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Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

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Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#111

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #75
chatmasta wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children/teenagers are also losing a time of their life they will never get back. For example, if you're a junior in high school looking to get recruited to college for a spring sport, you're basically out of luck. This kind of extended hiatus from everyday life can alter entire life trajectories.

Death alters it rather more. Without these measures a lot of folk will die a lot sooner than they should.

Come on, man. Acknowledging the harms of an extended lockdown isn't an argument that we should ignore the harms of death.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#112

Post by CuriousCosmic »

CodeCube wrote: post #83
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the east coast outside of actually being located in the hard urban part of the city, from what I've seen 1 and 2 bedroom apartments only end up being marginally different in price. For example, one of the places I was looking at had 1 bedroom apartments for around 1400-1500USD per month while their 2 bedroom apartments only increased in price to 1600-1800USD depending on whether you wanted a bit more squa…

Yeah this sounds about right. This is the way it should be. I mean, hell, even that is a bit pricey TBH ... rent prices are generally out of control and need to come down. People have to be able to live without cramming into places with roommates like sardines.

this place im looking at is within walking distance of main street in a nice little town, just outside of a major metropolitan area(think 30-45 min drive), includes water & gas, and the the complex is on the water. Because of that I'd say the place was a steal.

Otherwise though I'd generally agree. Rent is getting crazy in the US.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#113

Post by sciencewolf »

treyfitty wrote: post #110

I raised this on Ask HN to little fanfare so hoping people could opine on my thoughts here: Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American? Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logi…

This has been a fear for 30+ years now. And it seems like at the end of the day, for most companies, the decrease in cost of labor does not offset the increase in costs resulting from miscommunication, poor training, lack of care in quality of work, and increased times to delivery.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#114

Post by kyleee »

mirimir wrote: post #98
hef19898 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume running a team of 12 people being the first time in there whole careers working from that is planning global production for a multi billion dollar business is a real job. As trying to get a bootstrapped startup of the ground. The first case is my wife, the second one me. We have two kids. For obvious reasons I had my office at home anyway. For two weeks bow it is WFH for both of us. Plus the kids at ho…

Just a couple days ago, I spoke with a patient rep for a medical practice in metro NYC. She was obviously working from home, with a young child yelling, and pressing buttons on the phone. And obviously tense. So I just said that I understood that she was working from home, and that everything was OK. And then everything was OK, and her child quieted down.

Yep, I've been finding it comforting to talk about it (even briefly) to clear up some of the pressure. I think it's nice that you've done that and I appreciated it when someone brought it up similarly with me while on a call. It allowed me to relax a bit and refocus as opposed to just trying to ignore the interruptions and being anxious about it

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#115

Post by kyleee »

roel_v wrote: post #28
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized after I had kids that a huge amount of "new urbanist" thought is driven by the young and childless and does not incorporate the needs of people with children or of children themselves. This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a…

I have a home office (proper office with separate meeting room etc, a whole floor of our house) and I still get a babysitter on days school is out and I can't not work that day. It's just not the same when you have to always reserve some brain cycles for thinking about what's going on in the rest of the house. A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told…

Hah, but as you said it will probably only buy you one day (or a half day), so not exactly helpful long term

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#116

Post by BLKNSLVR »

treyfitty wrote: post #110

I raised this on Ask HN to little fanfare so hoping people could opine on my thoughts here: Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American? Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logi…

One of my takeaways from this situation is that there's been too much dependence outside the country. I actually think this situation will result in bringing some level of previously outsourced work back onshore.

This may go hand-in-hand with a (degree of) rolling back the uber-capitalism of sacrificing long-term "anything and everything" for the potential of an immediate bump to the stock value.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#117

Post by TeMPOraL »

yodsanklai wrote: post #49
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

Outside of young, childless tech workers, this sudden remote work experiment is not going well for most people I know. This isn’t the controlled trial of remote work that these think pieces suggest. Instead, everyone is forcefully stuck at home without time to prepare. Parents are juggling childcare with getting work done, while fighting an uphill battle against IT systems that weren’t prepared for everyone going WFH…

I've been working remotely for a while, but most of my colleagues work in the office by choice. First thing I noticed, our remote meetings are much better now. It works better when everyone is remote. Another thing that surprised me, many of my colleagues don't have a good working environment from home. They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids, and mostly don't have an office or even a good laptop.…

> They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids

That's most likely the reason why they "work in the office by choice".

Back when I was still working in a physical office, I couldn't understand why someone would want to escape from their home into an office. As a WFH father of an infant, I fully get it now. Working with a small child nearby pretty much precludes any regular focus or deep working sessions.

> Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.

Indeed it does. I've never wasted so much time obsessively reading the news like over the past month.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

ovulator wrote: post #26
vsareto wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Exceptions: weekly full-house meeting of 400 employees isn’t supported by hangouts so you can only participate in read-only mode Those have almost always been 'meetings that should have been an email' in my experience. I think some leaders are just used to having an audience to be effective.

Yeah, that's not a meeting, that's a sermon.

It probably would've been best handled by a livestream. Let the preacher/CEO talk, and have everyone else use the chat for comments.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#119

Post by nostrademons »

RangerScience wrote: post #73
gdubs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also been a week . Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot. If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fund…

I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids. Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video), I think there's an opportunit…

I've got a group of online friends from my alma mater that were thinking about this, and a bunch of the single folks volunteered to entertain kids over videochat for an hour or so, and they actually organized a Google Doc & Hangouts link to try it.

So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.

My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.

As a parent, I see two big problems with it:

1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)

2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.

Re: Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

slavapestov wrote: post #76
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized after I had kids that a huge amount of "new urbanist" thought is driven by the young and childless and does not incorporate the needs of people with children or of children themselves. This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a…

> This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from the office either, so I'm not sure what this means.

For some non-parents, it's not obvious that being in the same room (or building) as the kid(s) is nowhere near enough. Small children in particular can only briefly occupy themselves; the rest of the time, they need your attention - and they will demand it, loudly.

That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".

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