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Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

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Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#291

Post by larntz »

klenwell wrote: post #214
UncleOxidant wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how so many people/entities want to pretend that somehow the pandemic is less dangerous now than it was in March when we started all of the isolating/WFH. When in fact we have a lot more cases now, high levels of new cases and more than half the states have R0 > 1.0. https://rt.live/

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…

I am in south-ish (north palm beach) Florida and went to the beach the past few weekends. Fortunately it was nowhere near has busy as that picture. We haven't had much issue finding a spot with enough space to feel socially distanced.

We also went to Longhorn for dinner yesterday and they had everyone pretty spaced out (every other booth, no seating at center tables). All the restaurant employees were wearing masks. I'm not sure we were at more risk than getting takeout.

It has been really great mentally to go to the beach and have dinner outside the house.

I am trying to keep our distance and not expose ourselves or others to anything unnecessary... we would have definitely left the beach and/or the restaurant if it was anything like the pictures you posted.

I guess my point is I feel like it's possible to go out and not be too risky. I don't think every area reopening is getting crazy.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#292

Post by bragh »

jkaptur wrote: post #173

Ask 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…

> (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).

This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#293

Post by pkaye »

rebuilder wrote: post #207
duxup wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication being going into the office sucks and everyone has to do it to be fair. I wonder if they're aware of that subtext....

Or, that management thinks the work they're having employees do sucks, and their employees are going to slack off as much as they can if left unsupervised. Also, that management doesn't have much in the way of supervisory powers apart from tracking hours at the office.

Maybe look at work output instead of hours.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#294

Post by nybble41 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #235
throwaway894345 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful…

Um, I'm not sure it's easy at all for people to live as precariously as they do in the US now with a decent safety net. Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? You'd have to be pretty clever to emulate that.

> Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way?

It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#295

Post by ci5er »

danbolt wrote: post #205
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were told that the optics of us not coming back to the office as the city is reopening could destroy the company. Wherein "optics" means the millions that the top shareholders and decision makers may or may not make in the future. That's what's at stake, and that's why your families need to be put at risk.

their profits oh no

It's how the world works.

Now, it probably isn't as correlated to butts-in-seats as mid-management would like to pretend it is, and maybe those people don't deserve bonuses for being bad mid-managers, but after the US just blew $2T+ on speculative bailouts, I do think that the goose is required to lay a few golden eggs.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#296

Post by asdfman123 »

Leherenn wrote: post #280
asdfman123 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like American society is obsessed with safety and the value of individual lives, which has never made sense to me but I go along with it out of respect. However, when your actions have a x% chance of killing someone, and you can mitigate it with reasonable precautions... ad what value of X do you go along with? There's a disconnect there. Either people are really bad at math and science, or they do not care ab…

Why doesn't it make sense that people do not want to die (generally)?

I'm talking about a general societal lack of acceptance about death. You don't really see it as much in many other cultures.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#297

Post by bespontovy »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #265
BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some of people, probably more than you'd expect, work is pretty much the only social contact.

I see this comment in every one of these discussions, but finding new venues for social contact is a fairly simple adjustment to make once you accept that it's necessary.

"A fairly simple adjustment"? I've been in therapy for exactly this for a year. For me, this shit has been tough.

Not saying your experience isn't valid, but would you please stop generalising?

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#298

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

Loughla wrote: post #5

Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely. So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope. It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.

What a disturbing notion of “fairness” - apparently forcing people to be subjected to daily exposure to a deadly virus (via commute & office spaces) is “more fair”?

Absolutely jawdropping stupidity that is.

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#299

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #298
Loughla wrote: post #5

Meanwhile, my employer has said zero remote work once the state transitions into the next phase. They want to be "fair" to everyone, including those who have positions that cannot be performed remotely. So, you have a co-morbidity? Nope. You have no childcare suddenly? Nope. It's startling how stuck in the 1980's some people are. Just absolutely astonishing.

What a disturbing notion of “fairness” - apparently forcing people to be subjected to daily exposure to a deadly virus (via commute & office spaces) is “more fair”? Absolutely jawdropping stupidity that is.

By this logic, civil servants in a police precinct should be exposed to violent criminals because it’s more fair.

Apparently whatever is the maximum hazard experienced by an employee has to be shared by everyone to be fair?

Re: Most employees of NYT won’t be required back in physical offices until 2021

#300

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

walshemj wrote: post #167
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want to be "fair" to everyone This is the explanation I hear most often, but when you examine it, it makes no sense. Otherwise you would need everyone to make the same money, which makes no sense either. People are different, their duties are different, some jobs are better suited for remote work than others - putting everyone in the same basket is plain stupid.

The trouble is from an IR (industrial relations) perspective that actually can be problem if one group perceives that some other group has something they don't have. (Brigit's Jones Smaug Marrieds ) Also how would you audit this "oh her she's friends with manger x so she gets o work from home etc"

It depends. For example I have my set of duties written in a table (a fairy long one). I added a column with the "Can be done remotely?" heading and marked the respective entries (most of them - the exceptions were things like meetings and business trips). The same can be done with all employees: the ones who have tasks that don't absolutely require their presence should be able to work remotely during a pandemic.

Besides, by now it should be clear who is efficiently working remotely and who isn't. If there are problems, this should be a signal to reexamine the situation of a given employee. Everything should be based on clear metrics known to everybody. Riskng other people's (or, more likely, their relatives') lives for a wrong purpose is plain silly.

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