Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 409 posts

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

#321

Post by mehrdadn »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #198
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.

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/

That site looks amazing. It only seems to be state-level though. Do you know if it (or any other site) has aggregated local (city- or county-level) data?

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

#322

Post by klenwell »

larntz wrote: post #291
klenwell wrote: post #214

Earlier 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…

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 agree that going outside, especially when wearing a mask and staying socially distanced, does not seem especially risky. Public officials in Southern California have generally been accepting of outdoor activity, so long as it hasn't involved large groups gathering. I have avoided it myself because I have family members in elevated risk groups. (Although, in truth, I think we are all to some degree.)

The thing that would worry me most about the Huntington Beach photo (being familiar with that spot) is not being on the beach. It would be getting too and from the beach. You're going to be shoulder to shoulder with others once your ascend from the sand and get back on PCH.

The other part of the risk equation is the consequences of catching COVID-19. It reminds me of Taleb's Black Swan characterization: small risks predominate but potentially catastrophic consequences in the event. And an accumulation of lots of small risks as people ellide long-tail risks and treat them as no risk at all.

I get the impression from online chatter (mainly Reddit) that most people around here are catching it working in hospitals or restaurants. I recognize it's an unreliable sampling. I wonder if it would help keep people safe if local health officials categorized sources of infection. I suspect they couldn't do so in most the US right now even if they wanted to.

Vox, by the way, put out a nice simple guide on the topic:

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/22/21266756/coronavirus-pandemic-...

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

#323

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

agensaequivocum wrote: post #35
scruple wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a world of difference between what some 13 year old said on Twitter in 2011 and how a business actively treats it's employees today.

Fair. But it should be a last resort not the go to response.

>But it should be a last resort not the go to response.

Private companies have been slinging political / social issues messaging all over social media in the past few weeks. COVID and the decisions made around it are political / social issues, right?

So in the name of not having things be one sided i.e. they get political when it suits their brand, I really feel like the right counterbalance is employee activism via organizing & leaking online.

A company that is proclaiming about lives mattering one week and then pressuring their staff to return to close-quartered open-offices the next week deserves to have their dirty laundry hung high for all to see.

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

#324

Post by throwaway894345 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #319
throwaway894345 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was specifically concerned that people would take unproductive risks. Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more often, etc. But your point is a good one; my concern could be unfounded and maybe people would be more productive? I genuinely don't know. One question I would have about your model is how it stacks up against countries with strong social safety nets? Do they…

> Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more People do this regardless.

We don’t know that they would do it in equal distributions, and it stands to reason that more people would take worse risks if they had less to lose.

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

#325

Post by Izkata »

chrisco255 wrote: post #213
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/

Yes, but if you actually look at the death count, it has dropped in the past month and a half, despite re-openings: https://ga-covid19.ondemand.sas.com/ Georgia being one of the earliest states to re-open, continue to see their deaths plummet even as their case count increases. What's the reason for this? I don't know. Better testing, maybe. Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now. Not sure.

> Maybe a less deadly version of the virus is propagating now.

High probability that selection has already begun. It seems the strain that primarily hit New York City acts slightly differently than the one from Wuhan, and Chicago has a mix of them and others:

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/health-care/chicago-has-uniq...

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

#326

Post by dijit »

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…

> employees not getting on VPN for days at a time

Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by.

Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams).

I work my full complement.. actually even more so.

But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible.

For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.

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

#327

Post by beart »

chasd00 wrote: post #247
TuringNYC wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or...they may "forget" to include them in calls or conversations As much as I think WFH will be a huge win for workers, and the whole country (to some extent, ex SF/SV), I am skeptical it would work unless orgs are completely remote. In hybrid setups, I could see WFH workers end up getting edged out -- it has never worked any other way from what i've seen in the past.

this has happened to me. In leadership positions it should be either everyone is remote or no-one is remote. In a hybrid setup too many conversations and decisions get made face-to-face and leave out the remote people until way too late in the process. I would get on calls that went like "yesterday, after work we were at dinner and all decided to do X and so made some calls, just fyi".

There's nothing worse than joining a meeting and hearing about "the plan" for the first time. "The plan" having been decided on over a lunch meeting between person-in-charge and the-guy who thought "the plan" is the best thing ever. Doesn't matter how bad "the plan" is - it's 10 times harder to walk back something like that.

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

#328

Post by dijit »

kevindong wrote: post #209
elicash wrote: post #19

Here's a photo of the newsroom so you can get a sense of the degree to which they work in proximity: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/18/opinion/sunday/18...

That honestly looks more cramped than any office I've ever been in.

I thought the same thing initially; it looks terribly cramped.

But the longer I look at the picture, the more I realise that they have more personal space, sound isolation and visual privacy than I have in my office.

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

#329

Post by throwaway894345 »

Klinky wrote: post #262
throwaway894345 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no interest in building bridges during it's building, Republicans were laying out the dynamite, and spent a hell of a lot of wasted effort after Trump took office trying to trigger that dynamite. So what's the point? One could argue that Republicans were responding in kind. You would disagree (as would I, but that doesn't matter). This kind of endless litigation only polarizes us--we each permit our own e…

Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly. It is very hard to empathize with conservative capitalists, libertarians or the alt right, when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy. It's also kind of sad that rioting, protests and raw anger over recent social issues has been more effective at movi…

> Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly.

Right. He had the right idea. Of course things wouldn’t change over night. One man making positive gestures is important but insufficient to turn the ship on a dime. A lot of mistrust had been built up by that time and others were continuing to build that mistrust. I think he did a lot to stem the tide of divisiveness, especially given how quickly things fell apart in that regard after he left office.

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

#330

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

TACIXAT wrote: post #52

I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments. My partner and I went to Austin for a month and a half and now are back in the Bay Area to hear the next decision on her office reopening. 2021 is 6 months away. That's not enough to move somewhere else that would make the pain of moving worth it.

>I really hate how this is being dragged out in month sized increments.

Seconded. Employers are in a hard spot right now, because making an affirmative decision is going to cost them staff either way.

Those who've come to enjoy being at home and loving the flexibility of it, if told that it'll be back to the office in 2021 or ASAP, will start looking for a fully remote gig.

Those who dread the idea of being fully remote, if told that the company is going to remain fully or mainly remote, will start looking for a company that will offer more in-office hours.

They're probably looking down the barrel of a quick 20% turnover regardless of the decision they make, and so sitting here preserving the status quo is benefiting them the most.

Post reply on HN