
Quarantine will normalize WFH and recession will denormalize full-time jobs - awinter-py
https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/07/wfhdemic.html
======
PragmaticPulp
I can see normalizing WFH, but we need to get over this idea that WFH is the
best option for everyone. That’s a very tech-centric view that ignores the
fact that many people’s jobs really do benefit from, or even require, face to
face interaction.

It’s also ignores the realities that many people don’t want to WFH. Many of
the parents with young children at home are dreading the loss of their office
space right now.

I also expect that the shift toward WFH will not be a positive thing for
highly paid Silicon Valley engineers. Once people are working from home most
of the time, it’s not much of a stretch to hire cheaper engineers from a few
states over at literally half the cost of a SV engineer. From there, it’s only
a few more levels of difficulty to unlock international talent at 1/4 of the
price.

~~~
nkozyra
I've worked from home 9 of the last 10 years and much, much preferred the year
of going into an office, being better at separating work/leisure, etc.

I don't understand the appeal of doing either full-time. I can see myself
being comfortable with a mix of home and office, there are advantages to each
in different scenarios.

It's not just tech, lots of jobs are tech adjacent or tech-augmented and can
do this. More so than we thought ten years ago.

But in short, it's not for everyone. I'm bored of it. It makes work part of my
life one way or another. I like directly interacting other humans sometimes.

There's gotta be a balance, as with most things in life.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Think about this:

The office is 5-20 minutes away. There is a good work culture. You have
friends at the office. You can easily go home for a quick errand at lunch. WFH
wouldn't be as appealing.

Now consider:

The office is 1 hour away on a good day. Traffic is very frustrating. Parking
is expensive, same with transit which is hard to get an hour away. You get
home at 6 if you're lucky. After 2 frustrating commutes and a rough day at
work, and having to wake up very early to make the commute, you don't feel
like working out. You get the point.

~~~
SkyPuncher
Also, some flexibility to WFH is nice.

A friend and I are starting to do "workcations" several times per year (he
typically works in office, I work 100% remotely).

We go somewhere, work our during the day then go do something in the evenings
- typically skiing or mountain biking. It's an amazing setup. We both
typically get more done at work, because we're focused and wanting to get to
our evening activity. 4 hours of skiing or biking in the evening is more than
enough (especially when we do it 8 days straight).

That is one perk, I will never give up. Working on a 100% remote team has made
me care about vacation days much less. Instead of taking a 3 to 4 day trip
somewhere, I'll simply take a full week and work during the day (possibly
still taking some time off.)

~~~
rexarex
Where are you finding all the good night skiing?

~~~
SkyPuncher
My wife and I moved to Wausau, WI for her residency. Granite Peak is pretty
much in our backyard. It's a midwest "mountain" but it does the job. Extremely
nice to get out for an hour after work.

Many of the midwest hills near major cities have night skiing nearly every day
of the week.

Steamboat is probably the most well known "big resort".

------
melq
I’m surprised to see this post getting so much traction here. To me it reads
as a bunch of wild speculation, written as if it were factual, with no real
supporting evidence given.

> Home ownership was a bubble that popped in 08. Health insurance is a bubble
> that may pop when AMZN gets in the market.

Both of these assertions seem ridiculous to me. Home ownership was not ‘a
bubble’, selling high interest loans to under-qualified buyers and then
creating and trading a bunch of securities around them was the bubble. And the
idea that amazon entering the health insurance market will somehow transform
the entire paradigm of American healthcare is absurd.

~~~
JamisonM
I am not surprised by the traction, disappointing though. The distance one has
to scroll down to find a dissenting opinion is indeed disappointing.

------
awb
> As someone who’s been 1099 as often as not for the last few years, I don’t
> like the idea that these things are only available to employees, and would
> prefer a system that priced stuff equally for temps as for the elect.

I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Yes, it's a nice
benefit, but it's not like your health needs change significantly if your job
changes.

Maybe employers for dangerous jobs could offer supplementary insurance in
effect at the workplace or job site. But access to affordable day to day
healthcare is something we all need from birth to death without interruption.

Especially when you consider infectious disease, the health of the community
impacts all of us.

