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Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

nbloom.people.stanford.edu

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Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#361

Post by thekyle »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #282
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something more insidious to your analogy though. A lot of those banking jobs don't exist anymore. Any job that can be WFH will be easy to outsource. You aren't need in office so why do we even need you in this time zone? Outsource it cheap. If it really is manageable from a 30 min standup and Jira then why even bother with expensive devs? Before you had a small competitive market in a central location. Now yo…

> why even bother with expensive devs? Because you get what you pay for. I am yet to hear of any cases where in the long run outsourcing development to a low-wage country actually saved money. Competent engineers generally follow the money and emigrate. Why earn $10k a year in India when you could earn $100k in the USA?

What if $10k in India gets you the same lifestyle as $100k in the U.S.?

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#362

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dehrmann wrote: post #110
Smaug123 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really get the flu twice a year like clockwork? That must put you in like the top 0.01% of flu-getters; you have my sympathy.

A lot of people refer to the common cold and flu interchangeably, but they're very different, and it's usually just a cold.

I used to do this, and then I got the flu.

I was unable to function for 2-3 days (as in, I would fall asleep if I attempted to read a book) and was pretty rough for a week after.

Flu != cold.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#363

Post by plutonorm »

Aeolun wrote: post #317
zabzonk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding. You have obviously never been on the Tube at rush-hour in London. All it offers is a sense of stress and anger.

I can only speak for myself, but I miss my sense of stress and anger. Any time I go to the office I hate it because I’m extra stressed out about sick people being on the train, but I cannot deny it gives a sense of normalcy to life that is otherwise entirely missing.

institutionalised

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#364

Post by thekyle »

fermentation wrote: post #284
DC1350 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, pick a big city? I know. I guess it’s just choice paralysis.

Making friends in a new city is really hard even without covid. Anecdotally I found meetup helped me out a lot. After a few weeks of awkward gatherings I finally found people I clicked pretty well with. Forcing yourself to go is hard though.

What types of meetups did you find worked best?

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#366

Post by skywhopper »

anonytrary wrote: post #292

This is ironic coming from Stanford, who is currently fucking up every single aspect of their handling of covid, as many Stanford students will attest to. Colleges are basically scammers at this point. The whole benefit of going to college is being able to meet like-minded smart, young people like yourself. Remote college isn't a thing and never will be. College is about people, as much as it is about learning. The u…

This isn’t “coming from Stanford”. It’s a paper written by three researchers, one of whom is on the faculty at Stanford. But that person doesn’t speak for Stanford and has nothing to do with Stanford’s policies in re COVID.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#367

Post by KozmoNau7 »

anonytrary wrote: post #292

This is ironic coming from Stanford, who is currently fucking up every single aspect of their handling of covid, as many Stanford students will attest to. Colleges are basically scammers at this point. The whole benefit of going to college is being able to meet like-minded smart, young people like yourself. Remote college isn't a thing and never will be. College is about people, as much as it is about learning. The u…

I've been almost permanently WFH since April, with a few weeks back in the office during summer when the incidence rate was lower, then back to WFH when the second wave hit.

I enjoy not having to commute, but I absolutely miss the banter across the desks and lunch conversations.

I would absolutely like to keep 2-3 weekly WFH days in the future, which would also give me more flexibility in where I choose to live, I really want to move farther from the city and closer to nature. A longer commute would be acceptable if I didn't have to do it every day.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#368

Post by roca »

One effect this paper doesn't talk about is how remote work can snowball. For many people the main reason to go into the office is to meet other people on your team. The more they choose to work from home, the less their team members are incentivized to leave home. I've seen this cycle lead to everyone working from home all the time.

Organizations can try to set policies to avoid this, e.g. require everyone to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday. But then you start to wonder why you're paying for office space that you only use 3 days a week. You can try to save the money with hot-desking etc but that has its own effects.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#369

Post by graphtrader »

Spooky23 wrote: post #193
Fordec wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these tackle the one aspect that trumps everything else in the corporate world. Is this better for the company? Even if the majority of companies see things this way, they will return to the office. But those that succeed, survive, thrive or dominate a market will do whatever that makes them successful along the way. It doesn't matter if people like routine if the other guy beats you on revenue, time to marke…

I don’t think it is. The high performers work better, but half of the rest workers are doing nothing. I’m aware of people getting canned for stuff like outsourcing themselves, accidentally having sex on an open mic, illegally exporting computers to countries with export controls, etc since COVID. Work at home is great for people with tangible outputs. I don’t want my salesmen fucking around in the office. But many wo…

I would think the fact high performers work better remote though is what will be a competitive advantage for a 100% remote company at some point in the future.

I am way more productive remote and it isn't even close. While I do like the social aspect of the office, it is such overkill.

To me post-COVID, the whole country is open for business. I want to join a company that values high productive remote workers and sees the massive opportunity this is going to create.

Re: Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

#370

Post by atoav »

Ancalagon wrote: post #218
yourapostasy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...do more stuff over email, messaging and zoom has been great... WFH forces the kind of auditable accountability upon everyone I've taken for granted as necessary to thrive as a consultant. This popularizes communication modalities into the open long overdue. Use of more granular project tracking has gone up considerably as a coordination point to communicate early and often between teams, purely to reduce meeting…

Does socialization really matter to management and the business profits at large though?

When you know your collegues and their circumstances better it is easier to create a work environment with less friction. In the worst case you see your collegues as some abstract force that constantly makes your day worse, while you yourself wouldn't even go an extra milimeter to make things clear, easy to parse or simply less pain in the ass for the next person.

Knowing the people you work with can make these relationships less abstract and more emphatic.

In the worst case interpersonal communication in the workplace is all about who tends to offload work on whom (e.g. the manager who records a 15 min voice message where precisely one minute matter to each of the receipients offloaded the effort of sorting and parsing to the recipients. This manager wasted then 14 minutes times the number of receipients time, just out of pure lazyness).

Remote communications makes this worse, because every email that leaves open a questions takes time/energy as it goes back and forth.

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