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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

#181

Post by ashtonkem »

robbyking wrote: post #18

I 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…

The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#182

Post by throwaway713 »

dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#183

Post by dumbfoundded »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #41
alexbanks wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example Teams and Outlook have terrible search. Documents basically go into a black hole to never be seen again. We need the same search quality we have for web searches.

There are tools like automatic captions + manual tagging that can make search much better. The tools are out there, just not well adopted at this point.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#184

Post by mikeappell »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #160
dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

This makes sense. In my team it’s the same: the young guys like going out together after work and also often don’t have the space at home to set up a good workplace. They also need the most handholding. I remember some discussions a while ago where the conclusion was that it’s hard to onboard juniors remotely and remote is more suitable for experienced people.

This was my experience as well.

When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.

You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.

At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#186

Post by mjayhn »

_nhynes wrote: post #150
mjayhn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't go near an open office after COVID19 and I doubt I'm alone, I think things will change greatly.

I'm not sure that I understand this sentiment. Is the worry about COVID specifically (and hence would be abated by a vaccine or herd immunity), or is it about increased awareness of all infectious diseases? My lack of understanding stems from a (perhaps naive) assumption that social distancing will eventually go away along with the threat. I'd be glad to hear others' opinions on the matter.

I was already sick of getting sick 3-5 times a year just being in an open office, the fact that I'm more aware now that I can get something that will do more than knock me out of being able to code for a week is a huge deterrent to me ever wanting to work in a hamster cage surrounded by hundreds of other people with hundreds interactions with whoever.

I mean, I'm not a germophobe or something but I already thought it was gross how often I got sick and I'm 100% certain it was from my office environment, now I have a real reason that "suck it up stupid" doesn't just brush away. Every winter someones kid gets sick then it just blasts through the open office. Then it happens 3 weeks later, then again, then again..I'm pretty sure I got sick 3 times earlier this year, maybe 4.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#187

Post by bojo »

screye wrote: post #155

A question. Do y'all feel that a trend towards remote work benefits mid/senior level employees at the cost of the development of junior employees ? IMO, it is the same difference as in-person schooling vs online schools. As convenient as WFH is, it really isn't conducive to hands on mentorship. Tech companies might not mind it, since the attrition rate in tech at the junior level is incredibly high anyway.

My company is WFH right now, but my team is distributed across 4 cities anyways. I've mentored a handful of junior developers and it seems to have worked well, however, you really need a culture which supports it. Active video/screen sharing time, solid onboarding documentation, RFCs which describe processes, etc.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#188

Post by youeseh »

dddbbb wrote: post #137

I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must change drastically when you're middle aged, have a family to live around and a spacious house in the suburbs. But most younger people want to live in the middle of the city (i.e. small, often shared apartments but a short commute) and have no…

WFH also works for those young people that don't quite live in the middle of the city - say, they would like to live closer to where they play (the ocean, the mountains, on the road, etc).

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#189

Post by joncrane »

ravenstine wrote: post #127
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but it would also be good if more (tech) companies offered a decent working environment. That's coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs / assignments I've had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements. I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It's a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don't have their employees' b…

I'm an ardent supporter of remote work, and I wouldn't go back to non-remote work without a hefty pay raise, but I think I probably would have considered office jobs during my last search if the offices I'd worked in previously had actually been pleasant. Open office plans, low cubicle walls, cubicle sharing, frequent noise and disrespect of focus, flimsy banged up office chairs and equipment, no budget for standing…

> disrespect of focus

This right here is my beef in a nutshell. My attention should be under my control. For example, I can't believe that leaving audible cell phone notifications on is becoming normalized.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#190

Post by allenu »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55
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…

Maybe, but it would also be good if more (tech) companies offered a decent working environment. That's coming from personal experience btw, where most jobs / assignments I've had, it was usually open plan, flexible seat arrangements. I have a new job now where I have a fixed desk with a set of drawers. It's a breath of fresh air and honestly it sounds so stupid and trivial. But employers don't have their employees' b…

My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.
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