Turns out I dislike working from home more than I thought I would. Video calls and screen sharing is a poor substitute for real life, spontaneous back-and-forths in front of a large screen with no lag, compression artefacts and frame drops.
Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
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Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#252I 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…
Except that a lot of tech companies are out in the suburbs...
Yeah, I have to be pretty skeptical of the above take, for this reason:
1) I live in San Francisco. A ton of residents here commute to Mountain View and environs for work. A ton.
2) Most of those residents are young.
3) One of the few things that has been reliably proven to improve your happiness - even more than a salary bump! - is reducing your commute time.
4) With WFH (work from home) everyone who commutes from SF to elsewhere could cut their commute from 2 hrs round trip, daily, to 0.
5) Ergo, a ton of young people would quickly see the logic of this: WFH and cut your commute time to 0. They would want this option, and they will take it.
I know this complicated somewhat by the fact that you can work from the buses, but I still don't see the overcoming this widely shared preference, for no commute.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#253It'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 offic…
I can't count the number of times, my team has run into a complex issue, be it a production issue or a coming up with a complicated algorithm design that would've been a lot more difficult to do remotely. My current team has 2 members that are remote only and one person who comes in once a week, or every other week depending on circumstances.
I think there's a lot of day to day work that is more productive at home but in an ideal world, you could have the best of both worlds.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#254I 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…
I still remember being such a young programmer -- and I much preferred WFH. I have no car and commuting on foot and via public transport, only to turn up at a noisy, productivity-sapping open-plan office, is tiring. I would rather save that hour and a half each day and just work from home.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#255This is the one of the hugest news of 2020 now.... Imagine all the implications!!
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#256I 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…
Why would work from home in the suburbs be better than work from home in the city?
Bigger place with a home office.
Also generally if you live in the suburbs you probably co-habit with your family and probably spend your commuting life wishing you could see more of them (this is orthogonal to the city / suburb question really - it has more to do with the older / younger split).
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#257Never been more proud of my former employer. This is amazing. Kudos, Twitter! Hope more Bay Area companies follow your lead. The last project I worked on at Twitter was a 3 person affair - me in SF, front end guy in Seattle, our manager in the sky, flying between usa & asia. Manager sent out specs on google doc, I video-confed the Seattle dev, we agreed upon the breakdown of work, I did the backend statistics stuff with apache math & finagle, he did the frontend in mustache.js, then we got code reviews & lgtm. That was one of the very few things that actually shipped with zero friction, because none of us ever saw each other in person. Everything was email & gdocs & git. Really enjoyed that experience.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#258I 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…
Why would people fitting this description not prefer the flexibility of working remotely? As an aside -- I prefer not to use the term "work from home", as the ideal (for me) is the ability to work from anywhere at my option. Also, for what it's worth, co-working spaces can be a workable alternative to a traditional office.
Imagine you're 22. For the last 17 years you've showed up every day for an institution. It provided a schedule, a routine, social interaction with a community of peers who share common ground, even explicitly structured extracurricular events.
One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now?
Of course it's possible to build a life from scratch, without the benefit of an institutional attachment. You can enforce a schedule for yourself. You can go chat up strangers in bars or meetup groups or whatever, and build a social network that way. But it's not hard to see how this level of flexibility, so suddenly, could be suffocating.
Contrast with a mid-career professional who already has a spouse, a well-developed social network gathered from the many communities he's been part of over the years, and the structure/routine of childrearing.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#259I think the biggest argument for me against near 100% WFH is the space cost of a dedicated home office. Ideally I would need another room for it to be long term sustainable. Right now I live in a small 400 sq. feet (≈ 35 m²) studio apartment in city center, walking distance to everything (including the office in normal times). Property prices here are at around 1k USD / sq. feet (10 k USD / m²). An apartment with ded…
One possible outcome of a more normalized WFH culture might be a dramatic reduction in rent prices for the types of living arrangements you describe, precisely because their central locations have lost a principal source of value (proximity to the office), so demand will wane.
Similarly, centralized corporate real estate is not going to be as in demand as it once was. This will take decades maybe, but it's easy to imagine some of these buildings getting converted to residences, increasing the supply (and therefore decreasing the costs of rent).
Instead of 3-4k/month for a downtown studio in NYC, you might see 2k/month. It'll take us a while to get there.
Conversely, one might reasonably expect suburban rents to jump up, as city-dwellers move there.
Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
#260I 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…
Have you told them (or have they been told) that they can work from somewhere besides there home? Obviously there is an exception right now, but normally "working from home" means you can work from anywhere you want (different country, parents cottage, coffee shop, outside, where ever). I work for a tech company and we have people who regularly go to Europe/other places for months and work from there just getting up/…
Working from a separate country isn't usually allowed based on the labor laws of that country, since you are still paying your taxes to your home country while using the infrastructure of another. You can certainly do it, but your company may not want to know you are doing it.