~~~
didgeoridoo
> I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment.

Pre-WW2, many unions in the US had negotiated employer-paid health insurance
as a (taxable) benefit. When the government capped wages as part of wartime
price controls, these unions threatened to strike, which would have gutted
industrial production. To avoid a strike, the government offered to
temporarily make employer-provided health insurance a tax-free benefit.

Temporarily. And here we still are.

~~~
slg
As software developers we can probably empathize. I know I have been working
on production code and found years old comments written by me along the
following lines:

//Hacky solution to get a working prototype, should be refactored before
deployment.

Legislative and regulatory debt can be a problem just like technical debt.

~~~
Ericson2314
> Legislative and regulatory debt can be a problem just like technical debt

I really wish there was more appreciation for this outside of tech. I'm
disdainful of a lot of SV libertarianism, to say the least, but will gladly
make common cause on this one point.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Debt implies that we know there is a shortcoming and want/need to fix it, but
don't have the time or knowledge.

The healthcare situation in the US may have started out as a hacky WW2 era
fix, but has been explicitly and aggressively lobbied against for years at the
highests levels of government.

Framing it in a technocratic context as "technical debt, but for laws and
stuff" completely misses the intense crusade against it in the US.

~~~
Ericson2314
I'm not sure it misses the point. Technical debt is always poltical too,
whether it's system admin / database admin work being automated away (or
not!), or manager<->engineer friction on costs and deadlines.

------
zhdc1
No and no. Remote work irt Covid-19 was absolutely hated by most people in
China once it lasted for more than a couple of days. Surprisingly enough, a
lot of people actually like going to an office, where they can get away from
their family and socialize.

On the second point, the economic damage from natural disasters is usually
short and severe, with a quick recovery. Barring Covid-19 turning out to be a
lot worse than the Spanish flu, most impacted regions will return to business
as usual sooner (as in a couple of months) rather than later.

~~~
ausbah
Pandemics aren't really natural disasters are they? A natural disaster is
physical phenomena, usually geologically or weather based, like hurricanes,
earthquakes, tornados, etc. Recovery time from those types of events isn't
very quick, espeically if the country is underdeveloped - look at how long it
took Puerto Rico from Hurrican Harvey, Joplin from the 2011 tornado, Haiti's
2010 earthquake, etc.

~~~
zhdc1
The textbook case is the 2004 tsunami and tourism in Thailand. Most of the
destroyed infrastructure was replaced in about a year and tourist numbers
(measured by number of passengers to Phuket Airport) recovered shortly
thereafter.

The short-term effect of Covid-19 on Chinese manufacturing have been
absolutely devistating - I honestly can't think of another feasible event that
would cause the same level of slowdown that you saw last month. However the
recover is in progress, and while it's going to take some time, odds are that
everything will more or less return to normal in another couple of months.

~~~
jdminhbg
> I honestly can't think of another feasible event that would cause the same
> level of slowdown that you saw last month.

A war where shipping was disrupted would be much, much worse.

~~~
zhdc1
I don't think so. Shipping, for instance, came to comparative stand still in
2009. Exports dropped more then than what was reported today for January, but
it didn't have the same impact to the tertiary sector that Covid-19
undoubtedly had last month.

~~~
jdminhbg
There's a big difference between "there is a delay in producing or shipping
your inputs to you" and "your inputs have been sunk and the country that
produces them is at a state of war with us."

~~~
zhdc1
Not really. In both cases what matters is whether the products were
manufactured, shipped, and delivered. The latter case is actually more
beneficial, since it implies that factories are running, people are working,
and at least some products are being successfully shipped.

------
manigandham
Only a small percentage of jobs are actually remote-capable, but most people
would be just fine with 1099 work. Most benefits are unused and people prefer
cash that they can spend on their own needs instead. Taxes might be harder to
save for upfront but not a big deal.

The biggest challenge is how healthcare benefits are tied to employment. It's
something that made sense when it started but is now obsolete and seriously
detrimental to the modern workforce. Many people either suffer from lack of
insurance or are held captive in a job from fear of losing necessary coverage.

Fix that and we would see a lot more positive developments for workers.

