
Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers - piinbinary
https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/covid-19
======
jedberg
I guess one good thing of this panic is that a lot of companies will realize
they can do a lot more remote work than they were doing, which is a great
thing for the planet.

~~~
hkai
For us in Hong Kong, the effect of working from home was the fact that
revenues and productivity plummeted, and we are now forced to take one day of
unpaid leave per week while still putting in 40 hours a week and taking a 20%
pay cut for the privilege.

Just sharing as a perspective on why some people may feel that work from home
may not be a great idea.

~~~
jacquesm
Any idea why productivity dropped that much?

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AnthonyMouse
I suspect that a lot of the "productivity drop" in general is a result of
trying to measure productivity for remote workers but not office workers. If
someone is in the office, managers commonly assume they're working, even if
they're spending most of the day faffing around on the internet. If they're at
home, you can't see what they're doing so you try to measure it by results.
Which shows that they're only doing a couple hours of real work in a day,
which gets called a productivity drop even though it was just the baseline.

I mean think about it. If people were less productive then to do the same work
you'd need them to work more hours, not fewer, right?

And it's even worse if your metrics do something silly like measure by lines
of code or time spent typing. If someone spends an hour walking in a park
figuring out how to implement something and then five minutes when they get
home to type it into a computer, it's obviously bad accounting to call that an
hour of leisure and five minutes of working.

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dustinmoris
WFH is great, it's where I'm personally the most productive from, but unless
an entire household can stay at home I think it has little effect on avoiding
Covid-19.

You can be the most paranoid person, washing your hands 50 times a day, not
touching anything, wearing a gas mask and what not, but when your kid comes
home after touching everything at school and outside and then rubbing his/her
eyes and they happen to contract the virus then everyone in the same household
will eventually contract the virus. Same for your partner, flat mates, etc.

If one person gets it, everyone in a household will get it (eventually). They
will cough in the house, they will touch food in the kitchen, they will
decongest in the bathroom and spread germs everywhere, they will touch the
remote control with their hands where they just coughed in, a keyboard, your
phone, etc. etc.

I'm sure WFH will slow down the spread, which itself is good, but don't think
you're immune all of a sudden because you avoid public transport to work when
there's still so many avenues for the virus to enter your home.

~~~
focus2020
In that case WFH is much better as it does not spread to other employees

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tlrobinson
Here’s Coinbase’s in-depth plan that this appears to be partially based on
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRP4dnVCvKB7A5WXrESe-
cL5...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRP4dnVCvKB7A5WXrESe-
cL51i6_cg5nNGLNld6qch0/edit#)

Some of the phrasing is identical:

> are likely to get sick more easily or for whom getting sick would be
> particularly problematic

~~~
ewhauser421
Is Coinbase willing to make their guide on how to stay safe when working from
home public? It’s a link in the doc.

~~~
bobwaycott
There a quite a few links in that doc that would be interesting (and helpful)
to read, but are unavailable.

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moultano
Really frustrated that my employer isn't doing this. I convinced my immediate
manager to give everyone approval to WFH, but I cannot fathom why the whole
company isn't. I don't know whether it's an issue of priorities, foresight, or
capabilities.

~~~
cjbprime
I think one reason companies are reluctant to start WFH is that it's unclear
when you'd stop. You'd have to have a reason to stop, and it could easily be
like six months from now before there's a defensible one.

~~~
ISL
Sounds okay to me. My employer and my wife's employer's stance is presently
indefensible.

Our local health authorities (Seattle) appear to have a clear-eyed picture
that things are going to get worse, and that social-distancing measures will
be required, yet they prefer to wait and play the game on hard-mode.

It is hard to see why waiting to implement school closures and work holidays
is going to be a net benefit.

~~~
cjbprime
If the schools close and you have kids, you're not going to be working either
way.

And wait, isn't Seattle hosting a 100k attendee international ComicCon in ten
days? How can you argue that's more responsible than your employer is being?

Oh! Maybe your "they" refers to Seattle, not your employer in contrast to
Seattle. Confused.

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prawn
I wonder how much business travel, in-person meetings, working in offices, etc
won't rebound after this?

~~~
devmunchies
I work remote and I really miss more interactions, even some of the pointless
meetings. Obviously thats just the loneliness talking, but I wish remote
companies had some hubs you needed to live near so you could go in when you
needed it. An 80/20 (remote/office) model would be perfect.

~~~
jeswin
> I wish remote companies had some hubs you needed to live near

1\. You can't really move houses easily unless you're young and unmarried. (I
wouldn't have done this at any stage in my career)

2\. Many remote companies have employees across cities and smaller towns -
building or renting these hubs everywhere will not be economical.

~~~
devmunchies
I’m thinking 4 or 5 hubs in the country, depending on the size of the company.
You live within 2 hours and commute a handful of times a quarter.

