The "good worker" narrative is there to justify management's decisions and reduce survivor's guilt, but you'll see when layoffs come amazing talent and mediocre talent are equally removed. Management has zero problem laying off incredible people en masse.
In the case of the return to office dynamic, you're specifically filtering out high-quality workers who also prefer to be remote, and the results are retention of all low/medium quality workers regardless of remote/office preference, and high quality workers who don't mind or have some reason that keeps them in the office. You don't filter out low-quality workers whatsoever because they'll at least go to the office to keep their job assuming they don't have options (or else they'd be higher quality workers or maybe they just leave the work force).
...everyone for whom a full return to the office is a breaking point. You assume that correlates with capability of the employeeto perform their job well.
That does seem reasonable, but it remains just that: an assumption. And you know the thing about assumptions : they make a donkey out of U and MPTIONS.
All this to say here in response that I'm increasingly irritated at the, what's the right word? Polarization? Radicalization? Politicization? Of work options and how those options are creating new tribes and battlegrounds.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
A week or so ago, it didn't look too bad. It is indeed much worse than I realized right now.
>These findings translate to one in five COVID-19 survivors aged 18–64 years, and one in four survivors aged ≥65 years experiencing an incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19.
> Finally, the study only assessed conditions thought to be attributable to COVID-19 or post-COVID illness, which might have biased RRs away from the null. For example, clinicians might have been more likely to document possible post-COVID conditions among case-patients. In addition, because several conditions examined are also risk factors for moderate to severe COVID-19, it is possible that case-patients were more likely to have had an existing condition that was not documented in their EHR during the year preceding their COVID-19 diagnosis, resulting in overestimated risk for this group.
It also seems very possible that people with COVID diagnoses would be more likely to be on edge about their health / long COVID type symptoms. It also would have been nice if they differentiated things that can actually be tested for vs. things that can’t.
I’m not saying there isn’t an effect. I had bad cases of COVID twice. The first time I didn’t have any apparent effects afterwards other than my sense of taste taking a while to come back. After the second time - Delta - I definitely had some after effects.
We just need to be careful about claiming how many people get them. People are placeboing themselves into actually having symptoms (or thinking they do), and it’s hard to design studies to get around that.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1529477481127759872.html
Many of these are amenable to direct observation though. Research has already had many objective findings such as lung fibrosis, kidney function damage, abnormal liver function tests, shrunken brain matter (UK biobank study), etc. So the overall number might be debateable, but this is almost certainly going to have a significant impact on the number of healthy workers, not to mention the personal tragedies behind those statistics.
Here hospitalization and deaths are not following the infection curve at all. They are still following the end of the earlier omicron curve.
You need to draw a line between Covid and colds, or else count colds like Covid.
Here's the protocol: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-sur...
Also, there is no common variant of COVID that is anywhere near as mild any virus we call "common cold". In the best case (Omicron for a young, boosted individual) it's comparable with influenza in terms of severity.
I imagine, too, if there are "100x engineers" (or whatever their role is) there may be compromise otherwise that's not generally applied; I would however think that someone who's that production - unless it's somehow a mostly solo role - would necessarily need to be on-site to utilize whatever resources necessary.
There has been a sudden uptick in return to office talk (despite plenty of reporting that covid is actually much worse than people realize now). Other people on HN have mentioned it and all of a sudden the leadership at my office, who were always extremely pro-remote work have suddenly started making mention of how valuable in-face communication is.
So the feeling of a "soft layoff" might be the intended effect.