~~~
marcinzm
>Fix that and we would see a lot more positive developments for workers.

That basically requires getting rid of private health insurance (except as
supplemental insurance) which is going to be a difficult battle.

~~~
kasey_junk
I’m fairly ok with arguments for public only health care but that said, why
would detaching health insurance from employment require the end of private
health insurance completely?

Thats not true for any other of the insurances I have. My car, home, flood,
and life insurance all aren’t related to my employer yet still exist.

~~~
marcinzm
Essentially pre-existing conditions (including ones the patient knows about
but are not on their medical file) are a mess to deal with as they
significantly spike expected costs. Healthy people have little reason for good
insurance and unhealthy people are desperate for it. Car insurance is similar
but that's mitigate by it being mandatory and even then pre-existing
conditions (ie: accident rates) can spike insurance a lot.

You can deal with it I believe by making insurance mandatory for everyone,
banning all groups plans and preventing pre-existing conditions from being
taken into account. Probably need some more restrictions on the fifty other
ways of gouging expensive patients by insurance companies. But then you
basically have government run health insurance in everything but name.

~~~
kasey_junk
All of the forms of insurance I mentioned are extremely regulated. All of them
have adverse selection effects. All of them have good populations and bad.
None of them are associated with employment and you’d think someone was crazy
for suggesting they should be.

------
AdrianB1
"Our current run of low unemployment is economically weird in that salaries
haven’t gone up that much."

There is nothing weird, many companies took measure to not be impacted by
hiring the cheapest people that can try to do the job, not caring too much
about skills. My employer (big US-based non-IT company) is now hiring in IT
without any IT skills interview or even a CV/credential check with the mindset
that if they can keep the lights on for a few years, the next recession we can
hire experienced people for cheap to fix the things that are currently
neglected. I see this in every company I work with, big and famous IT software
or services suppliers that are scrapping the bottom of the barrel and gives us
unqualified people play-pretending to be developers, DBA's, architects etc.
Everybody is cutting corners, in some cases very visible (Boeing), in others
subtle (Intel and the 10 nm saga) and everyone else in between.

------
ryanyde
I went to a taqueria today. It was open. No one there was working from home.
The guys cooking work there 5 days a week.

WFH is such a small percentage of the economy.

We went to see our pediatrician yesterday - the full-time staff was there.

Freelance has gone from 2% in the mid 90s to 3% today.

Big perhaps in absolute numbers of people, small in terms of percentages of
the economy.

SF is mostly a bubble in terms of this.

~~~
JDiculous
Well yea, none of those anecdotes you referenced are office jobs.

------
DecoPerson
The biggest issue with WFH is how poor peoples’ written communication skills
are.

Take a spoken conservation:

\- Person A says something

\- Person B thinks what they said is derailing the conversation

\- Person B uses body language and makes subtle modifications to their
response (“Uuh.. sure. Anyway...”) to express their opinion of Person A’s
behavior

\- Person A notices this and will begin to reflect

\- Person B takes the opportunity to actually say “I think you’re derailing
the conversation, we need to stay focused on X...”

\- Person A learns from this experience

Now take a written conversation:

\- Person A makes 18 points in an email (I find people say a lot in emails —
especially if you include the assumptions of the author that are a part of
each sentence.)

\- Person B reads the email a day later.

\- Person B thinks of 26 points of feedback they’d like to make, but they’re
much harder to express. The bandwidth of written communication is higher, so
the “derailing” feedback becomes invalid. Instead the feedback is “You’re
saying too much, we can’t keep track of all this” but that comes across like
“I can’t handle this many things” — which if you think about it is fine, but
it’s definitely weirder than the in-person form. Also feedback like “you
should use a comma here” seems pedantic, but it can be really fucking
important to avoid miscommunication.

\- Person B gets into a fluster and decides not to give any feedback, because
it’s too hard.

\- Person A doesn’t learn from this experience.

I’ve found people that are very self-critical become quite good at written
communication.

I read my own emails three or four times before sending them, to be sure
they’re easy to understand. Yet when I read others’ emails, the mistakes
present indicate they didn’t read their own email even once. This is
indicative of a lack of desire to self-reflect.

