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Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

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Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#101

Post by celticninja »

dawg- wrote: post #54
gdubs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also been a week . Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot. If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fund…

I think maybe we don't need a controlled experiment. Maybe we need to embrace a situation where we are forced to adapt and come up with solutions on the fly.

necessity is the mother of invention

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#102

Post by RangerScience »

mirimir wrote: post #95
RangerScience wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids. Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video), I think there's an opportunit…

As in Stephenson's Diamond Age .

Ah! You know, kinda, yeah. Combine educators who can produce detailed lesson plans with performers who can deliver them, kinda like a lecturer and a TA, and it really is reminiscent of the Primer.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#103

Post by Kaiyou »

projektfu wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized after I had kids that a huge amount of "new urbanist" thought is driven by the young and childless and does not incorporate the needs of people with children or of children themselves. This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a…

It sort of makes you wonder where we went wrong. Other social forms had children integrated into the things adults do.

The part where it was made illegal for children to work. Humans had children integrated into the things adults do, too. I don't even get who pushed for this. It just alienates young adults from life, opening paths for them to turn to drugs and other destructive behaviors.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#104

Post by bamboozled »

jtms wrote: post #53
bamboozled wrote: post #37

The minute I can leave my house and do some work in an office or cafe I'm there. WFH everyday is a joke. Disclaimer, I have done a lot of remote work.

Just because you and your specific likes and dislikes don’t agree with WFH everyday as a viable approach doesn’t make it “a joke”. I’m perfectly fine and productive with it.

It goes both ways, you don’t have to be told to like work from home and be downvoted over it.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#105

Post by Kaiyou »

formercoder wrote: post #15
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

Outside of young, childless tech workers, this sudden remote work experiment is not going well for most people I know. This isn’t the controlled trial of remote work that these think pieces suggest. Instead, everyone is forcefully stuck at home without time to prepare. Parents are juggling childcare with getting work done, while fighting an uphill battle against IT systems that weren’t prepared for everyone going WFH…

I agree. If anything business travel and in office time will increase - we’re gonna realize how great it is to be in the same room.

I'm realizing how great it is to not be in the same room. Meetings are more productive. It's easier to get stuff done without being distracted.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#106

Post by arthurjj »

mirimir wrote: post #95
RangerScience wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids. Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video), I think there's an opportunit…

As in Stephenson's Diamond Age .

I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated.

Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.

For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.

That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#107

Post by klyrs »

RHSeeger wrote: post #65
closeparen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>paying an extra 10%+ in rent/mortgage Where a one-bedroom is $4000, a two-bedroom is going to be $6500, not $4400. Obviously a cheaper metro will have lower prices, but is the relative premium for an extra room also so dramatically lower?

I was playing it safe and assuming a family adding one more room to a multi-room house. The 10% is on the low side. Where I live, it's an extra $100,000 between a 3 bedroom house and a 4 bedroom (or adding a bonus room), and then bump that up another $50,000 for the total cost after mortgage interest, utilities, etc. But nobody (that goes into an office) seems to want to believe it costs $150,000 to work from home (b…

Add TWO rooms to that house. It sounds like you live in an area with inexpensive housing. Folks who rent face an entirely different economic reality.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#108

Post by closeparen »

CodeCube wrote: post #83
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the east coast outside of actually being located in the hard urban part of the city, from what I've seen 1 and 2 bedroom apartments only end up being marginally different in price. For example, one of the places I was looking at had 1 bedroom apartments for around 1400-1500USD per month while their 2 bedroom apartments only increased in price to 1600-1800USD depending on whether you wanted a bit more squa…

Yeah this sounds about right. This is the way it should be. I mean, hell, even that is a bit pricey TBH ... rent prices are generally out of control and need to come down. People have to be able to live without cramming into places with roommates like sardines.

Interesting interaction: the lower the marginal cost of an additional bedroom, the more of a splurge it is to have your own place.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#109

Post by klodolph »

Kaiyou wrote: post #93
dorchadas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias warning: I am a public school teacher myself. And this is also exactly what I feel the people who are now pushing for online schooling in general don't get (apart from the fact there's a non-negligible part of the population that doesn't have consistent/good internet access). There's a lot more to school than just going and learning 'stuff that doesn't affect real life', as some seem to believe. It's about socia…

Because maybe in their experience - it definitely was in mine - it didn't happen at all in school. I always disliked school because of the other students that got in the way of my peaceful life. Never had a single friend throughout school and college, either. Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit. People like me who'd needed it the most didn't get any of it during…

> Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit.

Not to put too fine a point on it—but I don’t think that very many people who work in education think this way. Especially not the teachers running the classrooms. You leave children to their own devices and you get Lord of the Flies, which was written by William Golding, who based the book on his experiences as a schoolteacher.

My personal advice, as someone who “survived” school, is that intense feelings of anger in reaction to school add too much color. You have to wait and let the logical, non-angry patterns re-emerge in your own mind each time that anger reappears.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#110

Post by treyfitty »

I raised this on Ask HN to little fanfare so hoping people could opine on my thoughts here:

Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American?

Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.

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