A Hybrid Approach to Work • Hacker News Board

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#101

Post by xiphias2 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:59 AM UTC

throwawaygler1 wrote: post #99

philsnow wrote: post #43

> We’ll also offer opportunities for you to apply for completely remote work (away from your team or office) based on your role and team needs. Before the pandemic, we had thousands of people working in locations separate from their core teams. I fully expect those numbers to increase in the coming months as we develop more remote roles, including fully all-remote sub teams. This is the most interesting bit that I sa…

10+ of my co-workers at Google have left for permanent wfh positions in the last month or so, I suspect that significantly influenced their decision to change their stance. Before that, their attitude was "people will vote with their feet" and when people started actually voting with their feet, this got announced pretty quickly.

My Googler friend already found remote jobs as he started looking a few months ago to go remote (moved from LA to Florida), and he says that he will probably move anyways as the other offers are great.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#102

Post by anonporridge » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

slavapestov wrote: post #65

anonporridge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, if everyone is vaccines can we do away with mask requirements? We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. That's why we're still wearing masks even after vaccination until we have better understanding of how the vaccine affects transmission rates.

> We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. We absolutely do and such studies exist, and furthermore you can see a rapid decline in new cases in countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage, which would not have occurred if vaccines did not prevent onward transmission.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021032...

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#103

Post by anonporridge » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #38

anonporridge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, if everyone is vaccines can we do away with mask requirements? We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. That's why we're still wearing masks even after vaccination until we have better understanding of how the vaccine affects transmission rates.

> We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. Yes we do. I'm not sure that we have peer reviewed published A/B studies yet (but I think we do have some initial ones). But there is absolutely hard evidence that trasmissions rates decrease among vaccinated populations. We saw this with population level…

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021032...

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#104

Post by killjoywashere » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

I lead/oversee a team of 7 that was built across 10 time zones, starting in 2017. The team got to its current size about 6 months before the pandemic hit. Three of us are fully remote, and there are two sub-teams of two in one city, separated by about 40 miles. We've got biz dev, ops, and software development (NLP and image analysis). We definitely dial people in if we need them, and there's a daily stand-up.

So, we were built around a hybrid-ish sort of model from the beginning. I'm honestly not sure how the team would do if we were all together. I know we wouldn't have the same team, that's for sure. A couple of the folks couldn't have taken the jobs if a move had been required.

I oversee work by a number of other teams, they are all working at the international level, and none of them are fully localized. If anything, the one thing I think may change with the pandemic is that people will develop less localization, and travel to visit teammates will become a thing. If I recall, Slack does this: they have everyone meet up once or twice a year. We did that at the beginning and it was super helpful.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#105

Post by hinkley » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #21

> They’re testing new multi-purpose offices and private workspaces, and working with teams to develop advanced video technology that creates greater equity between employees in the office and those joining virtually. It just doesn't work when half of the team can walk by each other's desk, do some impromptu planning, and the other half are spread out across the world effectively uninvolved in these conversations. Nob…

If people in the building have private offices, and the buildings have floors, there are a lot of psychological barriers that people either didn’t notice of have forgotten about because we’ve been trying to do our best imitation of a feedlot.

I’m not going to go across a building and up steps to ask someone a question unless I am out of other options. I’m not. You’re not. I’ve done too many 5 Why’s where one of the answers was “they made a guess because they couldn’t be arsed to cross the building to verify things”.

We might message that person, if we use it and they actually read their messages. At which point being in the office isn’t quite as transformative.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#106

Post by wfhbata » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #90

3 days in the office and 2 days "where ever they want". This is meaningless. Either WFH completely or not, this in between thing doesn't work. Employees don't have the freedom to live where they want. All those dreams about Silicon Valley dispersing all over the country are just dashed. People still live close to work and they just get to stay home a couple days a week. That's all.

“3 days in, 2 days out” is what they’ve been saying for a while.

The news here is that they’ll allow some employees to work in remote offices, and some to go fully remote.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#107

Post by Sophistifunk » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #68

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You either choose to be fully digital, and make digital communication the way work gets done, or you harm people out of the office. I say this as someone who managed mixed distributed / WFH teams: If in-person conversations are an advantage (and they are), no company is going to willingly surrender them for the sake of catering to the people who aren't in the office. That doesn't mean teams can ignore the remote te…

I’m not sure I completely buy that in-person conversations are a net positive. Constantly being interrupted with drop-in conversations definitely hurts productivity. The vast majority of the time those conversations could have been an email and our two minute chat is going to take me ten minutes to get back in the zone of what I was working on.

Indeed. And everything must be documented anyway, before you start building, otherwise all you're getting is n different recollections of the same meeting causing problems, whether it was in meatspace or not.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#108

Post by rhodozelia » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #71

garet2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you harm people out of the office I have seen this implication frequently in these discussions, that remote workers will get fewer promotions, lower ratings, etc. The assumption is that this therefore makes remote work non-viable. I don't really get that. Trading off better compensation through promos and ratings is just a business decision for the potential remote worker. Personally, I would trade never getting a…

> trade never getting a promotion again for remote work Trade you say? Sounds like win-win to me! Not being made to manage/lead a bunch of other engineers sounds pretty nice

Eventually you might master your domain of expertise and solving the same problem again and again for different customers may become boring. Helping more junior coworkers mostly do the projects themselves with your assistance for the cruxes could be rewarding and multiply your output far beyond what you could achieve just working on it yourself.

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#109

Post by what_ever » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

nomoreplease wrote: post #14

> In fact, in places where we’ve been able to reopen Google offices in a voluntary capacity, we’ve seen nearly 60% of Googlers choosing to come back to the office. They don’t classify if that’s continuous or one-time to get a laptop replacement. I would guess the latter

You don't need to go to office to get laptop replacement at Google..

Re: A Hybrid Approach to Work

#110

Post by what_ever » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

slavapestov wrote: post #65

anonporridge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, if everyone is vaccines can we do away with mask requirements? We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. That's why we're still wearing masks even after vaccination until we have better understanding of how the vaccine affects transmission rates.

> We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader. We absolutely do and such studies exist, and furthermore you can see a rapid decline in new cases in countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage, which would not have occurred if vaccines did not prevent onward transmission.

> We absolutely do

Source please. CDC hasn't said anything about this.