Feedback culture is important. I feel a remote-only company could be far more
effective than a traditional company if they figure out interpersonal
processes that lead to results — feedback on written communication being a
part of that.

~~~
intopieces
>I read my own emails three or four times before sending them, to be sure
they’re easy to understand. Yet when I read others’ emails, the mistakes
present indicate they didn’t read their own email even once. This is
indicative of a lack of desire to self-reflect.

I am glad I'm not the only person who does this, though in my case I think it
turns out being a little bit of a hindrance. I have a post it note sticking to
the bezel of my work monitor that says "STFE" \-- (short for, 'send the
fucking email') -- because I otherwise I end up with a draft box full of an
entire day's emails.

I do, however, take 2 minutes to _reduce the number of things I say in an
email_ by answering these two questions in the first two sentences: "What does
this person _need to know_ and _what decision do I need them to make based on
this information_?" The rest is basically CYA record keeping.

------
bsder
Sorry, but what a load of garbage.

1) The vast majority of work is _NOT_ "knowledge work"\--it is schlepping
things around. Who are the biggest employers and what do they do?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States)

Take a good look at that list. It's almost _ALL_ about schlepping things
around. That's takes people-- _in person_.

2) Short term is incompatible with real social existence.

You have bills every month. Your child is stuck in a specific school for 3/4
of a year or more. You're going to your sister's wedding next year.

Sure, maybe if I'm a brogrammer in the Bay Area with no life, I don't care
about getting upended continually. The rest of us with lives need money and
need it _on a schedule_.

3) Most people aren't productive remotely because they are barely productive
_in person_.

The vast majority of people are simply not productive without some level of
oversight. Most companies don't need unicorn productivity, they simply need
people to produce a little something every day. Most people working most jobs
don't want to think or work too hard, do want to do a little something and
then simply go home to their _real_ lives.

~~~
wott
> The vast majority of work is NOT "knowledge work"\--it is schlepping things
> around. Who are the biggest employers and what do they do?

It doesn't mean that those employers do not have hordes of office employees.

As a manifestation of the local bubble, all comments I read so far seem to
believe that only programmers already spend their day in an office in front of
a computer, whereas they are only a very small part of the office workers who
could more or less easily switch to Work From Home (and who sometimes already
do it).

------
blazespin
You know, like the coronavirus, I don't think anyone knows exactly how this
will play out. It's good to err on the side of caution, but folks should avoid
predicting and speculating about things right now. Better would be to just
wash your hands, practice social distancing, hope for the best, and encourage
others to do the same. Making statements like this aren't helpful and just
upset people, _especially_ those who can't work from home.

And there are a lot of people who our economy needs to show up to work. So
let's all try to support them right now by not talking about things like this,
OK?

------
Barrin92
Alexander Pentland's book, _Social Physics_ , actually had a very empiric
approach to measuring the productivity of employees and compared remote and
physical workers and there was a significant gap for remote-based work.

The reason is that face-to-face interaction conveys significantly more
information between people than any form of remote work ever does. The
spontaneous, rich interaction and the resulting creative output of humans
gathered in the same place is at least with today's tech, not possible to
replicate at a distance.

There's the anecdote about scientists making the most progress while standing
at the coffee machine talking to each other on breaks and at least if
Pentland's is to be believed the data bears this out.

I think another pretty good example of this is language acquisition. Compare
trying to learn a language through internet communication with actually
physically locating to a foreign country.

~~~
mxcrossb
Yes it’s strange that everyone’s so eager to say work from home, don’t shake
hands, don’t go to parties, don’t go to sports games, as if these were just
arbitrary aspects of human life that we can discard. In fact, these are
important social structures that evolved in human society for a reason. There
is a real danger of unintended consequences here.

~~~
jlokier
It's not so strange when you consider that people are only expecting it to be
for a small number of weeks or months.

------
simonw
I'm wondering if this will have an impact on the San Francisco housing crisis.
If it turns out WFH works out really well for tech companies, could we see a
reduction in demand for housing in SF?

