It's strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100% remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike open offices, they're noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack, and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team. I'd be happy if we just go back to offices or even cubicles. I miss my cubicles with my mini-whiteboard and my own little corner with a desk with drawers. In the bay area at least we've been crammed into ever-larger open spaces like workers in a meatpacking plant, with smaller desks and more noise and disruption.
Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#62The thing I miss the most while WFH is the whiteboard conversations. It's nice to be able to drag your colleagues for quick tech discussion and go back to work. Pen is much faster than drawing diagrams online.
Not affiliated, but Mural somewhat makes it less painful online
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#63It 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.
I'm not sure how your conclusion follows - it's undoubtedly true that more and more folks are involved in teams that at least partly remote. However, the skills needed to manage these effectively are mostly the same as co-located teams. To whatever degree "people person" was needed, it seems mostly the same to me.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#64And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop
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…
I would guess the opposite. If more Bay Area companies allow WFH, there's less demand here.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#65I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office. I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be j…
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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#66I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office. I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be j…
I disagree that this is a likely outcome. For many people, this is a worst of both worlds - still requires all the costs of living within commuting distance of your employer (particularly for SFBA and NYC) and likely shrinks the average size/perks of the office you commute to. Partial remote doesn't seem to solve any problem in a way that is any better than the status quo.
Yeah I just took a WFH job and if I HAD to be near one city that would really limit my flexibility and is a huge negative. My company does bi-yearly get-togethers, or did.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it’ll come to have the same meaning as “unlimited vacation”, a vague policy that in practice, is used unofficially in job evaluations to implicitly punish employees who take advantage of the policy.
This has about as much truth to it as people who say "perks are just to make you stay at the office longer!". i.e. it's typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.
> This has about as much truth to it as people who say "perks are just to make you stay at the office longer!".
> i.e. it's typically not a problem and can be very beneficial to the worker.
Many states require payout of vacation time accrued at time of separation. How does that work for unlimited vacation?
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time zone is gonna be tougher. Going from sync to async requires a big shift and most big companies have enough trouble with communication. One other benefit to companies - maybe they won’t pay a premium anymore for people who live in expensive areas.
If the time zone difference is San Francisco to London, sure. But I've lived in Pacific while working for a company in Central, and live in Eastern while working for a company in Pacific, and it's not a big deal. You just adjust your daily cycle by a couple of hours. Domestically, it only gets complicated when you have an entire office of people in a different zone. Then large meetings get hard to schedule around lun…
Within continents it’s not much of a problem, just saying off continent can definitely be
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#69And so begins the bay area salary bubble pop
Please no, I've worked for a long time to finally put myself in a marketable position for FAANG and other west coast companies. It'd be hella disappointing to miss out now.
well you are going to miss out on the gargantuan salaries, which will likely still have a premium but maybe closer to 10% premium instead of 250% premium, but if you like networking with people working on cutting edge protocols you still can
the cities and towns themselves aren't spectacular though. I mean there are more spectacular ones to immerse yourself into if you are really just trying to relocate somewhere intersting
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#70I work for a pretty well-known tech company, and my hypothesis is that we'll switch to a mostly at-home work week, where most people WFH 3 or 4 days a week with one day of the week being designated as a "meeting day" where everyone is in the office. I don't think this will happen because of people are worried about virus transmission, but instead because most people like working from home and we've proven we can be j…
Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week "meeting day" but really try to focus on socializing than "this is the day we do all our meetings" since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)