~~~
wtracy
You must live in Europe. :-)

4 or 5 hubs would cover maybe half of California.

~~~
devmunchies
No I live between Sacramento and Tahoe. A hub in the Bay Area would be fine if
I only went once or twice a month. I don’t like 100% distributed remote model.
We need to be anchored to something.

A company doesn’t need employees in every state.

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winrid
As someone that's taking the train to work in the Bay area I so hope my
employer does this soon...

~~~
bvandewalle
Ah, I'm in the same train as you.

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devmunchies
I feel for the sales guys who get paid on commission and can’t travel.

I wonder if as a company transitions to remote if many employees take
advantage and work few hours vs a company that was already remote.

~~~
Johnny555
_I wonder if as a company transitions to remote if many employees take
advantage and work few hours vs a company that was already remote._

Deadlines and other commitments won't change, it's up to managers to make sure
employee output stays on track. Though if the disease spreads many employees
may be out of commission with the illness or caring for family members.

My company discourages work from home, but has multiple offices and we all
rely on Slack and video conferencing so much that it'd be pretty apparent if
everyone was WFH and someone went for a hike ride instead of working.

I find that my productivity improves when I WFH, but I have a dedicated office
area to retreat to (plus I save 60 - 90 minutes of commute time)

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xrd
If this helps non remote employees (and managers) develop empathy for remote
employees, well, that'll be amazing at pushing remote culture forward.

~~~
awfycooper
We've actually done remote experiments at Stripe in order to do just that.
Where whole teams will get spread across as many places as possible and we
attempt to keep everything as it was in order to discover the holes in the
daily processes we have.

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fossuser
A lot of companies are doing this in the Bay Area, even closing offices and
mandating WFH (in addition to suspending travel).

It’s an interesting experiment to see what’s it’s like to work with everyone
fully remote.

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busterarm
We did the same thing today. Bunch tech companies have been talking to each
other about how to handle this. Expect to see more announcements along these
lines.

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etxm
Flew to SF for CodeBeam, crossing my fingers I didn’t poke the pooch.

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jorisw
> Airports and air travel are likely to be higher-risk.

Who says an airport is any more risky than public life in a city? There is no
personal interaction between travellers at all.

~~~
gojomo
High volumes of travelers siphoning through the same paths, touching the same
surfaces, interacting with the same service personnel.

Those travelers being from all-over, thus introducing new region-to-region
microbiota mixes. Those travelers often tired or dehydrated from long plane
travel across time-zones.

Even a heavily-trafficked park, grocery store, or DMV-like public service
outlet might not face the same volume of widely-exposed & weary people as an
airport does.

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blackrock
At this point, I think we can assume that the virus is spreading in America,
and building steam.

The major metropolitan cities are going to get hit. NYC, Boston, Chicago,
Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

But fear not, the virus is still controllable, since most of America is
suburbia and rural. But we need to begin work-from-home on a massive scale,
and begin temperature monitoring of people and ourselves.

~~~
senordevnyc
Suburban and rural areas will get hit too, it’ll just take longer. They may
not ride the subway or have an elevator they share with neighbors, but they
travel, they go to work and school, they buy groceries, they go to church,
etc.

All that said, I’d much rather be in a rural area right now instead of
Manhattan!

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LatteLazy
I'd love it if a tech company had the balls to just say "we're not the cdc,
here is their advice, no one will be required to attend if sick or to travel
if they don't want to".

Instead every HR person in Silicon Valley is wetting themself to play
doctor...

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99_00
A reminder:

The risk of getting COVID-19 in the U.S. is currently low.

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/share-
facts....](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/share-facts.html)

Also, expect positive cases to explode in number over the next two weeks as
testing capacity comes on line and massive number of tests are administered.

~~~
rolltiide
I want to get it to get it over with. Kind of weird that San Francisco isn't
ground zero for this in USA yet.

Hope the news of reinfection complications is wrong.

~~~
throwaway1777
FYI you can't just "get it over with". Some people have been infected multiple
times already.

~~~
rolltiide
Its almost like my post was made for your specific comment.

Anyway, hope the news of reinfection complications is premature and incorrect

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aaron695
Why are we destroying business?

We will hit a mini GFC or I think a GFC+

And now on top of that companies are just going remote. Not done before and
all of a sudden with limited planning.

So they will lose more business unless it's an Easter miracle and remote work
is so amazing without planning it can still break even.

Whats the plan here? 'Everyone' is going to get it.

Right now you can slow it down. If you are in Winter, then slowing it until
Summer will help. If you are in Summer slowing it until Winter probably will
screw you.

But I'd like to know what Stripe is trying to do. What model is it trying to
achieve. Or is this designed by a committee? Does WHO agree? Is it trying to
spread the disease out internally? Or is it just random flailing around?

~~~
jacquesm
Stripe is being a good and responsible employer.

~~~
jorisw
I'm sure of their good intentions, the question is how informed their choice
of measures is.

