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Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#31

Post by gfodor »

rattray wrote: post #24
blhack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget about the commercial real estate bubble pop, and potentially a massive pump in prices of family homes as a result. I think that investors are going to be moving their money out of commercial real estate, and into residential. Edit: to be clear: I don't live in the Bay Area, and I think the housing prices there could go either way: 1) People spend more time in their homes and spend an even larger portion…

Interesting - do you predict that bay area residential housing prices will go up? I would have guessed folks would just start leaving...

Downward pressure on bay area burbs because of people leaving, but upwards pressure potentially due to the exodus of SF as people start to want more separation from people. Time will tell.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#32

Post by PopeDotNinja »

qppo wrote: post #16
bfrog wrote: post #4

And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop

I'd gladly take a 15-20% paycut to leave the area but keep my job. Love the company, love the people I work with, hate this place.

I did that. I dumped my SF job and started traveling the world last November. I just picked a helluva year to start :)

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#33

Post by alexbanks »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #19
Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

Video conferencing is pretty bad IME. I think that all too many companies view Slack as an acceptable option for communication most of the time, and I think that's an extremely inhibiting factor for most remote work. I think some innovation around the tools we use for remote work would be great, fwiw.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#34

Post by the_watcher »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

As you move up the chain in global companies such as Twitter, it becomes more likely that you'll have a superior or direct report based in a different location than you, and this has been true for years. The "people person" executive theory only holds for companies that do not already have a substantial number of teams that are not all located in the same place.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#36

Post by dudul »

kelw22 wrote: post #17
dudul wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These advantages have always existed, and yet most of the FANG have resisted WFH policies until now. Personally, I find it pretty funny how this "work that can only be done well in person, in an office" can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home.

Personally, I find it pretty funny how this "work that can only be done well in person, in an office" can suddenly be done remotely no problem when the government mandates that everybody stays home. You're spinning things toward your bias with your sentence. Who, exactly, is saying it can be done "no problem"? My experience is that any communication-intensive work is significantly harder and more time consuming. We j…

That's the usual argument, and honestly I'm not even gonna put a lot of effort into arguing. People work differently, fine, it's your XP, sorry it's not working that well for you.

My XP is that remote communication is different, seem to take longer, but is also far superior. When you're forced to communicate via documents, diagrams, chat, etc you put more effort into your content. You try to anticipate questions to avoid wasting a few round trips. It forces you to think more about what you're saying, it forces you to think about edge cases, specific details, etc.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#38

Post by IngoBlechschmid »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #30
dumbfoundded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

I think there is still a lack of things like white boarding tools. I haven’t seen anything that could replace a big whiteboard. Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that. Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help. I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.

I love this online free self-hostable open source collaborative whiteboard: https://wbo.ophir.dev/ Unlike many others, this one is nice and lean and hence works smoothly even on old hardware.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#39

Post by jeffbee »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #19
Ididntdothis wrote: post #9

It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…

Collaboration tools are already pretty solid. What else do you really need other than a remote desktop + video conferencing? I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#40

Post by tannhauser23 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #12
amateurdev wrote: post #2

I have a feeling a lot of companies will follow suit. It saves up huge costs in real-estate by not having to provide seats to people. It also might just open up more companies to hire from any time zone.

The interesting question is, why now? I mean on the surface sure - because we have a pandemic and state ordered quarantine. But the more interesting question is - why is this finally provoking companies and why do we think they will continue the trend in the future post-quarantine? I've been a remote worker since 2006. It's been obvious to me for a long time that companies could go all remote or some version of remot…

Crises tend to accelerate existing trends. Makes sense to me that a forced quarantine would be the giant straw that breaks the camel’s back.
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