I could certainly see tech employees deciding to move to a cheaper city where
they can WFH and spend less of their income on rent.

~~~
dboreham
Hasn't this been a thing for 20 years? (Source: moved from the valley to
Montata 20 years ago).

------
lopmotr
Since the problem with WFH seems to be lack of casual interactions, I wonder
if it could be solved with very imposing video calling. Something like an
always-on whole wall display showing another office, so you can see people
from a distance, approach them at the wall, wave them over, hear background
sounds, etc? Perhaps displays and internet bandwidth are only now (or not
yet?) cheap enough to do this in your house.

~~~
cheerlessbog
I've done this in a team where we were spread across two offices. A TV on the
wall showed the other office (on the other coast). We called it the wormhole.
I can't remember it being useful in any way

------
lmilcin
As a contractor, I think this is... complicated.

Quarantine may help WFH situation. For example, my bank is increasing their
capacity to support remote which until now was 1 day a week at most. Teams
also learn to deal with the situation which will improve my ability to be
productive when WFH in the future.

On the other hand it seems only a portion of population is able to be
efficient when working from home. I find that very large portion of my team
treats WFH as a kind of paid vacation where they seem to produce zero to
almost zero. Will not join meetings and will be only available on Skype just
to pretend they are available while in fact doing their own stuff. One just
told me he can't discuss a problem with me because he's taking care of his
kid.

As to contracting/FT jobs, it is also a matter of choice. Most people value
stability and they don't want to think about themselves as disposable. Maybe
they would like to have career path.

What I am saying is that being a contractor has its disadvantages which most
people are not very comfortable with.

------
booleandilemma
What’s this obsession with working from home? Does no one else like going into
their office and seeing people face to face?

~~~
txcwpalpha
HN (and the tech industry in general) has a bias for being introverted,
computer-focused workers that, if they had their way, would spend 10 hours a
day heads down with a technical task and no interaction with other human
beings. They live in a bubble where they assume that everyone else is the same
way. As evidenced by the comments in this thread, many of them have trouble
understanding that other people genuinely do enjoy socializing with their
coworkers and going to after-work happy hours, and actually dread the thought
of spending their entire workday alone without anyone to gossip with in the
break room.

~~~
sysbin
I think it greatly depends on where you work, the group of people you're
around, and if the atmosphere is open office or something more discrete like
cubicles.

My open office division of where I've been assigned, has a group of people
that aren't very social and conversations usually end with I need to get back
to work. They're all great people but totally different experience compared to
previous socializing at work. I typically can get my "social fix" by visiting
a different area of team members and that are way more toned down on just
writing code all day.

This sort of solution isn't pleasant at all and makes me just want to work
from home. In general I could just stay home, code and nothing would be
missed.

------
egypturnash
And the rich software people will put even _less_ of their money into the rest
of the economy, it’ll be great for everyone who’s doing a job that requires
being at a particular time and place. Absolutely great!

~~~
kjgkjhfkjf
No, it means that they will put their money into local economies other than
those of tech hubs. A good thing, surely.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
Maybe? My last chat with a random recruiter ended when I asked about
telwcommuting since the place was too far for me and I am kinda spoiled now (
don't go to the office unless I know something needs to be signed or people
might forget how I look ) ended since the company in question wants warm
bodies in chair.

That was 2 weeks ago. Admittedly, an eternity in market panics.

Still, I will postulate that wfh isn't for everyone. It took me a while to get
used to it. And I saying that while absolutely loving the benefit of not
spending my precious time in traffic ( 45min to 1 hour ).

------
newshorts
Remains to be seen. If this goes horribly wrong (I expect it won’t) then it
may have the opposite effect. If things go even slightly well, I expect the
lessons learned will at the very least allow companies to be more flexible in
their hiring practices.

Either way I believe it will open the conversation to those who previously
shot the idea down. Any change is scary, but that won’t stop things from
moving forward.

The real issue here is neoliberal values and misplaced economic theory. Remote
work can be done in an ethical and economically beneficial way.

------
Ericson2314
Uber and co need to lobby _hard_ for non-employment-base healthcare and other
benefits. It's very enlightened, and very self-interested.

The thing is I suspect bullshit jobs are the easiest ones to do from home.
Once (hopfully!) non-labor-tied welfare and UBI break the oversupply of labor,
we'll have less of those, and in turn the jobs that remain will be more
intense, pay very well, and often require in person coordination.

------
znpy
> But contractors are the future.

I strongly disagree. Contractors are, by nature, traveling craftsman. If you
want an employee to stick around, bond with the company and really envision...
the vision, then a stable, permanent work agreement (read: contract) is
mandatory.

Otherwise be warned that the future will be a time of unattached people that
care very little about the success of your company (besides being successful
enough to pay them).

