A cycling pal of mine is an in-house lawyer at a big oil company here in Houston. They were told a couple weeks ago that there were no plans to go back to the office until at LEAST 2021. All the work is being done just fine.
Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
251–260 of 409 posts
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
So unlike a modern tech company, they sit farther apart and at least have barriers between their desks?
Most modern tech companies have a single height-adjustable desk per person, so most of the time your desk will be slightly higher or lower than your neighbour's.
All the tech offices I have worked in or visited for Meetup groups are long shared benches. How much linear space you get depends on how fast the team is hiring, whether there are interns right now, etc.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a while for people to die after infection. Give states like Georgia time to catch up. Their hospitals will be overwhelmed and the numbers of deaths will get there. There is no "less deadly version of the virus". Treatment protocols have improved but that has not dramatically changed the odds of at-risk folks dying.
The China strain that people get on the west coast has been shown to be less deadly than the Italy strain that people get on the east coast.
It's been shown to be less infectious. Mortality rates are the same for both strains.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the part that gets me, too. Here's a summary I put together of where the US stands on the latest "reopen" benchmarks: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSSp19amBFU... It varies region to region. I'm in Orange County, CA. (You may remember us from such recent news events as...) This was Huntington Beach weekend before last (probably much the same this weekend, too): https://www.reddit.com/r/Coro…
It's definitely concerning how people are acting but that being said I think the initial research is showing that outdoor spread during the day is very unlikely. UV light seems to be devastating to Covid and Vitamin D seems to be protective. So a crowded beach is probably not all that bad. Packed bars and restaurants? That's a near worst case scenario
I have been pro-lockdowns and have not indulged in any conspiratorial nonsense. But at a certain point, if states and localities don't accept the mounting evidence that outdoor transmission is not a significant threat, it will start to feel a little tyrannical.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#255Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new normal, citing long reopening timelines, their own preferences, increased productivity, Twitter's policy change, etc. But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments…
Personally I can't wait for this to come back to normal: being inside an office for 9 hours every day helps me be productive and focus.
I guess it depends on your WFH situation. If you live in a big enough house to have a dedicated office room, probably it is better to WFH. If you live in a studio, where you do everything in a single room, then it is better to go to the office to change the scene a bit.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable. They think employees need an eye behind its back in order to produce. And if it is that way, it is their fault, they have chosen bad when hiring.
> Some people just do not understand that employees are more productive if they are comfortable. I'd wager most people understand it. Like you pointed out, it's an issue with the perception of lost control, and people are willing to trade productivity for power.
That's a really good point. People do do a lot of non-rational things when they feel like they've lost control.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup for sure. I (generally) see two camps on the remote work debate: - WFH / unlimited remote work is the future, forcing people to come into the office is oppressive. - Remote work harms culture and collaboration, we all need to get back into the office ASAP as we can't be effective remotely. Overall I've just been surprised at the intensity of the remote work discussion, and surprised that we don't see deeper analy…
Is it really forcing? If the work contract says "we pay you $X/month (or hour) to come to the office and do this work" is this oppressive? I work from home since mid 2007, I know the benefits and I know the price. I do go to the office from time to time without anyone forcing me to do it. Without physical presence there is a significant negative impact for employees, I think the best of the 2 worlds is 1-2 days per w…
"Oppressive" is too strong in most cases. The more candid description of that side of the fence is probably more along the lines of "I prefer to work from home and not commute."
Assuming your team isn't geographically distributed anyway--which it often is at larger companies--the day a week thing makes some sense. I've done variants of that in the past.
On the other hand, you're now telling everyone that they still have to live in commuting distance, even if it can be a bit longer because it's infrequent just so they can come into the office now and then.
On still the other tentacle, I absolutely agree that some F2F is useful. But maybe that's better done with getting together every month or two for a few days and just fly people and put people up in hotel rooms if they're not local. Where I work, most of us (not engineering, but the same applies to engineering to greater or lesser degrees) are scattered around multiple offices and fully remote people.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!? Easy, the CPE equipment is garbage or placed in a shitty location. I'm a nerd, but my ancient wifi setup started to struggle with the entire family working and schooling all day. I upgraded to a Ubiquiti solution with multiple antennas and life is goo…
We are talking about wired performance here. I worked on the CPE team for Google Fiber, and indeed, WiFi performance is something that we spent a lot of time on and never got perfect. The average ISP using off-the-shelf CPE doesn't stand a chance. I fear that the CPE is not the problem in my friend's case, and the ISP is just aggressively oversubscribing, and so nothing can be done. Switching to the business plan won…
That's unfortunate.
With COVID wfh, I've definitely heard alot of horror stories about local ISPs, especially with time of day based issues. (10 & 2) seem to be high-disruption periods. Where our folks have gotten engaged, 30/35 times it's wireless issues.
One thing that I would offer is for your friend to try to get input from neighbors in a rough proximity. I did have an issue a few years ago with Time Warner Cable where a contractor screwed up and hung the wrong grade coax on a pole.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#259Get ready for a wave of outsourcing of everything from tech to bpo like the US labor market has never seen in the coming 6 months. Once employers go through the initial pain of setting up remote work, the more than 50%(and sometimes as much as 80%) cost savings will be irresistible. If you are not in government, healthcare, or other industry that does not have legal requirements to maintain a US presence and you work…
Time zones are still a thing. No matter how remote someone is, if they're more than a few times zones away it becomes problematic. More than nine timezones across the company is nearly impossible to do well. So if we're talking about a US company, if you want anyone on the west coast, hiring continental Europeans will be tough, unless one of those groups is willing to work outside normal hours. Also, taxes can be har…
Also, taxes can be hard. I'm sure as remote working gets more popular, services will pop up to help with this and maybe laws will change, but right now, it's really hard to hire someone outside the US, and it's fairly complex to hire someone inside the US in state that you aren't already in.
Inside the US is a solved problem. I haven't worked for a company in 20 years that did its own payroll. ADP, Insperity among others solve this for you. You can even set this up with a small business account through Bank Of America.
Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean a dedicated office at home or you want to get out of the house? For me it's given me a much greater appreciation for working from home as I can be with the kid all day rather than outsource that for the majority of her waking hours.
If you are with the kid you are not working
Worked fine for centuries. We have been living in a historically abnormal time.