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Shopify Goes Digital by Default

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Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#191

Post by bamazizi »

Consider the domino effect of these decisions. With WFH culture rising: (Disclosure, I'm 100% in favour of WFH and been doing it for past ~5 years)

- Commute time is reduced to seconds/minutes

- Driving or taking public transportation plummets

- Fuel consumption is vastly reduced, taking care of Pollution as well

- Rush hour peaks flattens. might still have traffic, but it won't be because of volume of cars. like from accidents or road work

- Cook/eat at home vs. going out for lunch solo or with colleagues

- Work from home or sometimes go to nearby cafe, the rise of nearby desk options

- Dressing up for work, replaced with pijamas! Who needs a suit or any formal wear?

- Suburban expansion, city planning project have to be completely revised.

- Location becomes irrelevant, housing/rent costs will displace huge amount of families

- Office space occupancy plummets and thus impacting commercial real estate. Might see a plan for retrofitting office buildings into residential properties which will increase the inventory of homes and reduction of housing costs in major cities

- Group meetings and gathering going digital, will also prevent spread of viruses and general sickness, impacting health care industry and pharmaceuticals

- and so many other direct or indirect dominos I haven't mentioned or considered...

= Conclusion: Savings are huge for both employees and employers but other in-direct industries will have to reinvent or disappear.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#193

Post by alexbanks »

look_lookatme wrote: post #121
alexbanks wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue is king. Yahoo pulled it as a last ditch "I don't know, maybe this is the problem" attempt. If companies going full time remote find that they're struggling to perform they'll probably switch back. I think if they just continue the same or improve, definitely not.

It was also a personality-driven decision (Mayer).

I don't now much about her other than most of the people that I know that worked at Yahoo during her time did not like her.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#194

Post by baron816 »

newfeatureok wrote: post #90

Remote-first is the future. I'm not sure why anyone would be against it. No one is forcing you to work from home. From a compliance and operations perspective a remote-first company is effectively forced to do a lot of things many companies do not or will not undertake: - Make meetings accessible to everyone - Communicate more effectively and transparently internal to the organization (and even externally, for the ad…

Imagine being the only employee on the team who wants to work in the office. That could be a problem. You’re young, maybe just out of college, and moving to a city hoping to form new connections with people. Yet, everyone’s now working from home. You don’t have any real opportunity to build relationships with your coworkers. Work becomes a much more dreary experience at that point. No one to each lunch with. No interpersonal culture. You’re just there to output a product and collect a paycheck.

It’s hard for many of us to say we need other people, especially when you compare it to all the confidence benefits of working from home, but it’s absolutely true. Being alone for long periods of time really really sucks (that’s what I’m going through).

Maybe we’ll see a rise in social clubs that will revitalize everyone’s social lives. But even with that, most people who are working remotely are going to be alone for 8+ hours per day.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#195

Post by exdsq »

fourmyle wrote: post #137

People are going to change their tune once the paycuts start coming. There is no reason to pay SF money to someone living in the Midwest. $80k a year is comfortable most places. I hope remote first people like the suburbs and country because there is no reason to live in the city with no office. The real truth though is most people are far less productive remote because it requires proactive communication and self di…

"If you are fully remote then anyone in the world can do your job. Supply goes up prices go down."

I work for an all-remote company and wages are based on the NY labour market. Anyone on the planet can apply sure, but I've not seen salaries reduce (if anything they're highly competitive outside of SF!). If you can get $150k and live wherever you want I wouldn't complain!

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#196

Post by aswanson »

dan_quixote wrote: post #166
cletus wrote: post #141

So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I hate it. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could. By convention, people would most often WFH on Wednesdays. I liked this timing of people doing it at the same time. But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going…

| I've found that advocates of WFH are mostly motivated by that's what they want to do more than anything else. I've heard endless people state that WFH productivity is through the roof with absolutely no evidence. And lets not pretend that we can accurately measure productivity of software devs - we've all been down this road with agile.

Can only speak for myself. Im far more productive without an hour commute, people constantly interrupting me in my cube with trivia, interrupts to explain you can't do X in the code because the repercussions are X^10, etc followed by a long commute home. But hey, to each his/her own.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#197

Post by chrisseaton »

enumjorge wrote: post #171
chrisseaton wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But presumably you live in that apartment because you needed to be within commuting distance of the Manhattan office? If you don't need to be so close to Manhattan I would guess (not really knowing anything about your situation) that you could afford a mansion in a town or village instead.

Some people like living in big cities, and are ok trading off a bigger living space to make that happen. I love being able to walk out to a bunch of different restaurants, having easy access to entertainment venues, etc. The idea of having a giant house in the middle of nowhere has very little appeal to me. This is especially common for younger people and those with no kids.

There's a whole world between big city and the middle of nowhere. You can live in a small town with restaurants, culture, coffee-shops, a theatre, social life.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#198

Post by MattGaiser »

alexbanks wrote: post #118
MattGaiser wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me. If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent. I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.

Can you describe why you couldn't spend a day in a boardroom _virtually_? Or how developers involved in "requirement analysis" need to be in the same room?

It isn't impossible, just more difficult, mostly based on human factors.

Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.

On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#199

Post by PaulRobinson »

cletus wrote: post #141

So I've now been WFH for 2 months and honestly I hate it. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could. By convention, people would most often WFH on Wednesdays. I liked this timing of people doing it at the same time. But communication and collaboration is just much harder work remote and you can't change my mind. I'm sure you can work hard to make it almost as good but it's never going…

Linux (and almost all OSS ), was built from people WFH.

Follow the same processes: be as asynchronous as possible,reduce meetings to a few times a year, rely on tools and build new ones if you need them.

If you are permanently WFH, why are you in a small pad in the city? Look at what you can afford out in the country, or even another country entirely.

Yes, it should be a choice and not forced onto everybody, but after a couple of years of being remote, I get worried about needing to ever go into an open plan office ever again. There are positives to all this, but you may need to adapt to make it work for you.

Re: Shopify Goes Digital by Default

#200

Post by jjice »

I know a lot of people like working from home, and I like the option, but I'm personally more of a fan of being in the office. I feel more productive and I like having the ability to talk to my coworkers.

I've seen a lot of people saying that working from home is objectively better, and I think that that is a bit of a radical claim. I rent a room in a beaten up house, so I have about 130ft2 of personal space, a shared kitchen, and a shared bathroom. There are other people like me who also feel like they're stuck in a bubble, especially now that they can't see their friends and family, or even strangers at a coffee shop.

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