~~~
dchyrdvh
49 out of 50 states are "at will" states, meaning that "the employment can be
terminated at any time for any reason or no reason at all".

~~~
mac01021
Which state is not?

------
adatavizguy
There are lots of recommendations for protection against coronavirus which are
the same as the recommendations for protection against normal flu. If people
are implementing them which is very likely, there should be a decrease in
normal flu cases. We should be able to quantify how effective they, washing
hands frequently, are.

------
_bxg1
Maybe this will be the turning point for universal healthcare. The current
status quo is only barely tolerated, where many don't get any healthcare at
all and most of what people do get is sub-par. If only a _minority_ had it,
there might finally be the political pressure to push through a total reform.

~~~
jobigoud
I don't know about that. In Italy the system is almost at / past the
saturation point and they are talking about ICU triage by age (no access to
ICU over a certain age). Some people in the comments were taking this
opportunity to criticize the universal healthcare model. In the sense that you
contribute all your life and then you are denied treatment. I don't how they
will do triage in the US if/when it becomes necessary but I think some people
still think that money should play a factor.

~~~
_bxg1
Meanwhile in the US some are being charged thousands of dollars for going and
getting tested.

Anyway, I wasn't talking about the care during the virus but the increased
commonality of non-full-time employment, which in the US means you don't get
health insurance at all.

------
danielvlopes2
I'm not sure about denormalize full-time jobs, but normalizing WFH is a good
thing. It does require different practices though.

Our company has a ton of training material on managing remote teams, and due
to high demand because of the virus, we decided to make our eBook on "Managing
Remote Teams" free. Maybe we can help ease the transition for teams moving to
WFH.

The 60+ pages book is the result of months of research and interviews with
successful remote companies (it’s usually a part of our paid product). We
collected tips on pretty much everything, from onboarding to communication
best-practices, to tools you should consider.

[https://knowyourteam.com/m/managing_remote_teams](https://knowyourteam.com/m/managing_remote_teams)

------
pwthornton
I agree that this will probably make WFH seem like an option that works for
more companies, more people, and more jobs.

I also think it might show us that we don't need to keep road building.
Instead, we should incentivize companies to do more WFH. If companies that
currently require people to be in the office daily allow workers to even work
1-2 days a week from home, that will greatly reduce rush-hour road congestion.

The governor of Maryland, for instance, is trying to widen the Beltway and
I-270. Both roads are mostly heavy traffic during rush hour. I-270, in
particular, is relatively light outside of rush hour in one direction. Simply
lessoning rush hour demand for these roads would greatly reduce congestion.

WFH is a much cheaper and environmentally friendly option. It can also be
implemented immediately.

------
dwheeler
Note: WFH = "working from home". Not all of us speak in undefined acronyms
:-).

~~~
markdoubleyou
I found this irritating, too. I had to google LNKD--it's the stock symbol for
LinkedIn. Made me feel dumb for not figuring it out from the context.

------
nnq
It's from whoever wrote "The coming IP war over facts derived from books" [1]

 _That 's enough signal to make me not bother reading this. Writing this here
to prevent other from wasting their time. Don't know the agenda behind, but
can see the author(s) is/are trying to "pull" the Overton-window in a really
really nasty direction concerning many things..._

[1]: [https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-
ip.html](https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-ip.html)

------
jpm_sd
"Quarantine will normalize WFH..."

"That's good!"

"... and recession will de-normalize full time jobs."

"That's bad!"

