341–350 of 447 posts
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No they said the office is dead, full remote
It sounds to me like the office is simply closed for remodelling and cleaning and will reopen at partial capacity in a few months. This is the vibe I get from the intro, can't read the whole article (paywall)
They can work 'remotely'. Of course they can - they are hardly doing anything :)
Twitter, Basecamp, Shopify - what do all these companies have in common? They don't need to do anything and even if they could, they haven't for so long, that working in an office or remotely changes nothing. They're in maintenance mode - you can do maintenance mode from home while cutting staff/costs. Good.
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…
2. Work was already flexible enough such that if you wanted to WFH you could: could you WFH permanently or 99% of the days in a year?
3. the meals and snacks -> if you can't cook, now is a good time to learn. save money
4. Many people who work at these companies live in big cities where they don't have huge amounts of space -> in a normal period of time, you could just relocate to somewhere better. We are not doing normal WFH
5. Those of you who are claiming this will be some form of revolution I think are naive -> I agree but I also think that you are naive if you think remote working is not superior for information workers
6. If you need an office anyway you don't really save anything -> Wrong. Water, electricity, internet, coffee, amenities, cleaning equipment, toiletries, cleaning services. And of course, the office itself. For workers: they get absolute freedom to shape their home space as they see fit. Oh and the MOST important time, you save everyone their commute (which will get you well rested employees).
7. I just don't think a company with 50,000+ employees: do you HAVE to join a 50k company?
I really hope this doesn't become a bigger trend. Shopify was a company I was seriously considering working at in the future, but this would probably disqualify them. Working from home once a week sounds great to me, but doing it full time would drive me insane. Virtual meetings are awful for me, and you miss out on so much of the discussion that happens outside of the meeting - I think most of the important discussi…
I too am not enjoying the 100% WFH right now. BUT I want the flexibility to WFH 3/5 days a week. I don't mind living within an hour and a half commute, and coming in 2 days a week. Going every day... painful. In theory I could WFH before, but as things weren't really set up for that, I only did it once a week if that. So in that regard, I welcome this kind of thing. If companies can work out the logistics.
Going full remote with trips to the office once per quarter for example allows you to live wherever you want. That's the way I see this working well in other companies. Remote first and once per quarter everyone gets together for a couple days.
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One big issue is that more experienced employees will be the ones to choose work-from-home as their default, while the newer employees seeking to learn the ropes will opt to come to the office. Perhaps a solution is to somehow formalize some of these implicit knowledge transfer mechanisms in the workplace. Explicitly assign mentors to new employees, etc.. But I just don't see how it could possibly compare to a normal…
> Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day. How is an open office any better?
I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.
People have commented the impact of this shift on SF/NYC etc, but based on this announcement the impact on smaller tech hubs will be even more devastating. Why would you now open a office in a smaller tech hub when you can hire someone from anywhere ? The impact of this in Canada can be huge
> Why would you now open a office in a smaller tech hub when you can hire someone from anywhere ? The impact of this in Canada can be huge Why not? The wage differential will still apply: why hire someone remotely from SF when you can hire someone remotely from Ottawa at 70% the wage?
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Here are some numbers... I work at a FAANG and 28-day commits in my division (~5K engineers) are down ~3% from February. Not an exact science but some real data I just pulled for you.
It's an interesting data point, but hard to judge much by it. Two things: 1. Working-from-home-during-global-pandemic-with-kids-and-spouses-and-roommates-and-not-ideal-setup isn't the same as working-from-home. Undoubtedly some people are less productive today. 2. Commits isn't necessarily a great proxy for productivity to begin with. For example, with greater focus comes less "oops I missed a unit test and broke the…
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> Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day. How is an open office any better?
For one, I can ask my coworkers to keep the noise down and they will politely oblige. Offices have pros and cons. My stance is that the pros outweigh the cons enough that we shouldn't eliminate offices entirely. I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.
At any rate, I brought it up because the fix for both noisy neighbors at home or in an open office is the same pat answer: get noise-cancellation headphones.
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Different tastes. With all due respect, for every guy like you who doesn't want to work there, there are 10 that do. I understand that remote first doesn't work for everyone, nothing works for everyone.
You are quite delusional if you think the ratio is 10:1 in favor of WFH. One thing that the recent lockdown and forced WFH experiment has revealed is that while people are strongly in favor of flexibly WFH the ratio is closer to 10:1 against having no office at all.
This one is behind a paywall and i'm not a Bloomberg subscriber. Here's a long article published today at Vox that gets into this: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/21/21234242/coronavirus-co... "A survey of senior finance leaders by research firm Gartner found that 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting company Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when th…
As someone who has worked from home for a decade-plus, don't discount the surreal and disorienting pandemic. The past couple of months have been a very different situation than the "normal".