating they understand the risks and that they accept it is all on them.