[https://youtu.be/Krbl911ZPBA](https://youtu.be/Krbl911ZPBA)

------
l8again
I see a novel playing out. A bird's eye view of the sprawling highways in a
major US city shows them completely empty and lifeless in broad daylight. It
all starts out by companies canceling events and conferences. The shutdowns
also spread to concerts. Eventually, a gathering of any size, even live music
at a local bar, is banned. This happens in a time-span of just over a month.
Schools shut down and students are told to communicate over Google classroom.
Families self quarantined themselves. The stock market wildly goes up and
down.

------
milemi
This poorly written op-ed, rich on bombastic proclamations and backed with
absolutely no research, getting to the top of HN is a (chef's kiss) testament
of a what a giant circle jerk this site is.

~~~
sjg007
HN like FB suffers from the same thing... we basically like a good story
regardless of the truth behind it. Even facts have become opinionated.

------
adreamingsoul
I prefer working from the office and benefit from having in-person
conversations. I also enjoy lunch with coworkers and having a space dedicated
to work. That said, the flexibility of WFH is an amazing benefit and privilege
that we have in the tech industry for people who primarly work on a computer.
However, I can’t help but think of my brother who works in manufacturing and
has to work with machines. WFH is not an option for him, and in his industry
when people are sent home they no longer get a paycheck.

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briefcomment
I really hope we see a dramatic drop in emissions, and lobbying groups,
unions, or just employees in general can point to that as a real benefit of
being more permissive with WFH.

If this really improved emissions in Salt Lake City for example, I could see
this pushing WFH from a being a luxury to being encouraged. Everyone hates the
poor air quality here, including decisions makers at companies. Maybe this
will give them a reason to back WFH to some extent.

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dchyrdvh
And once these expensive SW engineers get the pay cut, they'll start
defaulting on their expensive mortgages. A year from now?

The software industry consists has the organizational layer - all these
managers and vps - that relies on face to face communications, and the
technical layer - all these engineers and devops - who can work remotely. The
former will stay and retain their high pay. The latter will be outsourced at a
fraction of the current price.

~~~
smileysteve
If the financial correction continues (with the 10 year note selling for so
low), this pandemic has a likelihood of preventing fundraising in the near
term.

------
tanilama
It is too early to say anything.

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fyrefoxboy12
WFH is a great option, but - having worked in that kind of environment for a
few years - I much prefer working in an office. It's definitely true that I'm
more productive when I WFH, but honestly, losing that human touch and spur-of-
the-moment creativity, which for me requires human interaction (bouncing ideas
off each other), is a bigger negative than the positives of getting my work
done

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dntbnmpls
Every few years, we get the X will normalize WFH. I remember when oil prices
skyrocketed a decade or so ago and the cost of travel was supposed to
normalize WFH. Oil prices dropped and hence nothing.

Coronavirus will be forgotten about in a few weeks/months. People will move
on. Especially with modern news cycle where a new catastrophe or controversy
somewhere in the world will distract the public.

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quotemstr
I think the shift to WFH will also crash tech industry salaries, probably
never to recover to present heights. Over the long term, there's every reason
to suspect that a labor glut combined with better ML-driven program creation
will change "manual" programming --- the direct writing of program logic in
code --- to a low-pay, low-status profession.

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walterkrankheit
WFH already seems pretty normalized to me. But the denormalization of full-
time jobs/employees does seem like a real danger in any field at the moment.
Unfortunately not all employers are ethical when it comes to that. If you're
lucky to find one that is, stick with it.

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newsgremlin
As a dev I don't mind coming into the office, infact I probably would never
want a 100% WFH situation because I know I would get too comfortable to be
productive when I need to be. But I'd like more days of WFH to break up the
mundane office culture and burnout.

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Havoc
For programmers maybe. Rest of the world not so much. Most things can’t be
pushed through fiber pipes

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rb808
Most people work in factories, teach in schools, treat people in hospitals,
clean houses, drive cars/buses/trains/planes, cook/serve in restaurants, work
in shops or warehouses. Most people can't WFH.

~~~
buboard
i think the issue is that, of those people who _can_ telework , very few do

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badrabbit
I don't mind wfh but it doesn't work for everyone. Not everyone has a quite
home where they can focus. When working in a team,just having part of the team
work in a differnt city by itself can affect team dynamics.

