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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

#351

Post by ByteJockey »

Klinky wrote: post #188
throwaway894345 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Obama and everything, but I don't think the federal government was meaningfully more capable of administering a significant welfare program then than it is now. As much as we like to pretend that Obamacare was a great success, I don't get the feeling that it dramatically improved circumstances on balance (premiums went up across the board but coverage for preexisting conditions is guaranteed so that's somethi…

Obamacare was huge for pre-existing conditions and the marketplace, you actually had options now, instead of zero. Also Obamacare was watered down to appease Republican interests at the time. 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. It is hard to meet in…

Wasn't it watered down (specifically the public option being removed) to get Lieberman's vote?

Why would they try to appease people who weren't going to vote for it?

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

#352

Post by jmchuster »

nostrademons wrote: post #253
jmchuster wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No idea what original article I read now that compared mortality rates, but I'd suspect it used this analysis as it's source: https://www.cato.org/blog/two-supertypes-coronavirus-east-as... which led me to conclude that the mortality rate differed.

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

#353

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kanox wrote: post #184
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…

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 can't wait for it to back to normal because my employer has done an absolutely terrible job of making our infrastructure work well for remote development.

No source code allowed on laptops, but my work is on hardware devices I have to sit next to. So I have to shell to my workstation to produce binaries, port forwarding to my hardware devices to push them over, slow slow awkwad...

Part of the code base I work on is open source, so for my own sanity I'm mostly just doing that portion of work... but on my own personal (underpowered) computer. But not allowed to expense a new machine... Doing work for the corporation using my own assets...

And forced to use a chromebook as my laptop, with its awful ssh support...

Sorry, this can't end soon enough. But it won't for us until January or so. They need to fix this, or I need to find an employer who is competent at WFH.

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

#354

Post by ponker »

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.

More fair would be to allow people to choose to remain remote, but at a salary deduction, and give that salary to the people who are required to be on-site.

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

#355

Post by ponker »

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…

Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN."

Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.

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

#356

Post by ponker »

jedberg wrote: post #270
scarface74 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

It's absolutely not solved. I run a company with employees in multiple states. The payroll company takes care of some of the problems, but for example, every state has different rules about worker's comp. Most states require you to get your own, but you still have to let them know. Some states require you to buy into their state system, which requires signing up. Then there is corporate registration. Many states requ…

I just looked up this company and... is the domain parked or something?

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

#357

Post by throwaway894345 »

Klinky wrote: post #338
throwaway894345 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thin…

Again, I don't buy the "meet in the middle" approach or the "both sides are at fault" theory. Only one side has a populist leader who's platform was to foment racism and pledged to destroy Obamacare, and basically no one is reigning him in. If anything, people are volunteering for their chance to be thrown under the bus. It's very hard to meet in the middle with the current situation. There is serious moral concern i…

I don’t know man. I don’t see how we’re going to go anywhere if we’re determined to only see the worst qualities in our opposition. Notably contrary to your point, lots of conservatives are Never Trumpers and are very unhappy about the populist turn things have taken. Anyway, if you’re interested in minimizing racism, “the middle” is where we should be. The poles are obsessed with their racial hierarchies. Moderates are committed to a post-racial egalitarian future, even if they don’t have all of the information or political power to push things over the line. But anyway, good luck; it feels like doubling down on polarization, division, intolerance, etc is a recipe for disaster, but I guess I hope I’m wrong since it seems like the direction we’re committing ourselves to as a country.

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

#358

Post by jedberg »

ponker wrote: post #356
jedberg wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely not solved. I run a company with employees in multiple states. The payroll company takes care of some of the problems, but for example, every state has different rules about worker's comp. Most states require you to get your own, but you still have to let them know. Some states require you to buy into their state system, which requires signing up. Then there is corporate registration. Many states requ…

I just looked up this company and... is the domain parked or something?

Sort of yeah. We aren’t launched yet.

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

#359

Post by JamesBarney »

devalgo wrote: post #220
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…

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 think the outside is less dangerous not because of UV, but because a far smaller percentage of the air you breath in was breathed out by someone else in the last 15 minutes.

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

#360

Post by deathgrips »

jedberg wrote: post #144
momokoko wrote: post #109

Get 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…

Management doesn't care about this. They don't care about language barriers, cultural differences, time zones, etc. All they care about is reporting to their boss that they cut expenses by 50% and hired people who at a glance look just as suitable for the job.
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