~~~
loco5niner
> Not everyone has a quite home where they can focus.

Exactly what I say about my open-office. It's not quiet, and I cannot focus.

~~~
NateEag
You should read "quiet" here not as "free from sound" but "free from toddlers
who barge into the office without warning and sit kicking the door if it is
locked".

My own kids are pretty good about this, but it still happens sometimes.

~~~
loco5niner
I'm sure that is also a problem, but "quiet" still means "free from sound" and
I very strongly emphasize that it does apply here.

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johnchristopher
I work in tech and IT and as a lead manager on some websites in a position
between junior and senior and I definitely could use some wfh days but
definitely need some office time with coworkers.

------
tra3
What is “async” communication that everyone is taking about? Isn’t that
email/irc/slack that we had since forever? How are things going to change all
of a sudden?

~~~
mac01021
Yes it is those things. We've had the tech since forever, but businesses have
not embraced them as a sole or primary means of internal communication.

If you make the decision to structure the coordination of your business around
email instead of meetings, it can have a large effect on your organization's
productivity. Depending on how well your employees do with written
communication, that large effect can be extremely positive.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
All the WFH companies must be salivating at this situation. Are there any
public investment opportunities (other than Zoom)?

~~~
nradov
Cisco. They have networking infrastructure, VoIP, VPNs, and Webex meetings.

~~~
mschuster91
On the other hand they're in the news every fucking month because their
products are full of intentional backdoors, unintentional backdoors, other
security issues, and bugs.

------
ojosilva
This crisis is going way beyond just working from home. Governments
restricting people's movement and forcing quarantine is just the tip of a very
deep iceberg. The astonishing decision to cut off Northern Italy was praised
by authorities, without much regard to the chaos and the panic that ensued.
There's a mindset that is dictating this is the right thing to do and very few
critics. When is this going too be too much?

I hate to be catastrophic, that's just not me as I tend to think crises will
balance out itself eventually, or just fade away as vaccine, treatment, the
summer weather (in the North) or the public attention turns to something else.
But the picture right now is that we're sailing deep into uncharted waters. It
seems like anyone, public and private sector, plain civilians or even mobs can
now single out humans and quarantine for disease, segregating at work,
schools, public transportation or any place anyone pleases. People are running
for masks and hand sanitizers, but in fact it all does not seems too far from
bank runs, a financial system shutdown and economic mayhem.

The 2010 Public Health Service Act in the US gives government almost
unrestricted mandate to limit people's freedom under certain circumstances
(such as a new respiratory virus like the COVID-19) and there isn't going to
be anyone with the power, or the courage, to dial it back. We need to find a
way to 80/20 on this epidemic and get most effectiveness without herding
ourselves out of a cliff.

~~~
edouard-harris
As of this moment, large-scale group quarantines are the only mitigation
measures that have been shown to reduce the R0 of the coronavirus below 1.
(The source for this is a recent epidemiological study of the situation in
Wuhan:
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593v1))

Given this, it's perhaps understandable that governments and individuals in
the hardest-hit areas would be erring on the side of caution.

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markus_zhang
We are already moving into temp WFH and I'm really scared that a near future
recession will hit us hard.

------
shahbaby
As much as I love WFH, the truth is that people will be more committed to
their job if they're on site.

~~~
loco5niner
> The truth is that people will be more committed to their job if they're on
> site.

I would be way more committed to my job if they gave me the flexibility to
work from home.

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stared
Is WFH a commonly used acronym?

A remote worker myself, I didn't know how to decipher that. (Spoiler: Work
From Home.)

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latrasis
Just in case anybody got confused, WFH stands for "Work From Home"

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redgrange
It would have helped to have three article state what wfh stands for

------
sigzero
I really don't think it will do either.

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tylerjwilk00
I'd like to see the data on carbon footprint reductions associated with WFH.
Also traffic related deaths would imaginably be reduced.

------
Fjolsvith
The Coronavirus vaccine will negate the need for WFH. [1]

1\. [https://www.livescience.com/us-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-
rec...](https://www.livescience.com/us-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-
recruiting.html)

